Tooley on evil

Philosopher Michael Tooley has published a new monograph: The Problem of Evil (Cambridge 2019). He's arguably the most sophisticated atheist on this particular issue, so it's useful to scrutinize his position. I'll focus on what I take to be his best arguments.  

2.6 Allowing Undeserved Suffering Cannot Be Justified by Appealing to the Great Good of the Existence of Laws of Nature

First, it is generally held that an omnipotent deity could miraculously intervene at any time and place to alter what happens in the natural world, and this is surely right, since if God is the creator of everything, all that is needed for God to be able to intervene in the natural world at any time is to create laws...of the ‘God willing’ variety. Moreover, they need to be of that variety if, as most theists believe, God sometimes intervenes miraculously in the natural world.

Let us turn, then, to a second argument, which is that many evils depend upon precisely what laws the world contains. An omnipotent being could, for example, easily create a world with the same laws of physics as our world, but with slightly different laws linking neurophysiological states to qualities of experiences, so that extremely intense pains either never occur, or else could be turned off by the sufferer when they served no purpose. Alternatively, God could create additional physical laws of a rather specialized sort that could, for example, either cause very harmful viruses to self-destruct, or prevent viruses such as the avian flu virus from evolving into an airborne form that would have the capacity to kill hundreds of million people.

I disagree with the facile way atheists like Tooley posit that God could create different physical laws. There are limitations on what an omnipotent God can do by means of natural media. While he can often bypass natural processes to produce an outcome directly (although there are exceptions to that as well), if God is working by means of a natural cause and effect process, then all laws must be mutually consistent. God can't just create ad hoc laws at odds with a network of physical processes. 

To return to the main argument, given ‘God willing’ laws, God could intervene to destroy the viruses and bacteria that are responsible for diseases that cause enormous suffering and millions of deaths each year. These diseases include, in the case of viruses, AIDS, cervical cancer, dengue fever, Ebola disease, hepatitis, influenza, Lassa fever, measles, Nipah virus disease, poliomyelitis, rabies, rotavirus, viral hemorrhagic fever, and West Nile fever. In the case of bacteria, they include anthrax, bacterial meningitis, bacterial pneumonia, diphtheria, epidemic typhus, leprosy, leptospirosis, Lyme disease, meningococcal meningitis, necrotizing fasciitis, pelvic inflammatory disease, rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, tetanus, toxic shock syndrome, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and yaws. Alternatively, if God preferred, precisely the same result could be achieved by God’s creating purely physical laws that result in the destruction of harmful viruses and bacteria as soon they come into being. There would never have been, then, the Black Death in the Middle Ages, which is estimated to have killed between 75 and 200 million people, or the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people.

God could also intervene whenever it was necessary to prevent great natural disasters in the form of earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, hurricanes, and so on. These would include the earthquake in China in 1556 that killed around 800,000 people, or tsunamis, such as the one in 2004 that hit twelve Asian countries and killed over 200,000 people.

Finally, it is not just natural evils that God could have prevented. Consider great moral evils such as the Holocaust. A small intervention by an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being could have allowed one of the many failed attempts to assassinate Hitler to succeed, or a small mental nudge could have resulted in Hitler’s realizing the error of his deadly anti-Semitism.

The irrelevance of an appeal to the claimed desirability of God’s remaining relatively hidden is also now apparent. Natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and droughts all depend upon the weather in ways that involve highly complex causal processes. Would any human conclude that God must be intervening if hurricanes never occurred in human history? Would it not require an unimaginably massive scientific inquiry, if it were even possible, for humans to arrive at the conclusion that some supernatural being must be intervening to prevent such occurrences? Or consider earthquakes, which occur at the boundaries of tectonic plates. If God simply prevented such movement, or allowed it to occur only very slowly, would any human ever be able to discover what was happening?

The same is true with regard to the suffering and deaths that result from diseases, including those listed above, due to viruses and bacteria. An omnipotent and omniscient being would know, as he watched things evolve, when any new virus or bacterium that appeared would harm humans or other sentient beings, and could destroy any such thing immediately. Or he could have created laws that would do that without any intervention needed on his part. If either were the case, would any human ever be able to discover that this was happening?

Finally, the same is true as regards great moral evils. An omniscient being would know when a Stalin or a Hitler or a Hirohito was about to do something that would lead to the deaths of millions. If such people died from a stroke, would anyone know that a deity had intervened?

All that overlooks at least three considerations:

i) Some second-order goods are contingent on evil. The evil can only be eliminated at the cost of eliminating the corresponding good.

ii) Eliminating moral and natural evil generates a radically different world history. There are billions of humans whose existence hinges on a particular world history, containing moral and natural evil. They miss out in a world devoid of moral and natural evil. 

Tooley might take a hardline Epicurean view, but it's arguable that nonexistence is a deprivation. Indeed, the most fundamental deprivation of all. So there are tradeoffs. Not all goods are compossible in the same timeline. 

iii) Since Tooley concedes that divine preemption of evil might be indetectable, then for all we know, God has in fact preempted evil countless times. However, as I also noted (ii), preempting evil has a disruptive effect on the future. So the value of divine intervention must be counterbalanced by taking the unfortunate side-effects into consideration.  

2.8 Part 2 of the Incompatibility Argument from Evil

Condition 2: Allowing the undeserved suffering would lead to an improvement in the life of the individual undergoing the suffering, an improvement that otherwise could not be achieved, and where the improvement would outweigh the badness of the undeserved suffering.

Condition 3: Preventing the undeserved suffering would result in some other sentient being undergoing even greater undeserved suffering.

Condition 4: Not preventing the undeserved suffering would make possible either the existence of some intrinsically good state of affairs, or the prevention of some intrinsically bad state of affairs, which would otherwise be impossible, and which would outweigh the prima facie wrongness of allowing the undeserved suffering of the sentient being.

I think those are all justifications for God to refrain from preventing evil in many situations. 

3.3 What Is the Rationale Behind Appealing to Skeptical Theism?

Does skeptical theism at least succeed in refuting incompatibility arguments from evil? This question will be addressed in Section 3.4. First, however, it is worth asking why one would appeal to skeptical theism in order to show that incompatibility arguments from evil cannot succeed. Why not simply appeal to the skeptical thesis that is part of skeptical theism?

It is hard to see what the answer is other than that skeptical theists think that belief in the existence of God is rational at least to some extent, thereby lending weight to the idea that there may be unknown goods that justify the evils found in the world.

If something like this is the skeptical theist’s underlying line of thought, it is open to the objection that there is no good reason for believing that theism is true. 

Actually, the general principle is independent of theism (considered in isolation). Take the law of unintended consequences. An event may have both beneficial and deleterious consequences, in the short-term or the long-term. And these are ultimately unforeseeable by humans. The future is less predicable the farther out it goes. So skeptical theists are simply applying that general principle to theodicy. 

Or consider arguments from claimed miracles. Such arguments typically focus on very limited texts, ignoring miracle claims in other texts in the same holy scripture. For example, in the case of Bible-based arguments, no attention is paid to the stories of Noah and the great flood, or Joshua and the battle of Jericho, where we have excellent evidence that the purported and spectacular miracles in question never took place. 

Arguments from miracles also virtually always ignore information both about the dramatic growth of miracle stories in a short stretch of time. This has been set out, in a detailed and scholarly way in the case of Francis Xavier, by A. D. White 1896, as well as about the failure of any recent and present-day miracle claims to survive critical scrutiny – as shown by the work of D. J. West 1957, Louis Rose 1968, William A. Nolen 1974, James Randi 1987, Joe Nickell 1993, and others, as well as by careful scientific studies, such as the 2005 MANTRA II study (Krucoff et al. 2005) and the 2006 STEP study (Benson et al. 2006).

1. His appeal to White's antiquated study is naive. It's been roundly critiqued.

2. I presume that he has a global flood in mind. One problem is that modern readers usually interpret the narrative anachronistically because they construe the descriptions in light of their knowledge of modern geography. But the original audience never had that frame of reference. They had a different sense of scale. The narrator may well intend to describe a flood situated in the middle east. And that's quite realistic. Consider the work of academic field geologist David Montgomery on Noah's flood. 

3. What OT scholars/archeologists has he studied on the battle of Jericho? For instance, Richard Hess?

4. His references on reported modern miracles are quite dated. He seems unaware of case-studies amassed by 

Craig Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, 2 vols. (Baker, 2011)

Robert Larmer, The Legitimacy of Miracle (Lexington Books, 2013), appendix 

Robert Larmer, Dialogues on Miracle (Wipf & Stock, 2015), appendix. 

What about appeals to religious experiences, including ones involving visions and voices, experiences of the ‘numinous’ (Otto 1958), or theistic mystical experiences? As regards the first, such experiences are strongly tied to the beliefs of the person: Hindu children do not have visions of, nor receive messages from, the Virgin Mary, while Catholic children do not have visions of the Hindu deity, Lord Shiva. As regards the second, numinous experiences do not involve any sense that one is encountering a being that is perfectly good. Finally, as regards theistic mystical experiences, the crucial question is whether theistic mystical experiences have a different ontological basis than the nontheistic introvertive mystical experiences found in Hinduism and Buddhism, and in Plotinus. That question was very carefully investigated by Andrew Robison (1962 and 1973), who examined the descriptions of introvertive mystical experiences given by the monistic mystic Plotinus and Hindu and Buddhist mystics, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by the theistic mystics Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Avila. Robison’s conclusion was that, unless one is oneself a mystic, the most reasonable conclusion, given the total evidence available, is that the references to God that one finds in the descriptions given by the Christian mystics, rather than reflecting any ontologically fundamental features of their experiences differing from those found in nontheistic introvertive mystical experiences, reflect only the conceptual framework that Christian mystics brought to their experiences.

There's a lot of truth to that, but it's too indiscriminate. Some visions, dreams, and auditions may have veridical elements. Take a premonitory dream. Take a near-death experience where you meet a deceased relative you didn't know had died. Take a crisis apparition where you receive information you didn't know about, which is corroborated by subsequent experience? Same thing with an audible voice. 

3.4 Skeptical Theism and Incompatibility Arguments from Evil: New Work for Skeptical Theists

Skeptical theists generally appear to believe that if the skeptical thesis that is part of skeptical theism is true – that is, if probabilities cannot be assigned to certain propositions about goods and evils beyond our ken – then it follows that no incompatiblity argument from evil can be sound. That view, however, cannot be correct, since it is not enough to claim that there could be goods that lie beyond our ken, the probability of which is unknown: one must also show that those goods could be connected with the evils found in this world in such a way that an omnipotent and omniscient being could not obtain those goods without allowing the evils in question. No skeptical theist, however, has shown that this is so.

i) Many truths that can't be quantified. That's an artificial mathematical standard. 

ii) Whether or not skeptical theists have shown the connection, other Christian philosophers have show the connection between certain kinds of evil and soul-building virtues or second-order goods. 

4.6.3 Step Two: The Case of Multiple Prima Facie Evils

Next, what happens to the probability that God exists when there is more than one prima facie evil? Since the existence of even a single all things considered evil is incompatible with the existence of God, the probability that God exists cannot be greater than the probability that, of all the prima facie evils found in the world, not even one of those is an all things considered evil. In addition, given that the probability that God exists given a single prima facie evil is less than one-half, and given the extraordinary number of prima facie evils in the world, it would be quite surprising if it turned out that the probability that God exists, given the prima facie evils there are in the world, was not very low indeed.

i) The existence of evil is hardly incompatible with biblical theism or Christian theism. To the contrary, they presuppose the existence of evil. They'd be false if evil didn't exist. 

ii) This treats the probability of God's existence in isolation. If we set aside all the evidence for God, then perhaps the conclusion follows, but that's artificial.

iii) It isn't necessary to justify every evil individually. It will suffice if there are enough theodicies to cover all the general kinds of evil.