[First Last Name]
Philosophy [Number]
[Date Month Year]
Introduction
The evil-God challenge is an offshoot of the unending debate over the existence of God on the basis of the problem of evil. In this current presentation, Law simply improved the discourse by enhancing its sophistication through his theory of reverse theodicy and theory of symmetrical logic. However, the persistence of this discourse without conclusive resolution flows from several flaws that will be discussed in adequate detail in Critique section of this paper. The critique will be grounded upon the accepted definitions of ‘evil’ and ‘God’ from the religious tradition of Catholicism, which represents the more orthodox theology of evil and God in the history of the concepts. Through these definitional foundation, the flaws of the evil-God challenge will be revealed as a means to effectively refute Law’s discourse based on real and not contrived definitions of these concepts.
My thesis is: unless the discourse of the evil-God challenge is grounded on correct theological definitions of evil and God, the discourse will fester without true resolution and adds to confusion instead of enlightenment; thus, turning into a meaningless, wasteful, and fruitless discourse.
Stephen Law’s Challenge
Law’s fundamental premises concedes with the classic propositions of monotheism: (a) “there exists an omnipotent, omniscient creator” (353), which he labeled as the “good-god hypothesis”; and (b) “there is some sort of supernatural intelligence behind the universe.” However, he cannot logically concede to the existence of a “supremely benevolent creator” due to the problem of evil (354). Neither can he subscribe to the theory of a supremely evil creator due to the problem of good (356). He proposed that the logical existence of one god argues against the non-existence of the other in an almost symmetrical manner.
The arguments that Law presented against three theodicies were admittedly valid and reasonable. The ‘simple (human) free-will solution’ (Law 345) cannot address the challenge because it pertains to human free-will and the challenge is not about human properties but that of god (or gods in absolutely opposing characteristics).
Conversely, the ‘character-building solution’ (Law 355) did not only ineffectively argue against the challenge but unwittingly damaged the image of a benevolent God by attributing an intent to cause pain and suffering to humans on the ground of character-building. If pain and suffering is evil, then, this argument essentially attributes evil as a creation of God in the sense of the evil means (for a good end) reasoning, complicating the argument instead of clarifying it. The theodicy that insists of ‘second-order goods (as requiring) first-order evils’ also works much the same in its ineffectiveness and its error of negative attribution. Logically, a supremely good God cannot willfully commit evil even as a means to a good end.
The beauty of Law’s argument comes from his theory of symmetry, which easily attributes all the arguments in favor to or against the good God to the evil god through a reverse theodicy.
Row’s Counterarguments
Row’s probability argument as presented in the Guided Course Notes argues two major opposing probabilities: (a) that God exists and allows evil for a good reason; and (b) that humans cannot comprehend any good reason for God to allow evil to exist. Within this continuum, he included two other premises: (c) that God’s good reasons can be understood by humans at an odd of 50 percent; and (d) that God’s good reasons cannot be understood by humans at an odd of 50 percent. Then he concluded that “the probability of God’s existence is less than 50 percent” (D) (i.e., 33 percent) on the basis that no understandable reasons can explain the existence of evil or that there is no reason at all.
In essence, Rowe argues that the probability of God’s existence depends upon the probability that humans can understand the reasons of evil’s existence or even the lack of reason thereof. Thus, God’s existence depends upon the understanding of mankind both of his existence and that of evil, defining the infinite existence of God with the finite measure of human understanding. Moreover, Law’s approach to resolve the evil-God challenge follows the same dualistic approach of Law, but in a more limited scope, which covers only the understandable/ non-understandable dualism of reason of evil’s existence. His four-level premises cannot adequately address the polarity of reasoning that Law demands for the challenge.
Similarly, the half-way probability employed in Row’s argument cannot adequately address the depth of the evil-God challenge, which even Law recognizes as possible and real although irrelevant to the arguments he presented: “the amount of evil is irrelevant to this version of the argument – all it requires is not that there is some, no matter how little” (Law 354). In fact, Law validly counter-argues that just because “we can’t understand why there is so much good (or evil) in the world if he exists is not good evidence of his nonexistence” (358).
Critique
Despite surface logic in the arguments of Law in the evil-God challenge, there are at least four fundamental flaws that had led to the erroneous logical direction, each of which could has effectively faced the challenge.
First, Law assumed that the omniscient benevolent God is elemental in nature. It is “elemental” because only elements of contrasting characteristics cannot permit the existence of the contrasting other in the same manner that water and fire cannot mix and that either water should prevail or fire, but not simultaneously. Conversely, Row seemed to assume that evil and God can coexist as God permits for his reasons (Guided Course Notes D). The error in Law’s logic comes from assuming that the nature of God is the same as the nature of evil, which, based in the Catholic theistic tradition, are not. Thus, Law’s premise alone is flawed from the start, rendering the evil-God challenge essentially invalid.
Second, Law assumed that the omniscient benevolent God is unidimensional and unthinking. It is “unidimensional” because the nature of God was being described in a manner that cannot permit other characteristics such as a multi-dimensional intelligence, which includes the ability to make discretionary choices like a fire that is capable of choosing when to exercise optimum destructive heat and when to let only the nourishing warmth. He assumed that the benevolent God can only eradicate evil because it opposes the good and cannot choose to permit evil to co-exist with the good. In such a premise, God is not free to choose between allowing evil to exist and totally eradicating evil. This is a natural and logical offshoot of perceiving God as elemental in nature. However, the God that cannot choose is not really God but a slave. This definition, too, cannot find valid support from sound theistic perspectives, such as Catholicism.
However, to be fair with Law, he did intuitively recognized the free-will inherent in being God for having the option or free choice to create a universe of free or puppet human beings: “God could have created a universe populated with puppet beings” (354). He simply failed to take note of his own intuitive sense enough to notice this deep personal conviction of God as a Person with a full freedom to choose whatever he wants to do, whether allowing evil to exist or not. In fact, in his discussion of reverse theodicy, there is an underlying presumption that God can make voluntary and unconstrained choice to choose between creating free and puppet human beings. He did fail to notice this same freedom between letting evil exist and eradicate it. Similarly, Row also presumed an underlying reason for the existence of evil, particularly of God’s reason for allowing evil to exist (Guided Course Notes D).
Third, Law assumed that evil is as powerful as good; that is, the worst of evil is as powerful as the best of good. This is particularly true even when he associated evil with the evil God and goodness with the benevolent God. Thus, his conclusion becomes inevitably of the imagined evil god that is as omnipotent as the benevolent God. This premise flows logically from the first two flaws. In his views, evil, evil God, goodness, and benevolent God are both elemental matters and without freedom or personality apart from being evil or good. On the contrary, Rowe disagreed (Guided Course Notes D).
However, the confusion became more complex when the personal Christian God became lumped with a non-personal essence of evil, giving evil the same omnipotence and omniscience that only the personal Christian God should possess alone. Like the first and the second flaws, the third flaw makes the evil-God challenge invalid and, therefore, meaningless.
Fourth, the ultimate error in Law’s reasoning did not come from his logic but from the fundamental understanding of what is good and evil. Like in his first three errors, he assumed that evil is an entity of evilness; that is, as entity as the entity of goodness instead of a condition of being not good or without goodness in the same way that the contrast of air is not the presence of a black air but the absence of air in a vacuum. The blackness of the opposing air is not material to the nature or presence of air, though, as Law (354) already recognized. Rowe did not make this mistake; although he premised his argument on human beings’ ability to understand God’s reasons for allowing evil as basis for his existence, which is also flawed.
This is an inherent problem with the innovative definition of the concept of evil separate from the concepts accepted or as traditionally and historically defined. Law simply plucked his definition of the ‘evil god’ from the air, endowing it with divine characteristics, and labelled it ‘god’. His definition simply assumes that evil is an exact opposite of good; thus, imputing the same presumed exact oppositeness between the invented ‘evil god’ and the Judeo-Christian God.
Conclusion
Although a good exercise of logic and philosophical discourse, Law’s evil-God challenge poses a meaningless exercise if its premises cannot be based on accepted definitions of the concepts of evil and God primarily on the basis that it is disconnected from what it purports to resolve: the existence or non-existence of God or evil or both. Moreover, the argument purportedly to refute theistic definitions of these concepts cannot be validly made unless these theistic definitions are used as premise in the logical discourse. Otherwise, it becomes a contrived refutation with no real meaning to the concepts it purportedly refute. However, in all this, where Law made errors in his definitional premises, Rowe apparently did not other than his perception of God and human understanding.
Work Cited
Law, Stephen. “The Evil-God Challenge.” Religious Studies Sep. 2010, 46 (3): 353-373. PDF file.
Guide Course Notes [no citation]
