earned income and all profits would be the same as not having a money economy at all).
And where we draw the line is an arbitrary matter. However much we spend on social
services, we shall always be able to find some person or family who would be saved from
misery if the state spent (in the right way) a mere $1,000 more than it in fact plans to
spend. And the state can always find another $1,000, and can find it without damaging
the economy or doing any other sort of harm.
14. Concluding Remarks: Evaluating Theist's Response to the
Argument from Evil
So Theist replies to Atheist's argument from horrors. But we may note that Theist has
failed to respond to an important point Atheist has made. As he himself conceded, his
reply takes account only of postlapsarian horrors. There is still to be considered the
matter of prelapsarian horrors, horrors such as Rowe's poor fawn. There were certainly
sentient animals long before there were sapient animals, and the paleontological record
shows that for much of the long prehuman past, sentient creatures died agonizing deaths
in natural disasters. Obviously, the free-will defense cannot be expanded in such a way as
to account for these agonizing deaths, for only sapient creatures have free will, and these
deaths cannot therefore have resulted from the abuse of free will—unless, as C. S. Lewis
has suggested, prehuman animal suffering is ascribed to a corruption of nature by fallen
angels (1940, 122–24). Interesting as this suggestion is, I do not propose to endorse it,
even as a defense. I confess myself unable to treat this difficult problem adequately
within the scope of this chapter. I should have to devote a whole essay to the problem of
prelapsarian horrors to say anything of value about it. I must simply declare this topic
outside the scope of this chapter. I refer the reader to my essay “The Problem of Evil, the
Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence,” (van Inwagen 1991), which contains a
defense—not a version of the free-will defense—that purports to account for the
sufferings of prehuman animals. I will remark that this defense shares one important
feature of the expanded free-will defense. This defense, too, requires God to draw an
arbitrary line; it allows God to eliminate much animal suffering that would otherwise
have occurred in the course of nature, but it requires him, as it were, to stop eliminating it
at some point, even though no good is gained by his stopping at whatever point he does
stop at. I would thus say that God could have eliminated the suffering of Rowe's fawn at
no cost and did not, and that this fact does not count against his moral perfection—just as
the fact that he could have eliminated the Mutilation at no cost and did not does not count
against his moral perfection. But the nature of the goods involved in this other defense is
a subject I cannot discuss here.
end p.216
Let me put this question to the readers of this chapter: Has Theist successfully replied to
the argument from horrors insofar as those horrors are events that involve human
beings? Well, much depends on what further things Atheist might have to say. Perhaps
Atheist has a dialectically effective rejoinder to Theist's reply to the argument from