Further Reflections on Theism 245Personally, I am in something of two minds about the possibility that we
may not comprehend the place of evil. On the one hand, believing that, as
rational beings, we are specially created in the image of God, I am inclined to
think that it is within our power to understand evil much better than we
do at present. On the other hand, believing with Augustine that we carry the
wounds of sin in our disturbed passions and darkened intellect, I think we
cannot expect for much on our own accounts.
The logical form of the problem maintains that there is a contradiction
involved in asserting the existence of an all-powerful, all-good and all-knowing
God and acknowledging the existence of natural and /or moral evil. No such
formal contradiction is apparent and none has ever been demonstrated. In the
particular argument scheme I considered (p. 137) a further premise additional
to the theistic conception of God was introduced in order to derive the con-
clusion that there is no such being, namely that were there one, there would
be no evil. This is not something that the theist need accept, and there has
been no shortage of accounts of how it might be that a good God would per-
mit evil. In general, these ‘defences’ envisage ways in which an evil is either
a necessary concomitant of a more-than-compensating-good, or a necessary
condition of the avoidance of an at-least-as-considerable-evil. Generalizing
from these strategies the theist may invert the argument as follows:
(1) God exists.
(2) If God exists, then there is no intrinsically gratuitous evil.
(3) Therefore there is no intrinsically gratuitous evil.
Give its formal validity the atheist must challenge either (1) or (2) or both.
Since he wants to argue from evil to the non-existence of God he will not
want to challenge (2). Indeed, his strategy is to contrapose (2) and claim that
there is intrinsically gratuitous evil, thereby deriving the conclusion that no
God exists. To deny (1) by asserting that it is incompatible with the existence
of such evils as we know of, just begs the question as to whether that evil is
indeed intrinsically gratuitous. This dialectic points to the need to evaluate
the case in favour of God’s existence, and that in favour of there being
intrinsically gratuitous evils.
So far as the latter is concerned, given that the fact of evil per se is not
logically incompatible with theism, the claim must be that there is evidence
of unnecessary evils: ones that are not accompanied by a more-than-
compensating-good or which constitute blocks to an otherwise unavoidable
at-least-as-considerable-evil. Here we reach the evidential argument typically
supported by real examples of horrendous particular evils that are uncomfort-
able to contemplate but not hard to find. What I have to say about this can be
said briefly, for it is a structural response which may be worked out further,