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A man may accept the arguments of the previous two chapters in principle. He may agree that one does need a substantial amount of various kinds of evil in order to provide the opportunity for greater goods, and in particular a choice of destiny for men, to a significant degree. But he may feel that there is just too much evil in the world, and that less evil would produce adequate benefit. It might be said that a God could give to man choice enough by allowing him to inflict quite a bit of pain on his fellows, and could deter a man from harmful actions by some nasty headaches. In our world, the objection goes, things are too serious. There is too much evil which man can do to his fellow, and deterrents of too great seriousness, and so too unpleasant natural evils to give men knowledge thereof. The suffering of children and animals is something which rightly often appals us. The game, it may be said, is not worth the candle. This is, I believe, the crux of the problem of evil. It is not the fact of evil or the kinds of evil which are the real threat to theism; it is the quantity of evil—both the number of people (and animals) who suffer and the amount which they suffer. If there is a God, he has given man too much choice, the objection in effect says. He has inflicted too much suffering on too many people (and animals) to give knowledge to others for the sake of the freedom of the latter; he has given to man too much opportunity to do evil, and used too powerful deterrents to certain bad actions instead of just stopping men from doing them by force. With the objection that if there is a God, he has overdone it, I feel considerable initial sympathy. The objection seems to count against the claim that there is a God.
Clearly if there is a God, he must set a limit to the amount of suffering. Clearly too there is such a limit. There is a temporal limit constituted by death to the amount a given man can suffer. And there is also presumably a limit to the intensity of possible suffering, set by the constitution of the brain through which suffering comes to man. But the objection is that the limit is set too wide. It ought never to have allowed Hiroshima, Belsen, the Lisbon Earthquake, or the Black Death. But the trouble is that the fewer natural evils a God provides, the less opportunity he provides for man to exercise responsibility. For the less natural evil, the less knowledge he gives to man of how to produce or avoid suffering and disaster, the less opportunity for his exercise of the higher virtues, and the less experience of the harsh possibilities of existence; and the less he allows to men the opportunity to bring about large-scale horrors, the less the freedom and responsibility which he gives to them. What in effect the objection is asking is that a God should make a toy-world, a world where things matter, but not very much; where we can choose and our choices can make a small difference, but the real choices remain God's. For he simply would not allow us the choice of doing real harm, or through our negligence allowing real harm to occur. He would be like the over-protective parent who will not let his child out of sight for a moment. Conscious of the very short temporal span of human and animal life (and to a lesser extent of the limits to the depths of pain and suffering within that life which can be experienced), my own final verdict is that God has good reason to bring about or allow to occur that amount of suffering which exists for the sake of the greater good which results. My conclusion is based on the grounds which I have given as to why a God might wish to produce such evils. But I have set them out only very briefly. Adequately to justify a moral viewpoint and to persuade others, not merely is a great deal of argument needed but also often a lot of personal experience of the kinds of goods and evils involved. For these reasons my arguments may not have been adequate to convince many a reasonable opponent. Also of course my own lack of experience of many of the harsher evils of the world may have led me to fail to appreciate their full horror. However the length of this book precludes further argument, and experience of worlds is no part of books; and so we must leave the argument here. Clearly a God has a reason for making a world with the amount of natural evil and the possibilities for man-made evil which this world contains (a reason in the responsibility, etc. which are thereby given to man). Clearly too he has a reason for not making such a world (given by the evil involved in it). Fairly clearly too, I would judge, he does not have overriding reason for making such a world. There would be nothing wrong in his making a world without such evil. But, also, my own tentative conclusion, in the light of the considerations adduced, is that God does not have overriding reason for not making a world with this evil. For these reasons the existence of the evil which we find does not count against the existence of God. There is no good C-inductive argument from the existence of evil to the non-existence of God. Everything turns on a quantitative moral judgement (i.e. a judgement about the quantity of evil which it is justifiable to bring about or to allow to occur, or the quantity of good which it is obligatory to create). Quantitative judgements are the hardest moral judgements on which to reach a sure conclusion. They are highly fallible, as can be seen by the fact that we frequently change our minds about them. Although we may hold throughout our lives certain general qualitative moral principles (e.g. that inflicting harm not for the sake of resultant good is always wrong), we normally through experience come to change our judgements on the detailed application of such principles; as we say after changing them, we grow in moral understanding. The two-year-old child who falls down and grazes himself, and bursts out crying would judge, if he could put his thoughts into words, that the evil of his suffering could never be justified by any higher good. When he grows up he is liable to think rather differently about the incident. We should bear in mind too that very great concern about non-extreme physical suffering is characteristic of contemporary Northern Europe and America. This is not to say that we are wrong to have such concern; it is only to draw attention to the fact that there are cultural differences, and that they should lead us to reflect on whether we are over-sensitive on this matter—and conversely not sensitive enough on other matters, about some of which other cultures have been very sensitive (e.g. the importance of responsibility, loyalty, freedom, knowledge, and right worship).
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