For one can ask how this claim is to be justified. One answer that might be offered would be that some form of consequentialism is true—such as, for example, the view that an action that fails to maximize the balance of good states of affairs over bad states of affairs is morally wrong. But the difficulty then is that any such assumption is likely to be a deeply controversial assumption that many theists would certainly reject. The problem, in short, is that any axiological formulation of the argument from evil, as it stands, is incomplete in a crucial respect, since it fails to make explicit how a failure to bring about good states of affairs, or a failure to prevent bad states of affairs, entails that one is acting in a morally wrong way.
Moreover, the natural way of removing this incompleteness is by appealing to what are in fact controversial ethical claims, such as the claim that the right action is the one that maximizes expected value.
The result, in turn, is that discussions may very well become sidetracked on issues that are, in fact, not really crucial—such as, for example, the question of whether God would be morally blameworthy if he failed to create the best world that he could. The alternative to an axiological formulation is a deontological formulation.
Here the idea is that rather than employing concepts that focus upon the value or disvalue of states of affairs, one instead uses concepts that focus upon the rightness and wrongness of actions, and upon the properties—rightmaking properties and wrongmaking properties—that determine whether an action is one that ought to be performed, or ought not to be performed, other things being equal. When the argument is thus formulated, there is no problematic bridge that needs to be introduced connecting the goodness and badness of states of affairs with the rightness and wrongness of actions.
How is the argument from evil best formulated? As an incompatibility argument, or as an evidential argument? In section 1. That formulation involved the following crucial premise:. The problem with that premise, as we saw, is that it can be argued that some evils are such that their actuality, or at least their possibility, is logically necessary for goods that outweigh them, in which case it is not true that a perfectly good being would want to eliminate such evils.
The thrust of the argument was then that, first of all, an omniscient and omnipotent person could have prevented the existence of such evils without thereby either allowing equal or greater evils, or preventing equal or greater goods, and, secondly, that any omniscient and morally perfect person will prevent the existence of such evils if that can be done without either allowing equal or greater evils, or preventing equal or greater goods.
The second of these claims avoids the objections that can be directed against the stronger claim that was involved in the argument set out in section 1. But the shift to the more modest claim requires that one move from the very modest claim that evil exists to the stronger claim that there are certain evils that an omniscient and omnipotent person could have prevented the existence of such evils without thereby either allowing equal or greater evils, or preventing equal or greater goods, and the question arises as to how that claim can be supported.
In particular, can it be established by means of a purely deductive argument? Consider, in particular, the relevant premise in the more concrete version of the argument from evil set out in section 1. If one had knowledge of the totality of morally relevant properties, then it might well be possible to show both that there are no greater evils that can be avoided only at the cost of the evil in question, and that there are no greater goods that are possible only given that evil.
Do we have such knowledge? Some moral theorists would claim that we do, and that it is possible to set out a complete and correct moral theory. But this is certainly a highly controversial metaethical claim, and, as a consequence, the prospects for establishing a premise such as 1 via a deductive argument do not appear promising, at least given the present state of moral theory.
This is a serious question, and it may well be that such knowledge is ruled out. But as will become clear when we consider evidential versions of the argument from evil, it may well be that one can have justified beliefs about the rightness and wrongness of actions. If a premise such as 1 cannot, at least at present, be established deductively, then the only possibility, it would seem, is to offer some sort of inductive argument in support of the relevant premise.
If the argument from evil is given an evidential formulation, what form should that take? There appear to be four main possibilities that have been suggested in recent discussions. The first, which might be called the direct inductive approach, involves the idea that one can show that theism is unlikely to be true without comparing theism with any alternative hypothesis, other than the mere denial of theism.
At the heart of this first approach, which was set out by William Rowe, is the idea that one sound type of inductive inference is what might be referred to as instantial generalization, where this is a matter of projecting a generalization that has been found to hold in all cases that have been so far examined to all cases whatever.
The second, which can be labeled the indirect inductive approach, argues instead that theism can be shown to be unlikely to be true by establishing that there is some alternative hypothesis—other than the mere negation of theism—that is logically incompatible with theism, and more probable than theism. This approach, which was originally used by David Hume in one of his arguments in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , and which has been set out and defended in a detailed way by Paul Draper, can be viewed as involving an inference to the best explanation, a type of inductive inference that was discovered by C.
Pierce, and which is now very widely accepted. The third approach, which has been advanced by William Rowe, involves what might be referred to as a Bayesian approach, and it differs from the first two approaches in that it does not involve either instantial generalization or inference to the best explanation, or, indeed, any sort of inductive inference.
The idea, instead, is to start out from premises that are themselves substantive probabilistic claims, and then to show that it follows deductively from those premises, via axioms of probability theory, that it is unlikely that God exists. The fourth and final approach, which has been set out by Michael Tooley, involves the idea of bringing a substantive theory of inductive logic, or logical probability, to bear upon the argument from evil, and then to argue that when this is done, one can derive a formula giving the probability that God does not exist relative to information about the number of apparent evils to be found in the world.
The basic idea behind a direct inductive formulation of the argument from evil is that the argument involves a crucial inductive step that takes the form of an inductive projection or generalization in which one moves from a premise concerning the known moral properties of some state of affairs to a conclusion about the likely overall moral worth of that state of affairs, given all its moral properties, both known and unknown.
When the argument from evil is formulated in this way, it involves five premises, set out at steps 1 , 3 , 5 , 7 and 9. Statement 1 involves both empirical claims, and moral claims, but the empirical claims are surely true, and, setting aside the question of the existence of objective rightmaking and wrongmaking properties, the moral claims are surely also very plausible.
The other four premises, set out at steps 3 , 5 , 7 and 9 , are plausibly viewed as analytic truths. As regards the logic of the argument, all of the steps in the argument, other than the inference from 1 to 2 , are deductive, and are either clearly valid as they stand, or could be made so by trivial expansions of the argument at the relevant points.
The upshot, accordingly, is that the above argument appears to stand or fall with the defensibility of the inductive inference from 1 to 2.
The crucial questions, accordingly, are, first, exactly what the form of that inductive inference is, and, secondly, whether it is sound. A familiar and very common sort of inductive inference involves moving from information to the effect that all observed things of a certain type have a certain property to the conclusion that absolutely all things of the type in question have the relevant property.
Could the inductive step in the evidential argument from evil perhaps be of that form? Let us consider, then, whether that view can be sustained. When this is done, the above inference can be compactly represented as follows:. For the reason given, it is not a cogent criticism. But a criticism of type B is entirely proper to advance against any inductive inference of the sort we are considering. Let us consider, then, the relevance of this distinction.
But, by contrast, it is not true that this is so if one rejects, instead, the inference to 1. Compare the situation with a very long conjunction: given any particular conjunct, it may be likely that that conjunct is true, while being very unlikely that every conjunct, and hence the conjunction as a whole, is true.
This is important, moreover, because it is 1 that Rowe needs, since the conclusion that he is drawing does not concern simply the next morally relevant property that someone might consider: conclusion Q asserts, rather, that all further morally relevant properties will lack property J. Such a conclusion about all further cases is much stronger than a conclusion about the next case, and one might well think that in some circumstances a conclusion of the latter sort is justified, but that a conclusion of the former sort is not.
One way of supporting the latter claim is by introducing the idea of logical probability, where logical probability is a measure of the extent to which one proposition supports another Carnap, , 19—51, esp. Is it impossible, then, to justify universal generalizations? The answer is that if laws are more than mere regularities—and, in particular, if they are second-order relations between universals—then the obtaining of a law, and thus of the corresponding regularity, may have a very high probability upon even quite a small body of evidence.
So universal generalizations can be justified, if they obtain in virtue of underlying, governing laws of nature. The question then becomes whether Q expresses a law—or a consequence of a law. If—as seems plausible—it does not, then, although it is true that one in justified in holding, of any given, not yet observed morally relevant property, that it is unlikely to have property J, it may not be the case that it is probable that no goodmaking or rightmaking property has property J.
It may , on the contrary, be probable that there is some morally relevant property that does have property J. This objection could be overcome if one could argue that it is unlikely that there are many unknown goodmaking properties. For if the number is small, then the probability of Q may still be high even if Q does not express a law, or a consequence of a law. Moreover, I am inclined to think that it may well be possible to argue that it is unlikely that there are many unknown, morally relevant properties.
But I also think that it is very likely that any attempt to establish this conclusion would involve some very controversial metaethical claims. As a consequence, I think that one is justified in concluding that such a line of argument is not especially promising. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , Hume contended that it was not possible to arrive at the conclusion that the world had a perfectly good cause—or a perfectly evil one—starting out simply from a world that consists of a mixture of good and bad states of affairs:.
But if this is right, and the hypothesis that the first cause or causes of the universe is neither good nor evil is more probable than the hypothesis that the first cause is perfectly good, then the probability of the latter must be less than one half. Hume advanced, then, an evidential argument from evil that has a distinctly different logical form from that involved in direct inductive arguments, for the idea is to point to some proposition that is logically incompatible with theism, and then to argue that, given facts about undesirable states of affairs to be found in the world, that hypothesis is more probable than theism, and, therefore, that theism is more likely to be false than to be true.
More than two centuries later, Paul Draper, inspired by Hume, set out and defended this type of indirect inductive argument in a very detailed way. It then follows, provided that the initial probability of T is no greater than that of HI, that T is more likely to be false than to be true. By substitution in 1 , we have:. So far, this is simply a matter of probability theory.
But now Draper introduces two substantive claims. The first is that the a priori probability of the hypothesis of indifference is not less than the a priori probability of theism, so that we have. So we have. Finally, Draper assumes as a substantive premise that the hypothesis of indifference is logically incompatible with theism:.
There are various points at which one might respond to this argument. First, it might be argued that the assumption that the hypothesis of indifference is logically incompatible with theism is not obviously true.
For might it not be logically possible that there was an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect being who created a neutral environment in which evolution could take place in a chancy way, and who afterwards did not intervene in any way? Draper supports it by arguing that whereas the hypothesis of theism involves some ontological commitment, the Hypothesis of Indifference does not. But, on the other hand, the latter involves a completely universal generalization about the absence of any action upon the earth by any nonhuman persons, of either a benevolent or malevolent sort, and it is far from clear why the prior probability of this being so should be greater than the prior probability of theism.
Nevertheless, the objection does bring out an important point, namely, that the argument as it stands says nothing at all about how much below 0. Fourthly, objections can be directed at the arguments that Draper offers in support of a third substantive premise—namely, that introduced at 6. Some of the objections directed against this premise are less than impressive—and some seem very implausible indeed, as in the case, for example, of Peter van Inwagen, who has to appeal to quite an extraordinary claim about the conditions that one must satisfy in order to claim that a world is logically possible:.
Nevertheless, given that the argument that Draper offers in support of the premise at 6 involves a number of detailed considerations, very careful scrutiny of those arguments would be needed before one could conclude that the premise is justified. Finally, rather than attacking the argument itself, one might instead argue that, while it is sound, the conclusion is not really a significant one.
For what matters is not whether there is some evidence relative to which it is unlikely that theism is true. What matters is whether theism is improbable relative to our total evidence. The question then is whether the appropriate revision of the first substantive premise is plausible. That is, do we have good reason for thinking that the following statement is true:. A Draper-style argument is one type of indirect inductive argument from evil. It is important to notice, however, that in formulating an indirect inductive argument from evil, one need not proceed along the route that Draper chooses.
If one explains the fact that the world contains an impressive mixture of desirable and undesirable states of affairs by the hypothesis that the creator of the world was an omnipotent, omniscient, and indifferent deity, then nothing more needs to be added.
By contrast, if one wants to explain the mixed state of the world by the hypothesis that the creator of the world was an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect deity, one needs to postulate the existence of additional, morally significant properties that lie beyond our ken, and ones, moreover, that are so distributed that the mixed appearance does not correspond to what is really the case. A theistic explanation is, accordingly, less simple than an indifferent deity explanation, and therefore, provided that one can argue that the a priori probability of the latter hypothesis is not less than that of the former, one can appeal to the greater simplicity of the latter in order to conclude that it has a higher posterior probability than the theistic hypothesis.
It then follows, given that the two hypotheses are logically incompatible, that the probability of the theistic hypothesis must be less than one half. We have just considered the Bayesian-style argument offered by Paul Draper. Let us now turn to another. The latter argument has been vigorously criticized by Plantinga , but Rowe has remained confident that the new argument is sound. Secondly, the object of the argument as a whole is to start out from some probabilistic assumptions, and then to move deductively, using only axioms of probability theory, to the following two conclusions:.
Thirdly, in order to establish the first conclusion, Rowe needs only the following three assumptions:. Fourthly, all three assumptions, interpreted as Rowe does, are surely eminently reasonable.
As regards 2 , it certainly seems plausible, assuming that the existence of God is not logically necessary, that there is at least some non-zero probability that God does not exist, given our background knowledge. But one can derive 2 , provided that one is willing to accept the not uncontroversial principle that only necessarily false propositions have a probability equal to zero. This principle is very plausible if one accepts the idea of infinitesimals.
If one does not, one may hold that some contingent propositions have a probability equal to zero. Similarly, 3 also seems plausible, and here too one can derive 3 provided that one is willing to accept the principle that only necessarily false propositions have a probability equal to zero.
Given assumptions 1 , 2 , and 3 , how does the argument for the first conclusion go? In outline, one first uses 1 , 2 , and 3 to prove that. The key starting point is with the following theorem of probability theory Compare Draper, , :.
This objection, however, is open to the following reply. The reason that I am justified in believing the proposition that either God does not exist or there is a pen in my pocket is that I am justified in believing that there is a pen in my pocket. The proposition that either God does not exist or there is a pen in my pocket therefore does not represent the total evidence that I have.
In section 3. All of the steps in that argument were deductive, except for the following crucial inference:. Essentially, there are three ways in which one might attempt to defend this inference. One is by treating it as a case of instantial generalization. But as we saw in effect in section 3. A second approach is to view that inductive step as a matter of inference to the best explanation, and this is a more promising possibility. That approach would lead to an argument of the general form advanced by David Hume and Paul Draper, considered in section.
There is, however, a third possibility, which is the focus of the present section. Underlying this approach are two general ideas: the first is that both induction via instantial generalization and inference to the best explanation abduction, the method of hypothesis, hypothetico-deductive method stand in need of justification; the second idea is that at the heart of such a justification will be the defense of an account of logical probability.
The fundamental idea, accordingly, is that the way to determine whether the inductive step that lies at the heart of the evidential argument from evil is sound is by bringing serious inductive logic—understood as a theory of logical probability—to bear upon the question.
What is the appropriate theory of logical probability? But if one holds, as Tooley and does, that governing laws are logically possible, then it is clear that the fundamental equiprobability assumption needs to be formulated in terms of governing laws of nature.
At present, however, no detailed formulation of such an approach to logical probability is available. To establish that the inductive step in the version of the evidential argument from evil set out above is sound requires a rather technical argument in inductive logic.
But one can gain an intuitive understanding of the underlying idea in the following way. Suppose that there is a rightmaking property of which we have no knowledge. If an action of allowing a child to be brutally killed possessed that property, then it might not be wrong to allow that action, depending upon the weightiness of that unknown rightmaking property. But the existence of unknown rightmaking properties is no more likely, a priori, than of unknown wrongmaking properties.
Let us suppose, further, that these two properties are equally weighty, since, a priori, there is no reason for supposing that one is more significant than the other. One can then see that there are the following four possibilities:.
The intuitive idea, then, is that if one has an action that, given only its known rightmaking and wrongmaking properties, is an action that it would be morally wrong to perform, then it is more likely than not it is also an action that it would be morally wrong to perform, given the totality of its morally significant properties, both known and unknown.
But what underlies this intuitive idea? The upshot is that given an action that would be morally wrong if judged only by its known morally significant properties, every possibility of a combination of unknown rightmaking and wrongmaking properties that would make that action morally right all things considered would be precisely counterbalanced by a combination of unknown rightmaking and wrongmaking properties that would make that action morally even more wrong, all things considered.
But, in addition, there can be combinations of unknown rightmaking and wrongmaking properties that would move an action in the direction of being morally right all things considered, but not sufficiently far to make it morally right all things considered. Finally, there is the possibility that the action has no unknown morally significant properties. Consequently, if an action is one that it would be morally wrong to perform, if judged only by its known morally significant properties, then it is more likely than not that it is one that it is morally wrong to perform given the totality of its morally significant properties, both known and unknown.
The upshot is that the probabilistic inference that is involved in the move from statement 1 to statement 2 in the argument set out above in section 3. How is the formal calculation carried out? The answer is somewhat complicated, and there are slightly different ways of doing it, as in Tooley and b , with the method used in the latter case being perhaps slightly more perspicuous, but with both methods generating the same result.
The key in both cases, moreover, is to make assumptions that increase the probability that an action that is morally wrong as judged only by its known rightmaking and wrongmaking properties is morally right relative to the totality of its morally significant properties, both known and unknown. In the case where one focuses only upon a single action whose known wrongmaking properties outweigh its known rightmaking properties, the result is as one would expect, namely, that the probability that the action in question is not morally wrong relative to the totality of its morally significant properties, both known and unknown, must be less than one half.
But what is the general result? Social media Twitter Facebook Discord Reddit. This page was last modified on 2 September , at Unless explicitly noted otherwise, all content licensed as indicated by RationalWiki:Copyrights. Cogito ergo sum Logic and rhetoric. Key articles. Logical fallacy Syllogism Argument. General logic. Association fallacy Bait-and-switch Fallacy fallacy Fallacy of ambiguity Nemmeno sbagliato Straw man.
Bad logic. Appeal to nature Balance fallacy Fallacy of opposition Moralistic fallacy Nazi analogies What's the harm v - t - e. Preach to the choir Religion. Crux of the matter. Speak of the devil.
Atheism Antitheism Secularism Humanism. An act of faith. Apologetics and counter-apologetics:. Rejecting the idea that evil is a positive force, he argues that it is merely a "name for nothing other than the absence of good". At first glance this looks like a philosophical sleight of hand. Augustine might try to define evil out of existence, but this cannot diminish the reality of the pain, suffering and cruelty that prompt the question of evil in the first place.
As the 20th-century Catholic writer Charles Journet put it, the non-being of evil "can have a terrible reality, like letters carved out of stone".
Any defence of Augustine's position has to begin by pointing out that his account of evil is metaphysical rather than empirical. In other words, he is not saying that our experience of evil is unreal. On the contrary, since a divinely created world is naturally oriented toward the good, any lack of goodness will be felt as painful, wrong and urgently in need of repair. To say that hunger is "merely" the absence of food is not to deny the intense suffering it involves.
One consequence of Augustine's mature view of evil as "non-being", a privation of the good, is that evil eludes our understanding. His sophisticated metaphysics of evil confirms our intuitive response of incomprehension in the face of gratuitous brutality, or of senseless "natural" evil like a child's cancer. Augustine emphasises that evil is ultimately inexplicable, since it has no substantial existence: "No one therefore must try to get to know from me what I know that I do not know, unless, it may be, in order to learn not to know what must be known to be incapable of being known!
Postulated explanations of this paradox are known as theodicies, and such answers have been for centuries handed out by members of many belief systems when challenged to provide logical answers to the question of how it is possible that a just and moral God can co-exist with evil.
Among these answers are:. The online forward quoted above draws upon yet another possible explanation: that evil is the absence of God, in the same way that cold is the absence of heat, and dark is the absence of light.
This argument has been around for a long time, as has the legend about the pious student using it to squelch an atheist professor.
The name of Einstein gets used in legends whose plots call for a smart person, one whom the audience will immediately recognize as such i. This venerated cultural icon has, at least in the world of contemporary lore, become a stock character to be tossed into the fray wherever the script calls for a genius. But he is not inserted merely to serve as an icon of learning to be humbled in tales that aim to teach that faith is of greater value than provable knowledge; he is also woven into these sorts of stories for his lack of belief.
Just as the villain in oldtime melodramas had to have a waxed moustache, a black cape, and an evil laugh, so too must the bullying professor of such stories be an atheist: it would not be enough for him to be merely an insufferable, over-educated git arrogantly attempting to stretch the minds of his students by having them question something deeply believed. No, he must instead be someone who rejects the existence of God, an assignment of role that re-positions what might otherwise have been a bloodless debate about philosophy as an epic battle between two champions of faith and denial and sets up the action to unfold as one putting the boots to the other.
He is also pivotal to these following tales, which are yet other variations on the same theme:. While the professor stood up at the beginning of class and did his thing, the student had an idea. This is an expressive classroom, and I think it would be fine if you spoke your mind. An atheist professor was teaching a college class and he told the class that he was going to prove that there is no God. He got down to the last couple of minutes and a Marine just released from active duty, and newly registered in the class, walked up to the professor, hit him full force in the face, and sent him flying from his platform.
Why did you do that? He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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