Abstract
The amount and variety of evil in our world has often baffled and perplexed believers in God. Evil can occasion deeper problems: faced with the shocking concreteness of a particularly appalling example of it in his own life or the life of someone close to him, a believer may find himself tempted to take towards God an attitude he himself deplores; such evil can incline him to mistrust God, to be angry with him, to adopt towards him an attitude of suspicion and distrust, or bitterness and rebellion. This is a pastoral, or religious, or existential problem of evil.
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Notes
David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1985), p. 65.
“Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind, 1955, (Widely reprinted). In Mackie’s posthumous The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) Mackie wavers between his earlier claim that the existence of God is straightforwardly inconsistent with that of evil, and the claim that the existence of evil is powerful but not conclusive evidence against the existence of God. (See pp. 150-175, and see my “Is Theism Really a Miracle?”, Faith and Philosophy, April, 1986).
And (as I see it) rightly so; see my The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) Chapter IX, and God Freedom and Evil (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1974, and Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdman’s); and see Alvin Plantinga (Profiles Series), eds. James Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1985) pp. 36–55.
“The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 336. My (3) is Rowe’s (1).
I think there are problems, from Rowe’s perspective, with respect to the statement of (3) and (4); see my paper “The Probabilistic Argument from Evil” Philosophical Studies, 35, 1979, pp. 6-10.
See “The Probabilistic Argument from Evil”, pp. 9-10.
“The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: on Avoiding the Evils of Appearance,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 16 (1984): 85.
For a fuller statement, see the items referred to in note 3.
Here I assume (what seems to me to be true) that while God is indeed eternal, he is not timeless, “outside of time”, in the Boethian sense. (What I say can easily be restated to accommodate the latter view).
Some have objected to the Free Will Defense on the grounds that it presupposes that there are such things as counterfactuals of freedom, that they have truth values, and that God can know them. It is the atheologian, however, who really needs these suppositions; things are easier, not harder, for the Free Will Defense if we reject these assumptions.
I argue below that epistemic probability does not in fact conform to the probability calculus; but it is easy to see how to reconstruct the above argument from the perspective of the idea of epistemic probability outlined there.
I have argued this point in detail elsewhere “The Probabilistic Argument from Evil”, 10-44; here I shall briefly recapitulate the main thrust of those arguments and add some new considerations.
Following F. P. Ramsey (“Truth and Probability”), first published in The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, ed. R. B. Braithwaite (New York: Humanities Press, 1950) personalists often suggest that a person S’s credence function is determined by the sort of betting behaviour in which he would engage in various circumstances. (As a matter of fact, what the personal ist must appeal to here is the sort of odds S would post if he were forced to post odds on all the propositions in the domain of PS).
See B. Van Fraassen, “Belief and the Will”, Journal of Philosophy (984): 237 ff., and see David Lewis; diachronic Dutch Book argument in P. Teller, “Conditionalization, Observation, and Change of Preference”, in W. L. Harper and C. A. Hooker, Foundations of Probability Theory, Statistical Inference, and Statistical Theories of Science, vol. 1 (Boston: Reidel, 1976), pp. 209 ff.
See his The Foundations of Scientific Inference (Pittsburg: The University of Pittsburg Press, 1966), p. 124 ff.
See “The Probabilistic Argument from Evil”, pp. 44–47.
This seems to be the theory of probability embraced by, for example, J. L. Mackie in the probabilistic argument from evil he (apparently) offers in chapter 9 of The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). It is not entirely clear whether what Mackie means to offer is a probabilistic atheological argument from evil, or a deductive argument from evil; see my “Is Theism Really a Miracle?”, Faith and Philosophy, April, 1986.
We could say, if we like, that this probability was infinitesimal rather than 0; this won’t affect the argument that follows.
If we adopt the course suggested in the previous footnote, then these two probabilities will be infinitesimally close to 0 and 1.
Richard Swinburne (The Existence of God) suggests that a priori probability is determined by simplicity; for critical comment see my “Is Theism Really A Miracle?”, Faith and Philosophy, April, 1986.
Of course the pair (0), (2)) is not one of these; it is by no means just obvious that (2) is unlikely or improbable on (1). Here we have a situation in which there is disagreement as to what is probable with respect to what-just the sort of situation that drives us to inquire what probability is.
There is abrief and savagely truncated account in “Epistemic Justification”, Nous, April, 1986. A fuller version of the same ideas may be found in “Positive Epistemic Status and Proper Function”, in Studies in Philosophy: vol. 2, Epistemology, ed. James Tomberlin (Northridge: Ridgeview Publishing Co, 1988).
See my “Reason and Belief in God” in Faith and Rationality, ed. A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 57.
See the essays referred to in note 23.
In what follows I am indebted to Richard Otte; see his “A Theistic Conception of Probability”, Faith and Philosophy, October, 1987.
I must emphasize that this is indeed a first approximation; there remain problems. For example, there is the problem that some propositions such that other propositions may have epistemic probability on them, are not such that a human being can rationally believe them: There are no conscious beings, for example, or No one now believes anything. See my forthcoming book Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: 1992), chap. IX.
Following Bas Van Fraassen (“Belief and the Will”, p. 251) we can then say that a person’s beliefs are coherent “only if ”there is at least one probability function P such that P(A) > P(B) if it seems more likely to him that A than that B, P(A)≥P(B) if it seems no less likely to him that A than that B, P(A/C) > P(B/C) if on the supposition that C it seems more likely to him that A than that B, and so forth”.
Notice that this is impossible on the personalist reading of the matter; since (on this view) all the propositions I know will enjoy the maximum or near maximum degree of belief, any propositions I know will be extremely probable with respect to each other.
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Plantinga, A. (1992). Epistemic Probability and Evil. In: Clark, K.J. (eds) Our Knowledge of God. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2576-5_3
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