4 6 1R e l i g i o u s R e a s o n i n gin a forest fire, suffering horribly as it does so, that is an evil. It is not only
human suffering we must take into account, when we are weighing good
against evil in this world.
Now, if you accept anything like the theory of evolution,* you will believe
there were other animals on this planet long before humans appeared on the
scene. Many of them must have suffered horribly as their species became
extinct. None of that suffering can be justified as a necessary consequence of
permitting humans freedom. We weren’t around then. So none of it seems
beyond the power of omnipotence to prevent without the loss of that good.
Another objection: The greater goods defense can easily lead to a kind
of cost-benefit analysis which is deeply repugnant to our moral sense. Con-
sider the kind of case which troubled Ivan in Dostoevsky’s great novel, The
Brothers Karamazov.** A little girl is treated quite brutally by her parents, who
beat her because she has done something which made them angry. Perhaps
she wets the bed repeatedly, and they think she ought to be old enough to
control her bladder. Or perhaps the father is an alcoholic who abuses his
daughter sexually. The Brothers Karamazov is fiction, but to hear about real
cases like this, you need only listen regularly to the 11 o’clock news.
The free will defense seems to say, in cases of this kind: well, it’s all very
unfortunate, of course, but this is the price we must pay for having freedom.
For the father to have the opportunity to display moral goodness, God must
give him the opportunity to choose evil. You can’t have the one opportunity
without the other. And the father’s having the opportunity to display moral
goodness is such a great good that it outweighs the fact that he chooses evil.
But notice who gets the good here. It’s the father. And notice who suffers
the evil. It’s the little girl. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that the
benefit outweighs the cost. Freedom is a very great good. Still it makes some
difference who pays the cost. Freedom may be a great good, even a good
so great that it would outweigh really horrendous suffering. But justice re-
quires some attention, not only to the net amount of good, after you have
subtracted the evil, but also to the way the goods and evils are distributed.
Some distributions just aren’t fair.†* You don’t, of course, have to accept the full Darwinian explanation of evolution for this to be a
problem, so long as you accept what the evidence of geology and paleontology seems to make
as certain as anything in science can be: that the earth has been around for a very long time, and
that many, many different species of animals flourished and then became extinct before man
appeared on the scene.
** See Part II, Book V: Pro and Contra, Chapter 4: Rebellion. The text is available online at:
http://www.online-literature.com/booksearch.php.
† I first became aware of the importance of this by reading Michael Tooley’s “The Argument
from Evil,” in Philosophical Perspectives, 5—Philosophy of Religion, 1991, ed. James E. Tomberlin
(Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1991), 89–134. But I think acknowledgment of this
point underlies Marilyn Adams’s rejection of the free will defense in her Horrendous Evils and the
Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).97364_ch21_ptg01_449-464.indd 461 15/11/13 12:22 3M
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