The arguments against God

The arguments against the existence of God are fewer than the arguments for, and one of them is much stronger than the rest. This lesson gives that one most of its space.

A note on scope, which is the first thing careful writers on this subject establish. None of these arguments touches a deistic first cause or the necessary being of the contingency argument. They are aimed at a specific and much richer claim: that there exists a being who is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good. That claim is what most believers hold and it is what has content enough to be argued with, and the reader should notice that an atheist who defeats it has not defeated everything in lesson ten.

The problem of evil

The oldest statement is attributed to Epicurus and survives in Lactantius. Its modern form has two versions that need separating, because they fail and succeed differently.

The logical problem, pressed by J. L. Mackie in 1955, claims a flat contradiction:

1. God is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good.
2. An omnipotent being could prevent any evil; an omniscient being knows of it; a perfectly good being would want to.
3. Evil exists.
4. So no such God exists.

For this to work, premises 1 and 3 must be strictly inconsistent, and that is a strong claim. It fails if there is any possible reason a good being might have for permitting evil, even one nobody has thought of.

Alvin Plantinga's free will defence, developed through the 1970s, supplies one. If free will is a great good, and genuine freedom entails the possibility of choosing wrongly, then a world containing free agents who sometimes choose evil may be better than a world of automata. Even an omnipotent being cannot make someone freely choose the good, since a caused choice is not free in the relevant sense.

The defence is widely accepted as settling the logical problem, and it is worth being precise about what that means. Plantinga did not argue that this is God's actual reason. He argued that it is possibly a reason, which is all that is needed to break a claim of strict contradiction. It is a minimal result and it is a real one.

It also costs something. It commits the theist to a libertarian account of free will, the position the free-will course sets out and which a majority of philosophers reject. And it addresses only moral evil, leaving earthquakes, childhood cancers and the suffering of animals for hundreds of millions of years before any human chose anything.

Example. Someone replies that natural evil is caused by the free choices of fallen angels, so the free will defence covers it after all. Evaluate the move using lesson nine.

It is logically available and it is expensive in exactly the way lesson nine described. The hypothesis was introduced to neutralise a specific observation, has no independent support, and forbids nothing, so it is an ad hoc rescue of the Last Thursday kind. Note carefully what that does and does not show. It does not show the claim is false, and against the logical problem it works, since the logical problem needs strict inconsistency and a merely possible scenario defeats it. What it cannot do is help with the evidential problem below, because there the question is how probable the observations are, and a hypothesis manufactured to fit them contributes no probability. The same move therefore succeeds against one version and fails against the other, which is why the two must be kept apart.

Now you. Why does the free will defence not help with the 200 million years of animal suffering before humans existed?

The evidential problem

The version that survives. William Rowe stated it in 1979 and it does not claim contradiction at all, which is what makes it hard.

1. There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some equally bad or worse evil.
2. A perfectly good being would prevent any such suffering.
3. So no such being exists.

Rowe's illustration is a fawn burned in a forest fire started by lightning, which dies in agony over several days, unseen. The claim is not that no reason could exist. It is that we have looked, and the hypothesis that there is a justifying reason for each such case is not what we would expect, given the sheer quantity and distribution of suffering.

This is an argument of exactly the kind lesson five described. It concedes that theism is not refuted and claims that the observations are much more probable on atheism than on theism, so they lower the probability of theism.

The main reply is sceptical theism: we are not in a position to judge what reasons an omniscient being might have, so our failure to find one is weak evidence that there is none, in the way that a novice's failure to see the point of a grandmaster's move is weak evidence that it is pointless.

The reply is powerful and it has a price, which lesson nine already named. A theism inscrutable enough to absorb the evidence of suffering is inscrutable enough to absorb the evidence of fine-tuning, and someone who uses this defence here should not appeal to what a good creator would plausibly do in lesson ten. There is a further cost that troubles many theists more: if we cannot judge what a good being would permit, our moral reasoning about what to prevent is undermined too.

Example. Rowe's argument needs premise 1, that some suffering has no justifying reason. A critic says nobody can know that. Does the argument collapse?

Not quite, and the repair is the interesting part. Rowe himself distinguished the claim that there is no justifying reason from the claim that we can see none, and rested the argument on an inference from the second to the first. That inference is legitimate when we would expect to see a reason if there were one, and illegitimate otherwise, which is exactly where sceptical theism attacks. So the argument does not collapse, it becomes conditional on a judgement about our epistemic position, and both sides can state their side of it clearly. Stephen Wykstra pressed the sceptical case in 1984 and Rowe accepted the reformulation, which is an unusually clean example of a philosophical dispute narrowing to one identifiable question rather than dissolving into vagueness.

Now you. Does the evidential problem of evil work against the deistic first cause of lesson ten?

Divine hiddenness

A distinct argument, developed by J. L. Schellenberg from 1993.

1. If a perfectly loving God exists, then any person capable of a relationship with God, and not resisting it, would be in a position to believe God exists.
2. There are people who are capable, not resisting, and do not believe.
3. So no perfectly loving God exists.

The argument's strength is premise 2, which is empirical and hard to deny: there have been sincere seekers who wanted to believe and could not, and vast populations who never encountered the claim. The usual reply targets premise 1, arguing that hiddenness serves some good, such as preserving the freedom to respond or producing a better kind of faith. Notice that these replies have the same structure as the responses to evil, and inherit the same difficulty about what can be known of divine purposes.

Incoherence arguments

Finally, a family of arguments claiming the divine attributes are internally inconsistent. Can an omnipotent being create a stone too heavy to lift? Can omniscience coexist with freedom? Can a being outside time act at a moment?

These are the weakest arguments in the lesson, and it is worth saying so plainly. Each has a standard reply, usually a refinement of the attribute: omnipotence is the power to do anything logically possible, which dissolves the stone; foreknowledge is treated in the free-will course, where the scope error in the argument is diagnosed exactly. A defender can absorb these with definitions, and the definitions are not obviously ad hoc, since they were largely in place before the objections.

Example. An atheist says the problem of evil disproves God. A theist says the free will defence answers the problem of evil. Both are overstating. What is the accurate statement?

That the free will defence answers the logical problem and not the evidential one. The logical problem claimed a strict contradiction and no longer stands, which most philosophers on both sides accept. The evidential problem claims that the quantity and distribution of suffering is much more expected if there is no God, and that argument is alive, contested, and unaffected by Plantinga's result. So the atheist is overstating by saying "disproves", since evidential arguments do not disprove, and the theist is overstating by treating a reply to one version as a reply to both. Notice that getting this right requires no position on the underlying question, only attention to what each argument claims.

Now you. A theist argues that atheists cannot call anything evil without an objective standard, so the problem of evil refutes itself. Does it?