THE PROBLEM OF EVIL The Problem of Evil The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St Andrews in 2003 PETER VAN INWAGEN 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Peter van Inwagen 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Van Inwagen, Peter. The problem of evil : the Gifford lectures delivered in the University of St. Andrews in 2003 / Peter van Inwagen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-924560-4 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-19-924560-6 (alk. paper) 1. God—Proof. 2. Good and evil—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Theodicy. I. Title. BT103.V35 2006 214—dc22 2006006153 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–924560–6 978–0–19–924560–4 13579108642 For Lisette Preface These lectures were delivered in the University of St Andrews in April and May of 2003. It is difficult for me to find words to express my gratitude to the members of University of St Andrews for giving me the opportunity to deliver a series of Gifford Lectures in their university. Having attempted and discarded several more elaborate expressions of gratitude, I will say only that I am very grateful indeed for the honor they have done me. I am also grateful to many individual members of the university for all they did to make my stay in St Andrews a pleasant and productive one, and for their many acts of kindness to me and to my wife Lisette and my step-daughter Claire. Special thanks are due to Professor Alan Torrance, Dr Peter Clark (Head of the School of Philosophical and Anthropological Studies), Professor Sarah Broadie, and Professor John Haldane. I wish also to thank the audiences at the lectures for their insightful comments and questions, many of which I have responded to (however inadequately) in this book. These responses are to be found in the endnotes; in a few cases, they have taken the form of revisions of the text of the lectures. Finally, I thank the two readers to whom the Oxford University Press sent a draft of the manuscript of this book. I have tried to meet some of their concerns about particular passages (and I have responded to some of their more general comments and suggestions) in the notes and in the text. I have not, in turning the text of the lectures into a book, tried to make it anything other than what it was: a text written to be read aloud to an audience. (With this qualification: in the process of revision, some of the ‘‘lectures’’ have become too long actually to be read in the hour that academic tradition allots to a lecture.) Many passages in the text of the lectures have been extensively rewritten, but all the revisions are ones I would have made before the lectures were delivered—if only I had been thinking more clearly at the time. Most of the material in this book that was not in the original lectures is in the endnotes. The lectures were written for a general audience (as opposed to an audience of philosophers). A few of the notes are simply thoughts that could not be fitted into the text without ‘‘breaking the flow’’. Most of the others (citations of books and articles aside) are for philosophers. I advise readers of the book who are not philosophers to viii Preface ignore the notes (unless, perhaps, they see a footnote cue attached to a passage in which something I’ve said seems to them to face an obvious objection; they may find their concern addressed in the note). I will not summarize the content of the lectures here. The Detailed Contents contains a summary of each of the lectures, and the first lecture gives a general overview of their content. Citations are given in ‘‘minimal’’ form in the notes (e.g. Adams and Adams, The Problem of Evil). For ‘‘full’’ citations, see Works Cited. Quotations from the Psalms are taken from the Book of Common Prayer. Other biblical quotations are from the Authorized (King James) Version unless otherwise specified. Peter van Inwagen South Bend, Indiana August 2005 Outline Contents Detailed Contents xi Lecture 1. The Problem of Evil and the Argument from Evil 1 Lecture 2. The Idea of God 18 Lecture 3. Philosophical Failure 37 Lecture 4. The Global Argument from Evil 56 Lecture 5. The Global Argument Continued 75 Lecture 6. The Local Argument from Evil 95 Lecture 7. The Sufferings of Beasts 113 Lecture 8. The Hiddenness of God 135 Notes 152 Works Cited 177 Index 181 Detailed Contents LECTURE I. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL In this lecture, I defend my approach to the problem of evil: my decision to approach the problem of evil by way of an examination of the argument from evil. I distinguish several different ‘‘problems of evil’’ and several different ‘‘arguments from evil’’. I examine the contention that there is an ‘‘overarching’’ problem of evil, a problem that confronts both theists and atheists, and conclude that this contention is simply false. LECTURE II. THE IDEA OF GOD I present a more or less traditional list of the ‘‘divine attributes’’ and conclude that this list represents an attempt to flesh out the Anselmian notion of a ‘‘something than which a greater cannot be conceived’’. I contend that the concept of God should be understood in this Anselmian sense, and that it is implausible to suppose that a ‘‘something than which a greater cannot be conceived’’ should lack any of the attributes in the traditional list. I raise and try to answer the question: To what extent is it possible to revise the traditional list of divine attributes without thereby replacing the concept of God with another concept? LECTURE III. PHILOSOPHICAL FAILURE My thesis in these lectures is that the argument from evil is a failure. But what is it for a philosophical argument to fail? I propose that a philosophical argument fails if it cannot pass a certain test. The test is the ability of the argument to win assent from the members of a neutral audience who have listened to an ideal presentation of the argument. That is: the argument is presented by an ideal proponent of the argument to an ideal audience whose members, initially, have no tendency either to accept or to reject its conclusion; the proponent lays out the argument in the presence of an ideal critic whose brief it is to point out any weaknesses it may have to the audience of ‘‘ideal xii Detailed Contents agnostics’’. If—given world enough and time—the proponent of the argument is unable to use the argument to convince the audience that they should accept its conclusion, the argument is a failure. LECTURE IV. THE GLOBAL ARGUMENT FROM EVIL The global argument from evil proceeds from a premise about the totality of the evil (primarily the suffering) that actually exists. Having examined and refuted the popular contention that there is something morally objectionable about treating the argument from evil as ‘‘just one more philosophical argument’’, I imagine this argument presented to an audience of ideal agnostics, and the beginnings of an exchange between Atheist, an idealized proponent of the argument, and Theist, an idealized critic of the argument. The idea of a ‘‘defense’’ is introduced: that is, the idea of a story that contains both God and all the evils that actually exist, a story that is put forward not as true but as ‘‘true for all anyone knows’’. I represent Theist as employing a version of the ‘‘free-will defense’’, a story according to which the evils of the world result from the abuse of free will by created beings. LECTURE V. THE GLOBAL ARGUMENT CONTINUED I begin with an examination of three philosophical theses about free will, each of which would, if it were true, refute or raise difficulties for Theist’s attempt to reply to the argument from evil by employing the free-will defense: that free will is compatible with determinism; that an omniscient being would know what anyone would freely do in any counterfactual circumstances; that free will is incompatible with divine foreknowledge.