theodicy, which would vindicate God by showing that God does indeed have good
reasons for permitting evil to occur. It is especially important to note that Plantinga's
defense does not depend on our assuming that (4) is true, or even that it is something that
is reasonable to believe based on the evidence we have. All Plantinga needs is that (4) is
logically possible, and that it is consistent with (1) and (2). If that much is true, Mackie's
logical problem of evil fails.
In the aftermath of the collapse of the logical problem, discussion of the problem of evil
has taken a different turn. Most commonly, it is not evil as such, but gratuitous evil, evil
that is not the occasion for any greater, outweighing good, that is held to be inconsistent
with theism. It is claimed that our experience strongly indicates that such gratuitous evil
does indeed exist, and therefore that God does not exist. A classic statement of this
“evidential problem of evil” is due to William Rowe:
- There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could
have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally
bad or worse. - An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense
suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or
permitting some evil equally bad or worse. Therefore, - There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being. (Howard-Snyder
1996, 2)
The argument is undeniably valid, so the question that must be considered is whether we
have good reason to accept the premises. Most of the discussion has centered on premise
(1). The theist, presumably, wants to reject this premise, but what are the possibilities for
doing so reasonably? One possibility is to reject (1) on the basis that God does in fact
exist and that, since God exists, (1) cannot be true. One who takes this line would hold
that even if our experience suggests to us that (1) is true, the fact that God does exist
means that our experience must be misleading us in this respect, and that there is in fact
some greater good that results from each instance of evil that God allows.
Such a response comes at a price. If this line is taken, then the weight of our experience
that suggests the existence of gratuitous evils counts against the existence of God and
must be subtracted from whatever degree of rational support one's belief in God derives
from other sources. If that support is strong enough, the counterevidence from evil may
not seriously undermine it. But if the support
end p.433
we have for belief in God is less robust, it may be overwhelmed by the evidence of evil,
resulting in a belief that, if it persists at all, is no longer rational.
The answer of traditional theodicy is that (1) is false because we can see that there very
likely are in fact outweighing goods for all the evils that exist. To be sure, no one could
sensibly claim to be able to identify the outweighing good in each particular case. But we
can see enough of the general types of good that result from God's permission of various
sorts of evils to make it plausible that our inability to discern these good consequences in
some particular instances is merely a result of our limited knowledge. Unsurprisingly,
this sort of theodicy has not been a popular pursuit during the later part of the twentieth
century. Given the two World Wars, the numerous smaller wars and other calamities,