God, Gratuitous Evil, and van Inwagen’s Attempt to Reconcile the Two

by Nick Trakakis
Monash University, Australia


problem of evil; gratuitous evil; Peter van Inwagen

Abstract
Both critics and advocates of evidential arguments from evil often assume that theistic belief is not compatible with gratuitous evil. It is often assumed, in other words, that an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good being would not permit an evil unless he had a morally sufficient reason to permit it. However, this cornerstone of evidential arguments from evil has come under increasing fire of late, in particular by Peter van Inwagen. The aim of this paper is to outline and then assess van Inwagen’s attempt to reconcile theism with gratuitous evil.
1 Introduction

It is often assumed by all sides of the debate on the problem of evil that an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God could not permit any gratuitous evil, evil that is (roughly speaking) avoidable, pointless, or unnecessary with respect to the fulfillment of God’s purposes. In discussions of evidential arguments from evil, for example, any premise to the effect that God must have a morally sufficient reason for every evil he permits is usually conceded to be indisputable, self-evident, necessarily true, or something of that ilk. [1] The intuition here, as the Howard-Snyders explain, is that ‘on the face of it, the idea that God may well permit gratuitous evil is absurd. After all, if God can get what He wants without permitting some particular horror (or anything comparably bad), why on earth would He permit it?’ [2] The focus, then, tends to be placed on the atheologian’s claim that there does in fact exist pointless evil. Madden and Hare, for example, state that ‘the really interesting problem of evil is whether the apparent gratuity [of much evil] can be explained away by more ingenious measures or whether the gratuity is real and hence detrimental to religious belief.’ [3] That pointless evil is incompatible with theism is simply taken for granted.

An increasing number of theists, however, are beginning to question this assumption of incompatibility. This way of responding to the evidential problem of evil has been described by one prominent atheist as ‘radical, if not revolutionary,’ [4] but it is viewed by many theists as the only way to remain faithful to the common human experience of evil, according to which much of the evil we observe in the world strikes us as utterly pointless, absurd, or excessive. An ingenious attempt to square gratuitous evil with theistic belief has recently been made by Peter van Inwagen, and in what follows I will outline and then evaluate his proposal.

2 Van Inwagen’s No Minimum Thesis

In his paper entitled ‘The Argument from Particular Horrendous Evils,’ van Inwagen considers an evidential argument from evil modelled on Rowe’s well-known argument but based on an instance of evil dubbed ‘the Mutilation.’ [5] Van Inwagen’s account of the Mutilation runs as follows:

A man came upon a young woman in an isolated place. He overpowered her, chopped off her arms at the elbows with an axe, raped her, and left her to die. Somehow she managed to drag herself on the stumps of her arms to the side of a road, where she was discovered. She lived, but she experienced indescribable suffering, and although she is alive, she must live the rest of her life without arms and with the memory of what had been done to her. [6]

Van Inwagen then devises the following Rowe-like argument:

  1. If the Mutilation had not occurred, if it had been, so to speak, simply left out of the world, the world would be no worse than it is.
  2. The Mutilation occurred and was a horror.
  3. If a morally perfect creator could have left a certain horror out of the world he created, and if the world he created would have been no worse if that horror had been left out of it than it would have been if it had included that horror, then the morally perfect creator would have left the horror out of the world he created—or at any rate he would have left it out if he had been able to.
  4. If an omnipotent being created the world, he was able to leave the Mutilation out of the world (and was able to do so in a way that would have left the world otherwise much as it is).
  5. Therefore, there is no omnipotent and morally perfect creator. [7]

Unlike most theists who have responded to such arguments, van Inwagen does not find fault with the first premise, but rather considers it to be ‘fairly plausible.’ [8] Instead, he attempts to debunk premise (3), which amounts to the claim that For any particular horrendous evil E permitted by God, there is a morally sufficient reason for God’s permission of E. This premise, states van Inwagen, appears to be predicated on a general moral principle of the following sort:

(MP) If one is in a position to prevent some evil, one should not allow that evil to occur—not unless allowing it to occur would result in some good that would outweigh it or preventing it would result in some other evil at least as bad. [9]

But is (MP) true? Van Inwagen thinks not, and to substantiate his position he draws attention to some scenarios of what would (or could) result if (MP) were put into practice by some moral agent. Each scenario functions in effect as a reductio ad absurdum of (MP). The first of these scenarios is described as follows:

Suppose you are an official who has the power to release anyone from prison at any time. Blodgett has been sentenced to ten years in prison for felonious assault. His sentence is nearing its end, and he petitions you to release him from prison a day early. Should you? Well, the principle [i.e., (MP)] says so. A day spent in prison is an evil – if you don’t think so, I invite you to spend a day in prison…Let’s suppose that the only good that could result from someone’s being in prison is the deterrence of crime…Obviously, nine years, three hundred and sixty-four days spent in prison is not going to have a significantly different power to deter felonious assault from ten years spent in prison. So: no good will be secured by visiting on Blodgett that last day in prison and that last day spent in prison is an evil. The principle therefore tells you, the official, to let him out a day early. [10]

Van Inwagen concludes that ‘this much, I think, is enough to show that the principle is wrong, for you have no such obligation.’ [11] But there is worse in store for (MP). By means of the reasoning employed in the above case, van Inwagen reveals that (MP) has further disastrous results. To paraphrase van Inwagen:

Firstly, consider the fact that a threatened punishment of n days in prison for felonious assault would not have a significantly less deterrent effect on felonious assault as a threatened punishment of n-1 days in prison. For example, a threatened punishment of, say, 1023 days in prison would not have a significantly less deterrent effect as a threatened punishment of 1022 days. But then, by applying reasoning familiar to students of sorites arguments, we quickly arrive at the conclusion that a threatened punishment of 1023 days would not have a significantly less deterrent effect as a threatened punishment of no time at all in prison.

Now, let’s suppose that Blodgett, after being sentenced to ten years in prison, is given the opportunity to appeal for a reduction in his sentence. Clever Blodgett takes up this opportunity and appeals for a reduction in his sentence of only one day. Given that you (the prison official) accept (MP), you must grant his appeal. Blodgett then lodges a second appeal: that his sentence be reduced from ten years minus one day to ten years minus two days. Again, you are obliged to grant his appeal. As long as Blodgett has the time and energy to lodge 3,648 successive appeals (each one for a one-day reduction of his sentence) before entering prison, he will escape prison altogether! [12]

The above cases, in van Inwagen’s view, indicate that the problem with (MP) is that it ‘forbids the drawing of morally arbitrary lines.’ [13] (MP) does not countenance such things as a legislature’s right to set an arbitrary time span (e.g., ten years) as the minimum punishment for felonious assault. Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with setting such arbitrary limits – indeed, this is a necessity in many facets of the real world – (MP) cannot make any provision for this practice and for this reason it has highly counterintuitive consequences.

The implausibility of (MP) is further highlighted by considering it in the light of God’s decision as to which evils to prevent and which to permit. Let’s assume that God’s plan for humanity includes the permission of a vast amount of horrendous evil for the sake of some future good that outweighs it—this future good may be called the ‘Summum Bonum Creatum’, though its nature or content need not detain us here. Consider, now, the case of the Mutilation. Should God have added this particular horror to his list of horrors to be prevented?

Suppose that God is guided in his deliberations about what to do by the principle expressed in (MP). In that case, God would prevent the Mutilation from taking place. For if the Mutilation were prevented, the world would not have been a significantly less horrible place, and so God’s plan for the realization of the Summum Bonum Creatum would not have been jeopardized. [14] But this point can be generalized as follows: For any n, if the existence of n horrors is consistent with God’s plan for the achievement of the Summum Bonum Creatum, the existence of n-1 horrors will be equally consistent with his plan. [15] Clearly, if this reasoning were applied to every instance of evil, God will end up creating a world totally devoid of evil. But even though God may prevent many horrors, he cannot (we have assumed) prevent all of them without thwarting his plan for achieving the Summum Bonum Creatum. (MP), therefore, would result in the frustration of God’s purposes.

To avoid this outcome, God must draw the line somewhere between horrors that are to be prevented and horrors that are to be permitted. But wherever he draws the line, it will be an arbitrary line. For assume that he draws the line so as to exclude the Mutilation from the set of actual horrors. In that case, no greater good would have been lost and no evil equally bad or worse would have resulted—thus, God would have no reason for drawing the line in such a way as to exclude the Mutilation. The line would have to be drawn arbitrarily. And it just so happens (we are assuming) that the Mutilation has fallen on the ‘actual horrors of history’ side of the line.

In short, if (MP) is rejected, the number of evils God must permit in order to fulfill his purposes becomes a purely arbitrary matter. What this means is that there is no minimum number of horrors that God must permit in order to realize the Summum Bonum Creatum. Let’s call this van Inwagen’s No Minimum Thesis:

There is no minimum amount of horrendous evil that God must permit in order for the greater good(s) he aims at to be secured.

As van Inwagen puts it, ‘to ask what the minimum number of horrors consistent with [God’s] plan is, is like asking, What is the minimum number of raindrops that could have fallen on England in the nineteenth century that is consistent with England’s having been a fertile country in the nineteenth century?’ [16] But if there is no minimum number of horrors, it is logically impossible for God to produce it and hence unreasonable for anyone to expect that he do so. [17]

To summarize, premise (3) is predicated on (MP), but (MP) has unwelcome consequences, as has been brought out by the examples involving prison sentencing and, especially, God’s permission of horrendous evil. (MP) therefore ought to be rejected and replaced by the No Minimum Thesis, which better reflects the realities and vagaries of our moral life. The No Minimum Thesis, however, entails the falsity of (MP) and, by extension, of premise (3). It seems, then, that proponents of Rowe-like arguments must find some reasonable grounds for rejecting the No Minimum Thesis. Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder sum up the matter as follows:

Until we articulate principled grounds for denying the No Minimum Claim, we cannot responsibly say that theism is incompatible with gratuitous evil; until we articulate principled grounds for denying this, we cannot responsibly accept Rowe’s incompatibility claim [that the truth of theism is not compatible with the existence of gratuitous evil], or the argument that goes with it. To date, no one has met this challenge; indeed, no one has even tried. [18]

I wish to argue, however, that the position advanced here by the Howard-Snyders is mistaken, for there need not be any incompatibility between the No Minimum Thesis and what the Howard-Snyders call ‘Rowe’s incompatibility claim.’

3 Taking the Sting Out of the No Minimum Thesis

One way of understanding van Inwagen’s critique is as follows. If the principle expressed by (MP) were to be applied in a given situation, one would end up with a sorites-style chain of reasoning and hence an unpalatable conclusion (e.g., no criminal ought to spend even one day in prison). The problem is that sorites-style reasoning is flawed, even though it is infamously difficult to identify where precisely the flaw resides. As a result (MP) is also flawed, since any application of (MP) commits one to defective sorites-style arguments. The question, therefore, is whether there is any way of restating the evidential argument from evil that does not commit one to (MP) and thus does not oblige one to renounce the No Minimum Thesis.

To begin with, assume that van Inwagen’s No Minimum Thesis is correct, and so there is no minimum amount of horrific evil God had to permit in order to achieve his purposes. As some commentators have pointed out, it is entirely consistent with this view that God could have achieved those purposes with a lot less horrific evil than there is. [19] And if this is the case, then God should have set out to achieve his purposes by way of a lot less horrific evil. The point here is that even if there is no minimum amount of evil God had to permit, this does not entail that he would have permitted just any amount of evil. If, for example, we were to assume that there is no minimum prison sentence that would suffice as a sufficient deterrent for car theft, this would not justify a judge sentencing a convicted car thief to life in prison.

The claim, then, is that even though there may be no minimum number of evils permissible by God, there must at least be a threshold beyond which any further instantiations of evil are gratuitous. To illustrate this, consider first the following diagram:

Figure 1: Precisely specified amount of evil God must permit in order to achieve his ends

In the above diagram, evil is quantified in terms of ‘turps’ (to borrow Plantinga’s terminology). Worlds in which God permits anything less than, or anything more than, 385 turps of evil will not allow for the achievement of his purposes. Therefore, only worlds in which God permits 385 turps of evil are ones in which his purposes can be fulfilled. In this case, 385 turps is the minimum number of evils (as well as the maximum number of evils) that God can permit. [20] Now, compare this scenario with the following:

Figure 2: ‘Fuzzy’ threshold for amount of evil God would have to permit in order for his purposes to be realized.

In this diagram, in contrast to the previous one, there is no exact amount of evil God must permit in order to fulfill his ends. There is only a threshold, and any amount of evil falling within this threshold would be consistent with God’s plan. But since the boundaries of the threshold are ‘fuzzy’, there is no precisely specified minimum amount of evil that God must permit in order to achieve his purposes. This threshold, however, does not rule out the possibility that there are amounts of evil that are clearly excessive. For example, worlds where God permits 1,000 turps of evil would clearly thwart the realization of his plan. And so, even if there is no minimum number of evils that God must allow, this does not leave God free to allow just any amount of evil into the world. [21] In response, it may be held that it is impossible to determine whether our world is one in which the threshold, as represented in Figure 2, has been crossed. Of course, the amount of evil found in our world certainly appears excessive, but how can we tell whether appearances are in this case deceptive? For all we know, the amount of evil in our world falls somewhere within the threshold of ‘acceptable amounts of evil.’ Van Inwagen, therefore, can accept the claim that, even though there is no exact or ideal amount of evil that God must permit, not just any amount of evil would be permitted by God. But van Inwagen may question the further claim that our world contains excess evil, for it seems impossible to settle the truth-value of this claim. (He need not, of course, doubt our ability to tell, with respect to at least some possible worlds, whether they contain too much evil.)

Is this skepticism regarding our ability to determine whether there is excess evil in our world warranted? Consider Theodore Drange’s comment that, ‘I can know that I have too much or too little of something even if I do not know exactly what the perfect amount would be. For example, I can know that my food is too salty even if I do not know exactly how much salt would be ideal.’ [22] Or, to borrow another of Drange’s examples, I can tell whether my neighbour’s music is too loud, even though I do not (or cannot) know what the ideal volume would be. ‘In a similar way,’ Drange contends, ‘we can know that our present world contains too much suffering even if we cannot describe in detail just what the ideal amount of suffering should be.’ [23] But is Drange correct to draw this inference? If he only means to say that we can tell, with respect to at least some possible worlds, whether they contain too much evil, then it is difficult to dispute Drange’s contention. But Drange wants to say more than this, for he is claiming that we can just see that our world contains too much suffering. But how could anyone know this?

I think the most promising option here is to rely on a strategy used to great effect by Rowe, viz., the appeal to ‘noseeum inferences.’ That is to say, one can claim to know that our world contains excess – and hence gratuitous – evil on the basis of the failure of theodicy: despite thorough investigations on the part of many people over many years, no plausible justification for God’s permission of numerous evils has been uncovered. Since no goods we know of can justify God’s permission of these evils, we are entitled to infer that no goods whatever are served by the evils in question (in Wykstra’s terminology: we no see ’um [i.e., the goods in question], so they ain’t there!). The success of such a strategy will obviously depend on the degree of warrant that attaches to noseeum inferences. But if (as I believe) little can be said against, and indeed something can be adduced in support of, noseeum inferences from inscrutable to pointless evil, then there is a way to overcome skepticism regarding our ability to tell whether our world contains too much evil. [24] The upshot is that premise (3) withstands the objections levelled against it by van Inwagen via his No Minimum Thesis. But how is (MP) to be modified in order that it be immune from sorites-style paradoxes like those involving the sentencing of Blodgett? I propose the following reconstruction of (MP):

(MP*) If God is in a position to prevent some amount of evil, he would not allow that amount of evil to be instantiated—unless that amount of evil falls within the threshold of evil he would have to permit to realize his ends. [25]

The threshold, however, is not precisely defined. Therefore, in some cases there may be no truth of the matter as to whether a particular amount of evil falls within the relevant threshold. Or, to venture into fuzzy logic, that a given amount of evil falls within the threshold may only be ‘partly true’. Such departures from classical logic are highly controversial, and there is no need to insist here that one must adopt a non-standard logic to dissolve sorites-style paradoxes. For even though the boundaries of the threshold are fuzzy, the important point is that God would only permit that amount of evil that clearly falls within the threshold (or that clearly falls within the bottom range of the threshold). This, of course, is not to deny that God’s choice of a specific quantity of evil, from amongst the various quantities of evil that fall squarely within the threshold, is entirely arbitrary. And so with this in mind, the earlier Rowean evidential argument can be recast as follows:

(P) No good we know of justifies God in permitting so much horrendous evil rather than a lot less.

(Q) (Therefore) No good at all justifies God in permitting so much horrendous evil rather than a lot less.

(3*) If God exists, then some good justifies him in permitting so much horrendous evil rather than a lot less.

(Therefore) It is likely that there is no God. [26]

The move from (P) to (Q) represents Rowe’s ‘noseeum inference’, while (3*) is an amended version of premise (3). As long as (3*) is predicated on something like (MP*), the counterintuitive scenarios that plague (MP) will be avoided, since (MP*) allows for both the vagaries of moral life (e.g., there being no precise prison sentence sufficient to deter car theft) and for arbitrarily made decisions in response to these vagaries (e.g., setting twelve months exactly as the minimum prison sentence for car theft). But given that (MP*) does not entail the falsity of the No Minimum Thesis, there is no need – despite the suggestion made by the Howard-Snyders as quoted at the end of Section 2 above – to find some principled grounds for denying this Thesis before accepting Rowe’s incompatibility claim. In short, a commitment to the No Minimum Thesis does not exclude a commitment to the position that gratuitous evil is not compatible with the theistic world-view.

4 Conclusion

In sum, van Inwagen has failed in his attempt to reconcile theism with gratuitous evil. To be sure, a number of other attempts at reconciliation have been made, particularly by William Hasker and Michael Peterson, and these also merit attention. [27] The increasing number of criticisms voiced against the assumption that If there is a God there can’t be any pointless evil do at least indicate that this assumption can no longer be taken as self-evidently true and hence in no need of justification. Nevertheless, the foregoing discussion also indicates that the case against this assumption, as illustrated by the arguments developed by van Inwagen, is in need of further work if it is to have greater appeal. [28]


Notes
[1] Consider, for example, the following comments: ‘It is logically inconsistent for a theist to admit the existence of a pointless evil’—Terence Penelhum, ‘Divine Goodness and the Problem of Evil,’ Religious Studies 2 (1967), 107; and ‘Unnecessary evil of any kind would certainly be incongruous with an absolutely perfect God’—Norman L. Geisler and Winfried Corduan, Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids 1988), 371.
[2] Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder, ‘Is Theism Compatible with Gratuitous Evil?’ American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1999), 115.
[3] Edward H. Madden and Peter H. Hare, Evil and the Concept of God (Springfield 1968), 3.
[4] William Rowe, ‘Ruminations about Evil,’ Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991), 79.
[5] Peter van Inwagen, ‘The Argument from Particular Horrendous Evils,’ Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 74 (2000), 65–80. The stance taken here by van Inwagen against Rowe-like evidential arguments was also proposed, though in less comprehensive form, in some of his earlier papers, in particular ‘The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil: A Theodicy,’ Philosophical Topics 16 (1988), 167–68; ‘The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence,’ Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991), 164, fn.11; and ‘Reflections on the Chapters by Draper, Russell, and Gale,’ in Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil (Bloomington 1996), 234–35. See also van Inwagen’s Introduction to Part I of his God, Knowledge, and Mystery: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca 1995), 15–19.
[6] Van Inwagen, ‘The Argument from Particular Horrendous Evils,’ 68–69.
[7] Ibid., 69.
[8] Ibid., 70.
[9] Ibid., 71. Importantly, Van Inwagen adds that the phrase ‘is in a position to’ in (MP) should be understood to mean both ‘is able to’ and ‘is morally permitted to’ (p.72).
[10] Van Inwagen, ‘The Argument from Particular Horrendous Evils,’ 72–73.
[11] Ibid., 73.
[12] Ibid., 72–73.
[13] Ibid., 73.
[14] It may be protested that the world would in fact be a much better place if the Mutilation were prevented. Van Inwagen, however, is assuming that God’s plan requires the possibility of vast amounts of horrendous evil, and that this possibility was, unfortunately, realized. But then the subtraction of only one instance of horrific evil from the world would make, at best, a negligible difference to the overall balance of good over evil in the world. The elimination of the Mutilation would, of course, make a significant difference to the life of the sufferer, but it would make little, if any, difference to the fulfillment of God’s ends.
[15] Dean Stretton raises the following objection to this line of reasoning: If a world W1 containing n horrors serves God’s purposes, then another world W2 containing n-1 horrors (in virtue of containing less evil than W1) would not serve God’s purposes equally well. W2 may still serve God’s purposes, but it would do so less well than W1. See Stretton, ‘Review of David O’Connor, God and Inscrutable Evil,’ available from http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dean_stretton/oconnor.html. But the only justification for thinking that God’s purposes are better served in W1 than in W2 is that there is an ideal amount of evil required for God’s project. If there is no ideal amount, however, both W1 and W2 may do equally well.
[16] Van Inwagen, ‘The Argument from Particular Horrendous Evils,’ 76.
[17] On pp.78–79 of ‘The Argument from Particular Horrendous Evils,’ van Inwagen puts forward another example in illustration of the falsity of (MP), the example this time involving the necessity of making an arbitrary choice as to which children will be given a limited store of life-saving medicine and which children will miss out and hence die.
[18] Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder, ‘Is Theism Compatible with Gratuitous Evil?’ 129.
[19] See in particular Daniel Howard-Snyder, ‘The Argument from Inscrutable Evil,’ in Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil, 288–9; Theodore M. Drange, Nonbelief and Evil: Two Arguments for the Nonexistence of God (Amherst 1998), 36–38; and David O’Connor, God and Inscrutable Evil: In Defense of Theism and Atheism (Lanham 1998), 73–5.
[20] It is important to note that the issue here is the amount of evil God would have to permit in order to fulfill his ends. If, for instance, God must permit only 350 turps of evil to realize his ends, this does not entail that any world actualized by God will contain 350 turps of evil and no less. For to say that God must permit 350 turps of evil is not to say that God must bring it about that 350 turps of evil will be actualized. And so, even if God must permit 350 turps of evil, there may in fact turn out to be no evil at all if the free creatures created by God always freely chose the good.
[21] In Figure 2, the upper boundary of the threshold need not be vaguely defined. All that is required for there to be no precise minimum amount of evil is that the lower boundary have no sharp cut-off.
[22] Drange, Nonbelief and Evil, 37.
[23] Ibid., 37.
[24] Van Inwagen, of course, is likely to challenge noseeum inferences by deferring to a variety of skeptical theism founded on his doctrine of ‘modal skepticism.’ According to this doctrine, ‘we are largely ignorant of modal matters that are remote from the concerns of everyday life’ (van Inwagen, ‘Introduction,’ in God, Knowledge, and Mystery, 11), and so the possibilities we can envisage for divine reasons for permitting evil would not even come close to exhausting the possibilities open to an omniscient, omnipotent being. Without wishing to enter into a detailed discussion of van Inwagen’s modal skepticism, it may be pointed out that it is somewhat strange that van Inwagen would think that the reasons God might have for permitting evil have little or no practical concern for us.
[25] This indicates that van Inwagen’s mistake occurred right at the beginning with his attempt to derive premise (3) from a moral principle that applies to all agents rather than only to agents possessing maximal power, knowledge, and goodness.
[26] Cf. Howard-Snyder, ‘The Argument from Inscrutable Evil,’ 289.
[27] See William Hasker, ‘The Necessity of Gratuitous Evil,’ Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992), 23–44, and Michael Peterson, Evil and the Christian God (Grand Rapids 1982), chs 4 and 5.
[28] I would like to thank Graham Oppy for helpful comments on the present paper.