Social evil: A response to Adams

Abstract

Before I address Marilyn Adams's fine paper directly, I would like to set forth a brief fable. Once upon a time, when the dreary winter of positivism had passed, analytic philosophers felt themselves free to take religion seriously. So they began to look for problems they could solve with their well-honed analytic tools. Soon they formulated the logical problem of evil, which is a modern version of an old Epicurean worry. Is the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good God consistent with the existence of evil or of certain kinds or amounts of evil? In connection with this problem it might be said that if J. L. Mackie had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him.1 Armed with the new modal logic, the philosophers worked out the now celebrated free-will defense. It is generally agreed that it constitutes an adequate solution to the logical problem of evil. Making use of the techniques and results of contemporary epistemology, the philosophers also tackled the evidential or probabilistic problem of evil. Does the existence of evil or of the kinds or amounts of evil within our ken render belief in the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good God improbable to the point of irrationality? No consensus on an answer to this question has yet emerged, but some new and powerful lines of argument have been formulated and are currently under discussion. Of course analytic philosophers of religion realize that much of what religious traditions have found perplexing about evil does not fall squarely under either of these two problem headings. However some of the remainder can be dismissed on the grounds that it gives rise to merely pastoral problems, and some can, under the present academic division of labor, be relegated to other disciplines such as theology or biblical studies. And so the story ends happily with analytic philosophy of religion having vindicated, once again, its claim to be a progressive problem-solving enterprise.