ANTHOLOGY EXTRACT 1
J.L. Mackie's 1977 essay begins by setting out the Problem of Evil & Suffering.
In section B, Mackie outlines the "Fallacious Solutions" offered by some religious thinkers. Mackie argues these solutions are 'fallacious' because they are (he says) logically contradictory or unsupported. Mackie's style is worth imitating. He makes a broad attack on an idea he disagrees with. Then he considers how a believer in that idea might respond. He looks at how a believer might refine their argument and he offers his own criticisms of each refinement. If he is successful, the believer is left "without a leg to stand on", with all his arguments defeated. |
With the "adequate solutions", Mackie thinks they explicitly (openly) abandon one of the traditional theist beliefs - that evil doesn't exist, that God isn't all-powerful or moral perfect. This why they are in fact 'solutions'. However, Mackie thinks they implicitly (secretly) reinstate those beliefs later on. This is why he accuses them of being "half-hearted" or even dishonest.
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God can do all things that are possible - Thomas Aquinas
meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can” - C.S. Lewis
Other critics link the necessity of evil with the impossibility of heaven. If evil is necessary for the existence of goodness, then there must be evil in heaven, because heaven is supposed to be a place of goodness - but heaven is also supposed to be without evil or suffering, so this leads to a contradiction. In order for heaven to be free of evil, evil has to be non-necessary.This is another reductio ad absurdum style argument.
However, some religious believers might respond by saying that Hell represents the continuing existence of evil (defeated by God). Others might say that the memory of evil and suffering is still present in heaven. However, these responses raise even more questions... |
Caravaggio painted the scene (John 20: 24-29) where Thomas inspects the wounds in Jesus' hands and chest - the marks of suffering still present after the Resurrection
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Mackie thinks that this solution involves thinking of "good" and "evil", not as opposite "qualities" that eliminate each other, but as relative comparisons. Nothing is "good" or "bad", but some things are "better" or "worse" than others. He makes a comparison with "great" and "small" which are also relative terms.
A £10 banknote is greater than a £5 note but smaller than a £20 note. Maybe you need to know what £5 means in order to appreciate how much £10 is worth. But £10 isn't the opposite of £5. It doesn't possess some quality called "greatness" all by itself. It's entirely relative.
Most religious believers don't have this view of good and evil. They don't think that God is just better than the Devil; they think God is morally perfect and that God possesses goodness (or is goodness). If good just means "better", then God doesn't want us to be good, just better than we now are.
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God is the same as his essence - Thomas Aquinas
The current scientific model of the universe tells us that it is very big and expanding all the time, but it's not infinitely big. It has an absolute size. Therefore everything can be compared to the size of the universe. The universe is the biggest thing there is or can ever be. It is the absolute standard for "greatness" and nothing can be "greater" than the universe. Once something is as big as the universe then it's not just "greater" - it's actually "great" in its own right.
Maybe goodness is a bit like that. There's an absolute value of "goodness", which is God himself. Everything else is only good relative to God, but if you get to be as good as God, you are absolutely "good".
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Using the example of 'redness', it's clear that we need some things not to be red in order to understand what the word 'red' means. In a world where EVERYTHING was red, the word "red" would become meaningless. This is an example of a linguistic principle.
It might be a linguistic principle that we need to CALL some things "evil" in order for the WORD "good" to have any meaning. But if evil is only necessary in this linguistic sense, that doesn't solve the problem of evil. God could create a world with no evil in it - it's just that human beings wouldn't realise God had done this, because we would then have no concept of what "evil" meant. |
Mackie argues that, if evil is necessary, it can only be necessary in a "minute dose" - a tiny amount. After all, for the inhabitants of a red world to appreciate redness, it would only be necessary for there to be "a minute speck" of non-redness.
Mackie seems to be suggesting that even if evil is necessary, God could satisfy this necessity by creating a world where people stubbed their toes or received paper cuts - painful but not excessive. Or perhaps a world where only one person had to suffer and everybody else could be happy.
The world we actually live in seems to contain far more suffering than is necessary. |
"Schindler's List" (1993) is shot in black-and-white, except for the appearance of one Jewish girl in a red dress. When she is killed by the Nazis, the audience have greater appreciation of the horror of 6 million deaths in the Holocaust
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I cannot conceive of God being capable of performing miracles and refraining from doing it. I could not worship a God capable of preventing the horrors in the Nazi death campus Who did not act - Simon Friedman
Secondly, notice what has happened to Mackie's argument. He began by proposing the logical problem of evil and claiming that the idea of God was contradictory simply as an idea. Now he is proposing the evidential problem of evil. This is admitting that the idea of God makes sense, but claiming that the universe doesn't provide us with evidence for this God. That is still an argument against the existence of God - but it's a different argument from the one Mackie started with.
Mackie started by accusing theists of "equivocation" (muddling different ideas together to make their argument seem stronger). Is he doing something similar here?
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The existence of evil is incontrovertible. The existence of "excessive evil" is something a brave theist could deny without being irrational (although he may come across as callous and hard-hearted)
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For example, very few women want to be pregnant. Pregnancy is a necessary means to having children. Most men and women think that the happiness of childbirth and their love for a child makes the pain and difficulty of pregnancy worthwhile.
This is similar to the earlier argument, but it shifts from claiming that God has to allow evil as part of creating a good world to saying that the process of becoming a good person has to involve being exposed to evil. This might be because you have to be lied to in order to realise how important honesty is or you have to see violence in order care about peace. |
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Mackie's objection to this is simple. This solution rejects the idea of omnipotence. If evil is logically necessary, then even an omnipotent God might be unable to prevent it. But if evil is instrumentally necessary, then that is EXACTLY the sort of thing omnipotence ought to be able to avoid.
Miracles in the Bible often show God's power by ignoring instrumental necessity. Jesus heals illnesses or multiplies fishes by "skipping over" a process of recovery or reproduction that would normally take months. Many steps are normally necessary to turn water into wine but Jesus dispenses with these steps and turns water into wine instantaneously. His miracles can "skip to the end".
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It's certainly true that evil and suffering CAN be a means to good.
However, it's also true that evil and suffering DON'T ALWAYS lead to goodness.
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