Philosophy of Religion

Philosophy of religion is the philosophical examination of the themes and concepts involved
in religious traditions as well as the broader philosophical task of reflecting on matters of
religious significance including the nature of religion itself, alternative concepts of God or
ultimate reality, and the religious significance of general features of the cosmos (e.g., the
laws of nature, the emergence of consciousness) and of historical events (e.g., the 1755
Lisbon Earthquake, the Holocaust). Philosophy of religion also includes the investigation and
assessment of worldviews (such as secular naturalism) that are alternatives to religious
worldviews. Philosophy of religion involves all the main areas of philosophy: metaphysics,
epistemology, value theory (including moral theory and applied ethics), philosophy of
language, science, history, politics, art, and so on

Religion and Science

The relationship between religion and science has been an important topic in twentieth
century philosophy of religion and it seems highly important today.
This section begins by considering the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of
Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) statement on the relationship between
science and religion:
Science and religion are based on different aspects of human experience. In science,
explanations must be based on evidence drawn from examining the natural world.
Scientifically based observations or experiments that conflict with an explanation eventually
must lead to modification or even abandonment of that explanation. Religious faith, in
contrast, does not depend only on empirical evidence, is not necessarily modified in the face
of conflicting evidence, and typically involves supernatural forces or entities. Because they
are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense,
science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different
ways. Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none
needs to exist. (NASIM 2008: 12)
This view of science and religion seems promising on many fronts. If the above statement on
science and religion is accepted, then it seems to insure there is minimal conflict between
two dynamic domains of what the Academies refer to as “human experience”. The National
Academies do seem to be correct in implying that the key elements of many religions do not
admit of direct scientific investigations nor rest “only on empirical evidence”. Neither God
nor Allah nor Brahman (the divine as conceived of in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and
Hinduism) is a physical or material object or process. It seems, then, that the divine or the
sacred and many other elements in world religions (meditation, prayer, sin and forgiveness,
deliverance from craving) can only be indirectly investigated scientifically. So, a neurologist
can produce detailed studies of the brains of monks and nuns when they pray and meditate,
and there can be comparative studies of the health of those who practice a religion and those
who do not, but it is very hard to conceive of how to scientifically measure God or Allah or
Brahman or the Dao, heaven, and so on. Despite the initial plausibility of the Academies
stance, however, it may be problematic.
First, a minor (and controversial) critical point in response to the Academies: The statement
makes use of the terms “supernatural forces or entities” that “are not part of nature”. The
term “supernatural” is not the standard term used to refer only to God or the divine, probably
(in part) because in English the term “supernatural” refers not just to God or the divine, but
also to poltergeists, ghosts, devils, witches, mediums, oracles, and so on. The later are a
panoply of what is commonly thought of as preposterous superstition. (The similarity of the
terms supernatural and superstitious may not be an accident.) The standard philosophical
term to reference God in the English language, from the seventeenth century onward,
is theism (from the Greek theos for god/God). So, rather than the statement refer to
“supernatural forces or entities”, a more charitable phrase might refer to how many world
religions are theistic or involve some sacred reality that is not directly, empirically
measurable.

Philosophical Reflection on Divine Attributes

Speculation about divine attributes in theistic tradition has often been carried out in accord
with what is currently referred to as perfect being theology, according to which God is
understood to be maximally excellent or unsurpassable in greatness. This tradition was
(famously) developed by Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4–1109). For a contemporary work
offering an historic overview of Anselmian theism, see Yujin Nagasawa’s Maximal God; A
New Defense of Perfect Being Theism (2017). Divine attributes in this tradition have been
identified by philosophers as those attributes that are the greatest compossible set of great-
making properties; properties are compossible when they can be instantiated by the same
being. Traditionally, the divine attributes have been identified as omnipotence, omniscience,
perfect goodness, worthiness of worship, necessary of non-contingent existence, and
eternality (existing outside of time or atemporally). Each of these attributes has been subject
to nuanced different analysis, as noted below. God has also been traditionally conceived to
be incorporeal or immaterial, immutable, impassable, omnipresent. And unlike Judaism and
Islam, Christian theists conceive of God as triune (the Godhead is not homogenous but
consists of three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth
(fully God and fully human).
One of the tools philosophers use in their investigation into divine attributes involve thought
experiments. In thought experiments, hypothetical cases are described—cases that may or
may not represent the way things are. In these descriptions, terms normally used in one
context are employed in expanded settings. Thus, in thinking of God as omniscient, one
might begin with a non-controversial case of a person knowing that a proposition is true,
taking note of what it means for someone to possess that knowledge and of the ways in
which the knowledge is secured. A theistic thought experiment would seek to extend our
understanding of knowledge as we think of it in our own case, working toward the
conception of a maximum or supreme intellectual excellence befitting the religious believers’
understanding of God. Various degrees of refinement would then be in order, as one
speculates not only about the extent of a maximum set of propositions known but also about
how these might be known. That is, in attributing omniscience to God, would one thereby
claim God knows all truths in a way that is analogous to the way we come to know truths
about the world? Too close an analogy would produce a peculiar picture of God relying
upon, for example, induction, sensory evidence, or the testimony of others. One move in the
philosophy of God has been to assert that the claim “God knows something” employs the
word “knows” univocally when read as picking out the thesis that God knows something,
while it uses the term in only a remotely analogical sense if read as identifying how God
knows (Swinburne 1977).
Using thought experiments often employs an appearance principle. One version of an
appearance principle is that a person has a reason for believing that some state of affairs
(SOA) is possible if she can conceive, describe or imagine the SOA obtaining and she knows
of no independent reasons for believing the SOA is impossible. As stated the principle is
advanced as simply offering a reason for believing the SOA to be possible, and it thus may
be seen a advancing a prima facie reason. But it might be seen as a secundum facie reason
insofar as the person carefully scrutinizes the SOA and its possible defeaters (see Taliaferro
& Knuths 2017). Some philosophers are skeptical of appealing to thought experiments (see
Van Inwagen 1998; for a defense see Taliaferro 2002, Kwan 2013, and Swinburne 1979; for
general treatments see Sorensen 1992 and Gendler & Hawthorne 2002).
Omniscience
Imagine there is a God who knows the future free action of human beings. If God does know
you will freely do some act X, then it is true that you will indeed do X. But if you are free,
would you not be free to avoid doing X? Given that it is foreknown you will do X, it appears
you would not be free to refrain from the act.
Initially this paradox seems easy to dispel. If God knows about your free action, then God
knows that you will freely do something and that you could have refrained from it. God’s
foreknowing the act does not make it necessary. Does not the paradox only arise because the
proposition, “Necessarily, if God knows X, then X” is confused with “If God knows X, then
necessarily X?” After all, it is necessarily the case that if someone knows you are reading this
entry right now, then it is true that you are reading this entry, but your reading this entry may
still be seen as a contingent, not necessary state of affairs. But the problem is not so easily
diffused, however, because God’s knowledge, unlike human knowledge, is infallible, and if
God infallibly knows that some state of affairs obtains then it cannot be that the state of
affairs does not obtain. Think of what is sometimes called the necessity of the past. Once a
state of affairs has obtained, it is unalterably or necessarily the case that it did occur . If the
future is known precisely and comprehensively, isn’t the future like the past, necessarily or
unalterably the case? If the problem is put in first-person terms and one imagines God
foreknows you will freely turn to a different entry in this Encyclopedia (moreover, God
knows with unsurpassable precision when you will do so, which entry you will select and
what you will think about it), then an easy resolution of the paradox seems elusive. To
highlight the nature of this problem, imagine God tells you what you will freely do in the
next hour. Under such conditions, is it still intelligible to believe you have the ability to do
otherwise if it is known by God as well as yourself what you will indeed elect to do? Self-
foreknowledge, then, produces an additional related problem because the psychology of
choice seems to require prior ignorance about what will be choose.
Various replies to the freedom-foreknowledge debate have been given. Some adopt
compatibilism, affirming the compatibility of free will and determinism, and conclude that
foreknowledge is no more threatening to freedom than determinism. While some prominent
philosophical theists in the past have taken this route (most dramatically Jonathan Edwards
(1703–1758)), this seems to be the minority position in philosophy of religion today
(exceptions include Paul Helm, John Fischer, and Lynne Baker). A second position adheres
to the libertarian outlook, which insists that freedom involves a radical, indeterminist
exercise of power, and concludes that God cannot know future free action. What prevents
such philosophers from denying that God is omniscient is that they contend there are no
truths about future free actions, or that while there are truths about the future, God either
cannot know those truths (Swinburne) or freely decides not to know them in order to
preserve free choice (John Lucas). On the first view, prior to someone’s doing a free action,
there is no fact of the matter that he or she will do a given act. This is in keeping with a
traditional, but controversial, interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of time and truth.
Aristotle may have thought it was neither true nor false prior to a given sea battle whether a
given side would win it. Some theists, such as Richard Swinburne, adopt this line today,
holding that the future cannot be known. If it cannot be known for metaphysical reasons,
then omniscience can be analyzed as knowing all that it is possible to know. That God cannot
know future free action is no more of a mark against God’s being omniscient than God’s
inability to make square circles is a mark against God’s being omnipotent. Other
philosophers deny the original paradox. They insist that God’s foreknowledge is compatible
with libertarian freedom and seek to resolve the quandary by claiming that God is not bound
in time (God does not so much foreknow the future as God knows what for us is the future
from an eternal viewpoint) and by arguing that the unique vantage point of an omniscient
God prevents any impingement on freedom. God can simply know the future without this
having to be grounded on an established, determinate future. But this only works if there is
no necessity of eternity analogous to the necessity of the past. Why think that we have any
more control over God’s timeless belief than over God’s past belief? If not, then there is an
exactly parallel dilemma of timeless knowledge. For outstanding current analysis of freedom
and foreknowledge, see the work of Linda Zagzebski.
Eternity
Could there be a being that is outside time? In the great monotheistic traditions, God is
thought of as without any kind of beginning or end. God will never, indeed, can never, cease
to be. Some philosophical theists hold that God’s temporality is very much like ours in the
sense that there is a before, during, and an after for God, or a past, present, and future for
God. This view is sometimes referred to as the thesis that God is everlasting. Those adopting
a more radical stance claim that God is independent of temporality, arguing either that God is
not in time at all, or that God is “simultaneously” at or in all times. This is sometimes called
the view that God is eternal as opposed to everlasting.
Why adopt the more radical stance? One reason, already noted, is that if God is not
temporally bound, there may be a resolution to the earlier problem of reconciling freedom
and foreknowledge. As St. Augustine of Hippo put it:
so that of those things which emerge in time, the future, indeed, are not yet, and the present
are now, and the past no longer are; but all of these are by Him comprehended in His stable
and eternal presence. (The City of God, XI.21)
If God is outside time, there may also be a secure foundation explaining God’s immutability
(changelessness), incorruptibility, and immortality. Furthermore, there may be an
opportunity to use God’s standing outside of time to launch an argument that God is the
creator of time.
Those affirming God to be unbounded by temporal sequences face several puzzles which I
note without trying to settle. If God is somehow at or in all times, is God simultaneously at
or in each? If so, there is the following problem. If God is simultaneous with the event of
Rome burning in 410 CE, and also simultaneous with your reading this entry, then it seems
that Rome must be burning at the same time you are reading this entry. (This problem was
advanced by Nelson Pike (1970); Stump and Kretzmann 1981 have replied that the
simultaneity involved in God’s eternal knowledge is not transitive). A different problem
arises with respect to eternity and omniscience. If God is outside of time, can God know
what time it is now? Arguably, there is a fact of the matter that it is now, say, midnight on 1
July 2018. A God outside of time might know that at midnight on 1 July 2018 certain things
occur, but could God know when it is now that time? The problem is that the more emphasis
one places on the claim that God’s supreme existence is independent of time, the more one
seems to jeopardize taking seriously time as it is known. Finally, while the great
monotheistic traditions provide a portrait of the Divine as supremely different from the
creation, there is also an insistence on God’s proximity or immanence. For some theists,
describing God as a person or person-like (God loves, acts, knows) is not to equivocate. But
it is not clear that an eternal God could be personal. For recent work on God’s relation to
time, see work by Katherine Rogers (2007, 2008).
5.1.3 The goodness of God
All known world religions address the nature of good and evil and commend ways of
achieving human well-being, whether this be thought of in terms of salvation, liberation,
deliverance, enlightenment, tranquility, or an egoless state of Nirvana. Notwithstanding
important differences, there is a substantial overlap between many of these conceptions of
the good as witnessed by the commending of the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would
have them do unto you”) in many religions. Some religions construe the Divine as in some
respect beyond our human notions of good and evil. In some forms of Hinduism, for
example, Brahman has been extolled as possessing a sort of moral transcendence, and some
Christian theologians and philosophers have likewise insisted that God is only a moral agent
in a highly qualified sense, if at all (Davies 1993). To call God good is, for them, very
different from calling a human being good.
Here are only some of the ways in which philosophers have articulated what it means to call
God good. In treating the matter, there has been a tendency either to explain God’s goodness
in terms of standards that are not God’s creation and thus, in some measure, independent of
God’s will, or in terms of God’s will and the standards God has created. The latter view has
been termed theistic voluntarism. A common version of theistic voluntarism is the claim that
for something to be good or right simply means that God approves of permits it and for
something to be bad or wrong means that God disapproves or forbids it.
Theistic voluntarists face several difficulties: moral language seems intelligible without
having to be explained in terms of the Divine will. Indeed, many people make what they take
to be objective moral judgments without making any reference to God. If they are using
moral language intelligibly, how could it be that the very meaning of such moral language
should be analyzed in terms of Divine volitions? New work in the philosophy of language
may be of use to theistic voluntarists. According to a causal theory of reference, “water”
necessarily designates H2O. It is not a contingent fact that water is H 2O notwithstanding the
fact that many people can use the term “water” without knowing its composition. Similarly,
could it not be the case that “good” may refer to that which is willed by God even though
many people are not aware of (or even deny) the existence of God? Another difficulty for
voluntarism lies in accounting for the apparent meaningful content of claims like “God is
good”. It appears that in calling God or in particular God’s will “good” the religious believer
is saying more than “God wills what God wills”. If so, must not the very notion of goodness
have some meaning independent of God’s will? Also at issue is the worry that if voluntarism
is accepted, the theist has threatened the normative objectivity of moral judgments. Could
God make it the case that moral judgments were turned upside down? For example, could
God make cruelty good? Arguably, the moral universe is not so malleable. In reply, some
voluntarists have sought to understand the stability of the moral laws in light of God’s
immutably fixed, necessary nature.
By understanding God’s goodness in terms of God’s being (as opposed to God’s will alone),
one comes close to the non-voluntarist stand. Aquinas and others hold that God is essentially
good in virtue of God’s very being. All such positions are non-voluntarist in so far as they do
not claim that what it means for something to be good is that God wills it to be so. The
goodness of God may be articulated in various ways, either by arguing that God’s perfection
requires God being good as an agent or by arguing that God’s goodness can be articulated in
terms of other Divine attributes such as those outlined above. For example, because
knowledge is in itself good, omniscience is a supreme good. God has also been considered
good in so far as God has created and conserves in existence a good cosmos. Debates over
the problem of evil (if God is indeed omnipotent and perfectly good, why is there evil?) have
poignancy precisely because one side challenges this chief judgment about God’s goodness.
(The debate over the problem of evil is taken up in section 5.2.4.)
The choice between voluntarism and seeing God’s very being as good is rarely strict. Some
theists who oppose a full-scale voluntarism allow for partial voluntarist elements. According
to one such moderate stance, while God cannot make cruelty good, God can
make some actions morally required or morally forbidden which otherwise would be morally
neutral. Arguments for this have been based on the thesis that the cosmos and all its contents
are God’s creation. According to some theories of property, an agent making something good
gains entitlements over the property. The crucial moves in arguments that the cosmos and its
contents belong to their Creator have been to guard against the idea that human parents
would then “own” their children (they do not, because parents are not radical creators like
God), and the idea that Divine ownership would permit anything, thus construing human
duties owed to God as the duties of a slave to a master (a view to which not all theists have
objected). Theories spelling out why and how the cosmos belongs to God have been
prominent in all three monotheistic traditions. Plato defended the notion, as did Aquinas and
Locke (see Brody 1974 for a defense).
A new development in theorizing about God’s goodness has been advanced in Zagzebski
2004. Zagzebski contends that being an exemplary virtuous person consists in having good
motives. Motives have an internal, affective or emotive structure. An emotion is “an
affective perception of the world” (2004: xvi) that “initiates and directs action” (2004: 1).
The ultimate grounding of what makes human motives good is that they are in accord with
the motives of God. Zagzebski’s theory is perhaps the most ambitious virtue theory in print,
offering an account of human virtues in light of theism. Not all theists resonate with her bold
claim that God is a person who has emotions, but many allow that (at least in some
analogical sense) God may be see as personal and having affective states.
One other effort worth noting to link judgments of good and evil with judgments about God
relies upon the ideal observer theory of ethics. According to this theory, moral judgments can
be analyzed in terms of how an ideal observer would judge matters. To say an act is right
entails a commitment to holding that if there were an ideal observer, it would approve of the
act; to claim an act is wrong entails the thesis that if there were an ideal observer, it would
disapprove of it. The theory can be found in works by Hume, Adam Smith, R.M. Hare, and
R. Firth (see Firth 1952 [1970]). The ideal observer is variously described, but typically is
thought of as an impartial omniscient regarding non-moral facts (facts that can be grasped
without already knowing the moral status or implications of the fact—for instance, “He did
something bad” is a moral fact; “He hit Smith” is not), and as omnipercipient (Firth’s term
for adopting a position of universal affective appreciation of the points of view of all
involved parties). The theory receives some support from the fact that most moral disputes
can be analyzed in terms of different parties challenging each other to be impartial, to get
their empirical facts straight, and to be more sensitive—for example, by realizing what it
feels like to be disadvantaged. The theory has formidable critics and defenders. If true, it
does not follow that there is an ideal observer, but if it is true and moral judgments are
coherent, then the idea of an ideal observer is coherent. Given certain conceptions of God in
the three great monotheistic traditions, God fits the ideal observer description (and more
besides, of course). This need not be unwelcome to atheists. Should an ideal observer theory
be cogent, a theist would have some reason for claiming that atheists committed to
normative, ethical judgments are also committed to the idea of a God or a God-like being.
(For a defense of a theistic form of the ideal observer theory, see Taliaferro 2005a; for
criticism see Anderson 2005. For further work on God, goodness, and morality, see Evans
2013 and Hare 2015. For interesting work on the notion of religious authority, see Zagzebski
2012.)
It should be noted that in addition to attention to the classical divine attributes discussed in
this section, there has also been philosophical work on divine simplicity, immutability,
impassibility, omnipresence, God’s freedom, divine necessity, sovereignty, God’s
relationship with abstract objects, Christian teachings about the Trinity, the incarnation,
atonement, the sacraments, and more.

God’s Existence
In some introductory philosophy textbooks and anthologies, the arguments for God’s
existence are presented as ostensible proofs which are then shown to be fallible. For
example, an argument from the apparent order and purposive nature of the cosmos will be
criticized on the grounds that, at best, the argument would establish there is a purposive,
designing intelligence at work in the cosmos. This falls far short of establishing that there is a
God who is omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and so on. But two comments need to be
made: First, that “meager” conclusion alone would be enough to disturb a scientific naturalist
who wishes to rule out all such transcendent intelligence. Second, few philosophers today
advance a single argument as a proof. Customarily, a design argument might be advanced
alongside an argument from religious experience, and the other arguments to be considered
below. True to Hempel’s advice (cited earlier) about comprehensive inquiry, it is
increasingly common to see philosophies—scientific naturalism or theism—advanced with
cumulative arguments, a whole range of considerations, and not with a supposed knock-
down, single proof.
This section surveys some of the main theistic arguments.
Problems of evil
If there is a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and completely good, why is there evil? The
problem of evil is the most widely considered objection to theism in both Western and
Eastern philosophy. There are two general versions of the problem: the deductive or logical
version, which asserts that the existence of any evil at all (regardless of its role in producing
good) is incompatible with God’s existence; and the probabilistic version, which asserts that
given the quantity and severity of evil that actually exists, it is unlikely that God exists. The
deductive problem is currently less commonly debated because many (but not all)
philosophers acknowledge that a thoroughly good being might allow or inflict some harm
under certain morally compelling conditions (such as causing a child pain when removing a
splinter). More intense debate concerns the likelihood (or even possibility) that there is a
completely good God given the vast amount of evil in the cosmos. Such evidential arguments
from evil may be deductive or inductive arguments but they include some attempt to show
that some known fact about evil bears a negative evidence relation to theism (e.g., it lowers
its probability or renders it improbable) whether or not it is logically incompatible with
theism. Consider human and animal suffering caused by death, predation, birth defects,
ravaging diseases, virtually unchecked human wickedness, torture, rape, oppression, and
“natural disasters”. Consider how often those who suffer are innocent. Why should there be
so much gratuitous, apparently pointless evil?
In the face of the problem of evil, some philosophers and theologians deny that God is all-
powerful and all-knowing. John Stuart Mill took this line, and panentheist theologians today
also question the traditional treatments of Divine power. According to panentheism, God is
immanent in the world, suffering with the oppressed and working to bring good out of evil,
although in spite of God’s efforts, evil will invariably mar the created order. Another
response is to think of God as being very different from a moral agent. Brian Davies and
others have contended that what it means for God to be good is different from what it means
for an agent to be morally good (Davies 2006). See also Mark Murphy’s 2017 book God’s
Own Ethics; Norms of Divine Agency and the Argument from Evil. A different, more
substantial strategy is to deny the existence of evil, but it is difficult to reconcile traditional
monotheism with moral skepticism. Also, insofar as we believe there to be a God worthy of
worship and a fitting object of human love, the appeal to moral skepticism will carry little
weight. The idea that evil is a privation or twisting of the good may have some currency in
thinking through the problem of evil, but it is difficult to see how it alone could go very far
to vindicate belief in God’s goodness. Searing pain and endless suffering seem altogether
real even if they are analyzed as being philosophically parasitic on something valuable. The
three great monotheistic, Abrahamic traditions, with their ample insistence on the reality of
evil, offer little reason to try to defuse the problem of evil by this route. Indeed, classical
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are so committed to the existence of evil that a reason to
reject evil would be a reason to reject these religious traditions. What would be the point of
the Judaic teaching about the Exodus (God liberating the people of Israel from slavery), or
the Christian teaching about the incarnation (Christ revealing God as love and releasing a
Divine power that will, in the end, conquer death), or the Islamic teaching of Mohammed
(the holy prophet of Allah, whom is all-just and all-merciful) if slavery, hate, death, and
injustice did not exist?
In part, the magnitude of the difficulty one takes the problem of evil to pose for theism will
depend upon one’s commitments in other areas of philosophy, especially ethics,
epistemology, and metaphysics. If in ethics you hold that there should be no preventable
suffering for any reason, regardless of the cause or consequence, then the problem of evil
will conflict with your acceptance of traditional theism. Moreover, if you hold that any
solution to the problem of evil should be evident to all persons, then again traditional theism
is in jeopardy, for clearly the “solution” is not evident to all. Debate has largely centered on
the legitimacy of adopting some middle position: a theory of values that would preserve a
clear assessment of the profound evil in the cosmos as well as some understanding of how
this might be compatible with the existence of an all powerful, completely good Creator.
Could there be reasons why God would permit cosmic ills? If we do not know what those
reasons might be, are we in a position to conclude that there are none or that there could not
be any? Exploring different possibilities will be shaped by one’s metaphysics. For example,
if you do not believe there is free will, then you will not be moved by any appeal to the
positive value of free will and its role in bringing about good as offsetting its role in bringing
about evil.
Theistic responses to the problem of evil distinguish between a defense and a theodicy. A
defense seeks to establish that rational belief that God exists is still possible (when the
defense is employed against the logical version of the problem of evil) and that the existence
of evil does not make it improbable that God exists (when used against the probabilistic
version). Some have adopted the defense strategy while arguing that we are in a position to
have rational belief in the existence of evil and in a completely good God who hates this evil,
even though we may be unable to see how these two beliefs are compatible. A theodicy is
more ambitious and is typically part of a broader project, arguing that it is reasonable to
believe that God exists on the basis of the good as well as the evident evil of the cosmos. In a
theodicy, the project is not to account for each and every evil, but to provide an overarching
framework within which to understand at least roughly how the evil that occurs is part of
some overall good—for instance, the overcoming of evil is itself a great good. In practice, a
defense and a theodicy often appeal to similar factors, the first and foremost being what
many call the Greater Good Defense.
5.2.5 Evil and the greater good
In the Greater Good Defense, it is contended that evil can be understood as either a necessary
accompaniment to bringing about greater goods or an integral part of these goods. Thus, in a
version often called the Free Will Defense, it is proposed that free creatures who are able to
care for each other and whose welfare depends on each other’s freely chosen action
constitute a good. For this good to be realized, it is argued, there must be the bona
fide possibility of persons harming each other. The free will defense is sometimes used
narrowly only to cover evil that occurs as a result, direct or indirect, of human action. But it
has been speculatively extended by those proposing a defense rather than a theodicy to cover
other evils which might be brought about by supernatural agents other than God. According
to the Greater Good case, evil provides an opportunity to realize great values, such as the
virtues of courage and the pursuit of justice. Reichenbach (1982), Tennant (1930),
Swinburne (1979), and van Inwagen (2006) have also underscored the good of a stable world
of natural laws in which animals and humans learn about the cosmos and develop
autonomously, independent of the certainty that God exists. Some atheists accord value to
the good of living in a world without God, and these views have been used by theists to back
up the claim that God might have had reason to create a cosmos in which Divine existence is
not overwhelmingly obvious to us. If God’s existence were overwhelmingly obvious, then
motivations to virtue might be clouded by self-interest and by the bare fear of offending an
omnipotent being. Further, there may even be some good to acting virtuously even if
circumstances guarantee a tragic outcome. John Hick (1966 [1977]) so argued and has
developed what he construes to be an Irenaean approach to the problem of evil (named after
St. Irenaeus of the second century). On this approach, it is deemed good that humanity
develops the life of virtue gradually, evolving to a life of grace, maturity, and love. This
contrasts with a theodicy associated with St. Augustine, according to which God made us
perfect and then allowed us to fall into perdition, only to be redeemed later by Christ. Hick
thinks the Augustinian model fails whereas the Irenaean one is credible.
Some have based an argument from the problem of evil on the charge that this is not the best
possible world. If there were a supreme, maximally excellent God, surely God would bring
about the best possible creation. Because this is not the best possible creation, there is no
supreme, maximally excellent God. Following Adams (1987), many now reply that the
whole notion of a best possible world, like the highest possible number, is incoherent. For
any world that can be imagined with such and such happiness, goodness, virtue and so on, a
higher one can be imagined. If the notion of a best possible world is incoherent, would this
count against belief that there could be a supreme, maximally excellent being? It has been
argued on the contrary that Divine excellences admit of upper limits or maxima that are not
quantifiable in a serial fashion (for example, Divine omnipotence involves being able to do
anything logically or metaphysically possible, but does not require actually doing the greatest
number of acts or a series of acts of which there can be no more).
Those concerned with the problem of evil clash over the question of how one assesses the
likelihood of Divine existence. Someone who reports seeing no point to the existence of evil
or no justification for God to allow it seems to imply that if there were a point they would see
it. Note the difference between seeing no point and not seeing a point. In the cosmic case, is
it clear that if there were a reason justifying the existence of evil, we would see it? William
Rowe thinks some plausible understanding of God’s justificatory reason for allowing the evil
should be detectable, but that there are cases of evil that are altogether gratuitous. Defenders
like William Hasker (1989) and Stephen Wykstra (1984) reply that these cases are not
decisive counter-examples to the claim that there is a good God. These philosophers hold
that we can recognize evil and grasp our duty to do all in our power to prevent or alleviate it.
But we should not take our failure to see what reason God might have for allowing evil to
count as grounds for thinking that there is no reason. This later move has led to a position
commonly called skeptical theism. Michael Bergmann, Michael Rea, William Alston and
others have argued that we have good reason to be skeptical about whether we can assess
whether ostensibly gratuitous evils may or may not be permitted by an all-good God
(Bergmann 2012a and 2012b, 2001; Bergmann & Rea 2005; for criticism see Almeida &
Oppy 2003; Draper 2014, 2013, 1996). Overall, it needs to be noted that from the alleged
fact that we would be unlikely to see a reason for God to allow some evil if there were one, it
only follows that our failure to see such a reason is not strong evidence against theism.