God and Evil Flashcards

Question

What is the first fallacious solution?

Answer 1

1. Good cannot exist without evil

Answer 2

But, secondly, this solution denies that evil is opposed to good in our original sense. If good and evil are counterparts, a good thing will not "eliminate evil as far as it can." Indeed, this view suggests that good and evil are not strictly qualities of things at all. Perhaps the suggestion is that good and evil are related in much the same way as great and small. Certainly, when the term 'great' is used relatively as a condensation of 'greater than so-and-so', and 'small' is used correspondingly, greatness and smallness are counterparts and cannot exist without each other. But in this sense, greatness is not a quality—not an intrinsic feature of anything—and it would be absurd to think of a movement in favour of greatness and against smallness in this sense. Such a movement would be self-defeating, since relative greatness can be promoted only by a simultaneous promotion of relative smallness. I feel sure that no theists would be content to regard God's goodness as analogous to this—as if what he supports were not the good but the better, and as if he had the paradoxical aim that all things should be better than other things.

Answer 3

This point is obscured by the fact that 'great' and 'small' seem to have an absolute as well as a relative sense. I cannot discuss here whether there is absolute magnitude or not, but if there is, there could be an absolute sense for 'great'—it could mean "of at least a certain size"—and it would make sense to speak of all things getting bigger, of a universe that was expanding all over. Therefore, it would make sense to speak of promoting greatness. But in this sense, 'great' and 'small' are not logically necessary counterparts: either quality could exist without the other. There would be no logical impossibility in everything's being small, or in everything's being great. Neither in the absolute nor in the relative sense, then, of 'great' and 'small' do these terms provide an analogy of the sort that would be needed to support this solution of the problem of evil. In neither case are greatness and smallness both necessary counterparts and mutually opposed forces or possible objects for support and attack.

Answer 4

It may be replied that good and evil are necessary counterparts in the same way as any quality and its logical opposite: redness can occur, it is suggested, only if non-redness also occurs. But unless evil is merely the privation of good, they are not logical opposites, and some further argument would be needed to show that they are counterparts in the same way as genuine logical opposites. Let us assume that this could be given. There is still doubt about the correctness of the metaphysical principle that a quality must have a real opposite. I suggest that it is not really impossible that everything should be—say—red; that the truth is merely that if everything were red, we should not notice redness, and so we should have no word 'red'. We observe and give names to qualities only if they have real opposites. If so, the principle that a term must have an opposite would belong only to our language or to our thought, and would not be an ontological principle. Correspondingly, the rule that good cannot exist without evil would not state a logical necessity of a sort that God would just have to put up with. God might have made everything good, though we should not have noticed it if he had. But, finally, even if we concede that this is an ontological principle, it will provide a solution for the problem of evil only if one is prepared to say, "Evil exists, but only just enough evil to serve as the counterpart of good." I doubt whether any theist will accept this. After all, the ontological requirement that non-redness should occur would be satisfied even if all the universe, except for a minute speck, were red. And if there were a corresponding requirement for evil as a counterpart to good, a minute dose of evil would presumably do. But theists are not usually willing to say, in all contexts, that all the evil that occurs is a minute and necessary dose.

Answer 5

This makes God subject to causal laws. Almost all theists argue that God created causal laws.

Answer 6

But let us see exactly what is being done here. Let us call pain and misery first-order evil, or evil (1). What contrasts with this—namely, pleasure and happiness—we will call first-order good, or good (1). Distinct from this is second-order good, or good (2), which somehow emerges in a complex situation in which evil (1) is a necessary component—logically, not merely causally, necessary. (Exactly how it emerges does not matter: in the crudest version of this solution, good (2) is simply the heightening of happiness by the contrast with misery; in other versions it includes sympathy with suffering, heroism in facing danger, and the gradual decrease of first-order evil and increase of first-order good.) It is also being assumed that second-order good is more important than first-order good or evil—in particular, that it more than outweighs the first-order evil it involves. The fatal objection is this: our analysis shows clearly the possibility of the existence of a second-order evil, or evil (2), contrasting with good (2) just as evil (1) contrasts with good (1). This would include malevolence, cruelty, callousness, cowardice, and states in which good (1) is decreasing and evil (1) increasing. And just as good (2) is held to be the important kind of good—the kind that God is concerned to promote—so evil (2) will, by analogy, be the important kind of evil: the kind which God, if he were wholly good and omnipotent, would eliminate. And yet evil (2) plainly exists, and indeed most theists (in other contexts) stress its existence more than that of evil (1). We should, therefore, state the problem of evil in terms of second-order evil, and against this form of the problem, the present solution is useless. An attempt might be made to use this solution again, at a higher level, to explain the occurrence of evil (2)—indeed, the next main solution that we shall examine does just this, with the help of some new notions. Without any fresh notions, such a solution would have little plausibility: for example, we could hardly say that the really important good was a good (3), such as the increase of benevolence in proportion to cruelty, which logically required for its occurrence the occurrence of some second-order evil. But even if evil (2) could be explained in this way, it is fairly clear that there would be third-order evils contrasting with this third-order good: and we should be well on the way to an infinite regress, where the solution of a problem of evil stated in terms of evil (n) indicated the existence of an evil (n + 1), and a further problem to be solved.

God and Evil Flashcards

(30 cards)