Justified True Belief

(P1) Gratuitous evil is evil whose permission no morally sufficient reason could justify. + Christianity has never denied that evil exists. What it denies is that any evil is gratuitous, and the whole dispute lives in the gap between those two claims. (1) A morally sufficient reason is what makes permitting an evil right. - Picture two people standing over a sedated man with a knife above his chest. One is a cardiac surgeon. The other came in through the window. The blade is the same, the hand is just as steady, and the wound will look identical in the morning. What separates them is a reason. - Permission works the same way. A father who lets his daughter come off the bike is not a bad father, because he has a reason for standing back and everyone watching can see roughly what it is. - So "gratuitous" is not a fancy word for terrible, or undeserved, or unbearable. An evil is gratuitous only if nothing whatever justifies permitting it. - The definition says nothing about God, and that is deliberate. Make it "evil God has no reason for" and every evil in the world turns gratuitous the moment somebody assumes there is no God to have reasons. That settles a dispute by wording rather than by evidence. (2) The external argument is a claim about the world, not about Christian belief. - Think of a building inspector, who has two very different things he might tell you. He can say the blueprints contradict each other, which is a claim about your papers. Or he can say the foundation is cracked, which is a claim about the building. - The internal argument from evil is the first kind. It stays inside Christian belief and asks whether what Christians say contradicts itself, or makes God improbable on their own assumptions. - The external argument is the second kind. It steps outside and says something about reality: that among the actual events of history are evils with no justifying reason behind them. (3) Christian teaching denies that any evil is gratuitous. - This is not a position adopted late, under pressure. Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers and jailed on a false charge, and what he says to them at the end is this: "You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Gen 50:20). - "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose" (Rom 8:28). That promise is addressed to believers rather than to the world at large. The wider claim is made elsewhere: God "works all things according to the counsel of his will" (Eph 1:11). - So Christianity is committed in both directions at once. Evil is real, since sin and the fall say the world is not as it was made. And no evil is gratuitous. That second commitment is what the external argument aims at. (4) Whoever says a thing exists carries the burden of showing it. - "There is at least one gratuitous evil" is an existence claim. "There are none" is the denial of one, and everywhere else we ask the person making the existence claim to produce the goods. - A prosecutor who says the defendant was in Chicago on Tuesday has to establish that he was. The defense does not have to prove where else he was. - Of course the rule cuts both ways. Anyone claiming outright that no evil is gratuitous owes evidence too, and (P4) and (P5) are where that evidence is supplied. Everything before them claims something much smaller: that the objector's existence claim has not been made out. - That is not a dodge. It turns the dispute on evidence rather than on how deeply anyone feels the horror, and both sides feel it. Therefore, the external problem stands or falls on one claim about the world: that at least one evil has no morally sufficient reason behind it.

(P2) Whether an evil is gratuitous depends on the whole course of history. + Nothing about an evil, taken by itself, shows whether a justifying reason stands behind it. That depends on what the evil is connected to, and the connections run a very long way. (1) A justifying reason can lie decades away in time. - Joseph's story is built for exactly this point. Sold at seventeen. Falsely accused and imprisoned. Forgotten by a man who had promised to speak for him, and left there another two years. - Twenty-two years later he is running the food supply of an empire through a famine, and the brothers who sold him are alive because of it. - Stop the story anywhere in that stretch and an honest observer would measure the evil correctly and read its meaning completely wrong. There was nothing for him to see. The thing that made sense of it had not happened yet. (2) A justifying reason can lie in someone the sufferer never meets. - A nurse works a night shift and sits with a dying man nobody has come to visit. At seven in the morning she goes home. She never learns that an orderly in the corridor watched her through the doorway, and changed how he meant to spend the rest of his life. - Suffering that does nothing at all for the person suffering may do a great deal for someone who watches it, hears of it later, or reads about it in a country the sufferer could not find on a map. - That is not a special case. It is how human lives actually touch each other, and it is close to invisible from inside any one of them. (3) The reasons may run through knowledge no creature has. - You know your friend well enough to say she would have refused the bribe, even though the offer never came. Judgments about what somebody would have done are perfectly ordinary. They are also the kind we quietly get wrong. - Christians describe providence, which is God's governing of everything that happens, in more than one way. • On one account, called Molinism after the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina, God has middle knowledge: he knows what any free creature would freely choose in any circumstance he might place them in, and he arranges circumstances accordingly. • Others locate providence in God's direct sustaining of every event, or in his simple foreknowledge of what will in fact happen. - The accounts disagree about the mechanism. What they agree about is the size of the gap between what God can see and what we can. Showing that no reason stands behind a given evil means closing off the reasons available on every one of those accounts, which is a far larger job than refuting whichever one an objector likes least. (4) Gratuity is inferred, never observed. - Sweep a beach with a metal detector for an afternoon, find nothing, and you have not learned that the sand is empty. You have learned how deep the machine reaches. - The careful published arguments know this, and they do not claim that pointlessness is visible in the event itself. They say a search for a justifying good has come up empty, and they reason from the empty search to the absence of the good. - Even the versions that treat the sheer look of an evil as evidence in its own right owe the same account. An appearance of absence is worth something only where the missing thing would have shown itself if it had been there. Therefore, whether an evil is gratuitous is settled by the whole course of history, and anyone who would establish it has to reach facts that inspecting the evil never supplies.

(P3) No finite mind can survey the whole course of history. + This is not a complaint about human intelligence. It is a remark about the size of the job. (1) The survey required has no visible end. - To call an evil gratuitous is to say that among all the goods that might have been served by permitting it, across all the ways history could have run from that morning onward, not one of them justifies it. Not a good anyone has thought of. Not a good anyone ever will think of. - A chessboard is about as small as a world gets: sixty-four squares, thirty-two pieces, fixed rules, two players. After four moves each, there are more than 288 billion ways the board can look. - History has billions of agents, no board, and no move limit. The number of ways it could have gone from the morning of any particular evil is not a number anybody has. (2) We fail to trace consequences even when we are watching closely. - A driver in Sarajevo takes a wrong turn in June 1914 and stops to reverse outside a delicatessen. The young man standing on that pavement steps forward and shoots the two people sitting in the back of the car. Nobody at the scene could read what was starting. - A bacteriologist goes off on a summer holiday and leaves a stack of culture plates out on the bench. He comes back, finds one of them spoiled by mold, and does not throw it away. Penicillin has since saved lives in the hundreds of millions, by the usual estimates. - We cannot follow the consequences of ordinary events, or even of good ones. What the external argument asks for is confidence about the consequences of terrible ones, across the whole of the future. (3) People with no stake in God concede the same limits. - Consequentialism, the ethical view that an act is right if it produces the best overall outcome, has faced this from the beginning: nobody can compute long-run outcomes. Its own defenders say so, and they work around it with rules of thumb. - Historians say much the same about their subject. What the printing press finally did, or what a run of bad harvests did, gets argued over for centuries and never closed. - So the limit is not a convenience invented for one dispute. It is the ordinary human condition, admitted freely in fields with nothing at all at stake theologically. (4) The claim required is far stronger than any of those. - "No justifying good exists" is a universal negative, which is a claim that a thing is nowhere to be found in the whole of reality: known and unknown, past and future, actual and possible. - There is a large difference between "I see no fish in this pond" and "there are no fish in the ocean." The first is a report about a pond you can see the bottom of. The second is a claim about a volume of water nobody has surveyed. Therefore, no finite mind can carry out the survey that establishing gratuity would require.

(C1) Therefore, no human being can establish that a particular evil is gratuitous. + What the external problem needs, and cannot get, is a step from how an evil looks to how it is. (1) The step from "no reason appears" to "no reason exists" needs a further assumption. - Philosophers call this a noseeum inference, from "no see 'um" to "there ain't 'um." We use it constantly and it is usually fine. No elephant appears to be in the refrigerator, so no elephant is in the refrigerator, and that works because of a fact about elephants: if one were in there, you would notice. - Now hold a dropped needle up to the light. No bacteria appear on it. That is not carelessness on your part. Bacteria are simply not the sort of thing an eye resolves. - Which of those two cases God's reasons resemble is exactly the question, and (P2, P3) answer it. They resemble the bacteria. (2) Every other route to the verdict is closed. - Think of a jury handed one page out of a ten-thousand-page ledger. They cannot add the accounts up, and no auditor has testified. The honest verdict is not that the books fail to balance. It is that the question has not been reached. - A fact that turns on the whole course of history could be reached three ways, and only the last is even in play. • Survey the history yourself, which (P3) rules out. • Hear it from someone who has, which here means God, and nobody claims to have been told. • Infer it. That can be done from the goods we happen to have seen, which needs our goods to be a fair sample of all the goods there are. Or it can be done from a rule about what an empty search shows, which needs a search that would have found the thing had it been there. (3) Skeptical theism doubts one thing only. - The position has a name, skeptical theism, and the name sounds worse than the thing is. It doubts our ability to survey the goods that might justify permitting a particular evil. It does not doubt God's goodness, and it does not doubt the difference between right and wrong. - "God works in mysterious ways," said and then left there, explains nothing and could be said about anything at all. (P2) and (P3) are a good deal narrower than that, and both of them are open to attack. (4) What fails is a claim to knowledge, not the reality of the evil. - A burned child is a horror. Grief is not a failure of nerve. The evils do not merely look bad. They are exactly as bad as they seem. - "This is unbearable" and "this is reasonless" are different claims. Only the second one can serve as a premise in an argument. (5) Both versions of the external problem need the same step. - The deductive version needs "gratuitous evil exists" flat out. One reasonless evil anywhere, and on that argument God does not exist. - The inductive version asks for less. Inductive reasoning moves from what we have observed to what is probably true in general, and this version needs only that at least one of these evils is, more likely than not, reasonless. - Weakening the conclusion does not repair the inference. A poll taken on one street cannot tell you what the country probably thinks, any more than it can tell you what the country certainly thinks. The fault is in the sample, not in how boldly the answer is stated. - Contemporary atheist philosophers have largely left the deductive version behind, because showing that no reason whatever could exist proved impossible. Therefore, the premise the external problem depends on has not been established, in either its deductive or its probabilistic form.

(P4) If God exists, no evil is gratuitous. + Both sides of the dispute accept this if-then claim. Their agreement is what makes the external argument possible at all. (1) The conditional follows from the attributes, not from convenience. - Think of a mother at the stove with a toddler reaching up for the pan handle. If she can move the pan, and she loves the child, she does not let the burn happen for no reason at all. - A being who is all-powerful can prevent any evil he chooses to prevent. A being who is perfectly good permits nothing without a reason that makes permitting it right. - Put the two attributes together, with no limit at all on the power and no flaw at all in the goodness, and gratuitous evil is precisely what such a being would not allow. No theist has to be talked into this. (2) The atheist's argument depends on it entirely. - The external argument is this conditional plus the claim that gratuitous evil exists, and out the far end comes the denial of God. Remove the conditional and no argument is left, only a description of a painful world. - A description of a painful world convinces nobody of anything, for the simple reason that nobody disputes it. (3) Scripture states the same conditional in its own terms. - "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (Gen 18:25). That is Abraham arguing with God over Sodom, and the question is rhetorical because both parties to the conversation already assume the answer. - "The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice" (Deut 32:4). - A God who permitted evils for no reason at all would be doing exactly what these texts deny of him. Christianity does not have the option of shrugging at gratuitous evil. (4) A conditional does not tell you which end to start from. - Take an ordinary one: if it rained last night, the driveway is wet. There are two ways to use it, and logic does not choose between them. • Check the security camera, see rain falling, and conclude the driveway is wet. That form is called modus ponens: affirm the first part, and the second follows. • Walk outside, find the driveway bone dry, and conclude it did not rain. That form is called modus tollens: deny the second part, and the denial of the first follows. - Which one you run is not a question of logic at all. It is a question of which end you are more sure about, the camera or the driveway. - The external problem is a modus tollens. If God exists there is no gratuitous evil; here is gratuitous evil; so there is no God. The form is valid, meaning the conclusion really does follow if both premises are true. Whether the argument is also sound, meaning its premises are in fact true, is a different question, and it depends on how good the evidence is at each end. Therefore, both parties are holding the same conditional, and the argument turns entirely on which of its two ends is better known.

(P5) God exists. + The reasons for holding this do not come from the problem of evil, which is precisely what makes them usable in answering it. Most of them belong to natural theology, the case for God built from the world itself rather than from Scripture. (1) Several independent lines of evidence converge on a Creator. - The universe began to exist, and whatever begins to exist has a cause. Whatever caused space and time cannot itself be spatial or temporal. - The constants and initial conditions of physics sit inside ranges so narrow that almost any other setting yields a universe with no chemistry, no stars, and nobody in it. - Moral obligations bind people who never agreed to them, which is a strange thing to be true if nothing at all stands behind them. - A first-century Jewish teacher was executed in public, buried in a known tomb, and then encountered alive by his followers, by his own skeptical brother, and by a man who had been hunting them down. - Ordinary people in every century and every culture report encountering God. How far those reports converge is argued over. What is not argued over is that a report of what somebody seems to perceive counts as evidence everywhere else, in a courtroom or a doctor's office, unless there is some particular reason to set it aside. (2) None of these depends on any claim about evil. - Independence is what makes the case usable against the problem of evil. An argument that quietly assumed "no gratuitous evil exists" would be traveling in a circle, and not one of these does. - A jury convicting on a fingerprint, a receipt, a witness and a motive is not leaning on any one of those to prop up the others. That is why four ordinary facts can carry more weight between them than one impressive one. (3) This premise is not free. - Anyone who thinks the case for God is weak will not grant it, and should not be asked to. Everything up to (C1) still stands for that reader. - The standard a deductive argument has to meet is not certainty but plausibility: each premise more plausible than its denial. So the claim is not that the evidence for God is beyond dispute. - The claim is that the evidence for God is stronger than the evidence that some particular evil is reasonless, and the second of those still has to survive an inference nobody can make. Therefore, the theist comes to the problem of evil already holding substantial and independent grounds for the first end of the conditional.

(C2) Therefore, no evil is gratuitous. + Run the atheist's own conditional from the end that is better known, and it delivers the opposite result. (1) The conditional runs forward as easily as it runs backward. - Back to the driveway. If you have stood at the window and watched the rain come down for an hour, then a dry-looking driveway is a puzzle about the driveway. It is not evidence about the weather. - The external problem runs the conditional backwards by modus tollens: gratuitous evil exists, so God does not. Given (P4) and (P5), the same conditional runs forward by modus ponens instead. God exists, so no evil is gratuitous. - Neither direction is a trick. The direction to run is the one the evidence supports. (2) The two conclusions cost different amounts. - (C1) needs nothing but the limits of human sight. It stops the external problem on its own, and it is available to a reader who is still undecided about God. - (C2) needs the positive case for God, and it is exactly as strong as that case is. No stronger. (3) "No evil is gratuitous" is not "every evil is a blessing in disguise." - The claim is that a morally sufficient reason exists, not that anybody knows what it is. (P2, P3) rule out the second: if the reasons are past our tracing, they are past our tracing when we are the ones doing the comforting. - Job's friends had a theory about his losses and thirty-five chapters in which to explain it to him. God's verdict at the end is that they had not spoken rightly (Job 42:7). Christian theology holds that a reason exists and that nobody at all is authorized to guess it aloud at a funeral. (4) What would defeat this. - A valid argument that some particular evil could not be justified by any good whatever, reached without the survey (P3) says cannot be performed. - A showing that our access to God's reasons is better than (P2) and (P3) claim, which would repair the inference and put the external problem back on its feet. - A collapse of the independent case for God, which would take (C2) away and leave (C1) standing on its own. Therefore, the external problem of evil does not establish that any evil is gratuitous, and on the total evidence the conditional runs the other way: what appears reasonless is not.