Monday, February 4, 2013

Rosenberg’s Argument from Evil Folly

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Intro



In my last blog entry I mentioned the debate between atheist Alexander Rosenberg versus William Lane Craig, the debate topic being “Is faith in God reasonable?” Alexander Rosenberg denies the existence of objective moral values but in the debate he had with William Lane Craig he argued the problem of evil. Yet without belief in an objective moral standard (as of what is morally good) the argument from evil shoots itself in the foot, because it removes all grounds for attacking even a trivial theodicy (where a theodicy is an alleged reason of why God allows evil).

A Hypothetical Theist



Suppose a hypothetical theist—call him Theophilus—concedes there are evils in the world but believes it is morally good for us humans to try to fight against them (refraining from doing morally wrong actions, advancing medical technology, learning to share our food with the hungry, etc.) with the limited abilities that we have, with the obstacles we face etc. and that this is better than God making the evils any less bad, such that if God shared this standard of moral goodness, God would allow all the evil that exists in this world, because on this standard of moral goodness God would have morally sufficient reasons for doing so (it is good for humanity to fight against these evils with limited abilities etc.).

An atheist might reject Theophilius’s view of what is morally good, and say that if God adopted the atheist’s standard of moral goodness, God would not allow the evil that we see.

So on one standard of moral goodness, God would not allow the evil in the world, but on another moral standard, God would allow our world’s evil. The problem for atheists who reject moral objectivism but embrace the argument from evil is this: without an objective standard of goodness, there’s no objective fact of the matter about which standard of goodness God would adopt if he existed, and thus there’d be no objective fact of the matter over whether God would allow evil if he existed, in which case the argument from evil would collapse under its own weight.

I’m not saying Theophilus’s theodicy is correct. But even if we grant it as foolish, without an objective moral standard the atheist who rejects moral objectivism is powerless to reject even Theophilus’s theodicy for why God allows evil. So for the atheist to put forth a successful argument from evil, the atheist needs to adopt an objective moral standard. However, it seems that if God does not exist, then objective morality does not exist, and if that’s true, then if objective morality does exist, then God does as well. Paradoxically, the argument from evil can be used as an argument for theism as follows:
  1. If God does not exist, then objective evil does not exist (since there wouldn’t be an objective moral standard).
  2. Objective evil does exist (thereby entailing an objective moral standard).
  3. Therefore, God exists.
It may seem like a trick, but as long as the first premise is true, objective evil implies God’s existence. The argument from evil is emotionally powerful, but emotions sometimes mislead the intellect. As long as the first premise is true, the argument from evil doesn’t work intellectually, even if we don’t know why God allows evil. (Since I’ve argued for the idea that objective morality doesn’t exist if God doesn’t exist elsewhere, I won’t repeat myself here about why objective morality implies God’s existence.)

Counterfactuals



Counterfactual conditionals are conditional statements in the subjunctive mood; roughly, those that take the form, “If P were true, then Q would be true,” as opposed to the indicative mood, “If P is true, then Q is true (contrast “If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, someone else did” with “If Oswald wouldn’t have shot Kennedy, someone else would have”). In one discussion I was challenged to defend “Without an objective moral standard, there would be no objective fact of the matter about which standard of goodness God would adopt if he existed.” I had thought that it would be obvious considering the many different conceivable standards of goodness one could adopt (e.g. that of the hypothetical theist), but for those who it isn’t so obvious, I’ll unpack that a bit here. I’ll argue that in the absence of an objective moral standard, it doesn’t make sense for an atheist to say that “If God existed, he would adopt my standard, not yours!” (an example of a counterfactual) in response to the hypothetical theist.

For counterfactuals to be true there is, very roughly speaking, something that makes the counterfactuals true. For example, in the case of “If it were to rain in the next five minutes, Sally’s car would get wet,” conditions relevant to making that counterfactual true might include Sally’s car being out in the open (as opposed to in a garage), the fact that rain makes things wet, and the fact that Sally is not going to move her car within the next five minutes.

On the other hand, there are situations where counterfactuals are not true due to there being (very roughly speaking) nothing to make them true. Suppose I say, “If this fictional character existed, she would like raspberries” and the fictional character is described as liking raspberries; this counterfactual would then be true. If however there is nothing in the fictional setting that would indicate either way whether the fictional character likes raspberries, then the question, “If this character existed, would she like raspberries?” has no real answer, and so “If this fictional character existed, she would like raspberries” is not true, not because she wouldn’t like raspberries, but because the relevant circumstances don’t determine either way whether she would like raspberries if she existed. In that situation, there’s no objective fact of the matter whether the fictional character would like raspberries if this character existed.

Something similar applies to “It’s an objective fact that If God existed, he would such-and-such moral standard.” If there is an objective moral standard, we have the relevant circumstances to make this counterfactual objectively true or false (God would adopt the objectively correct moral standard if he existed). But with no objective moral standard, we don’t have the relevant circumstances to make this an objectively true counterfactual; the situation is akin to “If this fictional character existed, she would like raspberries” when the fictional setting gives no indication either way. Note that for the atheist, God is essentially a fictional character! If I were to say, “If this fictional character existed, he would adopt such-and-such moral standard,” and there is nothing in the fictional setting that indicated which moral standard he would adopt, the relevant circumstances wouldn’t make the counterfactual true.

Note In the case of the aforementioned case of the hypothetical theist, if the deity of his conception existed, God would adopt the moral standard of that hypothetical theist, and this deity would thus allow all the evil in the world if that deity existed.

Of course, if there was an objective moral standard and this standard is not the same as the hypothetical theist’s, and the hypothetical theist believed God is objectively good, that theist would indeed have a problem. However, suppose there are no gods and no objective moral standard, such that God would be a fictional character, and the atheist recognizes this. In that case the atheist isn’t in a rationally coherent position to claim, “If God existed, he would adopt my moral standard and not yours.” After all, he disbelieves not only the existence of an objective moral standard but also the existence of gods, so which god is he talking about when he’s claiming “If God existed, he would adopt my moral standard not yours?” If it’s the hypothetical theist’s deity, this claim is clearly false, because the hypothetical theist’s deity would indeed adopt the moral standard of the hypothetical theist, because that’s part of the fictional character’s description.

The upshot of all this is that without an objective moral standard, a statement like “If God existed, he would adopt my moral standard not yours” doesn’t make a lot of sense. The relevant circumstances would fail to make that counterfactual objectively true, just as it would in the case of whether a fictional character would like raspberries when the relevant circumstances don’t answer that question either way.

Conclusion



Without conceding the existence of an objective moral standard, the atheist is powerless to attack even facile reasons for why a perfectly good God would allow evil, at least when such reasons are consistent with the theist’s view of moral goodness. This raises another point: even if the atheist has no grounds for thinking that God (if he existed) would adopt the atheist’s standard of goodness when deciding what evils to permit, couldn’t the atheist at least criticize the theist for having an inconsistency in the theist’s conception of goodness with respect to a perfectly good God allowing evil? That depends on the theist, but it’s relatively trivial to construct a view of goodness that is consistent with a perfectly good God allowing evil in the world, as the case of Theophilus illustrates. Even if Theophilus’s view of goodness is mistaken, it isn’t self-contradictory. Similarly, even if my own view of moral goodness is mistaken, I doubt there is anything self-contradictory about it with respect to a perfectly good God allowing evil in the world, in part because I don’t claim to have a complete picture of what moral goodness constitutes (though I’m pretty sure we’re to love our neighbor as ourselves), and I concede that there might be goods I am unaware of that constitute at least part of the reason for why God allows evil.

But even if I were to have an inconsistency in my own personal view of moral goodness, without an objective moral standard atheists doesn’t have a good argument from evil that is reasonable for them to accept. Without an objective moral standard, there’s no objective fact of the matter about which standard of goodness God would adopt if he existed, in which case there would be no objective fact of the matter about whether God would allow evil if he existed, in which case the argument from evil would collapse under its own weight. Consequently, atheists who reject moral objectivism shouldn’t be using the argument from evil.