“horrors” I will call them. Here are some examples of what I call horrors: a school bus
full of children is crushed by a landslide; a good woman's life is gradually destroyed by
the progress of Huntington's Chorea; a baby is born without limbs. Some horrors are
consequences of human choices and some are not (consider, for example, William
Rowe's [1979] case of a fawn that dies in agony in a forest fire before there were any
human beings). But whether a particular horror is connected with human choices or not, it
is evident that God could have prevented the horror without sacrificing any great good or
allowing some even greater horror.
Now a moment ago I mentioned the enormous amount of evil in the world, and it is
certainly true that there is in some sense an enormous amount of evil in the world. But the
word “amount” at least suggests that evil is quantifiable, like distance or weight. That
may be false or unintelligible, but if it is
end p.203
true, even in a rough-and-ready sort of way, it shows that horrors raise a problem for the
theist that is distinct from the problem raised by the enormous amount of evil. If evil can
be, even roughly, quantified, as talk about amounts seems to imply, it might be that there
was more evil in a world in which there were thousands of millions of relatively minor
episodes of suffering (broken ribs, for example) than in a world in which there were a
few horrors. But an omnipotent and omniscient creator could be called to moral account
for creating a world in which there was even one horror. And the reason is obvious: that
horror could have been “left out” of creation without the sacrifice of any great good or
the permission of some even greater horror. And leaving it out is exactly what a morally
perfect being would do; such good things as might depend causally on the horror could,
given the being's omnipotence and omniscience, be secured by (if the word is not morally
offensive in this context) more “economical” means. Thus, the sheer amount of evil
(which might be distributed in a fairly uniform way) is not the only fact about evil Theist
needs to take into account. He must also take into account what we might call (again with
some risk of using morally offensive language) high local concentrations of evil—that is,
horrors. And it is hard to see how the free-will defense, however elaborated, could
provide any resources for dealing with horrors.
I will, finally, call your attention to the fact that the case of “Rowe's fawn,” which I
briefly described a moment ago, is a particularly difficult case for Theist. True, however
sentimental we may be about animals, we must admit that the death of a fawn in a forest
fire is not much of a horror compared with, say, a living child's being thrown into a
furnace as a sacrifice to Baal. The degree of horror involved in the event is not what
creates the special difficulty for theists in this case. What creates the difficulty is rather
the complete causal isolation of the fawn's sufferings from the existence and activities of
human beings. No appeal to considerations in any way involving human free will can
possibly be relevant to the problem with which this case confronts Theist, the difficulty
of explaining why an omnipotent and morally perfect being would allow such a thing to
happen.