Now this evaluates God’s behavior according to its consequences; it applies the ethical doctrine known as consequentialism to let God off the hook for his failure to prevent preventable evils. Yet theists are often opposed to consequentialism—doing evil that good may result (Romans 3:8)—at least as it applies to humans. This must be a case of ‘Licet jovi, non licet bovi’ (What’s permitted to Jove is not permitted to an ox).

A theist might object that doing evil is not quite the same thing as permitting evil to occur. However, if God is omnipotent and omniscient, then these are indeed the same thing. An omnipotent and omniscient God is morally responsible for any event that occurs. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, then everything that happens is something God does.⁷¹ And furthermore, even though, in the context of human frailty, we draw an important distinction between making a bad thing happen and allowing something bad to happen, we do not always hold the latter to be blameless.

The Greater Good Defense takes one of four forms:

1. The Defense from Ignorance. There could be some reason, altogether unknown to us, why God had to permit a whole lot of evil, in order to bring about a greater good. We can’t say what this reason is, but, since we don’t know everything, neither can we prove it doesn’t exist.

2. The Counterpart Defense. Good cannot exist without its counterpart, evil. The existence of evil is essential to the existence of good. Or (a related contention, but not quite the same thing): We cannot conceive of good without conceiving of evil.

3. The Opportunity for Good Defense. The existence of evil provides the opportunity for good, for example when a person’s suffering provides the opportunity for another person to act compassionately or for that person to act courageously.

4. The Free Will Defense. God could achieve certain good objectives only by giving people free will, and if people have free will, God cannot stop them doing things which bring about evil outcomes.

1. THE DEFENSE FROM IGNORANCE

The Defense from Ignorance easily slips into the Appeal to Unintelligibility, which I rejected in the previous chapter. In trying to determine whether there is a God or not, as in trying to settle any other factual issue, we have to use whatever brains and imagination we have. The assertion, ‘There may be something you haven’t thought of which will lead to the opposite conclusion’, is always true but rarely helpful. At best, it’s a reminder of the truism that all of our judgments are fallible. It does not provide us with a warrant to reverse any one of our judgments, once we have done the best we can with the evidence at our disposal.

2. THE COUNTERPART DEFENSE

The Counterpart Defense is not important for atheism, since it is an answer to Question A only, and offers no reply to Question B. If we were to accept that there has to be some evil to make the existence of the good possible or conceivable, then a tiny, token amount of evil would do the trick. God could greatly reduce the amount of actual evil without endangering the conceivability or the existence of good.

Even so, the Counterpart Defense is mistaken. A quality may hold for every existing thing, and its absence or opposite might hold for nothing at all. For a possible example, consider the fact that everything we have any knowledge of exists in time. Humans have no experience of anything that does not occur in time. For all we know, there’s nothing outside of time. Yet for thousands of years thinkers have speculated about the possibility of timelessness, or of entities outside time. Many human minds have been acutely aware of time, and have asked questions like ‘Why does time seem to have just one direction?’ and ‘Could anyone travel in time?’ even though they have never witnessed absence of time, travel in time, or anything that would contradict a single, all-enveloping flow of time.

Awareness of time, measurement of time, discussion of time’s attributes—all these are entirely feasible without there being anything timeless. And further, even if no one had ever thought of these things, it could still be true that everything in the universe occurs in time, and there is no need for there to be any timelessness for temporal phenomena to be universal.

What goes for ‘time’ goes for ‘goodness’. There could conceivably be a universe without evil, and in such a universe, intelligent minds could become aware of the non-evilness of everything, and could even discuss the hypothetical possibility of evil. This awareness would have to be non-evil, of course, but it might well be non-evil, or even good, as it would help those folks to appreciate how lucky they were to live in a universe without evil. It’s also imaginable that the universe might have been wholly good, or at least wholly non-evil, without anyone thinking of the notion of evil. There is no conceptual problem about a universe lacking in actual evil, whether or not we suppose that in such a universe anyone comes up with an idea of evil.

Someone might question this line of argument by suggesting that evil—roughly, ‘bad things’—has to exist before consciousness and intelligence could evolve. I think this is correct. However, only an atheist (or at least someone who rejects the God of classical theism) is permitted to think this! A theist must accept that God existed prior to any Darwinian struggle for survival, and most theists would also accept that hosts of angels did too. No orthodox theist can deny that there could be a universe without evil, in which intelligent minds could become aware of the possibility of evil, since that is just what they claim did prevail before the defection of Lucifer, and will again prevail, “world without end.”.

There is a special sense in which evil may be a necessary counterpart of good. It’s essential to the evolution of acting, purposive animals that they prefer some outcomes to others. The categories ‘more preferred’ and ‘less preferred’ are inescapable for any population of purposively acting beings. If we now equate ‘less preferred’ with ‘bad’ and ‘more preferred’ with good’, we can say that good and bad are inescapable categories of purposive action.

However this fact doesn’t rescue the Counterpart Defense. If you’re playing tennis, you would prefer not to hit the ball into the net, but would you describe such an event as ‘evil’? Someone could have an idyllically happy life, free of all disease and mental agony, every day a delight, and such a person would continually be looking at more preferred and less preferred outcomes. Either we can define these less preferred outcomes as below the threshold of what counts as ‘evil’, or we can say that this is evil of an extremely minute kind, and its necessity does nothing to justify the existence of truly terrible evil.

3. THE OPPORTUNITY FOR GOOD DEFENSE

Theists point out that evil makes possible good which would otherwise not arise. If there is suffering, which is bad, this may stimulate compassion, which is good. It may also help to teach the sufferer to bear suffering calmly, which is also good—though whether this would be equally good if suffering were far rarer is not so clear. But our human standards of good and evil are already adapted to a world where bad events are commonplace.

Is the amount of evil sufficiently paid for by the noble actions it evokes? Does the perfectly benevolent God perceive a moral profit on the deal? Are the Holocaust or natural disasters fully paid for by the heroic efforts of resisters and rescuers?

Even theists will usually say no. If the answer were yes, this would suggest that acting to bring evil into being, even extreme and appalling evil, would be not such a bad thing.

While bad events sometimes bring out the best in people, they far more often bring out the worst. In the medieval Black Death, for instance, appallingly callous and cruel behavior far outweighed benevolent and helpful behavior. Parents generally abandoned their children and spouses abandoned their partners if they showed signs of plague. Robbery and other forms of violence are generally more common in lower-income than in higher-income communities. Suffering is a school for vice more often than for virtue.