![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Robert Bass argues that the evidential problem of evil can be strengthened by the application of a Bayesian conditionalization argument. I argue that, whatever the merits of Bayesian conditionalization arguments, they are unsuccessful in substantiating the evidential problem of evil because the problem of evil doesn’t meet the necessary conditions for applying the formula informatively. I offer two examples to show that a successful application of the Bayesian formula must pass two tests, the competency test and the connection test. I then show that the problem of evil passes neither, and is therefore not strengthened by the Bayesian analysis. I conclude that Bass’s reformulated argument poses no substantive threat to theism.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Robert Bass and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Notes
1. Bass, “Many Inscrutable Evils,” 118–32.
2. If one were disposed to regard the value of free will as a relevant justifying good for some instances of evil, and if one were to regard this freedom as valuable prior to and justifying of any later evils, a case could be made that a relevant justifying good can even precede a non-gratuitous evil. I won’t pursue this further, here.
3. It is important to include Plantinga’s, God, Freedom, and Evil. caveat here that the God of classical theism is also supposed to be omniscient. This is because it seems clearly possible that a being that could eliminate a certain evil and who is good enough to do so could still permit evils of which he is ignorant without wrongdoing (18–19). This implication, it would seem, extends to an all-powerful and perfectly morally good being.
4. Bass, “Many Inscrutable Evils,” 120.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 122.
7. Ibid., 123.
8. To be followed by successive instances, (I2), (I3), (I4), and so on.
9. Ibid., 125.
10. The assumption is that God’s existence is mutually exclusive with the existence of gratuitous evil, such that, if there is at least one gratuitous evil, then God doesn’t exist, and if God exists, there is no gratuitous evil. Nevertheless, these states of affairs are not exhaustive – neither the inverse (if there are no gratuitous evils, then God exists) nor the converse (if God does not exist, then there is at least one gratuitous evil) is assumed. Bass notes this briefly on pp. 125–6.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid. A reviewer noted that there remains a worry that Bass has not appropriately established the probabilistic independence of P(In|G) and P(In|~G). If they are not independent, Bass has chosen an inadequate formula by which to evaluate their relationship. Bass considers a version of this objection (126–30), but he is a bit cagy about its relevance. At first, Bass says, ‘If I am not entitled to that assumption, the argument fails’ (126), but then he softens this requirement: ‘We do not need to know that the probabilities of instances of inscrutable evil as evidence for gratuitous evil are entirely independent’ (126–7). What we need to know, instead, according to Bass, is that: P(I|G) > P(I|~G). Because of this, there is room to challenge Bass’s assumption that the relevant probability relationships are independent. I leave this particular problem to others to expound. My ‘connection test’ criticism addresses informally a similar worry.
13. Ibid., 126.
14. Ibid., 127.
15. Ibid., 128.
16. Ibid., 129.
17. Ibid.
18. Notice that the situation would be even worse for the skeptics if some initially inscrutable theorems turned out, on further research, to be true. This would increase, rather than decrease, our sense that OM is reliable. There is a comparable possibility with inscrutable evils, since it often happens that what we initially perceive as ‘evil’ we eventually commend as, say, forming in us the fortitude necessary to achieve greater success, or forming in us the character to contribute greater good to others.
19. Hick, “Soul-Making,” 257, emphasis his.
20. Ibid., 258.
21. I do not mean to suggest that we do not know what a gratuitous evil would be. It seems plausible to think, for example, that God’s predestining individuals to eternal conscious torment (irrespective of penal concerns) constitutes gratuitous evil (thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this example). We could derive this conclusion by holding certain constraints fixed. Note, for example, James Arminius’s (1560–1609) argument that predestination is inconsistent with justice. He argues that predestination implies that ‘…God wishes to subject his creature to misery, (which cannot possibly have any existence except as the punishment of sin,) although, at the same time, he does not look upon [or consider] the creature as a sinner, and therefore as not obnoxious either to wrath or to punishment’ (‘On Predestination,’ 150, brackets belong to translator). Holding fixed that (a) misery is just iff it is punishment for sin and (b) God predestines misery without regard for sin, it follows that predestined misery is unjust. But the question of what such an evil would look like is a different question. Are our cognitive capacities such that we could accurately detect when God acts unjustly? It isn’t obvious that they are, and thus my claim that we do not know what to expect a gratuitous evil to look like.
22. Bass, “Many Inscrutable Evils,” 129.
23. Ibid., 130.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jamie Carlin Watson
Jamie Carlin Watson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He defended his PhD on a priori justification at Florida State University in August of 2009. He has research interests in analytic and social epistemology, political philosophy, applied ethics, and philosophy of religion.