The Problem of Evil Is a Problem for Everyone
The most oft-discussed objection against theism is the problem of evil, and it runs basically as follows:
- If an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God exists, then he obviously wouldn't allow an evil unless he had a sufficiently good reason for doing so.
- Cite numerous examples of apparently gratuitous evils (i.e., evils for which there does not seem to be any sufficiently good reason for God to allow).
- Conclude that the examples cited in (2) count as evidence against the existence of God as defined in (1).
What is seldom recognized, however, is that atheists have a problem here too. In fact, the problem confronting the atheist is, arguably, at least as serious as that confronting the theist. The problem for the atheist can be posed in the form of a trilemma:
- Either (a) the atheist affirms that there is objective evil or (b) he affirms that there is none or (3) he remains agnostic on the matter.
- If (a) then the atheist is committed to an objective standard of goodness, but whence does this standard of goodness come from?
- If (b), then the atheist flies in the face of moral commonsense and gives up any objective basis for moral complaint.
- If (c), then the atheist has the burden of explaining how it is possible that there be objective evil and also flies in the face of moral commonsense, which takes it as obvious that some things (e.g., torturing a baby for fun) are wrong.
And if the atheist, as many do, denies that there is any objective morality, then he bites a rather large bullet. On the face of it, it just seems obvious, even an a priori truth, that torturing babies, rape, murder, the Holocaust, etc. are just plain evil. If the atheist is going to say that such thing are not really evil, then he's saying something that is prima facie highly implausible. And it's hard to see how this admission is any less implausible on its face than is the typical theistic response to cases of apparently gratuitous evil, namely, the suggestion that God may have reasons for allowing it that are inscrutable to us. (Indeed, it is arguable that the theist gets the better end of this exchange.)
My conclusion, then, is that the problem of evil is a serious problem for everyone, theist and atheist alike. Consequently, examples of apparently gratuitous evil have little tendency to support atheism over against theism.
posted by Alan Rhoda @ 10:16 PM
34 comments
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34 Comments:
I really appreciated what you had to say. I hadn't thought of it that way before, that it's really a problem for everyone. Not just theists. Very interesting. Have you thought about the problem of good? That's an interesting twist to the whole situation.
Good post Alan.
I think part of the reason why this is seen only as a problem for theists is that according to secularized academia theism (particularly Christian theism) is patriarchal, condones slavery, and is just a bunch of myths.
My view is that when the Christian West tucked tail and ran at the Enlightenment's arrival from Europe, they isolated themselves and thus became highly suspect, rationally speaking.
That's why what you are doing (& hopefully me) is so important in my view. Although the Kingdom is about winning hearts and not being smarter than unbelievers, the re-establishment of the intelligibility of the faith will have a profound effect on evangelism and ethics in the broader culture.
Thanks for your minstry Alan.
Amandalaine,
Thanks for your comment. It think I touched on the problem of good in option (a) of my trilemma. The problem you reference, if I understand you, is to explain where objective moral standards come from. What grounds them? This is an important issue that deserves more development than I gave it. A full treatment would require an examination of the famous "Euthyphro dilemma". (If that dilemma works, then the theist may not be in any better position to ground morality than the atheist, in which case the problem of evil would, I think, give some support to atheism over against at least some forms of theism.)
Hi Derek,
Thanks for the encouragement. I appreciate it.
As I'm sure you would agree, how worldview debates get settled only partially turns on who has the better arguments. In the end, after all the argumentative dust has settled (and maybe even before then), each of us will have to choose what kind of worldview (or Kingdom) we're willing to accept.
Good points. They resemble the approach of C. Stephen Layman in his articles in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion entitled "Moral Evil: The comparative Response" and "Natural Evil: The Comparative Response". These give an excellent and expanded version of the answer to the argument from evil you develop here. His way of arguing is vastly superior to skeptical theism and theodicy.
I do dispute, though, that moral arguments based on the need for "grounding" objective morality succeed; on the contrary, it seems it is certain facts associated with morality that need explaining. See my post Here for three moral arguments for God's existence.
That's why Buddhism sees that there is no good or evil, things are how they should be.
Alan,
that is such a good point. Recently a man named erwin mcmanus (i'm sure you have heard of him) wrote a book called soul cravings. It doesn't take a academic approach, but according to one of my good friends, Mcmanus talks about how truth and trust are intimately related. He states that our beliefs on truth are connected with what (or who) we are willing to trust. and visa-versa. He states that our views often fall inbetween the two ideals of who or what we are willing to trust and our view of what is true.
I like this view b/c it is honest about our (false) dualistic view of truth and belief. While it may be helpful to separate the two for precision, there is no way we can completely compartmentalize ourselves. Dealing with both poles at some point is the only way we can keep from deceiving ourselves as to why we believe certain ideas.
I want to take a closer look at one of the options you set out for the atheist.
You write:
If, like nearly all modern Western atheists, he believes that the physical universe is all there is, then it is really hard to see where objective moral laws could come from. What arrangement of matter, energy, and space-time could give rise to a moral obligation? Of course, he can try to give an evolutionary explanation of why we have the moral intuitions we do, but at most that explains why we think that some things are moral and others aren't. It does nothing to explain how something could be moral or immoral.
I don't know of many serious philosophers that are atheists that deny that morality is objective or would be confuse an evolutionary explanation of the origin of moral sentiment with an evolutionary account of the foundations of morality. You say many do, but I'm sceptical.
What they will say is that the physical facts are enough to ground morality. They'll say that you can't conceive of two worlds, physically indiscernible, that differ morally. That's not to say that you can derive the moral facts from non-moral descriptions of the universe. We've all read our Hume and most of us think that this is impossible, but we've also read our Kripke and know that there's nothing wrong with saying that the necessary connections between the moral and non-moral aspects of the universe are not necessarily knowable apriori even if they're knowable.
When you write, "it is really hard to see where objective moral laws could come from. What arrangement of matter, energy, and space-time could give rise to a moral obligation?" I'm having a hard time finding an argument here that isn't a fallacious appeal to ignorance. Maybe you can fill in the details a bit. I for one don't think that it's particularly hard to see how arrangements of matter, energy, and space-time give rise to moral obligations. Suppose that matter, energy, and space-time are arranged in such a way that we have a helpless infant, a sentient creature capable of suffering. What else would you need to make it the case that we have something that you shouldn't injure!?! Why isn't matter arranged into sentient beings not enough to determine that there is a duty not to do damage to this little material being?
MG,
Thanks for the references to Layman. I'll make it a point to look up those articles.
As for the "grounding" of morality, it should be clear that I didn't present anything close to a full-scale argument from morality to theism. You may be right, though, that grounding issues, by themselves, are not sufficient to construct an cogent argument for God's existence. Perhaps we do need to bring in "certain facts associated with morality" as well. I'm not sure about that, and will have to think on it further. I do think, however, that grounding considerations are sufficient to pose a serious problem for any strictly materialistic form of atheism.
Jojo,
You said that "Buddhism sees that there is no good or evil, things are how they should be."
This doesn't seem self-consistent to me. If there is no good or evil, then what can it mean to say that this is how things "should" be? I think you would be better to simply say "things are how they are".
The title of the post seems terribly misleading. The problem for the atheists is not evil, but rather the objectivity of morals. Furthermore, this is just as much a problem for the theists due to the Euthyphro dilemma. Thus, the theist is stuck with two really hard problems while the atheist is stuck with only one.
Hi Clayton,
Even if it were impossible that there be two physically indiscernable worlds that differ in morality, it wouldn't follow that morality does or could supervenes on the physical. To establish the plausibility of the supervenience thesis you have to do more than that. You'll need a halfway plausible story of how the moral could emerge from the merely physical. Frankly, I don't see any plausible stories along those lines in sight.
You beg to differ and accuse me of a fallacious appeal to ignorance, but you shouldn't be so quick to make such charges. A fallacious appeal to ignorance is essentially an illicit attempt to shirk or shift one's proper burden of proof, and at this point in our discussion there is no agreement on where the burden of proof lies. I think it's with you because it seems quite obvious to me that the merely physical cannot give rise to the moral. Your intuitions seem to run in the opposite direction. Hence, you think I have the burden of proof. Until we can resolve this particular impasse, accusing one another of fallacious appeals to ignorance is simply not productive.
To challenge my intuitions, you offer the following scenario: "Suppose that matter, energy, and space-time are arranged in such a way that we have a helpless infant, a sentient creature capable of suffering. What else would you need to make it the case that we have something that you shouldn't injure!?!
I respond as follows: In addition to that helpless sentient creature, you would also need a moral rule to the effect that inflicting suffering on sentient creatures (without just cause) is wrong. Consequently, I think your scenario validates my intuitions, not yours. For it seems to me that you find moral supervenience on the physical plausible only because you tacitly smuggle the moral in the back door by presupposing a moral rule such as I have suggested.
Clayton, there's one other thing I also thought about regarding your rhetorical question, "Why isn't matter arranged into sentient beings not enough to determine that there is a duty not to do damage to this little material being?"
Here's the basic scenario you have here: one helpless infant, one person that is causing the suffering (who apparently doesn't think it's wrong), and one person who feels it is wrong to cause the infant to suffer.
All are composed of the same basic physical properties.
What physical difference(s) could explain the moral difference?
Jeff,
You're right to bring up the Euthyphro dilemma in this context. If it works, it would seem to tip the balance toward the atheist as far as the problem of evil and the grounding of morality issues are concerned.
For my part, I don't think the E.D. succeeds, but unfortunately I'll have to leave that as another story for another time. Thanks for the comment.
Alan,
A couple of points...
(1) As for the fallacious appeal to ignorance, I thought a perfectly serviceable test went something like this. An argument commits that fallacy when the grounds for thinking that A is false is that A isn't known to be true (offered in contexts in which it's clear that A's not being known isn't evidence for the falsity of A).
The only argument I could see behind the rhetorical question you asked went something like this:
I can't imagine/don't know how the physical constitutes the moral, thus there is no constitution relation between them.
If you have a better way of making that point, I'm all ears. If you don't, that's a pretty straightforward case of a fallacious appeal to ignorance.
(2) As for supervenience and emergence, I think you're simply mistaken unless we were to assume that the F's supervene on the G's only if the F's emerge from the G's. One definition of supervenience is just that you can't have F-variance without G-variance. If you're granting that fixing the material aspects of the w1 and w2 doesn't allow for moral variation between w1 and w2 that is to establish the supervenience according to the definition of supervenience.
There is at present a debate as to whether supervenience is strong enough to rule out emergence, but none of the main players in that debate take emergence to be a necessary condition on supervenience (If nothing else, the F's supervene on the F's and nothing emerges from itself).
Establishing that the supervenience thesis is false requires imagining a world just like this one physically in every last detail where the moral facts differ. If you or any reader thinks that they can imagine that, say, in this world it's wrong to skin cats but in some physically indiscernible world it is okay, that intuition may well threaten the supervenience claim, but I'll wager that no one has that intuition.
(3) As for rules...
I have no idea what work the rule does in the case you mention. You make it sound as if the fact that the infant is suffering is insufficient to ground the wrongness if there is no rule. Presumably that would only be true if the suffering isn't the ground of the rule. What grounds these rules? A divine command? What grounds those commands if not the facts about infant suffering?
Heather,
I'm not sure I get the question you are asking. what moral difference are you referring to?
Clayton,
You seemed to state that "matter [is sufficiently] arranged into sentient beings ... to determine that there is a duty not to do damage to this little material being." If matter is arranged in such a way to determine that we're obligated to not harm infants, then I'm asking you to spell this out a bit further. How would the arrangement of matter determine moral laws? The answer to this is not clear because we find specific moral discrepancies in real life such as in cases where some people think it's ok to harm infants and others don't.
Heather,
I think I see better what you were asking, thanks.
Those who think that materialism has the resources for accounting for the objectivity of morality could say something like this.
(1) When material is arranged into infants, it's arranged into a sentient creature.
(2) Such creatures have an interest in not suffering, a fact known to anyone who has suffered pain themselves.
(3) That such creatures have such interests is sufficient to establish that there is a prima facie reason not to inflict such suffering.
(4) You oughtn't act against prima facie reasons unless you have a stronger reason to do so.
I'm not sure at which point here I've failed to supply a sufficient condition. Is it that the material stuff not enough for consciousness? Is it just contingent that beings that can suffer pain have an interest in not suffering pain? Is the infant's interest in not suffering not enough to constitute a reason for us to refrain from causing it to suffer?
Because I can't see how any of these links could sensibly be questioned, it's hard to see how the material aspects of the world could fail to provide a basis for some objective moral facts. But, some might be more imaginative than me.
Clayton,
Thanks for the reply.
(1) Regarding appeals to ignorance, let me say again that I think this is a red herring. My conclusion that the moral cannot come from the physical rests on what strikes me as a clear and obvious intuition. There's nothing intrinsically fallacious or irrational in that. People appeal to intuitions to justify claims all the time, and it's hard to see how we could do anything like mathematics or philosophy without recognizing intuition as a legitimate type of evidence. Now if you don't share my intuitions, then my appeal to them will not be convincing to you, but so what? All that shows is that we disagree about the truth of a premise, not that any fallacy of reasoning has occurred.
(2) I can flesh out my intuitions a bit, however. It seems to me that moral principles are necessary truths. It is wrong to torture babies to death for fun not just here and now, or in physical worlds similar to our own, but it is wrong everywhere and always, even in possible worlds in which there are no infants to torture, and it would be wrong even if there were no physical world at all. If that's right, then moral principles (as opposed to the application of moral principles, see below) are completely independent of the physical world. Hence, moral principles cannot be reduced to the physical.
(3) Regarding supervenience. You reject emergence-supervenience (ES) ("F's supervene on the G's only if the F's emerge from the G's") in favor of a kind of one-way invariance-supervenience (IS) (no F-variance without G-variance), where G is the ground or supervenience base. But I don’t see how this helps. The problem is that IS is too weak to effect a reduction of moral principles to physical facts. Either moral principles are contingent truths and thus can vary, or they are necessary truths (as I believe) and thus cannot vary. If moral principles can vary, and if there can be no moral variance without physical variance, then IS says that corresponding to every moral variance is a physical variance. But even if that’s the case, all it shows is that the moral and physical are correlated in a lawlike way. No reduction’s in sight. And if moral principles can’t vary, IS is satisfied (in this case there’s no F-variance without G-variance b/c there’s no F-variance, period) but moral principles turn out to be entirely indifferent to physical facts. Again, no reduction’s in sight.
So either you’re going to have to come up with another kind of supervenience to make your program work, or your going to have to fall back on ES, which you seem to agree won't work.
(4) Regarding moral rules. You ask, “What grounds these rules? A divine command? What grounds those commands if not the facts about infant suffering?”
In my view, facts about the infant’s suffering have nothing at all to do with what moral rules there are. The only thing physical facts affect is the application of moral rules, not the rules themselves. Thus, given the rule that suffering ought to be alleviated if it can be done without compromising other equal or greater goods or causing equal or greater evils, if I can help the suffering infant (without compromising ... etc.) then I ought to do so. The moral rule applies to me in that situation but the situation didn’t create the rule.
What grounds moral rules? I would say that moral rules are grounded in God’s nature, not in his commands. Of course, more needs to be said to flesh that idea out, as I’m sure you’ll agree, but that’ll have to do for now as I’ve gotta run. Cheers.
Clayton,
The four-step answer you gave Heather seems problematic to me.
First of all, if by "reason" in (3) you mean "moral reason" then I don't think it's obvious at all. Indeed, on that reading it begs the question by simply asserting that physical facts are "sufficient" to give rise to objective morality. On the other hand, if by "reason" you mean something other than "moral reason" then I fail to see the relevance of (3) to the discussion.
Second, (4) seems to just posit a moral rule, without any clear materialist grounding for doing so. It is not entirely clear to me, however, if "ought" and "reasons" here are supposed to have moral, as opposed to, say, merely pragmatic force. In short, I suspect that you are equivocating at one or more points here by sliding from non-moral reasons to moral reasons.
'It seems to me that moral principles are necessary truths. It is wrong to torture babies to death for fun not just here and now, or in physical worlds similar to our own, but it is wrong everywhere and always, even in possible worlds in which there are no infants to torture, and it would be wrong even if there were no physical world at all.'
You don't need a God to explain ncessary truths.
'Thus, given the rule that suffering ought to be alleviated if it can be done without compromising other equal or greater goods or causing equal or greater evils, if I can help the suffering infant (without compromising ... etc.) then I ought to do so.'
If we see a baby being tortured, and know for a fact that God is not alleviating the suffering, then we know for a fact that the torture of the baby is leading to a greater good.
Should we allow abortion?
God would only allow abortion if it leads to a greater good.
God allows abortion.
Therefore, abortion leads to a greater good.
Should the Holocaust have been prevented.
God would only have allowed the Holocaust if it led to a greater good.
God allowed the Holocaust,
Therefore, the Holocaust led to a greater good.
Alan,
I don't have much of a view about rules versus reasons, except that the two seem to spend quite a bit of time together. My own preference is to speak of reasons first.
I guess I'm somewhat shocked by the suggestion that the facts in virtue of which an infant would suffer if I kicked it couldn't on their own constitute a reason to refrain from doing so. It seems your view is that nothing could constitute a reason not to kick a helpless child unless those facts included facts about relations between the infant, me, and a divine being. In terms of the metaphysics, this strikes me as, well, about as crazy as any view about the metaphysics of morality one could possibly dream up. (Okay, I suppose if you substituted relations between infant and a divine being for relations between an infant and a burning barn 37 miles from the left is an ounce crazier, but only an ounce).
It seems you're committed to what we might call the denial of 'localism', the view that the properties that determine whether there is reason to kick a child or not are to be located in the regions of space-time near where the child is to be found. I'm a localist about some reasons for action and you're view seems to be that localism is never true about moral reasons for action and your argument against that view is that you don't have an intuition that it's true.
I'll note, however, that typically when we're arguing against theses like localism and appeal to our intuitions, we don't just say 'Well, I don't find it intuitive, therefore it's wrong'. We tell stories that present apparent possibilities in which such theses are false. You haven't even bothered to do that, and that's why I think you can't dress up what strikes me as an argument from ignorance as the typical appeal to intuition.
As for your remarks concerning supervenience, I think you're really setting up a strawman since almost no one who thinks that the material facts ground the moral facts are reductionists. Of course the invariance supervenience is too weak for reduction, but arguing against reductionism is too weak for rejecting materialism. For example, I don't think any sane person denies that all actual computers are material objects. I also don't think few thoughtful people think that the computer facts are reducible to micro-physical facts. There could have been ghostly computers.
Hi Alan,
I think that you speak rather unfairly for atheists when you suggest that it is so uncomfortable for them to "bite the bullet" and reject horn B of your trilemma. Certainly the most prominent ones that come to mind, such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, express no need for any objective basis for morality beyond the evolutionary account that they (quite rightly, I think) credit with the universality of human moral intuitions.
You say that such an evolutionary account might explain why we think that certain acts are in addition we have some extra way of seeing, as an a priori truth, that such acts don't just seem immoral, but actually are immoral. But you haven't demonstrated that these moral guidelines actually are grounded in any objective way, other than to argue that such an assumption "just seems obvious" - and of course the atheist can reply that yes, it does indeed "just seem obvious", precisely because we are wired up, for excellent adaptive reasons, to see things that way.
I for one, as a (very) skeptical agnostic, bite that bullet with no philosophical conflict whatsoever, and with a clear conscience.
Sorry - the first sentence of the second paragraph got mangled somehow. It was meant to be:
You say that such an evolutionary account might explain why we think that certain acts are immoral, but also claim that in addition we have some extra way of seeing, as an a priori truth, that such acts don't just seem immoral, but actually are immoral.
Clayton,
I’ve been extremely busy these past few days, so I apologize that I haven’t been able to get back to this until now.
I have a few questions about the 4-step accounting for the objectivity of morality you proposed.
First, “that such creatures have such interests” suggests a subjective reason (I also get this from (2), where you add “a fact known to anyone who has suffered pain themselves”) for the objectivity of morality. I don’t see how one’s desire to avoid pain provides sufficient grounding that we shouldn’t inflict pain on another. In other words, how are desires sufficient enough to establish that there are objective truths in regards to morality?
While I do agree that there is a prima facie reason to not inflict suffering, I don’t see how the explanation given in (3) suffices. I do think that our intuitions that certain forms suffering does indicate that there is objective morality, I don’t see how intuitions cause objective morality (if I correctly understand what you’re saying here).
Steven,
"You don't need a God to explain ncessary truths."
Granted...necessary truths can stand on their own. But your statement, "It seems to me that moral principles are necessary truths." seems to be question-begging.
Derek,
I'm very much in sympathy with your position, but I think you have a one-sided view of the history of the enlightenment. You write:
My view is that when the Christian West tucked tail and ran at the Enlightenment's arrival from Europe, they isolated themselves and thus became highly suspect, rationally speaking.
For a fuller view of the interplay between faith and reason in the Enlightenment, check out the orthodox writers during the deist controversy -- people like Thomas Sherlock, Joseph Butler, Samuel Chandler, Nathaniel Lardner, and John Leland.
Alan,
There is a fundamental flaw in your argument which hasn't been pointed out yet.
You claim that the atheist, in order to use evil as evidence against the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, must somehow objectively establish the existence of evil. That is simply not true. It is enough to establish the existence of evil according to the standards of the theist.
For example, imagine that you are a member of a strange religion which finds sunsets to be a great evil. Yet you claim the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God who created the universe. As a skeptic, I can point to the fact of sunsets as evidence against your God, whether or not I share your belief that sunsets are evil -- indeed, whether or not I believe in objective morality at all.
The problem of evil remains a problem strictly for the theist.
Alan,
You said:
On the face of it, it just seems obvious, even an a priori truth, that torturing babies, rape, murder, the Holocaust, etc. are just plain evil. If the atheist is going to say that such thing are not really evil, then he's saying something that is prima facie highly implausible.
This is a classic case of begging the question. You're saying that a thing isn't "really evil" unless it is objectively so. That's like saying that food isn't "really delicious" unless it is objectively so, and yet we seem to have no difficulty accepting taste in food as at once subjective and real.
So, there is no problem for the atheist. Just because our personal or cultural definition of evil isn't absolute doesn't mean that there's no definition. What it does mean is that any attempt to claim that God is perfectly good is fraught with difficulty. As keiths just pointed out, the theist is claiming God is perfectly good, and if the theist doesn't mean that God is good in the common, cultural sense of the word, then how are we to take the meaning of the theist's claim?
Exactly, Dr. Logic. We can get along very nicely with our own evolved sense of what is good and what is evil (augmented or superseded, of course, by whatever rational and social considerations we deem relevant), as I pointed out above. The discomfiture that Dr. Rhoda imagines the atheist must feel if he cannot work up an argument for grounding an objective morality in the physical world simply isn't there.
Keiths,
In order for an atheist to begin to work on a system of morality, said atheist must agree that there is such a thing as morality. What is it? Where does it come from? Why must we have such?
Out of the moral codes of most of the communities of humans, there is good and evil. Where do we get such notions? Can't we just have pleasure as a principle way of deciding? Why should I ever care about whether my pleasure, success, wealth, etc., come at the expense of someone else? Many folks obviously don't!
So, once the atheist agrees with the notions of morality, good, and evil, then of what use would they be if they are not objective. A moral system that is not objective would seem like no moral system at all. Why bother?
If it is objective, then who, what, or how did it come into being?
This is how I think it is easiest to reconcile
For the Theist
as Jojo said 'things are how they SHOULD be' i.e. the evil we see in the world isn't evil from god's perspective.
that sounds counter intuitive but if you think of it in the context of advanced physics it starts to look like it is on much stronger ground (for example imagine if, at least in a sense, all possibilities exit).
2) for the atheist
you say I don’t believe in moral absolutes in the sense that they would exist if there is a god BUT I believe that there is more or less a human consensus on what is moral and that in the 'conversational space' that consensus is as natural to apply to the words good moral or whatever as wet is to water.
It is also of course natural that people would argue (or fight) for that emergent consensus against other theories.
Dr. Logic,
"Alan,
You said:
On the face of it, it just seems obvious, even an a priori truth, that torturing babies, rape, murder, the Holocaust, etc. are just plain evil. If the atheist is going to say that such thing are not really evil, then he's saying something that is prima facie highly implausible.
This is a classic case of begging the question. You're saying that a thing isn't "really evil" unless it is objectively so. That's like saying that food isn't "really delicious" unless it is objectively so, and yet we seem to have no difficulty accepting taste in food as at once subjective and real."
When you said "this food is delicious," you're saying, "I like this food." You cannot be wrong about that. You are infallible. It is descriptive, and not prescriptive.
When we say, as Alan was, "prima facie, torturing babies is evil" we are not making a descritpive claim like: "I do not like torturing babies, " or, "I disagree with baby torturing," but we are claiming that it is prima facie *wrong* to torture babies. We are making a normative claim.
Thus your analogy was disanalogous.
cheers,
~PM
MANATA
When we say, as Alan was, "prima facie, torturing babies is evil" we are not making a descritpive claim like: "I do not like torturing babies, " or, "I disagree with baby torturing," but we are claiming that it is prima facie *wrong* to torture babies.
CARR
And it is a normative claim that God should not allow babies to be tortured.
God though makes the claim 'It is OK to allow babies to be tortured, because I allow babies to be tortured'.
And this is why the Problem of Evil refutes people who claim that it is objectively wrong to allow babies to be tortured.
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