Justified True Belief

(P1) A hidden contradiction requires a necessary truth to expose it. + The problem of evil starts as something anyone can feel, usually at a graveside or a hospital bed: a good and all-powerful God would not have allowed this, and this happened anyway. Its hardest form is not the complaint that evil makes God unlikely, but the charge that "God exists" and "evil exists" cannot both be true, the way one shape cannot be both a triangle and a square. (1) Some pairs of claims rule each other out by definition. - "Bob is a bachelor" and "Bob is married" cannot both be true, and you need nothing else to see it. "Bachelor" already means unmarried, so the second sentence takes back exactly what the first one gave. - Philosophers call that an explicit contradiction: the denial sits right there in the words, and nothing has to be added, investigated, or assumed. - "God exists" and "evil exists" are plainly not like that. Neither sentence contains the negation of the other, so whatever is wrong with holding both, it is not something you can see by reading them. (2) Most alleged contradictions need a hidden premise to do the work. - Think of a man who is rich and thoroughly miserable. "Bob is wealthy" and "Bob is unhappy" make an odd pair, and someone might insist the two of them clash. By themselves they do not, because wealthy people can be miserable and plenty of them are. - To turn that oddity into a genuine contradiction you would have to add a further claim, something like "all wealthy people are happy." With that in place, the pair collapses at once. Without it, there is nothing to collapse. - The charge against Christian belief has exactly this shape. The two claims do sit together awkwardly, and the awkwardness is real, but making it a contradiction takes a third claim that nobody has stated out loud. (3) The hidden premise has to be a necessary truth. - A necessary truth holds in every possible situation, not merely in every situation anyone has run into. Philosophers call each complete way things could have been a possible world: this one is a possible world, and so is the one where you took the other job. A necessary truth holds in all of them, which is why no possible world anywhere contains a married bachelor. - Compare "every swan I have seen is white" with "no swan could possibly be black." The first is a report on somebody's experience, and black swans in Australia finished it off. The second covers every swan there could ever be, and no amount of birdwatching will establish it. - A good rule of thumb will not do the job here. "All wealthy people are happy" would have to be a truth of the second kind for the argument about Bob to work, and so must whatever premise is carried quietly into the argument from evil. (4) The burden falls on whoever claims the contradiction. - In court, the side alleging fraud has to prove it, and the defendant does not have to prove his innocence in order to be entitled to it. Whoever says that two beliefs cannot both be true is the one with something to prove. - The oldest form of the charge is the dilemma reported by Lactantius and credited to Epicurus: if God is willing to prevent evil but unable, he is not omnipotent; if able but unwilling, he is not good. That is a powerful challenge and it deserves an answer. A challenge is not yet a demonstration, though, and the distance between the two is the whole issue. - The reply is deductive, which means its premises work like links in a chain: if each link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out. No link has to be certain. Each has to be more plausible than its denial. Therefore, the charge of contradiction stands or falls on a hidden premise, and that premise has to hold in every possible world.

(P2) Omnipotence does not include control over what a free creature would freely choose. + Omnipotence is the power to do anything that can be done. A string of words that cancels itself describes nothing that can be done, so failing to do it takes nothing away from anyone's power. (1) "Make someone freely choose" describes nothing at all. - To be made to choose is precisely not to choose freely. The phrase takes back with its second word what it granted with its first. - A square circle is not a task so difficult that only God could manage it. It is no task, and there is nothing there to attempt, to succeed at, or to fail. - Think of a master craftsman who can build anything that can be built. He cannot build a sound that is silent, and nobody counts that against his skill, because "a silent sound" names no object he failed to produce. - You might be thinking: why should God be bound by logic in the first place? If he is not, then no charge of contradiction can be brought against him either, and the objection falls apart before the reply to it does. (2) The freedom in question is the kind where the choice is genuinely yours. - Philosophers call it libertarian freedom: your choice is not settled in advance by anything outside your own will, so that in the moment you really could have gone the other way. - The difference shows up in ordinary life. A friend who sits with you in a hospital waiting room because he chose to has given you something. A paid attendant required to sit there has not, however identical the two of them look on the security camera. - Christians have disagreed for centuries about whether human freedom actually works this way, and the disagreement is an honest one on both sides. All that is needed is that libertarian freedom is possible, and nobody has shown it to be incoherent. (3) What a creature would freely do is not God's to decide. - If a choice is genuinely the creature's, then for every situation you could put that creature in, there is a truth about what they would freely do. Philosophers call these truths counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. A counterfactual is a claim about a situation that may never come up: if he were in these circumstances, he would freely do this. - Would your neighbor return a wallet he found on an empty street with two hundred dollars in it? There is an answer, and the answer is his rather than yours. You can put the wallet on the street. You cannot make the answer come out your way and still have it be his. - God knows every one of these truths perfectly. What he does not do is author them, because the moment he authored one it would stop being a free choice and start being his. (4) Some worlds are therefore possible without being ones God can produce. - A world in which every free creature always chooses well is possible in itself. Nothing about it is incoherent. - Whether it is feasible is a separate question, and a different one: not whether the world could exist, but whether God could bring it about, given how creatures would freely act. - Consider a matchmaker who knows in advance exactly who would say yes to whom. Some pairings are perfectly possible and simply not available to him, and not because he lacks skill or effort. The yes belongs to somebody else. Therefore, a world of free creatures who never sin may be genuinely possible and still not be a world God can produce, and that gap is not a gap in his power.

(P3) A perfectly good being may permit an evil for a morally sufficient reason. + Goodness does not require preventing every evil. It requires never permitting one without a morally sufficient reason: a good weighty enough to make permitting the evil the right call, and not available by any cheaper route. (1) Permitting an evil is not the same as doing it. - A parent who shoves a child off a bicycle has done something wrong. A parent who runs alongside, lets go, and lets the child fall has permitted something painful for the sake of something worth having. - Both parents produce the same scraped knee. Nobody thinks they have done the same thing, and no serious system of ethics treats them alike. - The distinction is not a loophole invented for this debate. It runs through medicine, law, and parenting, and it is why a surgeon who cuts you open is not charged with assault. (2) We already grant this reasoning to good people we know. - A mother holds her one-year-old still for a vaccination. She has the power to prevent the pain, she would far rather her child did not feel it, and she permits it anyway. We call her a good mother precisely because she does. - Change nothing but the size of the good at stake and the reasoning is the same. A coach lets a player lose a match, a teacher lets a student fail a first draft, a country lets its citizens make ruinous choices. Each permits a real harm for a real reason. - If permitting any evil at all made an agent bad, every decent person you have ever met would be disqualified along with God. - You might be thinking: the mother has no better option and God does. That is the right question to press, and it is why the kind of good matters. Courage in danger, forgiveness of a real wrong, rescue from a real disaster: each of those is a good whose description already contains the harm, so not even omnipotence can hand it over separately. (3) The reason need not be one we can see. - Your neighbor takes a chainsaw to the healthy-looking oak that shades the whole street, and you decide he is a vandal. What you did not know is that the tree service found rot at the base that would have dropped it across the road in the next storm. Your confidence was real. It was also grounded in not knowing enough. - The claim is modest: not that we know God's reason for any particular evil, and not that any proposed reason is likely, only that a sufficient reason is possible. - Ruling that out is heavier work than it looks. It means surveying every good there could ever be, in every possible world, and confirming that not one of them would justify permitting the evil in question. (4) Some goods are not on the same scale as the harms. - Christian teaching holds that the good on offer, eternal life with God, is not simply larger than earthly suffering but incommensurable with it: not a bigger number on the same scale, but a different scale altogether. - You cannot settle a debt of gratitude with money, however much of it you count out. The currency is wrong rather than insufficient. - Paul makes exactly this comparison: "this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Corinthians 4:17). He had been imprisoned, beaten, and shipwrecked three times when he wrote it (2 Corinthians 11:23-25). Therefore, perfect goodness and the permission of evil sit together without contradiction, provided a morally sufficient reason is so much as possible.

(C1) Therefore, God's power and goodness do not by themselves exclude the existence of evil. + The hidden premise has to come from somewhere. Without a bridging rule, some further claim that ties the two together, "God exists" and "evil exists" are just two sentences sitting side by side, and the oldest form of the charge supplies two candidates for the job: one taken from God's power, one taken from his goodness. (1) The bridging rule taken from omnipotence fails. - The rule says that necessarily, a God who can do anything can bring about any world he wants, including a world of free creatures who never sin. - Omnipotence has never meant the power to bring off self-cancelling descriptions, and it does not include control over choices that belong to somebody else (P2). - Unlimited power hands nobody the answers that are somebody else's to give, any more than a flawless matchmaker can supply the yes. So the rule is not a necessary truth, and where creatures are genuinely free it is not true at all. (2) The bridging rule taken from goodness fails. - The rule says that necessarily, a perfectly good being prefers every world without evil to every world with evil in it, and eliminates evil as far as it can. - No good person is held to that standard anywhere else, and goodness has never meant preventing every harm regardless of what the harm secures (P3). - A rule that strict convicts the mother at the vaccination clinic, the coach, and the surgeon along with God. That is a sign the rule is wrong rather than a sign they are all monsters. (3) Two candidates are not every candidate. - Denying each of those rules is more plausible than affirming it, which is exactly what a deductive argument asks of its premises (P1). Neither attribute yields the absence of evil, and neither does the pair of them together. - What none of that gives is a proof that no candidate could ever be found. Some third necessary truth might be waiting, and nobody should pretend otherwise. Producing it is the objector's task, since the burden sits with whoever alleges the contradiction (P1). - Closing the gap for good takes a positive step rather than another refutation: describing a single possible situation in which God and evil both exist. Therefore, God's power and goodness do not by themselves exclude evil, and the charge is still missing the necessary truth it needs.

(P4) It is possible that every world of free creatures God could make contains evil. + Two claims are compatible if there is one possible world in which both of them hold. Closing the case therefore takes not another refutation but a single scenario, however unlikely, in which God and evil exist together. (1) The challenge slides between two senses of "could." - The question behind the challenge is a fair one to feel. Why did God not simply make people who always freely choose the good? Such people are possible, God can do anything possible, and his not making them looks like a defect. - But "could have made" is doing two jobs at once. A world where you win a lottery every week for a year is perfectly possible, and it is still not something your employer could arrange for you, however much he might want to, because the winning numbers are not his to set. - What is possible in itself and what a particular agent can bring about come apart whenever part of the outcome belongs to somebody else. With free creatures, that is exactly the situation (P2). (2) A creature might go wrong in every situation God could place it in. - Suppose there is a person such that, in any circumstance where God gives them genuine freedom, they would freely do wrong at least once. Not that they must. That they would. Philosophers call this transworld depravity. - Think of a friend who, however carefully you arrange the evening, ends up saying the one thing that ruins it. Nobody is forcing his mouth open. It is simply how he would freely behave, in this restaurant and in every other restaurant you could book. - If that is true of a person, then no amount of divine rearranging produces a version of the evening where he behaves. God can change the circumstances. He cannot change the answer without changing whose answer it is. (3) It is possible that every creature God could create is like that. - The claim is not that everybody actually suffers from transworld depravity, or even that this is likely. It is that this is possible, which is a statement about what could have been rather than a guess about what is. - A reply that only has to be possible, never true, is called a defense, and this one has a name of its own: the free will defense. Think of the difference between a lawyer showing that somebody else could have done it and proving that somebody else did. The first is the lighter task by far, and it is also the harder one to knock down, because knocking it down means showing the thing is impossible rather than merely improbable (P1). - If it is possible, then there is a world in which God creates free creatures, wants no evil in it, and gets evil anyway. God and evil are both in that world, which is exactly what the charge said could not happen. (4) A world fit for free creatures may have to be a world that can hurt them. - Earthquakes and cancers are nobody's free choice, so an appeal to free choice looks as though it stops short of them. It does not, once the bar is set at possibility rather than plausibility, because there are several candidate accounts of natural evil and only one of them has to be possible. - One candidate is that a stable, law-governed world is what makes choices mean anything. If fire warmed but never burned, nobody could run into a burning house for a child, because there would be nothing to risk. The physics that makes the rescue possible is the physics that makes the fire possible. - Another, offered frankly as a possibility rather than a likelihood, is that some natural evils trace to the free choices of non-human agents. That strikes modern ears as strange, and strangeness is not impossibility. Therefore, it is possible that every world of free creatures available to God contains evil, and that God, wanting free creatures, made one of those worlds anyway.

(P5) It is possible that a world redeemed through Christ is better than any sinless world. + There is a second possibility, and it is distinctly Christian. It stands on its own feet, since it does not need free will to work the way the feasibility argument describes (P4), or to work that way at all. (1) The claim is not that evil is good. - Evil is evil on this account, without qualification and without a silver lining tucked away inside it. The claim is about what God is able to bring out of it. - Joseph says as much to the brothers who sold him into slavery: "you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:20). He does not tell them their act was secretly fine. He tells them two things were happening at once, and only one of them was theirs. - The cross carries the same double description in Christian teaching. It is the worst thing human beings have ever done and the best thing that has ever happened to them, and the New Testament never softens either half. (2) The incarnation and the atonement presuppose a world with evil in it. - A world without sin is a world with no crucifixion, no resurrection, and no God who has personally been through what his creatures go through. Whatever else such a world contains, it does not contain that. - The Exsultet, the proclamation sung at the Easter Vigil, puts the point as a paradox and calls the fall a felix culpa, a happy fault. Not that the fault was good, but that it became the occasion of a good beyond anything the world had before. - Augustine put it in a single sentence: God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to permit no evil at all. (3) Goods of that kind are not weighed against harms on one scale. - A world containing God's own entry into human suffering, and the redemption of everyone who accepts it, may be better than any sinless world, and better not by a wide margin but by a difference in kind. - Think of a father who missed his son's childhood and later offers him a check. The problem is not the size of the check. Some things are not the sort of thing a check can carry, and adding zeroes never gets any closer. - If even one good is like that, then the claim that a good God must prefer any evil-free world to any world with evil is not a necessary truth. It is not even true. (4) This possibility is open to Christians who reject libertarian freedom. - Many Christians hold that human freedom is compatible with God's determining what people choose, a view with a long tradition running through Augustine's later work and the Reformers. They answer the charge along this line rather than through the feasibility of worlds (P4). - The redemption claim asks nothing of them. It requires no counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, no transworld depravity, and no account of what creatures would do, only that a redeemed world may be worth what it cost. - That is why two Christians who argue hard with each other about predestination can give the same answer to this charge, and both of them mean it. Therefore, it is possible that God permits the evil in this world for the sake of a good that no evil-free world could contain.

(C2) Therefore, the existence of evil is logically compatible with the existence of God. + The existence of evil does not rule out the existence of God. Two claims are strictly incompatible only if there is no possible world containing both of them (P1), and two such worlds have now been described, either one of them enough on its own: one in which free creatures would go wrong in any world God could make (P4), and one in which the good of redemption outruns what it cost (P5). Neither has to be true. Neither has to be likely. They have to be possible, and nothing offered against them has shown that they are not. That conclusion is narrow, and its narrowness is the point. It does not show that God's existence is probable given the suffering we actually see. It does not explain why any particular child got leukemia. It offers no comfort to anyone in the middle of grief, and it was never built to. What it does settle is the charge of irrationality. A Christian who looks at a cancer ward and still believes in a good God is not holding two beliefs that cannot both be true, in the way someone would be who believed a shape was both round and square. He may still be wrong, and the questions that remain are about evidence, probability, and how any of this is to be lived with. Those are harder questions in some ways, and they have to be argued on their own terms. See also: CO / PoE: Intellectual PoE: Probabilistic CO / PoE: Intellectual PoE: External CO / PoE: Emotional PoE CO / PoE: Proof of God from Evil