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I turn now to an argument that the existence of many natural evils of the kind described is logically necessary for the existence of a world of the type which I have already described. For they are necessary if agents are to have the knowledge of how to bring about evil or prevent its occurrence, knowledge which they must have if they are to have a genuine choice between bringing about evil and bringing about good. How are agents to acquire knowledge—in particular the knowledge of which of their actions will have pleasant consequences and which will have unpleasant consequences for themselves or others, knowledge which they must have if there is to be a world of the kind which I have described? An agent's present evidence will allow him to infer to what will probably happen in future; his knowledge of what will happen in future will come from induction, but his evidence may be of one of two kinds. The normal evidence will be of patterns of similar events in the past allowing an inductive inference to how events will probably succeed each other in future. I shall call such inference normal inductive inference. The simplest case of normal inductive inference is where I infer that a present state of affairs C will be followed by a future state E, from the fact that in the past, states of affairs like C on all occasions of which I have knowledge have been followed by states like E. Because on the many occasions of which I have knowledge a piece of chalk being liberated from the hand has fallen to the floor, I can infer that the next time chalk is liberated it will fall. However normal induction may take a more complicated form. From a vast collection of data about the positions of planets a scientist may infer a consequence of a different kind, e.g. that there will be a very high tide on earth when the planets are in such-and-such positions. Here the data provide evidence for a complicated scientific theory of which the prediction about the high tide is a somewhat remote consequence; the similarities between the data and the prediction are more remote. (But the similarities exist and are the basis of the prediction. In the data and the prediction there are material bodies attracting each other.)
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As well as the free will defence, theism has had a number of traditional defences to the problem of evil. I must comment briefly on three well-known but rather unsatisfactory ones. First there is the claim that much of the evil suffered by a man is God's punishment for his sins. Although this might account for some natural evil, it is clearly quite unable to account for the suffering of babies or animals. Secondly, there is the claim that God ties to the choices of men the well-being of other men, including later generations, and also animals. In so far as men make immoral choices, God lets others suffer for it. This seems to be the view of Genesis 3: 16-20. One major difficulty is that if man does not believe that his actions have these effects (as perhaps normally he does not), there is no gain in this tie (viz. in the responsibility gained by free agents), to outweigh the resulting evil. In any case this defence cannot explain the suffering of animals long before men arrived on earth. More substantial is the third defence, used by many theistic writers down the centuries, that natural evils have been brought about by free agents other than men, viz. fallen angels. If there is reason, as I argued in the last chapter that there is, for allowing humanly free agents to hurt other agents, then there is reason for allowing free agents other than men to inflict such hurt. This move is an old one and it certainly saves the theist from a conclusive disproof of the existence of God. However, it still leaves an argument which counts against the existence of God—at any rate so long as there is no independent evidence of the existence of such fallen angels. For if the hypothesis that these angels exist and have power over nature is added to the hypothesis of theism to save it from falsification, then it has the status of an ad hoc hypothesis. An ad hoc hypothesis added to a theory complicates the theory and for that reason decreases its prior probability and so its posterior probability. So natural evil would decrease the probability that there is a God, disconfirm the theist's claim, if the fallen angel hypothesis were the only way of saving theism from falsification. (That is not to say that despite such disconfirmation, it may not on balance remain more probable than not.) I conclude that use of the third defence would disconfirm theism, that there is a major difficulty in the second defence, and that the first defence is not adequate to deal with many natural evils. Theism must look elsewhere for a more adequate defence.
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I have been considering the question of the kinds of world which a God would have reason to make. I have urged that a God has reason to make worlds of many different kinds, but among them a world providential in the ways described in the last two chapters. In such a world, there will inevitably be evil. For there will inevitably be biologically useful unpleasant sensations, such as the pain which a man suffers until he escapes from a fire or the feeling of suffocation which he gets in a room full of poisonous gas, and unpleasant emotions such as fear and grief. Also, since men have the power to do each other significant hurt and they are not causally determined to do what they do, it is vastly probable that in such a world there will be a lot of further suffering, inflicted by men on each other. And there will also be the moral evil of men choosing to do what they believe to be wrong, in inflicting such suffering. In these ways evil comes with the good—it would be logically impossible for God to give certain benefits (e.g. of choice of destiny and responsibility) without the inevitability or at any rate enormous probability of various accompanying evils. I suggested in the last chapter that they were worth it. A good God would have reason to create a world in which there were men with a choice of destiny and responsibility for each other, despite the evils which would inevitably or almost inevitably be presented in it, for the sake of the good which it contained. |
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