ARGUMENTS AGAINST MONOTHEISM 133Suppose that 2a and 2b provide both background assumptions and
presuppositions of that claim. Then if either 2a or 2b is false, 2 will be false.
If we have no reason to think 2a (The Actually Pointless Evil Claim) is true,
or no reason to think 2b (The We Would Know Claim) true, then we will
have no reason to think The Apparently Pointless Evil Claim true.
In our discussion of these matters, we will focus almost entirely on The
We Would Know Claim. The question as to whether God would allow
actually pointless evils is very difficult to answer, and we will not argue
either for or against it. The critic obviously needs it for his argument to
succeed. We will suspend judgment here regarding its truth, and discuss its
meaning only to the degree that this is helpful in getting clear about The
We Would Know Claim.^10
Let us begin, then, with The We Would Know Claim. Would we know it
if an evil has a point? The purposes of an omnicompetent being might well
be beyond our comprehension.^11 Hence there is no reason whatever to
think that if God allows an evil E in the light of E’s having a certain point P,
we will know what P is. So there is no reason whatever to think The We
Would Know Claim is true. Hence there is no reason whatever to suppose
that The Apparently Pointless Evil Claim is true. Since we have no reason
to accept The We Would Know Claim, we have no reason to think that The
Apparently Pointless Evil Claim is true. Hence the Simple Argument fails.
There is, however, a more sophisticated argument right next door.
A more sophisticated argument
It is true that, for lots of evils, we have no idea what their point, if any,
actually is. What point does someone’s having a migraine, a stomach ulcer,
cancer, or the inability to speak have? Even if we are able to say in general
what might serve as a rationale for a morally perfect omnicompetent being
allowing evils, and even for allowing certain specific kinds of evils, we are
not in a position to say things that would result from filling in sentences
like this with the names of actual persons and actual evils: The reason why
person X experienced evil Y is that the point of evil Y is Z. Doing so would
presuppose a degree of knowledge we do not have. There are also evils
regarding which it is hard to say what their point might be.
Suppose, then, we divide evils into two broad and admittedly ill-
defined^12 classes: those kinds of evils for which we can at least imagine
some point, and those for which we cannot. Call these very loosely defined
classes of kind of evil, respectively, imaginably pointful and unimaginably
pointful. Perhaps suffering that turns a miserably selfish person into a
person of compassion falls into the former class; perhaps so does even a