Dr Greg Bahnsen - The Problem of Evil: Is The Problem of Evil Problematic? (Part 1)

This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christian evil.

Has certainly been the most popular and certainly the most significant strategy of all those which have been employed in the criticism of Christian theism. Many philosophers of religion indeed deem the matter of theodicy, the matter of defending God's justice, as the most telling grounds for rejecting Biblical Christianity. The main issue involved, and thus any serious Christian defender of the faith, will eventually have to scale this problematic mountain which stands as an obstacle to faith for so many individuals and from which so many philosophers of religion have hurtled to their spiritual death upon that mountain. The sure footing of your apologetic is going to be challenged and tested, just as the endurance of your faith will be taxed. Indeed, all the apologetic problems are mere foothills in comparison to this problem. There is no way around it. The Christian must surmount the problem of evil. I want to ask, however, whether the problem of evil is problematic. That's the title of my lecture. Is that problem problematic? That is, can the anti theists generate an argument that renders evil a genuine problem for Christianity? Can he generate the argument? Can the case be adequately formulated and adequately specified? In the last class I was speaking to the seniors and I made some mention about argumentation and comments which are overly general and therefore cannot be properly responded to, nor used that I could have added for them in arguments because they're ambiguous by their generality. So we don't want a general, ambiguous, equivocating problem of evil. I want to know whether an adequate formulation can be given which is specific. I propose to call into question certain well known formulations of the problem of evil, since I think they fail to evidence requisite clarification of their terms or requisite clarification for the sufficient grounding of their assumptions. Now, in doing so, though, I want to make it very clear from the beginning of this lecture that we must not, we cannot, we ought not as Christians to take an easy or any inadequate way out of the problem of evil. We can neither skirt the personal agony involved in encountering evil as individuals, nor can we skirt the most stringent philosophic, logical form of the problem. You see, we've got to play for keeps because we're playing for eternity. Evil is no mere trifle to be lightly dismissed by any man, much less the Christian. Nor is it simply an academic puzzle. It's something that strikes at the core of your personal being. If you've ever been tempted to put aside the problem of Evil as something right. And, well, you know, you see it that way, I see it this way. We can just let it go at that. Then I recommend that you read book four of Dostoevsky's the Brothers Karmazov for therein, you know, Ivan is speaking with his brother Alyosha, who is a novice and becoming a priest. And Ivan is explaining to him why it's impossible for him to believe. And I'm going to skip about, but I want to read just a few paragraphs from Ivan's approach to Alyosha on this question. He says he begins by saying, the innocent, you see, Alyosha, must not suffer for another's sins, and especially such innocents as children. You may be surprised at me, Alyosha, but I'm especially fond of children. You see, people talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice. Indeed, it's an insult to the beast, for a beast can never be so cruel as a man so artistically cruel. I have better things to tell you about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children. Alyoshin. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her mother and father, those most worthy and respectable people of good education and good breeding. You see, I must repeat it again. It's a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children and children only. To all other types of humanity, these torturers behave mildly and benevolently like cultivated and humane Europeans. But they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in just that sense. And it's just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, Just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden, the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat. At the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow, and vice, gout, kidney disease, and on and on. Now this poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason, till her body was one bruise. Then they went to greater refinements of cruelty, shut her up all night in the cold and frost in the privy. And because she didn't ask to be taken up at night, as though a child of five, sleeping her angelic sound sleep, could be trained to wake and ask, they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement. And it was her mother who did it. That mother could sleep hearing the poor child's groans. Can you understand why a little creature who can't even understand what's done to her should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and cold, and weep her meek, unresentful tears through dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother? You pious, you humble novice, do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to dear, kind God? You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may be that if I live to the moment of the resurrection, or rise again to see it, I too perhaps may cry aloud with the rest. Thou art just, O Lord. But I don't want to cry. Then, while there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse to that dear, kind God. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for the truth, then I protest. The truth cost too much. I challenge you. Answer me. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. But that it was essential, that it was inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature, that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance, and to found the edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell me the truth. No, I wouldn't consent, said Alyosha softly, if you leave the lecture today, and that sort of passage doesn't just tear you up, and believe me, you've missed what I want to tell you. You cannot trifle with the problem of evil. You must play for keeps. You can't walk away, say, well, it's a matter of perspective, as the saying was when I was in college. Different strokes for different folks. I mean, some people, that's all right. Some people, it's not. It's not that way. One must carry through his analysis. One must find solid ground for his theistic or for his atheistic commitments, or else he has to admit that he's abandoned reality. For you cannot turn away from this problem with. It's an all how you choose to look at it, attitude, as though it were a matter of personal whim. One must account for evil which so agonizes him that evil, which the unbeliever and the believer both see, must be accounted for. And consequently, I want to maintain you cannot take a cavalier attitude with respect to the philosophical form of the problem. The very unfortunate thing in my reading on the problem of evil among so many evangelicals, and indeed some in the Reformed faith, is that their answers to the problem are nowhere near sufficient to the unbeliever, because they don't take the problem in its philosophical perplexity at all seriously. They skirt the problem by assuming what they have to prove. And I want to give you five such answers to the problem of evil that have been given in the history of the church and just quickly tell you why we cannot take that form of the problem, but that we're going to take the most rigorous form of the problem if we're going to look at it at all. Some have told us, first of all that evil is a necessary counterpart to good. That is, if you're going to have good, you've got to have evil, whereby to define it, right, Wrong. Because, you see, if that's the case, you make God evil by necessity. The good God must, if you demean it when you say that he's good, also be evil. He must be God and the demons together. Not only that, you limit God's creative abilities with respect to certain laws. If there are laws of logic or laws of empirical fact which necessitate God to bring good about only through having a counterpart in evil, then you have limited him to those laws in one way or another. And so you don't have an omnipotent God and you don't have a good God, and therefore you don't have the problem of evil. Now, a second way of avoiding the problem is to say that evil is a means to the good, that God is making better people out of us, kind of wearing off the rough edges, if you will. It's the conditions of nurture in this life, as John Hick at Princeton is wont to put it. Now we have to ask, though, playing the devil's advocate for the sake of the unbeliever, is God limited to those means? Could he not attain the same good via another channel? If he can't, he's not omnipotent. If he's not omnipotent, there's no problem to evil. Beyond that, of course, in context, perhaps it's the case that Good contributes also to ultimate evil. And so you can reverse the apologetic arm the believer by simply saying, well, if evil leads to good, it might be that good leads to evil. What's most ultimate? So we don't answer the question. But even more than that, you see, it removes your obligation to get rid of evil in the world. If God's put evil in the world to make us better people, you know, to wear off our rough edges, make us determined, steadfast, courageous people, then if you get rid of evil, we can't be courageous, determined people. So you have to keep evil. And of course, that's just absurd in light of the Christian scriptures. A third approach, a third I think cavalier approach is to say, by the way, I should have introduced these comments with this qualification. In none of these cases am I saying that what is being affirmed is not true. So happens in the first case it's not true. But in all the other cases I think that there's an element, if not actual truth to what's being said. But it's not the truth that I'm talking about. It's the adequacy as an answer to the problem of evil. That is, it is true that God does use the evil of this world to effect good ends. That's true, but it does not answer why evil is here to begin with. So keep that in mind. We're talking about apologetic answers, not what actually is the case in the world necessarily. The third answer is that God warns us by means of evil and and he punishes us by means of evil. Our sinfulness is to be punished, and we're to be warned against that sinfulness by the threat of punishment and also those effects in the historical world of suffering. But the unbeliever says, well, now, if that's God's way of bringing people to himself, it's certainly the most ineffective way he could have thought of. For you see, it's the problem of evil which turns people against Him. It doesn't draw them to him at all. Is there not a more benevolent way for God to draw himself, draw people to himself? You might think of that old child story of the wind and the sun debating how they're going to get the traveler's coat off. And the wind says, well, I'll do it. I'll just knock it off. Boom. You know, he throws out the wind and just does everything he can. But of course, the more the wind blows, the more the man pulls the jacket around him and holds on tightly. The sun says, I'll show you how to do it, he just beams out there and the man gets so warm, he takes it off willingly. The unbeliever says, now why can't God be like that? He wants to draw people to himself. He certainly doesn't know how to get people to be followers of him, if that's what he's trying to do. Not only that, the distribution of suffering is not proportioned to man's virtue in this world at all. The innocent suffer and the relatively innocent bear the greater condemnation in this life. So why does God punish the wrong men? Why does God punish animals at all? The fourth way, which I think is inadequate, is to say that God works through evil, he restrains evil, he atones for evil, and he will eventually eliminate evil. And as a biblical Christian, I affirm all of those. But it's not going to satisfy the unbeliever to bring up those inadequate answers. For, you see, what we're saying is God's going to clear up the mess. But the question is not will God take care of it, but why did God allow it? Why is there a mess to begin with? Why didn't he disallow the possibility of sin? What is accomplished by hell, after all? And then the quick answer, which is the fifth answer, is, of course, it's free will that explains it. It's because man freely chose the evil. And I agree that man freely chose the evil and that originated evil in this world, at least in our cosmos. I don't want you to deny that Satan had fallen before man, but that is not going to be adequate. And I have a number of lectures on the question of free will and evil that I can't go into. So let me quickly refer most of you who are Presbyterians just to your own creed. If you look at the Westminster Confession of Faith, you know, you go through this passe non precari and so forth. Well, when you get down to the end of the line, you read that when men get to heaven, non posse peccari, it's not possible to sin. Not possible to sin in heaven, and yet they're free, aren't they? Anybody want to maintain when you go to heaven, you're going to be an automaton? No, you're going to maintain that you're fully under God's sovereign control, and that's why you won't sin. But now, if you're free when you're in heaven, and obviously you are, you're not less than a man. And if you're controlled by God in such a way that you can't sin, then evil is not necessary to free will. It is logically compatible to say that men will freely do the good and eternally do it. And so the question comes, why didn't God ordain that state of affairs from the very beginning? And so I can't dwell on these, but I just want to show you that what I'm going to deal with today is not these cavalier philosophic responses. But we must take evil seriously and we must see it in its most stringent logical form. None of the common theodides is valid. None of them are sufficient to dissolve the problem of evil. And thus I don't assume in asking whether the problem of evil is problematic, that an easy resort to such inadequate answers can remove the problems involved in the most stringent form of it. We wish to scale the mountainous problem of evil to be sure not to skirt the full emotional force or the full forceful philosophical attack that it represents. It will do us no long term service to refuse. Looking at the problem and and its fullest strength in its most stringent form, this is a logical problem. It is a logical problem in its most stringent form. There are emotional things involved, but it's logical at base. David Hume, while he was not the first to formulate the problem, did put it in classical style in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Part 10, where he argues that the proposition God exists and evil exists are logically incompatible. Hume argued that God exists, that proposition is true if and only if there is no evil, given your definition of God. So they're logically incompatible propositions. And Hume felt that his dialogue settled the issue once and for all. Indeed, the same charge of inherent contradiction in Christianity has been charged by W.T. stace, John Stuart Mill, MacTaggart, Flew Akin, Makey, Ducasse, McCloskey and all those who are writing on the subject in these days. It's very apparent to anybody who reads in the field that it's not a matter of making yourself that you can appease your conscience about evil, but can you even think of such a God and the existence of evil at the same time? Critical thinkers in the philosophy of religion have claimed to detect a logical inconsistency in any theism which acknowledges the fact of evil in the world and yet conceives of God as 1 all powerful and 2 all loving. @ the very outset of his discussion, you see, McCloskey states the problem in the following. Evil is a problem for the theist in that a contradiction is involved in the fact of evil on the one hand, and the belief in the omnipotence and perfection of God. On the other, God cannot be both all powerful and perfectly good if evil is real. Whereas the anti theist once considered it necessary to show a deficiency of rational support in favor of theism in order to render it irrational. The more serious charge is now being leveled that traditional theistic faith is inherently self contradictory and therefore rationally untenable. That is, it isn't just a matter that you don't have enough support and evidence for your propositions, but your propositions are logically incompatible and therefore you can't even think your faith, much less affirm it, and then argue for it. You couldn't know that God exists at all. Quite obviously that sort of attack on traditional theism is very vigorous. No longer shall the argument be between theist and antitheist. No longer will the argument between them be permitted to terminate in a personal standoff, each drawing conflicting conclusions based on the respective variant evaluations of specific questions and evidences. There is a very real problem here about where the evidence points, as we are told. If you approach the evidence this way, well then of course it's compatible to be a Christian. If you approach the evidence another way, it's not compatible and thus there could be that standoff. But you see, it's not the evidence anymore that's at stake. It's the very logical compatibility of the faith. The aim is to demonstrate that theism, being strictly illogical, cannot be a reasonable and meaningful alternative for anyone. So the problem of evil is allegedly used to demonstrate not merely that theism is unlikely true, but that theism cannot be true. Now then, does a discerning and a cautious examination of this most stringent form of the problem of evil, this one that I'm proposing, Does an examination of such warrant the conclusion that theism is irrational or not? Can the problem of evil be utilized to deprive theism of rational credibility? And that's the question today. And I want to begin the first general part of my analysis and the attempt to generate the problem for the unbeliever. The attempt to generate the problem. Okay, I'm going to start putting a succession of propositions on the board with the aim of bringing a logical contradiction into the set. That is, I wish to nullify, well, not nullify that deduction, but I wish to deduce from this contradictory conclusions and thereby show an inconsistency. And it's going to take a little bit of logical maneuvering. And I don't presuppose that you have a great deal of logical background in notation. So I'm going to keep it in semantic terms rather than syntactic terms. And if I'm losing anybody, please raise your hand and say okay. Statements that are generally considered as central to traditional theism would include the A God exists. B God is omnipotent. C God is wholly good. D Evil exists in this world. The first premise establishes the theistic character of the position, obviously. And the second and third premises partially define the nature of that theism in question, so that the refutation of either one of those would entail the rejection of the first premise at the same time. That is to say, if you can show an inconsistency with either B or C, we will assume at the outset and we will grant to the unbeliever. He will have shown us that God does not exist because that's the kind of God we want to be proven. The fourth premise gives impulsion to human concern and interest in theism. For you see, it's just the background of evil. It's evil that is the background for the enterprises of theist in human culture. You may remember the comment of Bertrand Russell in his book Speaking My Mind where he says he was asked about the future of religion and answered, I think the future of religion depends upon whether people solve their social problems or not. I think that if there go on being wars and great oppressions and many people leading very unhappy lives, probably religion will go on. That is, Russell was saying it's only because of evil in the world and so forth that religion is a viable, at least emotional, psychological option for people. So everybody will grant that you have to have all four of these premises if you're going to be a Christian. All that's pretty easy. Now, the philosopher aiming to criticize theism based upon these premises faces a difficulty at the very outset, doesn't he? Because if you have even the most elementary training in logic, you know that these propositions do not contradict themselves. That is, in and of themselves, there is no formal contradiction involved. Obviously we've got to supply some statements which draw out the meaning of the lower statements in order to elicit that contradiction. Some other statements must be introduced to generate a self contradiction, to be show it to be inherent in theism that is self contradictory. All such additions must either be essential to traditional theism, or they must be the logical consequence of statements that are essential to theism. Or on the other hand, they can be necessary truths, that is truths of logic. So now we're going to allow the unbeliever to introduce premises. But we've set out the ground rules. You must give premises that I will affirm as being essential to my faith, the logical consequences of my faith, or the truths of logic, truths of honesty, if you will, in reasoning. Now, Mackie himself recognizes that problem, and he suggests that the necessary additional statements would be the following. E, good as opposed to evil, he adds F, a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can, and there are no limits as to what an omnipotent thing can do. Okay, both statements E and G. Am I blocking those statements? That just dawned on me. I shouldn't have written right behind myself. Both statements E and G are necessarily true because they're analytic. Omnipotent means there are no limits. And E he takes to be good as opposed to evil as an analytic truth. And I would agree with him, it is. By definition it's true. And so if you can join E and G behind me here with B and C, we can now validly infer some other things. I'm going to start drawing out some conclusions. H, there are no limits as to what God can do. And I the next conclusion. God is wholly opposed to evil. There's your indulgence. If you're getting tired of this sort of stuff. It's so obvious. Well, that's what logicians do. They work in the obvious. You'll understand why I have to drag you behind this horse in a minute or two. But bear with me, however, since I does not indicate just how God might oppose evil. Premise F does not follow from I. Moreover, F is neither essential to traditional theistic systems nor necessarily true. Indeed, it does not seem to be true at all. A good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can. Well, let's look at that. Everyone will recognize that there are cases where the production of some evil serves an overriding good purpose or an end which is otherwise unachievable. That is that there are some cases where evil does contribute to a greater good. We're not using that as our rationale for the whole problem, but in terms of this particular premise, we don't know. We want to introduce that. And conversely, sometimes a person can eliminate an evil in this world only by also eliminating a greater good along with it. That sometimes, if we're going to get rid of certain evil situations, there are some things that may be evaluated as even a greater good, but they've got to go as well. In such cases where people, that is, it's not logically true, then empirically we don't find this to be the case in such cases where people produce or fail to eliminate a relatively lesser evil than the good eventually realized. We do not hold them culpable. That's true in any system of jurisprudence. It's true in this land, even in the bad state we're in. Hence, further attenuation to the argument is required. If one is to show that traditional theism embodies a formal contradiction, another premise will be needed, one which follows from the previously accepted premises or is necessarily true, and one which would contradict God's goodness or power. Now, so we've eliminated F. We're going to take that out, and we're going to try something else. Certainly a premise that would work in this particular case would be premise J. There is some unjustified evil. There is some unjustified evil that'll give the antitheist what he wants. For instance, the gratuitous evil with which Madden and Hare speak in their book, the gratuitous evil of torturing innocent children and so forth are the allegedly innocent children. The unbeliever would say, now, the only premise essential to theism and relevant for deducing J. Now remember, you have to deduce it would be D. It's only from D that you get to J and thereby show that we're logically inconsistent. And D can only serve that purpose of being the bridge to J. Logically in conjunction with a further premise that means it must be mediated from D to J. There's got to be another premise inserted so you can get there. And that premise would be K. If there is any evil, then there is some unjustified evil taken in conjunction with D. Evil exists in this world. If there is any evil in this world, there is some unjustified evil. Consequently, there is some unjustified evil. And you are inconsistent, you Christians now. But, however, we must ask, what warrants introducing K? What's going to justify this premise? How do you get that into the argument? K itself would first have to be deduced from another premise. And such a premise might be L. L reads, every evil is such that if there is a good that entails it, there is a greater good that does not entail it. For every evil, there is another situation logically conceivable where a greater good would not entail that evil. That is, if you argue that now this evil is put here so that a greater good would be realized, the argument is no, there's even a greater good than that that does not entail that evil, and therefore there is unjustified evil and L would have to be a necessary truth or would have to be essential to theism. We're back to our problem, and it's not necessary to theism to introduce L. That is, no Christian is going to say, well, that's the case. And so it must be a necessary truth if it's going to be introduced at all. And since it's, well, it must be necessary so it could be introduced and thereby K and J would be warranted only if it were logically impossible that L should be false. That is, we're getting to the end of the argument. Now, how is L gonna get on the board? It's gonna get on the board only if it's a necessary truth, which is to say that it's logically impossible that it be false. Is it logically impossible that L be false? However? Well, L clearly implies statements like the following M, which is praising the Lord, I'm sure the last one I'm going to put on the board that somebody's bearing pain is never a good state of affairs. That is, if L is true, then it also must be true that M bearing pain is. I'm giving it to you in the other form is never a good state of affairs, okay? So M has got to be the case if L is going to be introduced. Because if M is not the case, then it's not the case that this is logically true because it's conceivable that it might be false. In which, in the case of M, and if that's not logically true, therefore you can't get to K if you can't have K, you can't move from B to J. And J is the essential premise. That's the rubber, everybody with the game plan, okay? But now, so what we're down to considering we've got it all out on the board, we see what we're up against, right? Logically speaking, you've got to have such an argument. But you say, I hope now in the time that's remaining to show that the very logical necessity of the argument is going to trap the unbeliever. Because, you see, we've argued we mustn't take a cavalier approach to this problem with respect to the emotional force of evil. We mustn't take a cavalier approach. Philosophically, it must be rigorous, it must be well defined, it must be exact, it must be analytical, okay? If it must be analytical, then he has to have such an argument without such an argument. That's back to different strokes for different folks. So that's where. That's where we are. And if he's going to have such an argument, he's got to argue am. What I hope you'll see, and most of you have had apologetics, I'm sure have seen it long, long ago, is that he began in logic, didn't he? But now the unbeliever is going to have to argue a substantive evaluative statement. He's going to have to argue bearing pain is never good, never good. If he can't argue that point, he can't introduce that premise, that is that empirical fact, that evaluative proposition, then he's not going to get his argument going. And if he can't get his argument going, then it's not problematic. And anybody with an imagination, anybody, can think of counterexamples to M, can't they? Where the good realized in avoiding pain is certainly outweighed by the greater good achieved only by enduring the pain. For instance, at the cost of a needle in your arm, which is a slight pain, but it is pain, you might give a pint of blood in order to save your child's life, and therefore bearing pain would certainly be a good state of affairs. Then therefore M is false, and by modus tollens, L is likewise refuted. Thus L is disqualified from being a necessary truth. With the obtaining of the dismissal of M and thereby the rejection of LJ as well, the antitheist fails to show that the set of beliefs maintained by us is inconsistent. At this point, the antitheist is driven to protest, though, oh, wait a minute, we're not going to run out just that quickly. Let's look at that situation over here a minute. We are wrong, he says, about the goodness involved in bearing pain so as to save our child's life. He says our willingness may be noble, our willingness to undergo the pain may be noble, but it certainly does not constitute our circumstance. The greater conceivable good, that is, we can think of something that is better than having to give a pint of blood to save your child's life. That willingness of yours is only making the best of an already bad situation. And so, he says, the greater good would be a situation where either your child could not die, or. Or if you could provide the necessary transfusion without pain to yourself. So why is there death? Why is there pain? And thus, protests the antitheist, bearing pain never is a good state of affairs. You may wonder, why is he getting so loud about this? Because that is the nub you're going to come down and the believer, I mean the unbeliever, has got to insist in with vehemence that pain is never good. That's not logic, friends, that's evaluation. That's emotion. That's what are my commitments to what constitutes good and evil. It never is a good state of affairs, he says. And thus we see the antitheist would be driven to insist upon a moral judgment if he were to formulate and maintain a compelling problem of evil against us as Christians. Any formulation of the problem of evil will eventually require the introduction of some general premise similar to M, that is, it may not be this particular one, but it will always be one that has that form. And that premise can be defended against the imaginative hypothetical vindicating counterexamples of the theist only by resorting to specific moral assertions. Such and such a circumstance is never a good state of affairs. That is, he must be able to make a moral evaluation if he's going to have the stringent form of the problem of evil. And consequently the cogency of his argument will rely upon the validity of his conception and his use of the word good in moral predicates. Now, at the beginning of this lecture I started fairly slowly and I tried to say that we're going to make sure that we clarify all essential premises. One of them is that such and such so forth is never a good state of affairs. Is never a good state of affairs. And now we must clarify the premise. What do you mean when you insist on an absolute moral indictment and you use the word good? What backs up that use of the word good? A thorough and critical analysis of the problem of evil requires one to continue into an investigation of the logical characteristics of the ethical discourse. An elucidation of the precise meaning of the key terms involved in ethical judgments such as M, to which the antitheist is committed. In taking up the problem of evil, can the antitheist provide an adequate account of the word good as it appears in his argument? That is, can he use good in that absolute sense which is required by the argument in which, if you read Dostoevsky emotionally, every man has got to account for it? Can the antitheist provide an adequate account of good? If not, his argument asserts nothing and it's got to be taken as an example of non cognitivism. If we're going to be analytical in our approach, we're going to insist that good now be explicated and thus we are forced to start examining the meta ethical candidates. And somebody would do me a great favor if you could tell me where I stand in my hour to know how long to take. This is working. Good. How we may make it. Okay, we've been forced down to premise M. And in terms of the structure of the argument to which the antitheist has committed himself in introducing it, we now have got to explicate the use of the word good in that absolute sense. And so we have to ask metaethics. I used that term a minute ago. And perhaps I should explain that metaethics explicates the logic of moral discourse. That is it. So what is the structure and language of the use of the word good, bad, and so forth? What is the basis for evaluative statements? That is, it's not normative ethics. Should we abort or not abort? Should we have capital punishment or not? That's normative ethics. Metaethics is. What are the philosophical foundations for your normative conclusions? How do you adequately explicate intrinsic goodness? What could the antitheist mean when, as part of the problem of evil, he asserts and insists, this situation is not good, it is evil? Let's survey the various theories aiming to explain the sense in which good is used here and in the area of ethics, two basic approaches to the question of the logical form of the word good. First of all, you have informative theory. Informative theories. And the first informative theory that we'll look at is the objectivist view. Okay, so you have an informative objectivist here. He wants to maintain that when you use the word good, when you say that X is good, you're informing somebody of an objective quality in X. And among the objectivists, there are two classes, the naturalist and the intuitionist. The naturalist says, when I say X is good, I am informing you of an objective, natural quality. The intuitionist says, when I say X is good, I'm informing you of an objective, intuitive quality. It's not natural. And then also among informative theorists, there are those who are subjectivists, and the subjectivists, as you can figure out, are societal and individual. Okay, he says, I'm informing you of a subjective societal quality. That is, our society subjectively sees that quality as good. The individual says, no, I personally subjectively view X as good. That's what I'm telling you when I say X is good. And then in addition to the informative theories, we have the performative theories of good. And primary performative theory was imperativism. And then secondly, emotivism, the performative theorist says, when I say X is good, I'm performing something upon you, that is, I am trying to have a perlocutionary effect in your life. I'm not trying to tell you something. I'm not informing your mind of anything. I'm not saying there's some quality which is good, which is natural or intuitive or societal or private, But I'm trying to do something to you. It's like when I say fire, you see, you all have to run from the room. That's a prolocutionary use of the word fire. An informative use of the word fire would be that given dry leaves in a certain climate and a lit match, you have a fire that informs you about fire. But I use fire to move you when I yell it in the way that I did a minute ago. Now, imperativism says, when I say X is good, I'm commanding you to do it. When I say loving your wife is good. By that, I don't mean to tell you anything about loving your wife, give you any information, but I'm saying you should love your wife. Do it. I'm trying to influence you to do what I believe is right. The motivist maintains, though, that the performative effect of the sentence X is good is not to command, but is to express emotion. And so, if we can put it rather bluntly this way, when I say honesty is good, I'm not informing you. I'm trying to give an emotional effect. And so we can translate that honesty. Yay. Okay, so I'm not attempting to be philosophically sophisticated at this point. I think you can get the idea of the outline of the meta ethical candidates. Now, that's what we're looking at. And we'll begin at the top with the objectivist naturalist. He reduces ethics to an empirical science and thereby commits a very basic fallacy, the naturalistic fallacy that G.E. moore drew out when he said, you argue from X is such and such to you ought. To do X, you move from is to ought, from statements of description to statements of prescription. And of course, everybody knows you can't do that. There's nothing, the situation may call for just the opposite prescription. And so you can't move from an is to an ought statement. It's considered generally a logical fallacy. While there are some people, I won't bore you with all the details, who are attempting to revive the argument recently in the journals, but objective naturalism has fallen under G.E. moore's criticism of its naturalistic fallacy. The fact that people feel a certain way about X doesn't convince anybody of the Truth of X and ethics. Ethics does not amount to statistics. You don't say here are all the facts about X and therefore you mustn't do X or you must do X. And so if you take the objective naturalist approach, you're going to be led down the path to relativism. And if you end up in relativism, you can't say X am over here bearing pain is evil. You can't insist on it. You can only say that I move from the statistics to that prescription. I'm going to eliminate some of the wrinkles in this argument just so we can get done this afternoon. The intuitionist I think you can see the obvious problem right away. G.E. moore was an intuitionist who said that the quality good is an indefinable simple. It's like the term yellow. When I say X is yellow, I can't define it anymore. You've either got to know what yellow is or you don't. I can't say yellow is like such and such and such and such. It isn't a combination of anything. It's a simple color, one of the basics. And therefore you've just got to intuit what it is. And that's the way good is. It's a property, but it's a property which is not known empirically. It's known intuitively. And RB Rice has aptly critiqued Moore's position in his book On Our Knowledge of Good and Evil. He says what would be a non natural property if it were not a supernatural property? And you don't want to say that it's a supernatural property. And so where are you? You're in no man's land. And that the statement that good is a simple property must be intuited. Okay, yeah, the logical notation in my notes sets us out. But okay, here's a statement. Good is a simple property to be intuitive. Now it's that statement that Moore argues for. Now that such a statement should be true must also be intuited by Moore. And therefore you see that Moore has no adequate proof of his position because the intuitive nature of good requires an intuition into the nature of good. And an infinite regress has been propagated. Conflicting intuitions obviously cannot be rationally resolved then because I intuit that beating children is good and somebody else doesn't. So we're back to relativism again. And therefore you can't insist that pain is evil if you're an intuitionist. How about a subjectivist? Do I even have to critique that from the fact that I've reduced objectivism to subjectivism. I don't see any heads and so I'm just going to skip that. I think you see what I would want to say if I had the time. How about the performative theories? Imperativism. Good is used in a prescriptive sense, that is do this. That was held by RM Hare and the later AC Hughing. They held that to say X is good as to make it a directive property to direct people to act in a certain way. But now the question is why are certain actions to be commanded? That is why are you to call them good? If it is commanded because the action has an inherent value, it is good in a different sense altogether in which the word good is used prescriptively. If you say X is good means do X and then you say why do X? You say because X is good, then you're either arguing in a vicious circle or you're using good in two different senses. If you're not using it in two different senses, if you're not equivocating, then of course no action is virtuous. It's only commanded. And that means it's relative. That means it's arbitrary. And you can't insist unbeliever, if that's your view of good, that the Christian should agree with you on proposition M. How about emotivism? Emotivism, it turns out, is only a significant ethical theory. If it is equated with private subjectivism, individual subjectivism, it might be reduced to imperativism, which some logicians have attempted to do. And since we've already eliminated those options, I won't spend any more time on that. So what's the upshot of this? The upshot is that the unbeliever is in a real quandary when he tries to argue from the problem of evil. Because logically he must declare certain situations to be evil, but he cannot explicate his use of the word in an absolutistic sense. But now the Christian has a non relativistic use of moral predicates, doesn't he? The personal God of Christianity being transcendent as the Creator and sovereign Lord of the universe. And yet the eminent governor and revealer of all provides an explanation and an objective standard for moral judgments. The Christian can identify evil in the world. Evil is defined by God's revealed standards or by God's character. To be good is to reflect the character of God. Now this is suitable to the logic of the ordinary discourse of the word good. And in addition it salvages the Moral evaluations from metaethical argumentation. We are not left in relativism. God is the transcendental of morality, that is, he is the condition of meaningfulness in moral discourse. Without there being such a God, there are no absolute moral decrees, and this is the persistent outlook of Scripture. God is good by definition. Abraham says, shall not the judge of all the earth do right? It's a rhetorical question. There's nothing higher than God by which I could draw him into question. So isn't it the case that he shall do right? Genesis 18:25 Abraham says, God says, sacrifice Isaac. Shall he tell me to do something which is evil? He doesn't even question it. He goes ahead and he is willing to do it, accounting that God would raise him from the dead if need be. Moses in Deuteronomy 32 defines God as the rock who is just. Job, as the problem of evil, comes to him, receives the spiritual theodicy in the 40th chapter when he puts his hand on his mouth and refuses to call God into question any longer. Paul in the third chapter of the book of Romans, verse four says, let God be true and all men be liars. You cannot call God into question. So in the ninth chapter, when he deals with the question of sin and God's sovereignty, he says, nay, man, who are you to reply against your maker? And thus for the Christian, we don't go any further back than God. He is our transcendental of meaningfulness. He's the precondition, meaningfulness. When it comes to moral discourse, God is the precondition, the originator and the final standard of morality. Therefore, the problem of evil is a non cogent and a muddled polemic of anti theism. The argument advance could only be meaningful if the disputer could appeal to a transcendent definition of goodness, that is to God. But you see, it's just God's existence he's wishing to refute. The atheist cannot generate the problem of evil, since being a naturalist or being a materialist, by implication of his atheism, the anti theist, the anti supernaturalist cannot account for moral judgments in the universe which is according to him, a machine. There is no sense to ought statements, to saying not even to an all good God ought to not allow such a situation to arise. He can't even assert that meaningfully. The problem of evil can only be meaningful within a metaphysical outlook which allows for intelligence, personality, morality, spiritual activity and supernatural beingness to God. And consequently our talk today has sought to demonstrate, according to one line of thought, that the problem of evil cannot be utilized to argue against God's existence, since the very generating of the problem requires the existence of God in order to meaningfully make ethical evaluations that are inherent in the formulation. The problem of evil may very well be psychologically compelling against theism. It might be for some people, until God changes their heart, it will be. But it certainly cannot be logically compelling in the face of evil. It may be emotionally unsatisfying to believe in God, but it is still not unreasonable to do so. Very quickly, I want to give you a basic outline of a presuppositional apologetic on this particular score. And it always takes this form. The unbeliever says logic is the problem inherent here. And so we have two arguments that have three very simple premises. One, God exists. We say evil exists, and therefore there is some justification for evil. Now the unbeliever, you see, denies our conclusion. He begins with just the opposite. There is no justification for evil. Secondly, evil does exist, and therefore God does not exist. I think you can see here then that the opening premise of his argument is the denial of the conclusion of ours, and the opening premise of ours is the denial of his conclusion. Logic cannot settle the question, obviously, and thus what the presuppositionalist does, he says, let's go to our common premise, that is, we're not going to get anywhere going from 1 and 3, so we have to argue if we're going to argue at all. And two, you say evil exists, and the presuppositionist says, now account for what you just said. Now I'm dealing with the problem of evil, and I realize that you have other problems that come up, but I'm saying that's the form of all apologetics. It really comes down to that logically. One argument says this, the other argument says this. You've got to take the common premise and you've got to go after it. But you don't go after it by supplying evidence for your position straight out. You go after it by saying, can you account for that person premise at all, even if there were evidence for it? I mean, grant that there is evidence that evil exists, but how do you know it's evil? So if evil is problematic, it is a problem for the unbeliever who cannot define it or account for it. And his problem at base is pitting his standards against God's standards, which is precisely how evil, that is precisely how sin entered the world in the first place. The theist, on the other hand, rests in God and struggles with evil. Realizing it's an emotional problem, but he knows that the antitheist can't even formulate the problem either way, therefore it's not logically problematic. Is the problem of evil problematic? No, it can't be, because the transcendental of meaningfulness in ethical discourse is God, and you must have such to have the problem at all. So I would conclude, paradoxically, that there can only be a problem of evil if evil is not ultimately a problem. The critic cannot generate the problem without assuming that which he wishes to refute. And thus the door is open for us to ask this very significant whether the problem of evil explains one's atheism, or whether one's atheism explains his insistence that evil is problematic. Our analysis today has not endeavored to answer every question that arises in connection with evil in the world. However, I think a presuppositional analysis of the problem of evil has philosophically reduced evil to a non critical perplexity. Or to change a common saying, I think we've made that opening mountain into a molehill. Or to put it another way, in terms of the biblical faith of Abraham, Moses, Job, and Paul, if you have faith about the size of a mustard seed, you can say to that mountain be removed into the sea. And it will be. Thank.

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