Abstract

For all we know, theism and evil are compatible. And God need not have created the best possible world He could have. So how does evil render atheistic belief justified? Perhaps, as Hume and Draper argue, the biological role of pain and pleasure make them much less likely on theism than on the hypothesis that they are not the result of the benevolent or malevolent actions of nonhuman persons. But this is very dubious. Perhaps Dostoevski's Ivan Karamozov is right: God would not permit the involuntary, uncompensated suffering of the innocent, of which there is plenty. But there are conditions under which God might well permit the innocent to be victimized and, for all we know, those conditions have been met. The most compelling argument from evil develops the idea that it is eminently reasonable to think there is no sufficient reason for God to permit particular instances of horrific evil or, at any rate, so much of it. For, after all, no reason we can think of would justify Him. I accept the premise, but I reject the inference. For, first of all, contra Tooley, Rowe, Martin and Russell, there is no good reason to believe that inscrutable evil is an adequate basis for inferring pointlessness. More importantly, though, it is positively irrational to infer pointlessness from inscrutability. To show this, I first construct an epistemic principle inspired by Wykstra's CORNEA. It implies that if we have good reason to think that it is at least as likely that we would be unable to discern God's reasons as that we would be able to discern them, then inscrutable evil does not warrant atheistic belief. We have such reasons. The most serious objection to my thesis is that, like a loving parent, God would not permit inscrutable suffering unless He made Himself and His love unambiguously known to us; this, I concede, He has not done. In reply I construct a rationale for the hiddenness of God based on a Christian conception of the point of the religious life.