The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion

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countless horrors left in the world—his plan requires the actual existence of countless
horrors—and the victim or victims of any of those horrors could bring the same charge
against him that we have imagined the victim of the Mutilation bringing against him.
But I see Atheist stirring in protest; she is planning to tell you that, given
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the terms of the expanded free-will defense, God should have allowed the minimum
number of horrors consistent with his project of reconciliation, and that it is obvious he
has not done this. She is going to tell you that there is a nonarbitrary line for God to draw,
and that it is the line that has the minimum number of horrors on the “actuality” side. But
there is no such line to be drawn. There is no minimum number of horrors consistent with
God's plan of reconciliation, for the prevention of any one particular horror could not
possibly have any effect on God's plan. For any n, if the existence of n horrors is
consistent with God's plan, the existence of n−1 horrors will be equally consistent with
God's plan. To ask what the minimum number of horrors consistent with God's plan is is
like asking, What is the minimum number of raindrops that could have fallen on England
in the nineteenth century that is consistent with England's having been a fertile country in
the nineteenth century? Here is a simple analogy of proportion: a given evil is to the
openness of human beings to the idea that human life is horrible and that no human
efforts will ever alter this fact as a given raindrop is to the fertility of England.
And this is why God did not prevent the Mutilation—insofar as there is a “why.” He had
to draw an arbitrary line and he drew it. And that's all there is to be said. This, of course,
is cold comfort to the victim. Or, since we are merely telling a story, it would be better to
say: if this story were true and known to be true, knowing its truth would be cold comfort
to the victim. But the purpose of the story is not to comfort anyone. It is not to give an
example of a possible story that would comfort anyone if it were true and that person
knew it to be true. If a child dies on the operating table in what was supposed to be a
routine operation and a board of medical inquiry finds that the death was due to some
factor the surgeon could not have anticipated and that the surgeon was not at fault, that
finding will be of no comfort to the child's parents. But it is not the purpose of a board of
medical inquiry to comfort anyone; the purpose of a board of medical inquiry is, by
examining the facts of the matter, to determine whether anyone was at fault. And it is not
my purpose in offering a defense to provide even hypothetical comfort to anyone. It is to
determine whether the existence of horrors entails that God is at fault—or, rather, since
by definition God is never at fault, to determine whether the existence of horrors entails
that an omnipotent creator would be at fault.
It is perhaps important to point out that we might easily find ourselves in a moral
situation like God's moral situation according to the expanded free-will defense, a
situation in which we must draw an arbitrary line and allow some bad thing to happen
when we could have prevented it, and in which, moreover, no good whatever comes of
our allowing it to happen. In fact, we do find ourselves in this situation. In a welfare state,
for example, we use taxation to divert money from its primary economic role in order to
spend it to prevent or alleviate various social evils. And how much money, what
proportion of the gross national product, shall we—that is, the state—divert for this
purpose? Well, not none of it and not all of it (enforcing a tax rate of 100 percent on all

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