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.

Sacrificing the fine-tuning argument to the argument from evil

The argument from evil is no stronger an argument than the fine-tuning argument. Moreover, the two are nicely paired up. Just as the fine-tuning argument seems to be seriously weakened by supposing a multiverse (since if there are infinitely many worlds, it's less surprising that some support life), so too the argument from evil is seriously weakened by supposing a multiverse of all creation-worthy worlds (since then there will presumably exist infinitely many worlds with lots of evils, as long as they are creation-worthy).

So here is a dialectical move a theist can make. Just sacrifice the fine-tuning argument to the argument from evil. Let the two cancel out! That still leaves the theist with a number of powerful arguments such as the cosmological argument, the argument from religious experience, the argument from moral epistemology, the argument from plausible miracle reports, the argument from consciousness and the argument from nomic regularity. The atheist, however, is left with little ammunition, besides some minor arguments concerning the exact formulation of divine attributes, which minor arguments can balanced off with less weighty arguments for theism, like the ontological argument or the argument from the experience of our lives as planned by another.

And so the balance of evidence, even if one does not take particular theistic arguments as apodeictic (I think one should do that in the case of the cosmological argument), strongly favors theism.