No Canadian Catholic, Evil God Is Not a Failed Thought Experiment
Responding to a deeply terrible article about the evil God challenge
Ever since Law dropped his evil God argument , theists have been struggling to come up with an adequate response to it. The argument is basically that, if we can’t rule out a good god based on evil, then we can’t rule out an evil God based on good. So if the responses to the problem of evil work, then we could similarly argue for maximally evil god that’s equally probable.
After all theists say things like
A) We can’t know what a good god would do, so we can’t rule out god having a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil.
But if this is true then we should accept
B) We also can’t know what an evil god would do, so we can’t rule out a maximaly evil entity having a morally insufficient reason for allowing good.
They say
C) We can’t experience good without knowing evil, just like we don’t call a line crooked unless we have an idea of a straight line
But then they should accept
D) We can’t experience evil without knowing good, just like we don’t call a line crooked unless we have an idea of a straight line
They say
E) Free will is needed for the greatest goods, so god gives us free will
But then they should accept
F) Free will is needed for the greatest evils, so an evil god could give us free will.
We could go on and on through all the theodicies. However, Canadian Catholic has a response that he thinks is successful. He is very wrong about this.
One problem with this thought experiment though, as I have stated numerous times, is that its defenders are never willing to define exactly what they mean by their preferred "evil deity".
Consider the following: The most common definition of what it means for a God to be all-good is the view that God has all the great making properties. But the opposite of this cannot be the definition of an "evil deity", since rationality is a great making property, for example, and thus, a maximally evil God would have to be maximally irrational, and thus, even if it was evil, creating an all good world could be just as, if not more, consistent with its character.
Rationality is not always a good making property. This can be shown with the principle
G) Rationality is only good when possessed by good entities.
This is very plausible, the Hitler would plausibly have been even worse had he been more rational and not made the military blunder of attacking Russia during the winter.
The other definition I keep hearing is that the evil deity would simply want to cause the most harm, but this is just trivially untrue. Why would a God aiming to do as much evil as possible allow 99% of planes to land safely? Now, of course, our detractors will say that the same is the case with an all-good God, and we could ask why an all-good God would allow 99% of species to go extinct in history, but notice how an all-good God does not have to be defined or understood in terms of His aim. After all, an all-good God could have no obligations whatsoever towards us. There is nothing inconsistent about a God that has all the great making properties in his own rite while not being obliged to preserve species in existence.
We can accept the original definition given the objection given above. However, the evil god could have a morally insufficient reason for allowing the plains to land. Perhaps doing so causes people to have more kids who will go to heaven, or perhaps it detracts from people’s robust soul development, and we can’t know the aims of an evil god, just like Christians say we can’t know god’s plan.
Canadian Catholic is wrong that an all good god would have no obligations to us. We should accept the very plausible principle
H) A good god would have an obligation not to bring about vast amounts of unnecessary suffering.
This seems to follow trivially from any decent conception of good. However, if we deny this we could accept
I) An evil god would have no obligations to harm us.
Secondly, and most importantly, the existence of theodicies only makes sense when we assume that God is rational and thus would necessarily have morally sufficient reason for allowing some evil. Note how these sorts of defences are much harder to make on the Evil God hypothesis.
Nope, I showed above how the theodicies can apply to an evil god’s goals being furthered by allowing goods. We also assume the evil god is rational for the same reason.
Ultimately, the problem is that this is a failed thought experiment. It is dead in the water and has been for a while now. But people are unwilling to just let it go.
Canadian Catholic has catastrophically failed to show that in this article. Despite all the bluster, if this is the best the theists have to offer against the evil god challenge, then we may be in for an eternity of misery at the hands of an evil god.