Friday, January 13, 2023

Trivial and horrendous evils

Nobody seriously runs an argument against the existence of God from trivial evils, like hangnails or mosquito bites.

Why not? Here is a hypothesis. There are so very many possible much greater goods—goods qualitatively and not just quantitatively much greter—that it would be easy to suppose that God’s permitting the trivial evil could promote or enhance one of these goods to a degree sufficient to yield justification.

On the other hand, if we think of horrendous evils, like the torture of children, it is difficult to think of much greater goods. Maybe with difficulty we can come up with one or two possibilities, but not enough to make it easy to suppose a justification for God’s permission of the evil in terms of the goods.

However, if God exists, we would expect there to be an unbounded upward qualitative hierarchy of possible finite goods. God is infinitely good, and finite goods are participations in God, so we would expect a hierarchy of qualitatively greater and greater types of good that reflect God’s infinite goodness better and better.

So if God exists, we would expect there to be unknown possible finite goods that are related to the known horrendous evils in something like the proportion in which the known great finite goods are related to the known trivial evils. Thus, if God exists, there very likely is
an upward hierarchy of possible goods to which the horrendous evils of this life stand like a mosquito bite to the courage of a Socrates. If we believe in this hierarchy of goods, then it seems we should be no more impressed by the atheological evidential force of horrendous evils than the ordinary person is by the atheological evidential force of trivial evils.

There is, however, a difference between the cases. Many great ordinary goods that dwarf trivial evils, like the courage of a Socrates, are known to us. Few if any finite goods that dwarf horrendous evils are known to us. Nonetheless, if theism is true, it is very likely that such goods are possible. And since the argument from evil is addressed against the theist, it seems fair for the theist to invoke that hierarchy.

Moreover, we might ask whether our ignorance of goods higher up in the hierarchy of goods beyond the ordinary goods is not itself evidence against the existence of such goods. Here, I think the answer is that it is very little evidence. We would expect any particular finite being to be able to recognize only a finite number of types of good, and thus the fact that there are only a finite number of goods that we recognize is very little evidence against the hypothesis of the upward hierarchy of goods.

5 comments:

Walter Van den Acker said...

The reason why few people seriously run an argument from trivial evils is simply because the case is much more obvious in the case of horrendous evil.
But a truly opnipotent being should be able to accomplish Evert good without any evil, unless this is logically impossible
So, unless there is a convincing argument for why a certain good cannot posdibly be accomplished without permitting evil, the default position should be that it is possible.

Unknown said...

There seems to be a legitimate reason to allow evil choices to exist and to allow those evil choices to affect other people. Seemingly, actions wouldn't mean much (such as freely loving God) if we were all in cubicles and couldn't actually interact with people negatively. Free love and free hatred seems to be two sides of the same coin. I would also say that there are legitimate reasons for suffering to exist. Perhaps the world would have less good in it if there is no suffering. Would God permit suffering to allow more good? I don't see a reason as to why He wouldn't. Theodicies and defenses are very interesting, though it seems to me that, intuitively at least, most theodicies seem to deal with the problem of trivial evils.

Walter Van den Acker said...

Unknown

So, God's actions do not mean much if He can't interact with people negatively?

Unknown said...

Perhaps not negatively, but certainly 'without love'. It seems to me that God did not have to create you and thus God did not have to love you. If God were forced to love you or loved you randomly, I wouldn't consider God to be a moral being. I also wouldn't consider love to be a moral good if it were forced. Therefore, it seems possible that evil actions are merely privations of good actions, and thus one cannot choose to do "nothing" because "nothing" is a lack of good, which seems to be some sort of evil. Perhaps one could make a distinction between evils, but it seems that this might be a better distinction that the one I previously drew.

Walter Van den Acker said...

Unknown

I wouldn't say "forced" is the correct word here, but it is true that God necessarily loves you. So, in a sense, God did/does have to love you.