Speak - The problem of evil

1. Heather Battaly, Virtue
2. Lisa Bortolotti, Irrationality
3. Joseph Keim Campbell, Free Will
4. Roy T. Cook, Paradoxes
5. Douglas Edwards, Properties
6. Bryan Frances, Disagreement
7. Douglas Kutach, Causation
8. Ian Evans and Nicolas D. Smith, Knowledge
9. Joshua Weisberg, Consciousness
10. Chase Wrenn, Truth

Copyright Daniel Speak 2015

The right of Daniel Speak to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2015 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6406-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6407-1 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-1795-4 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-1794-7 (mobi)

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For my wife, Lori Speak, whose love and friendship remind me that evil will not have the last word

Many thanks to Emma Hutchinson of Polity Press for her initial vision, wise counsel, and constant encouragement at each stage of this project. This book owes a great deal to the many students, both undergraduate and graduate, who have taken courses with me on the topic of the problem of evil over the past few years. I have learned particularly from Katherine Brown, Curtis Holtzen, Derek von Barandy, and Alex Zambrano. Two initially anonymous reviewers for Polity Press provided extremely useful feedback on a draft of the book. Raymond VanArragon in particular, who was kind enough to come out from behind his anonymity, made a substantial contribution to the overall quality of the manuscript and saved me from a number of embarrassments including confusing the names of an influential human ecologist and a left-handed Houston Rockets shooting guard. Manuel Vargas read the entire manuscript and provided terrific suggestions throughout. A second special thanks to Katherine Brown for extraordinary copy editing and the construction of the index.

It was a great pleasure to serve as a Visiting Research Fellow at Biola University's Center for Christian Thought during the spring of 2013 and as a Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University's Center for Philosophy of Religion during the 2013/14 academic year. Both opportunities afforded me great freedom to work on this project while also providing me with nearly unlimited philosophical inspiration. Finally, I would like to thank Loyola Marymount University, the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, and the LMU Department of Philosophy for the sabbatical time that allowed me to take advantage of the various fellowship opportunities that made writing this book such a pleasure.

It is hard to know in advance what kind of suffering a person will have to see or experience before becoming gripped by the problem of evil. Bad-things-happening-to-children does, however, constitute a pretty reliable recipe for getting the attention of most people. I can report that my own sensitivities to the issues taken up in this book were profoundly heightened by having a child of my own and becoming, as a result, freshly attuned to the innocent vulnerability of children. I was already disposed to feel the burden of their seemingly senseless suffering (who isn't?), even before my son was born. But after his birth, my emotional nerves seemed to have been exposed painfully to the shocking air of moral reality. Reports of starving or abused children, of children forced to become slaves or soldiers, even popular movies featuring children under threat (pretend-children that I knew would be pretend-rescued near the end of the two-hour ordeal) all placed a new and swelling weight on my psyche.

I suspect that this is at least some part of the reason that the following experience still leaps immediately to mind when I find myself considering the world's evils. A decade or so back, when our son was still quite young, my wife and I were in the habit of getting together regularly (roughly, weekly) with a group of our friends at one of our homes. A little food, a little conversation, and the kids with a baby-sitter; a good evening for everyone, typically. The last time that group ever got together, however, was tragically memorable. I showed up at the home of the host, Mary, a smidge earlier than everyone else to find a pair of police cars and Mary out front. Before I could get my car parked, it became clear that Mary was absolutely distraught. The explanation for her state turned out to be that her four-year-old son had drowned in their backyard pool some short time prior to my arrival. The son, Joshua, had evidently either climbed over the short protective pool fence by way of some bigger toys pressed up against it or had come through the gate accidentally left open by the pool cleaner, who had been by earlier in the day. In one sense, it doesn't really matter what the precipitating cause was. In either case, Joshua was dead and someone was going to be left feeling guilty for the rest of his or her life. In fact, maybe the best result was that we were never able to diagnose exactly how Joshua got into the pool area. Though both Mary and the pool cleaner will have to share the worry that each may have been the cause, neither of them has to bear the burden of certainly having been. Thank God for small mercies.

But, of course, that's just the point. It seems a pathetically small mercy in this context. After all, it is incredibly hard to shake the suspicion that it would have been very easy for a being with the qualities and powers typically ascribed to God to have kept Joshua from drowning. A light breeze to close the gate or the shifting of a plastic faux barbecue away from the fence is all it would have taken. If it is easier for God to put thoughts into heads than to move things around in the macro world, then a small and unobtrusive reminder for either the pool cleaner or Mary would easily have done the trick. For this reason, we can understand why Mary (or any of us who are able to sympathize with her pain and loss) might begin to wonder if God really does exist.

And now we are alive to the problem of evil a problem constituted by an apparent tension between traditional theistic commitment, on the one hand, and an open-eyed recognition of countless instances of seemingly unjustified suffering, on the other. The family of philosophical challenges to theistic belief that we will be exploring can, in fact, be read as variations on a theme introduced in what David Hume called Epicurus' old questions: