Chapter 11: The Problem Of Evil
If there is a God, he permits moral evils to occur, and apparently himself brings about natural evils (through creating the natural processes that cause bad desires, disease, and accidents.) The moral and natural evils include animal pain, either caused by humans or by other animals or natural processes. However, since brain complexity and sophistication of behaviour decrease as we move further away from humans down the evolutionary scale, it seems reasonable to suppose that animal pain is less intense than human pain, and that animals feel pain less, as we go down the evolutionary scale from the primates to the least developed vertebrates. And, since the brains of invertebrates are of a different kind from those of vertebrates, I see little reason for supposing that the latter suffer pain at all
Cephalopods are invertebrates that almost certainly suffer.
I have already given reason for supposing that, in a world providential in the ways described in Chapter 10, there will be evils of certain kinds. There will inevitably be biologically useful unpleasant sensations, such as the pain that someone suffers until he escapes from a fire or the feeling of suffocation that one gets in a room full of poisonous gas, and the emotion of fear in dangerous circumstances.
Why not just give humans and other beings conscious awareness that they’re being harmed but not make them endure intense agony? Or why not make their hedonic state start out super positive but diminish if something threatens their bodily security.
Yet, as we saw in Chapter 5, even God cannot do the logically impossible. And that makes it plausible to suppose that a perfectly good God may allow an evil E to occur or bring it about if it is not logically possible or morally permissible to bring about some good G except by allowing E (or an evil equally bad) to occur or by bringing it about. I suggest that there are three further conditions that must be satisfied if, compatibly with his perfect goodness, God is to allow an evil E to occur. The second condition is that God also in fact brings The Problem of Evil 237 about the good G. Thirdly, God must not wrong the sufferer by causing or permitting the evil. He must have the right to make or permit that individual to suffer. And, finally, some sort of comparative condition must be satisfied. It cannot be as strong as the condition that G is a greater good state than E is a bad state. For obviously we are often justified in order to ensure the occurrence of a substantial good in risking the very unlikely occurrence of a greater evil.
This is plausible, but God is omnipotent, so he shouldn’t need evil for a greater good. He can just bring about the good absent the evil.
I begin with the first condition. This is evidently satisfied in the case of moral evil, as I have pointed out earlier. If humans are to have the free choice of bringing about good or evil, and the free choice thereby of gradually forming their characters, then it is logically necessary that there be the possibility of the occurrence of moral evil unprevented by God.
I addressed this before.
The first of the substantial reasons why our ability to make significant free choices would be gravely diminished in the absence of natural evil is what is known as the ‘higher-order’ defence. This claims that natural evil provides opportunities for especially valuable kinds of emotional response and free choice. It begins by pointing out that the great good of compassion (the natural emotional response to the sufferings of others) can be felt only if others are suffering. It is good that we should be involved with others emotionally, when they are at their worst as well as at their best. But of course, the objector will say, even if pain is better for the response of compassion, better still that there be no pain at all. Now obviously it would be crazy for God to multiply pains in order to multiply compassion. But I suggest that a world with some pain and some compassion is at least as good as a world with no pain and so no compassion. For it is good to have a deep concern for others; and the concern can be a deep and serious one only if things are bad with the sufferer. One cannot worry about someone’s condition unless there is something bad or likely to be bad about it. If things always went well with someone, there would be no scope for anyone’s deep concern. It is good that the range of our compassion should be wide, extending far in time and space. The sorrow of one in a distant land who really cares for the starving in Ethiopia or the blinded in 240 The Problem of Evil India or the victims of carnivorous dinosaurs millions of years ago is compassion for a fellow creature, even though the latter does not feel it; and the world is better for there being such concern.
Compassion isn’t intrinsically good. If compassion lead people to do bad things, that would be bad. It’s only good if it improves lives.
Compassion doesn’t need pain. We could have compassion just by hoping people would be better off. For example, I think people show compassion hoping that I have a fun birthday relative to a less fun birthday, even though neither would involve pain.
Is there compassion in heaven? If yes, that proves that compassion needs no pain.
God could make us compassionate absent pain, because he is omnipotent.
Worst case scenario, God would just make a bit of pain so we could be compassionate.
If this is true, then it’s good to cause pain so we can increase compassion. This is clearly absurd.
This can’t explain pain for which people don’t experience compassion such as suffering in dreams, ineffable pains, and unobserved natural evils.
This also can’t explain suffering that we can’t affect, which includes most suffering throughout history.
But could not the absence of a good (of an ability to walk, say, or the ability to talk French) give to the victim equal opportunity: whether to endure it with patience, or whether to bemoan his lot; and to friends, whether to show sympathy or whether to be callous? To answer this question, it is important to consider why pain is a bad state and so, if uncaused by humans (and not negligently allowed to occur by them), a natural evil. Pain is a sensation of a kind that we do not dislike if we have it in a very weak degree; indeed, we may often like it—we may like the sensation of warmth, which we dislike if it gets a lot stronger and becomes a sensation of great heat. And there are a few abnormal people who appear not to dislike the sensations that we call ‘pains’ at all. A sensation is a pain and so a natural evil only in so far as it is strongly disliked. Any state of affairs not caused (or negligently allowed to occur) by humans, disliked as strongly, would be just as bad. Some people dislike their disabilities just as much as they dislike pain; they so dislike their inability to walk that they will undertake a programme to conquer it that involves their ‘overcoming the pain barrier’. True, it would be unusual for anyone to dislike anything quite as much as some of the pains caused by disease or accident (and to call those pains ‘intense’ just is to say how much they are disliked). And, for that reason, pain normally provides more opportunity for evincing patience rather than selfpity than does anything else. But any state of affairs disliked as much would be equally bad and so provide as much opportunity. And the choice between being sympathetic rather than callous matters more then than it does if the suffering is less. If the absence of the good is not disliked nearly as much as the sensations caused by disease and accident, then, of course, it is still very good to show courage in bearing that absence, but the courage is not in the face of such strong dislike for the existing state of affairs
This seems clearly false. Enduring personal sacrifice (say giving up your leg to prevent someone from losing both their legs, making their life still good but much worse) is not categorically different from sacrificing ones life to save others.
So, by bringing about the natural evil of pain and other suffering, God provides an evil such that allowing it, or an equally bad evil, to occur makes possible, and is the only morally permissible way in which he can make possible, many good states. It is good that the intentional actions of serious response to natural evil that I have been describing should be available also to simple creatures lacking free will. As we saw earlier, good actions may be good without being freely chosen. It is good that there be animals who show courage in the face of pain, to secure food and to find and rescue their mates and their young, and who show sympathetic concern for other animals. An animal life is of so much greater value for the heroism it shows. And, if the animal does not freely choose the good action, it will do the action only because on balance it desires to do so; and, when its desire to act is uncomplicated by conflicting desires, the good action will be spontaneous. And (even if complicated by conflicting desires), animal actions of sympathy, affection, courage, and patience are great goods.
Why? The reason helping others is good is not because it’s good for you, but because it’s good for others. Making the world worse so we can sacrifice to make it better is a less desirable state of affairs.
This also can’t explain most animals being r strategists, having oodles of offspring and not caring for them at all. Tuna, for example, lay 10 million eggs.
True, the deterministic forces that lead to animals performing good actions sometimes lead to animals doing bad intentional actions—they may reject their offspring or wound their kin—and in this case the bad action cannot be attributed to free will. Nevertheless, such bad actions, like physical pain, provide opportunities for good actions to be done in response to them; for example, the persistence, despite rejection, of the offspring in seeking the mother’s love or the love of another animal; the courage of the wounded animal in seeking food, especially for its young, despite the wound. And so on. The world would be much the poorer without the courage of a wounded lion continuing to struggle despite its wound, the courage of the deer in escaping from the lion, the courage of the deer in decoying the lion to chase her instead of her offspring, the mourning of the bird for the lost mate. God could have made a world in which animals got nothing but thrills out of life; but their life is richer for the complexity and difficulty of the tasks they face and the hardships to which they react appropriately.
Better for whom? Surely it would be better for the lion if they didn’t endure immense suffering to help their loved ones, relative to a world in which neither them nor their loved ones suffer. This also can’t explain teleological evils at all.
This also can’t explain very simple animals like fish who don’t care much about others or learn much, but who do suffer.
The Argument from the Need for Knowledge The second substantial reason why without natural evils, such as disease and accident, our ability to make significant free choices would be greatly diminished is that natural evils provide us with the knowledge required to make such choices. Natural evils are necessary if agents are to have the knowledge of how to bring about evil or prevent its occurrence, knowledge that they must have if they are to have a genuine choice between bringing about evil and bringing about good. Or rather, they are necessary if agents are to have this knowledge without being deprived of the good of rational response to evidence, and rational inquiry
Why can’t we gain other more important knowledge,
Why can’t we just have direct access to this knowledge, the same way we do to lots of other knowledge?
Why is knowledge good? It seems only good instrumentally. We don’t value useless knowledge, because knowledge is only good if it betters lives. That’s why it’s not good to know about the number of stars in the galaxy, the number of mosquito bites, or the number of Canadians.
If this is true then it would be bad to eradicate evil because that gets rid of knowledge gained through that evil.
This can’t explain mysterious evils or evils that we can’t prevent.
God has knowledge, yet he is not subject to evil.
We saw in Chapters 6 and 8 that there need to be regular connections between an agent’s bodily states and events beyond his body if he is to be able intentionally to perform mediated actions—that is, by his basic actions intentionally to produce effects beyond his body. But, if he is to acquire knowledge of how to perform these mediated actions by rational inference from observations of regularities in the world, and if he is to have the choice of whether to try to acquire this knowledge by rational inquiry (that is, by looking for such regularities), these regularities must be simple and observable, and the agent will need to extrapolate from what he observes by the criteria for a theory and so its predictions being probably true, as described in Chapter 3—what I shall call normal inductive inference. The simplest case of normal inductive inference is where I infer that a present state of affairs C will be followed by a future state E, from the generalization that, in the past, states of affairs like C on all occasions of which The Problem of Evil 245 I have knowledge have been followed by states like E. Because on the many occasions of which I have knowledge a piece of chalk being liberated from the hand has fallen to the floor, I can infer that the next time chalk is liberated it will fall. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, normal induction may take a more complicated form. From a vast collection of data about the positions of the sun, moon, and planets a scientist may infer a consequence of a different kind—for example, that there will be a very high tide on earth when the moon is in suchand-such a position. Here the data render probable a scientific theory of which the prediction about the high tide is a somewhat remote consequence: the similarities between the data and the prediction are more remote than in the simplest cases. (But the similarities exist and are the basis of the prediction. In both the data and the prediction there are material bodies attracting each other.)
Why is normal induction being the way we learn things so good that it’s worth killing thousands of children every day? Additionally, we learn things in other ways that are equally good, such as through deduction and intuition. Also, this doesn’t explain suffering because that’s a result of non deterministic mental laws on Swinburne’s view. Finally, there could be predictable laws without enormous suffering.
Now, for any evil that people knowingly inflict on each other, there must have been a first time in human history at which this was done. There must have been a first murder, a first murder by cyanide poisoning, a first deliberate humiliation, and so on. The malevolent agent in each case knows the consequence of the result of his action (for example, that causing someone to imbibe cyanide will lead to their death). Ex hypothesi, he cannot know this through having seen an agent give another person cyanide for this purpose. His knowledge that cyanide poisoning causes death must come from his having seen or others’ having told him that on other occasions taking cyanide accidentally led to death. (If, in my example, you think that knowledge of the effects of imbibing cyanide might be gained by seeing the effects of taking similar chemicals, the argument can be put more generally. Some person must have taken previously a similar poison by accident.) What applies to the malevolent agent also applies to the person who knowingly refrains from inflicting evil on another or stops evil occurring to another. There must be naturally occurring evils (that is, evils not knowingly caused by humans) if humans are to know how to cause evils themselves or are to prevent evils occurring. And there have to be many such evils, if humans are to have sure knowledge, for, as we saw, sure knowledge of what will happen in the future comes only by induction from many past instances. A solitary instance of a person dying after taking cyanide will not give to others very sure knowledge that in general cyanide causes death—maybe the death on the occasion studied had a different cause, and the cyanide poisoning had nothing to do with it. And, unless people have knowingly been bringing about evils of a certain kind recently, there have to have been many recent naturally occurring evils if people are currently to have sure knowledge of how to bring about or prevent such evils.
Similar remarks apply to the ones given above. God could give us this knowledge intrinsically, this can’t explain the degree of suffering, it can’t explain psychophysical laws, and it can’t explain the majority of animal suffering which has been going on for billions of years.
Normal inductive inference from the past is not the only possible route to knowledge of the future.Why do we need to acquire this knowledge by rational response to evidence? Why could not God ensure that we simply found ourselves having true basic beliefs that this action would cause pain and that action would cause pleasure, for actions of various kinds and pleasures and pains of various kinds?7 A basic belief is one that we find ourselves having, not on the basis of inference from other beliefs, and from which we may infer to other things that we then come to believe. For example, for most of us, the immediate deliverances of perception—that I am looking at a tree, or listening to a lecture—come to us as basic beliefs. By the Principle of Credulity, which I defend in Chapter 13, all basic beliefs with which agents find themselves are—in the absence of counter evidence—probably true; the mere fact that you have a belief is grounds for believing it. This route to knowledge of the future would be inductive, but not use induction of the normal kind. Given that (for the good reason adduced on p. 226) our world is a world of decay, our basic beliefs would need to include beliefs about what will happen if we do nothing—for example, about when a disease epidemic will strike unless we begin a programme of inoculation. It would not, however, be possible for any of us to know with any reasonable certainty all the long-term consequences of our actions, since those long-term consequences depend on whether other free agents help or hinder our actions attaining the consequences that we intend. So the most that would be possible is for us to know those consequences that are independent of the actions of others, and also conditional consequences (for example, ‘if no one else interferes, action A will have consequence C’). But, if God gave us true basic beliefs about the consequences of all our actions subject to those restrictions, we would know what would be the whole future of the world if humans did not interfere with it, and what would happen if they did interfere with it in various ways. And so, among the other things that we would know would be the outcomes of all the experiments we might do to attempt to confirm any scientific or metaphysical theory. We could still decide between competing theories on the basis of the a priori criteria of simplicity and scope. But the decision would be limited to a decision between theories that had exactly the same observable consequences as each other (even in the distant future); and in consequence the interest and importance of such a decision would be extremely low. For a major reason why some conclusion that a certain theory is more probable than some other is of great interest and importance is that the former makes predictions that the latter does not. But in the postulated situation we would not need to do science in order to know the future. As things are in the actual world, most moral decisions are decisions taken in uncertainty about the consequences of our actions, even if we discount the possibility of interference by other agents. I do not know for certain that, if I smoke, I will get cancer; or that, if I refuse to give money to Oxfam, another person will starve to death. Maybe I will be one of the ones who does not get cancer, and maybe my failing to make my small gift to Oxfam will make no difference to the number of people who starve to death. For suppose that the only difference made by the absence of my gift is that each starving person gets an allocation of food a tiny bit smaller than what they would have got anyway; and I know that this will be the immediate effect of my action. But what I may not know is whether that difference of allocation is so small as to make no difference to the future condition of the starving. So we have to make our moral decisions on the basis of how probable it is that our actions will have various outcomes—how probable it is that I will get cancer if I continue to smoke (when I would not otherwise get cancer) or that someone will starve if I do not give (when they would not starve otherwise). These decisions under uncertainty are not merely the normal moral decisions; they are also the hard ones. Since probabilities are so hard to assess, it is all too easy to persuade yourself that it is worth taking the chance that no harm will result from the less demanding decision (that is, the decision that you have a strong desire to make). And, even if you face up to a correct assessment of the probabilities, true dedication to the good is shown by doing the act that, although it is probably the best action, may have no good consequences at all. But if we are often in this situation (and for the above reasons it is good that we should be), then it is good (because we rightly seek to do good actions) that we should have the opportunity to obtain more certain knowledge of the consequences of our actions—that will involve getting more data about the consequences of events, for example, data from the past about what has happened to people who have smoked in ignorance of the possibility that smoking causes cancer. Seeking more certain knowledge, in other words, involves once again relying on normal induction. Above all, if our knowledge of the consequences of our actions is limited, we have the all-important choice of whether or not to pursue scientific inquiry to extend our knowledge, and of teaching or not teaching others the results of such inquiry. The rationality that is necessary if we are to make serious moral choices is, quite apart from its value for this purpose, a great good in itself. One of the very greatest glories of humans is their ability to be responsive to evidence and reach probable conclusions about the effects of their actions, about how the world works, and about what is our origin and destiny. Rationality is a quality for which it is worth paying a considerable price. We rightly value greatly the scientist who investigates the causes and effects of things and who opens himself to applying objectively correct criteria to discovering how nature operates, and about which events cause pain and which cause pleasure. And it is a further glory of humans that they cooperate in the activity of reaching probable conclusions; some humans teach others, and the others build on those foundations. And humans have the choice whether or not to investigate, to cooperate in investigation, and to teach the results of investigation. To have these various serious moral choices, we need initially to be (more or less) ignorant of the consequences of our actions, for good or evil. The occurrence of natural evil gives us the choice of improving our knowledge of these consequences, which we cannot obtain in any other way without a serious loss of good.
I dispute that this knowledge is intrinsically good.
Direct awareness is a rational method of belief—even regarding probability judgements.
God could give us ways of gaining moral knowledge without suffering. For example, giving us a complex moral sense that requires difficult decisions.
Why is making tough moral decisions good? It seems like perhaps choosing to do right is good, but not knowing what’s right certainly isn’t.
Swinburne next argues God could allow evil for greater good, which I agree with.
It may be urged that, despite the good ends that its actual or possible occurrence serves, there is too much evil in the world. My fourth condition for a perfectly good God to allow or bring about some evil is that it is probable that the good will outweigh any evil necessary for attaining it. And, even if it does outweigh it, there are—we have noted—limits to God’s right to impose evil. So—is there in the world too much evil for a perfectly good God to have imposed it? An objector may agree that one does need a substantial amount of various kinds of evil in order to provide the opportunity for greater goods, and in particular a choice of destiny for human beings. But he may feel that there is just too much evil in the world, and that less evil would produce adequate benefit. It might be said that a God could give to man choice enough by allowing him to inflict quite a bit of pain on his fellows, and could deter humans from harmful actions by some nasty headaches. In our world, the objection goes, things are too serious. There is too much evil that humans can do to their fellows, and too many and too unpleasant natural evils to subserve the good of the opportunities for sympathetic and courageous response and for rational inference and inquiry that they give to humans. The suffering of children and animals is something that rightly often appals us. This is, I believe, the crux of the problem of evil. It is not the fact of evil or the kinds of evil that are the real threat to theism: it is the quantity of evil—both the number of people (and animals) who suffer and the amount that they suffer. If there is a God, the objector says in effect he has given humans too much choice. He has inflicted too much suffering on too many people (and animals) for the purpose of making it possible for them to have a free choice and to make greatly significant differences to themselves, each other, and the world on the basis of knowledge obtained by rational inquiry. No God ought to have allowed Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the Lisbon Earthquake, or the Black Death, claims the objector. With the objection that, if there is a God, he has overdone it, I feel considerable initial sympathy. The objection seems to count against the claim that there is a God.
But then I reflect that each bad state or possible bad state eliminated eliminates one actual good. Each small addition to the number of actual or possible bad states makes a small addition to the number of actual or possible good states. Suppose that one less person had been burnt by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Then there would have been less opportunity for courage and sympathy; one less piece of information about the effects of atomic radiation, less people (relatives of the person burnt) who would have had a strong desire to campaign for nuclear disarmament and against imperialist expansion. And so on. Of course removal of one bad state or the possibility of one bad state will not remove much good, any more than the removal of one grain of sand will make much difference to the fact that you still have a heap of sand. But the removal of one grain of sand will make a bit of difference, and so will the removal of one bad state.
This is false, many evils don’t achieve any good. If one fewer animal had died that we’ll never know about, child had died of malaria in immense agony, or person had gotten dementia, it’s not plausible that there would be some greater good that would have been lost. Imagine you could prevent covid from transferring to humans: you should obviously do so. Yet God was in that situation and did not. He is similarly in this situation for every single disease in the world—and all non disease bad things.
If you really think evils have some good that makes them overall improve the world, then we shouldn’t try to rid the world of evil, because doing so makes the world worse. After all, if malaria has some divine purpose, making the world overall better, then a world without malaria would be worse, so we shouldn’t try to get rid of malaria. It just isn’t plausible that there are no evils that would make the world better in their absence.
What, in effect, the objector is asking is that God shall very greatly diminish the number of sufferers and intensity of the suffering produced by natural processes, and the harm that humans can do to each other. What this means is that, yes, there should be diseases, but not ones that maim or kill; accidents that incapacitate people for a year or two but not for life; we could cause each other pain or not help each other to acquire knowledge, but not damage our own or each other’s characters. And our influence would be limited to those with whom we come into contact; there would be no possibility of influencing for good or ill distant generations. And most of our beliefs about how to cause effects, good or evil, would be beliefs with which we would be born. Such a world would be a toy-world; a world where things matter, but not very much; where we can choose and our choices can make a small difference, but the real choices remain God’s. The objector is asking that God should not be willing to be generous and trust us with his world, and give us occasional opportunities to show ourselves at our heroic best.
This is fundamentally confused. Imagine the following dialogue.
Person 1: “You should eat healthier food.”
Person 2: “Okay, but there’s lots of unhealthy food which I really enjoy and would decrease my quality of life if I didn’t eat it.”
Person 1: “Okay, but there is also lots of unhealthy food you don’t enjoy. Examples include twinkies, kid-kats, and raw beef. You’ve said you don’t enjoy them and they’re unhealthy, so stop eating them".”
Person 2: “But you’re really asking me to cut out all unhealthy food.”
Person 1: “Well, I think you probably should, but right now my claim is that there is at least one of the foods you eat that you should stop eating. Whatever else I may claim, you should stop eating some of those things.”
In this case, it’s obvious that person 2 doesn’t have the best possible diet. Evil is the same. Maybe we think the world should have no evil, or far less evil. However, at the very least, there is some evil which shouldn’t exist.
If someone claimed another should be less annoying, the fact that some annoyance might be necessary would not mean they should let out loud squeals for no reason, just to be annoying.
It’s also not clear why a world in which millions of kids didn’t die of disease would be a toy world. Presumably heaven isn’t a toy world where nothing matters. God could make everyone perfectly well off.
I have already suggested that God would not have the right to give anyone an earthly life that is on balance bad unless he provided for them a compensatory period of good life after death. To add to theism the hypothesis that he does so is to complicate theism. I am also inclined to suggest that, if God makes humans (and animals) suffer to the extent to which he does, albeit for good purposes, he would in virtue of his perfect goodness share our suffering himself. (He would recognize it as a best act to do so.) We think that good 264 The Problem of Evil parents who make their children eat a plain diet because of some disease that they have will often share that diet (although they do not themselves suffer from the disease); or, if they make their children play with difficult neighbouring children who are badly in need of friendship, they will show special friendship to the neighbouring parents (even if the parents are less in need of friendship). Good kings and queens share the suffering that they demand of their subjects for good purposes (for example, to win a war against an oppressor), even if the suffering of the king or queen itself would not help to forward that particular good purpose. If he makes us suffer as much as we do, God must become incarnate and share our suffering. But to add to theism the hypothesis that he does so is further to complicate theism. For, while his allowing the kinds of evil that he does is as such compatible with his perfect goodness, and not unexpected in view of the good states that it makes possible, my concern (as that of most people who are concerned with the problem of evil ) is with the degree of that evil (the amount particular individuals have to suffer). That, my claim is, God would be justified in allowing only if he provides a compensatory period of good life after death (where necessary) and perhaps also shares the suffering of humans and animals by becoming incarnate.While I am not myself confident that there are any humans such that it would be better for them not to have lived, let me nevertheless allow the objector his claim that there are such. In that case theism needs one or may be two additional complicating hypotheses. Given them, and so the additional good that the additional evil makes possible, the degree of evil is not unexpected. For God might well be expected to ask a lot from us in order to give a lot to us
This is no explanation for evil. The fact that in the long term things will turn out good isn’t a justification for why small children die of cancer and little old ladies burn to death.
God being incarnate doesn’t prevent the world’s suffering.
I think Swinburne is wrong, there are people with lives not worth living (see here for some very horrific examples that will probably make you very sad).
Whether lives are overall worth living or not doesn’t affect whether or not God has a reason for allowing specific examples of evil.
Finally, Swinburne believes in hell, so there will be lives that aren’t worth living.
Note further that, while evil may provide a good C-inductive argument against the existence of God (bare theism); it does not provide a good C-inductive argument against Christian theism (theism plus the central Christian doctrines incorporated in creeds), for life after death8 and God becoming incarnate are already part of the more detailed hypothesis of Christian theism; which, because of its more detailed character (its greater scope), is always as such less probable than bare theism. So any further evidence in favour of these two detailed Christian claims9 will diminish further the force of the C-inductive argument. (And if the only extra hypothesis required were life after death, then, since that is part of many more specific forms of theism (for example, Islam), evil would not provide a good C-inductive argument against these forms of theism.)
Christian theism does not have the resources to account for evil, for reasons I describe here, here, and here.
Swinburne then moves onto hiddenness writing
My answer is twofold. Agnosticism makes possible a good for the agnostic, and it makes possible a good for the religious believer. To start with the former—a deep conviction of the existence of God inhibits someone’s ability to choose freely between good and evil. It makes it too easy to choose the good for anyone who has either a strong desire to be liked by good persons (and especially any on whom he depends for his existence), stronger than any contrary bad desire; or a strong desire for his own future well-being combined with a strong belief that it is quite likely that a God would not provide a good afterlife for bad people. Why it makes it too easy to choose the good is because, as we saw earlier, in order for someone to have a free choice between good and evil, he needs temptation—a (balance of) desire to do what is evil, which he can then resist, if he so chooses. Our good desires have to be outweighed in their causal influence on us by our evil desires if we are to make a free choice in favour of the good.
But then it’s bad to convince people God exists.
The agnosticism of the agnostic also makes possible a great good for the religious believer. It allows the believer to have the awesome choice of helping or not helping the agnostic to understand who is the source of his existence and of his ultimate well-being (helping the agnostic not merely by verbal preaching but by an example of what living a religious life is like). The existence of honest agnosticism may, if there is a God, be due to the failures of believers to help agnostics in these ways. But while, if there is a God, there are these good states that the evil of agnosticism makes possible, the goodness of these states (as of some of the other good states discussed in this chapter) depends on their being temporary. Agnosticism allows the agnostic to make a more serious commitment to the good than he would be able to make if the presence of God were more obvious. As his earthly life progresses, so he begins to form his character for good or ill. Once he has become committed to the good, the advantage of agnosticism in helping him to do it with great seriousness disappears. If he makes himself a good person, he makes himself a person ready to worship his creator if he learns that he exists, whether in this life or another one. And the goodness for the religious believer of the existence of agnosticism is for him to have the opportunity to abolish it. It loses its point if the believer makes himself so hard-hearted as to be indifferent to it. So, of course, if God has made us, it is a great good that he should show us his presence, and I shall be arguing in the next two chapters that he does show his presence to many humans. And there would be no good in the existence of agnosticism for the religious believer if there were no religious believers. So some must be aware of the presence of God (either through religious experience or seeing the force of arguments) if the existence of agnosticism is to provide an opportunity for them.
But if agnosticism is good then making people aware of God would be bad.
I think Swinburne’s account is fine if one doesn’t think that those who don’t believe in God will burn forever. If they do, not so much.
To be continued.