Justified True Belief

(P1) Probability is always relative to a body of background evidence. + The modern argument from evil does not claim that God and suffering contradict each other. It claims that the suffering we actually see makes God unlikely, and "unlikely" is a word that never stands on its own: unlikely given what? (1) The modern objection is a probability claim. - The older version, called the logical problem of evil, said that "God exists" and "evil exists" cannot both be true, the way "married" and "bachelor" cannot both be true of the same man. Hardly any philosopher presses that version today. - What replaced it is the evidential or probabilistic argument. It grants at the outset that God and evil could both exist, and it claims instead that the particular horrors we observe make theism, the claim that God exists, improbable. - That concession changed the job. Nobody has to hunt for a contradiction any more, which sounds like the easier road until you notice what it costs: a probability that came out low has to have come out low relative to something, and that something now has to be named. (2) Nothing is probable or improbable all by itself. - Probability attaches to a claim only given some body of information. Philosophers call that a conditional probability and write it P(h | e), read "the probability of the hypothesis h, given the evidence e." Change the e and the same h can swing from nearly certain to nearly impossible. - Think of it this way. Relative to the bare biology of conception, your own existence is fantastically improbable: one sperm out of a few hundred million, one egg out of a few hundred, one particular month, and then the same lottery run again for each of your parents, and theirs, back through however many generations you care to count. - Nobody has ever lain awake doubting their own existence on those grounds, and nobody should. Your total evidence, this morning's mirror and your own memories and the people who used your name at breakfast, swamps the improbability of that one thin slice of biology. Same claim, different e, opposite verdict. (3) A fact can count against a claim and still leave it probable. - A man's fingerprints are on the murder weapon. That is real evidence against him, and no honest juror pretends otherwise. Taken by itself it looks very bad indeed. - The jury acquits him anyway, because they also hear that the knife came from his own kitchen, that three people place him forty miles away that evening, and that another man has since confessed. The fingerprint never stopped being evidence against him. It stopped being decisive. - Nobody thinks the defense lawyer cheated by asking the jury to look at everything. Looking at everything is what a verdict is. (4) Weighing all the evidence is the standard rule, not a theistic loophole. - Confirmation theory, the branch of philosophy that studies how evidence supports a claim, has a name for the rule: the principle of total evidence. A rational judgment is made on all the evidence available rather than on a chosen slice of it, and atheist and theist philosophers alike work under it. - Think of a doctor reading a blood panel. If he seizes on the one alarming number and never looks at the other twenty, he has not been rigorous. He has been careless, and the patient is the one who pays for it. Therefore, any argument that God is improbable owes an answer to a prior question: improbable relative to what?

(P2) The evidence bearing on God's existence is far wider than the evidence of evil. + If probability is relative to a body of evidence (P1), the size of that body is the whole question. The evidence bearing on God is not one topic. (1) The argument from evil examines a single feature of the world. - It takes one feature of the world, its suffering, and asks what that suggests about God. A fawn dying in a forest fire, a children's cancer ward: given those, how likely is a good and all-powerful God? - That is a fair question, and if it succeeds it establishes something real. Suffering is evidence against theism. Grant that much, and grant it without flinching. - Even so, "counts against" and "improbable on the whole" are two different verdicts. (2) Several independent lines of evidence point the other way. - Set the suffering aside a moment. Six lines of argument run toward God, and none is about suffering. - The universe began to exist, and a thing that begins needs something outside space, time and matter to cause it. - The constants that fix gravity, the nuclear forces, and the rate of cosmic expansion sit in a narrow band that permits stars and chemistry at all, and physicists have written about that band for fifty years. • This is what fine-tuning means: not that the constants are beautiful, but that the values compatible with any complex structure are a small fraction of those they could apparently have taken. - Moral obligations look like genuine obligations rather than strong preferences, and a duty has to be owed to somebody. - Then the strangest of the six. A being as great as anything could be, all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good, would not merely happen to exist. If such a being is so much as possible, it exists necessarily: there is no way things could have gone in which it does not. • Everything turns on whether such a being is possible, which is where that argument is fought. - A first-century Jewish teacher was executed in public and then encountered alive by his followers, his enemies, and his own skeptical brother. - Across cultures and centuries, enormous numbers report an awareness of God they take to be a perception rather than an inference, and testimony on that scale is evidence whatever weight it is finally given. (3) These lines do not lean on each other. - Independence is what lets them add up. A chain fails at its weakest link, but a rope holds when one strand frays, because the strands do not carry each other. - Think of a jury convicting on a fingerprint, a receipt, a witness, and a motive. None is conclusive alone, which is why the four together are worth more than four repetitions of the best one. - Anyone who thinks all six fail will not be moved by any of this, and that is a fair place to stand. The claim is that the evidence is wide, not that a reader has already been persuaded by it. (4) A verdict cannot be read off one side of the ledger. - A home inspector who reports the cracked bathroom tile and says nothing about the foundation, roof, or wiring has not inspected the house. He has described a tile. - If suffering is evidence against God and these lines are evidence for God, the answer is the balance between them, and the balance is not visible from either side alone. Therefore, the evidence relevant to God's existence runs well past the evidence of suffering, and a probability that ignores the rest is not one on total evidence.

(IC) Therefore, evil considered by itself cannot settle whether God's existence is probable. + Put (P1) and (P2) together and the objection's central move will not go through: suffering on its own cannot show that God is improbable. The two premises lock together the way links in a chain do, which is what a deductive argument is, so if each link holds the conclusion cannot slip out. Neither link has to be certain, either. Each has only to be more plausible than its denial, which is the standard philosophy holds a deductive argument to. (1) Suffering may still count against theism. - (P2) granted exactly that, and nothing in (P1) or (P2) takes it back. - A team two goals down at half time is losing. That is a real fact about the game, and it is not the final score. - A verdict on one slice of the evidence is not a verdict on the whole, and the whole is what the objection needs. (2) Showing that God is improbable means engaging the case for God. - To show that God is improbable on everything we know, an objector has to take on the positive case rather than set it to one side. - In practice that means meeting those arguments on their own ground: the beginning of the universe, the fine-tuning of the constants, the standing of moral obligation, the evidence for the resurrection. Some of them may fail under inspection, and an objector is perfectly free to argue that they do. - What is not available is leaving them unexamined and calling the result a probability. That is a much bigger undertaking than the argument from evil, and it is a different one. From (P1) and (P2), the evils we observe cannot by themselves establish that God's existence is improbable.

(P3) No finite mind can survey the goods that permitting a given evil may secure. + Even granting every word of (P1) and (P2), the argument still turns on a step that is rarely said out loud. (1) The step from "I see no reason" to "there is none" must be earned. - Philosophers have a nickname for that step, the noseeum inference, from "no see 'um" to "there ain't 'um." Sometimes it is fine reasoning and sometimes it is worthless, and the difference is never how confident the reasoner feels. - Open your refrigerator, see no elephant, and you may safely conclude there is none, because an elephant in a refrigerator is exactly what you would have noticed. Open the same refrigerator, see no bacteria, and you may conclude nothing at all. - What separates those two cases is warrant: the assumption, in the good case, that you would have seen the thing if it had been there. (2) Reasons running through a vast causal order would not be noticed. - Small changes in complex systems amplify. Weather forecasts fall apart past about ten days, not for want of effort, but because a tiny error in today's measurements is an enormous one by month's end. The atmosphere is far simpler than human history. - A reason for permitting one evil could surface three generations downstream, in another country, in a person not yet born. Nothing about where we stand lets us trace such a chain forward or back. - Think of a two-year-old held down for a vaccination. He has no access to the reason the people he trusts most are hurting him, and his failure to see it is no evidence that there is none. The gap between an adult and a toddler closes with time. The gap at issue never closes. (3) People who are not theists already grant limits of exactly this size. - A long-standing objection to utilitarian ethics, the view that the right act is whichever produces the most overall happiness, is that nobody can run the calculation. Consequences keep unfolding past where anyone can follow them. - Nobody concludes that ethics is therefore impossible. They conclude that finite creatures cannot compute total outcomes, and carry on making moral judgments with what they have. - The same limit, applied to God's reasons rather than our own consequences, is not an exemption theists invented when the conversation got difficult. It is the ordinary human condition, noticed in a new place. (4) The limit is on our knowledge, not on God's goodness. - The claim is epistemic, a word for anything to do with knowing: we are badly placed to judge that no morally sufficient reason exists for a given evil. Such a reason makes permitting the evil the right thing for a good being to do, the way a surgeon's reason makes cutting into a body care rather than assault. - Christian teaching has said as much from the beginning. Paul writes that for now we see "in a mirror dimly" and know "in part" (1 Corinthians 13:12). - What is not claimed: that suffering is not really evil, that we know nothing about God's character, or that any behavior at all could be excused by appealing to hidden purposes. Those are much stronger claims, and none of them follows. - The position has a name, skeptical theism, and its skepticism is narrow. It doubts one thing, our ability to survey the space of possible goods, and nothing whatever about God's goodness. Therefore, the confident judgment that no morally sufficient reason exists for a particular evil lies past what our position lets us see.

(P4a) Christian teaching expects a world in which God permits terrible suffering. + The argument from evil is pressed as a problem for Christians, so the Christian answer is entitled to be Christian. Three things the church has taught from the beginning change what a world made by this God would be expected to contain. (1) A human life is for the knowledge of God, not for comfort. - The objection tests bare theism, the claim that some perfect being exists with nothing further specified. Christian theism says a great deal more about who that God is and what he is doing, and the two hypotheses predict different worlds. - If the aim were maximum comfort, this world is poor work, and Christianity has never said that was the aim. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, a Reformed question-and-answer catechism from the 1640s, opens by saying that man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. That is drawn straight from Paul, who counted everything he had lost as garbage next to knowing Christ (Philippians 3:8). - As it happens, the church has not grown fastest where life is easiest. It grew in China under Mao, when the churches were shut and the pastors jailed. It grows in Iran now. It grew through the wars and famines of the last century, while attendance in the comfortable West has been flat or falling. The causes are argued over and the pattern is not universal, but suffering and the knowledge of God are plainly not strangers. (2) Humanity is in rebellion against God. - The doctrine of the fall is not the modest observation that people sometimes behave badly. It is the claim that the race is in a settled condition of alienation from God, morally guilty, and busy building substitutes for him. - Much of the catalogue the objection reads out is human work. The Holocaust was human. The murdered child had a murderer. Famines in the modern world have usually had political causes. None of that surprises Christianity, because it is precisely what it says free creatures in rebellion produce. - Romans 1 describes God giving people over to what they have chosen, three times in five verses (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). That is not indifference. It is what it looks like when a father stops intercepting the consequences and lets a grown son find out. (3) The natural order itself is damaged and awaiting repair. - The part of the catalogue that is nobody's choice is where the objection bites hardest, and it deserves naming rather than skipping: the fawn in the fire, the tsunami, the tumor in a four-year-old. - Paul writes that the creation was "subjected to futility" and that the whole of it groans like a woman in labor (Romans 8:20-22). Christians read that as a real disorder in nature rather than as a figure of speech, and they disagree among themselves about how and when the disorder got in. - Walk into a body shop and the dented cars are not evidence that nobody works there. That says nothing at all about why one particular child got a tumor. What it says is that a world under repair is the world Christian teaching describes, so finding one is no surprise. Therefore, a world in which God permits horrors of this kind is the world Christian teaching describes, not a departure from it.

(P4b) Christian teaching places the decisive good beyond this life. + The objection weighs the suffering of a human life against the goods available inside that same life. Christianity has never accepted that boundary, and moving it changes the sum. (1) God's purposes run past the end of this life. - "Light momentary affliction" is Paul's phrase for his own sufferings (2 Corinthians 4:17), and it gets its weight from the man who wrote it: flogged five times, beaten with rods, stoned and left for dead, shipwrecked three times, and eventually executed in Rome. - The same writer calls the present age a groaning (Romans 8:22), so the phrase is not a claim that the suffering was small. It is a claim about proportion between a finite stretch of time and an endless one. - An argument that weighs a life's suffering only against the goods available inside that life is not testing Christianity. The Apostles' Creed ends with the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, the Nicene with the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, and a version of the faith whose promises run out at the graveside is not a version of it. (2) Knowing God is a good of a different order from the goods at stake. - Imagine handing a bereaved mother a check. Whatever the figure, something has gone wrong with the transaction, and the trouble is not that the figure was too small. - Philosophers call that move balancing off: a great good is set against a terrible evil and the total comes out positive. What it leaves out is the woman herself. The sum improves and nothing whatever has happened to her. - The stronger claim, and the one Christianity actually makes, is that the evil is defeated inside the sufferer's own life. Not paid for from outside, but taken up into an intimacy with God she would not trade away. - The worst evils have a name of their own. Philosophers call them horrendous: the ones that give a person reason to doubt whether her own life could ever be a good to her at all. Whether it can be, on the whole and to her, is the real question, and no entry in a ledger answers it. - This is said with care, and never on someone else's behalf. It is one thing for a woman who has come through something unspeakable to say she would not trade what she came to know. It is quite another for a stranger to say it about her, and Christians who blur that line do real damage. (3) The claim about life beyond death rests on a historical event. - Christianity does not assert a life beyond this one because the sums would otherwise fail to come out. It asserts one because of a claim about a particular week in Jerusalem, and it rises or falls with that claim. - Paul says as much, and says it against his own interest: if Christ has not been raised, the preaching is empty and so is the faith (1 Corinthians 15:14). - That makes the appeal answerable rather than convenient. Anyone who thinks the resurrection did not happen has a real objection to press, and it is an objection about history rather than about probability. Therefore, the evils in the world Christianity describes are far less surprising on Christian teaching than on the bare theism the objection tests.

(C) Therefore, the evils we observe do not establish that God's existence is improbable. + The evils we observe do not show that God probably does not exist. The objection has never weighed the whole of the evidence, and the single item it has weighed cannot deliver that verdict on its own. (1) Neither road to "improbable" is open. - A claim is defeated by knocking out what it stands on. Logicians call that pattern modus tollens, denying the consequent: if it rained, the street would be wet; the street is dry; therefore it did not rain. - If the evils we observe made God's existence improbable, that verdict would have to arrive by one of two roads, and both of them are blocked. • The first road weighs the whole body of evidence, and the objection has not weighed it (IC). • The second lets this one item settle the question by itself, which takes the step from "no justifying good is visible" to "there is none." That step has no warrant (P3). - Whichever road were taken, it would still have to run against the God Christians actually believe in rather than a thinner substitute, and the world Christian teaching describes is not one in which these evils come as a surprise (P4a, P4b). (2) A defense is not a theodicy. - (P1) through (P4b) offer a defense rather than a theodicy. A theodicy claims to give God's actual reasons for permitting an evil. A defense shows only that the case against God does not succeed, which is a smaller thing and a more defensible one. - Nothing in (P1) through (P4b) delivers a verdict on the total evidence either. The claim is narrower on purpose, and an argument that needs such a verdict has not produced one. - No Christian is in a position to tell a bereaved parent why. Anyone who says otherwise has claimed the god's-eye view that (P3) says nobody has, and has claimed it at the worst possible moment. (3) The intellectual answer was never meant to be the whole answer. - A person holding a photograph of a dead child is not raising a question about conditional probability. Answering as though they were is a failure of a different kind, and a worse one. - What is owed there is presence, time, and honesty about not knowing. That is a different discipline from argument, and not a lesser one. (4) Christianity's own answer to suffering is not finally an argument. - The claim at the center of it is that God did not stay outside the problem. He came into it: born into an occupied country, handed over by one of his own friends, tortured by soldiers, and executed, and he did all of it on purpose. - That is not a proof, and it settles no probabilities. It is the reason Christians have historically found the problem of evil agonizing without finding it decisive. From (P1) through (P4b), the probabilistic argument from evil does not establish its conclusion. Suffering remains a real cost to theism, honestly counted. It does not carry the weight the objection needs it to carry.