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However, clearly many persons of great moral sensitivity have reached a different conclusion from mine. Those who are inclined to follow them may well feel that although in itself the existence of evil does provide a good C-inductive argument against the existence of God, the argument will fail if we complicate somewhat the hypothesis of theism. We have already considered one way of doing this—adding to the hypothesis of theism the hypothesis of bad angels. Fairly clearly many, many years ago theism came to include this hypothesis for just this reason—to deal with the problem of evil. Another hypothesis added to theism partly also under the pressure of this problem is the hypothesis of life after death. Men felt that God would only bring about or allow others to bring about great suffering if there was a life after death in which God could restore the victims to health of mind and soul. I have not myself argued along these lines, but I can see very strong reasons why a God would choose to bring about life after death, including the reason of the compensating for evils of life on earth. If any one wishes to add this hypothesis to theism to save it from the force of an argument from evil, he must however bear in mind that theism then becomes a more complicated hypothesis, and hence has less prior probability and so needs more in the way of confirming evidence to raise its over-all probability on evidence, to (e.g.) more than ½.
A third extra hypothesis, which may be added to theism partly in order to deal with the problem of evil, is the hypothesis of redemptive incarnation. Men may feel that a God would only have the right to subject creatures to ills of the kind which they suffer if he were prepared to share with them the burden of the suffering and effort. The Christian religion has of course maintained that God knowing the worthwhileness of the conquest of evil and the perfecting of the universe by men, in fact shared with them this task by subjecting himself as man to the evil of the world, especially by accepting the Crucifixion. Similar considerations apply as apply to the additional hypothesis of life after death. I see abundant reason why a God should choose to bring about a redemptive incarnation. But to add this hypothesis to theism is to complicate theism so that it needs more in the way of confirming evidence, and I do not myself see the need to do this in order to save theism from a C-inductive counter-argument. However, I shall argue in the next chapter that there may be good grounds for believing in a redemptive incarnation which help to establish a theistic system rather than being dependent on one already established. I do not think that there are such grounds for believing in bad angels or in life after death. Arguments for the latter normally come through a belief in an independently established theistic system, e.g. through a belief about what a God would be expected to do, or through a belief that a particular person was a special messenger of God, may be God incarnate, and hence that the words which he uttered or that the teaching of the society which he founded is to be believed.
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