City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2017 Evil and the Ontological Disproof Carl J. Brownson III The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2155 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] EVIL AND THE ONTOLOGICAL DISPROOF by CARL BROWNSON A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, City University of New York 2017 1 © 2017 CARL BROWNSON All Rights Reserved ii Evil and the Ontological Disproof by Carl Brownson This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Graham Priest Chair of Examining Committee Date Iakovos Vasiliou Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Stephen Grover, advisor Graham Priest Peter Simpson Nickolas Pappas Robert Lovering THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Evil and the Ontological Disproof by Carl Brownson Advisor: Stephen Grover This dissertation is a revival of the ontological disproof, an ontological argument against the existence of God. The ontological disproof, in its original form, argues that God is impossible, because if God exists, he must exist necessarily, and necessary existence is impossible. The notion of necessary existence has been largely rehabilitated since this argument was first offered in 1948, and the argument has accordingly lost much of its force. I argue that the ontological disproof ought to be combined with the problem of evil, and that the resulting synthesis of the two arguments is far more powerful than either element could be alone. The argument is this: if God exists, then he exists necessarily. This necessary existence entails that the mere possibility of a state of affairs incompatible with God’s essential qualities, his perfect goodness and omnipotence, renders God impossible. The possibility of evil incompatible with God does exactly that. This simple argument has remarkable range: it serves as an ontological argument against the existence of God, but it can also serve as a new form of the problem of evil, allowing the resolution of that problem to rest on the mere possibility of evil incompatible with God. It can also iv serve as a contingency argument against the existence of God: God must be a necessary being to adequately explain the existence of the contingent world, but cannot be. This one argument, which I call the ontological problem of evil, can thus play several roles in the philosophy of religion, and can demonstrate the metaphysical impossibility of God from several directions simultaneously. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe gratitude to many people for their support as I worked on this project over the years. First, to my advisor, Stephen Grover: the genesis of the argument of this work was developed in a course I took with him on the problem of evil more than a decade ago, and he was enormously patient as those thoughts developed into the present work in pieces and threads woven around the rest of my life. Graham Priest and Peter Simpson were enormously helpful in different ways as I worked out the details. I would also like to thank Brian Madden, Damien Dupont and Morgan Horowitz for their feedback, sometimes formal and sometimes casual, over the years. On a personal level, my lovely wife Karen and my beautiful little girl Natalie: there is no measure for the peace and joy they brought me and the grounding they provided as I worked on this. The same goes for my sister-in-law Susie, who has been an essential part of our little family over the last year. Finally, I owe thanks to my mother and to my sister for being inspirations of the religious sentiment that, paradoxically, drove the questions in this work, and to my dad for being the source of the first and perhaps still most serious philosophical conversations I ever had: they happened early, cut deep, and continue to this day. vi Table of Contents 1. Evil and Necessity 1 2. From Findlay to Mackie 11 3. From Mackie to Findlay 36 4. What Does ‘Evil Incompatible with God’ Mean? 60 5. Possibility 68 6. Two Historical Advances in Possibility 91 7. The Possibility of Evil Incompatible with God 98 8. Why is Necessity Essential to God? 106 9. What Kind of Problem is This? 111 10. The Contingency Argument 118 10. Conclusions 134 Bibliography 140 vii 1. Evil and Necessity “[The problem of evil] seems to result from two distinguishable functions that the idea of God has. It is an ultimate source of explanations of why things are as they are; it is also the embodiment of the very standard by which many of them are found wanting.”1 The problem of evil raises questions about the existence and nature of God, but what exactly are those questions? Is the problem of evil a logical problem,2 or merely an evidential problem,3 or even just a “noncrucial perplexity of relatively minor importance”?4 Are only the goodness and omnipotence of God at stake,5 or are further attributes of God brought into doubt by evil as well? Omniscience is surely relevant to the problem of evil, and perhaps more qualities still – maybe a thicker concept like justice in place of goodness,6 or wisdom in place of omniscience, would make the problem more pointed. I think that amidst this ambiguity in the framing of the problem, an essential attribute of God has been neglected, one which changes the character of the problem and renders it decisive. I want to investigate what the problem of evil means for the necessary existence of God. The problem of evil raises serious difficulties for the notion that God exists necessarily. If there is a metaphysically possible state of affairs incompatible with 1 Penelhum, T. “Divine Goodness and the Problem of Evil.” Religious Studies 2 (1966): 95-107. 2 Mackie, J.L. “Evil and Omnipotence.” Mind (64): 200-212, 195. 3 Rowe, W. “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism.” American Philosophical Quarterly (16). 1979. 4 Pike, N. “Hume on Evil.” In Adams, R. and Adams, M. The Problem of Evil. OUP 1990: p. 52. 5 Mackie, p. 200. 6 Kant, I. “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy,” in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Wood, A. and di Giovanni, G. CUP. 2001 1 God’s perfections, then God is not a necessary being. Necessity, however, is part of the very idea of God, an essential attribute, just as omnipotence and goodness are. If the problem of evil entails that God is not necessary, it thereby entails that God does not exist. But evil incompatible with God is possible. This simple problem amounts to a disproof of the existence of God from several directions at once – an ontological disproof, a cosmological disproof, a stronger version of the logical problem of evil. Terence Penelhum, above, does not address necessity in his account of the problem of evil, but his framework points towards the role necessity plays: the problem of evil involves the necessity of God, because necessity is an essential part of how God can be an “ultimate source of explanations of why things are as they are.” Explaining why things are as they are in a moral sense is the point of theodicy; explaining why things are as they are in a metaphysical sense is the point of the cosmological argument. These two kinds of explanation are, I believe, in tension, as some of the ways things could be are incompatible with the existence of God. But both sorts of explanations must come together if God is to exist in any meaningful way. The problem of evil arises precisely because God is supposed to serve as an explanation of why the world is this way, and evil is part of the world, so it must be a part of that explanation. Modal questions arise in both the problem of evil and the cosmological argument. Thinking through the problem of evil involves counterfactuals, comparisons of this world with alternatives, a sense that things could have been better or worse: why do children get cancer, when they might not have? Why are things not better, if God is in charge? The problem of evil is both moral and modal. 2 The cosmological argument is modal as well: God must exist necessarily rather than contingently because he must serve as an explanation of why things are as they are and not another way. His existence, his sovereignty, his power and his freedom must therefore range over those other ways things could be. This modal overlap between the two problems means that the cosmological argument and the problem of evil can and should be contested on the same field. At that intersection of the necessity of God and the problem of evil lies the following problem: 1. If God exists, then God exists necessarily. 2. If God exists necessarily, then nothing incompatible with God’s existence is metaphysically possible. 3. Evil incompatible with the existence of God is metaphysically possible. Therefore, God does not exist. It will be easier if this argument has a name, so I will call it the ontological problem of evil, to reflect its role as a synthesis of two other problems: the so-called ontological disproof, and the problem of evil.