Part 1: The first argument
1) God is a perfect being. That is, God is unlimited in all great-making aspects; God is maximally great. (Premise 1)
2) Love is a great-making property. (Premise 2)
3) Therefore, God is maximally loving. (From 1,2)
4) With love comes compassion, which is the desire to help others when you see them hurting. In some cases, it may be that suffering produces goods which outweigh the badness of the suffering. A compassionate person can allow those instances of suffering, but that won’t apply to gratuitous suffering (suffering where the badness outweighs the goodness it produces). (Premise 3)
In other words, God can allow an evil if doing so entails a greater expression of love than preventing the evil would. In addition to the above definition, a gratuitous evil then is an evil the allowing of which fails to express a greater degree of love than preventing that evil would.
5) Therefore, God maximally desires to prevent gratuitous suffering. (From 3,4)
6) God is all-knowing and fully aware of the suffering of others. (Premise 4)
7) God is all-powerful and can prevent any instance of gratuitous suffering. (Premise 5)
8) Therefore, there is no one who experiences suffering where the badness of the suffering outweighs the goodness it produces. (From 5,6,7)
9) There are tons of people who experience gratuitous suffering. (Premise 6)
Contradiction. Therefore, one of the premises must be false.
I take steps 4 and 9 (premises 3 and 6) to be the ones worth challenging. Step 4 can be challenged on the basis that God has a more sophisticated kind of love than we do. Step 9 can be challenged using theodicies and skeptical theism.
Part 2: Defending Step 4
2a: Michael Rea suggests that human love is devotion, and so if God were to have a maximized version of human love, God would have to be fully devoted to humans, which would mean to worship us.[*1] But humans aren’t worthy of worship; it would be inappropriate for God to show us that kind of devotion. God, being transcendent, has a deeper, more sophisticated kind of love than we do, so it’s no surprise that God would seem unloving to us by our simplistic notion of love.
2b: The common sense notion of love I have in mind is not a kind of devotion. Love, it seems to me, is a regarding of someone as valuable or good. This is to regard the person as valuable and not something incidental about the person such as their money or good looks. When you regard someone as valuable, many things happen. You feel happy when you see them (like a kid running to the door when dad’s home), you want to make them happy, to be around them, to connect to them, for them to like you, and you desire for them to flourish (you will their good, as Aquinas said). You accept and celebrate them. You wish to see them preserved and protected. You perform behaviors that show your love, such as sacrificing for their benefit. Most important to our discussion today, you feel pain when something bad happens to them and feel happy when something good happens to them.[*2]
An intuition boost for this view is to look at the reverse of love. When we are hated, we feel as though we are being viewed as worthless, or even as worse than worthless – as having negative value. So we might say to hate is to see something as a source or wellspring of disvalue, while to love is to see something as a wellspring of value.[*3]
2c: One immediate problem I see with “love as devotion” is that God, by showing the bare minimum of help by answering a prayer here or sending a prophet there, would not be showing the level of excessive devotion needed to count as worshiping us. Sure, if God were to send a legion of angels to sing the praises of a common person who has not done anything to deserve such attention, then this would be ridiculous and inappropriate. But if a child prays for his sick mom to get better, would God be worshiping the child, or his mom, by granting the request? Of course not.
2d: Another problem is that the problem of evil uses a common sense notion of love. If this common sense notion is false or misleading, then theological problems emerge. First, if our love is not at least analogous to God’s, then in what sense are we made in the image of God? God is called God the Father, suggesting an analogy between parental love and God’s love for us. If the common sense notion of love is misleading, then isn’t this metaphor misleading too? Maybe God should be called Master, or Artist, or King, and never Father? This would make God out to be far less loving, but it would fit better with God being transcendent. Why would God be called Father if that’s a misleading metaphor?
Second, this common sense notion of love is biblical. In James we read that faith without deeds is dead. If you love someone, your actions will show it. Jesus tells us that if you love him, you will follow his commands. Where are God’s deeds? If God loves us, what actions, in our day to day lives, does God take to show his love for us? Jesus healed people, and even raised Lazarus from the dead. Why? If this life doesn’t matter, why would God send Jesus to earth? Why would Jesus bother to heal people? But if this life does matter, then why doesn’t Jesus heal people now? Presumably, Jesus healed because he saw people’s pain and became overwhelmed with compassion. Where did that compassion go? Why don’t miracle healings work today? Why aren’t sick folks rushing to churches instead of hospitals? Why would God allow the Bible to convey a misleading sense of love?
Third, if our common sense notion of love is mistaken, then how can we preach the gospel? Christians say “God loves you” and “Jesus loves you”. The gospel says that “For God so loved the world . . .” and “God demonstrated his love for us in this . . .” This message relies on the basic notion of love that humans come equipped with. If that notion is wrong, then Christians should say “God loves you, but in his own mysterious way, and if you use the ordinary human notion of love it might seem like God doesn’t love you.” That’s not very comforting. It’s confusing.
Fourth, why would God allow us to evolve a notion of love that leads to the problem of evil? Why wouldn’t God have us evolve with God’s notion of love, or send special revelation letting us know how love really works?
2e: Given the problems that emerge from challenging the common sense notion of love, it seems fair, and even unavoidable, to continue to use the common sense notion. But if love more or less works according to the common sense notion, and if God is maximally loving, then it follows that God maximally wills the good of all persons. But it’s never good for a person to suffer from an evil where the badness of that evil ultimately outweighs the goodness it produces. So God maximally wills for all persons to be free of gratuitous evil.
With step 4 defended, we can move onto step 9.
Part 3: The second argument
To defend the claim that there are gratuitous evils, I will first introduce a version of the argument from evil that uses a specific instance of horrendous evil. I will take a page from David Wood’s book, or really his dissertation, and relate to the problem of evil using a personal example.[*4] My mom, Elizabeth Jane, suffers from late-stage dementia. We can call her EJ. The argument goes like this:
1) If the reasons to prevent EJ’s dementia far outweigh the reasons not to, and yet God does not prevent EJ’s dementia, then God does not exist.
2) The reasons to prevent EJ’s dementia far outweigh the reasons not to, and yet God does not prevent EJ’s dementia.
3) Therefore, God does not exist. (modus ponens)
Premise 1 is the incompatibility premise, which corresponds to steps 1 - 8 of the first argument, except now the argument is phrased in terms of reasons. Premise 2 is the gratuitous evil premise, which corresponds to step 9 of the first argument.
This is a common evidential type argument from evil, inspired by William Rowe, where we take a single instance of evil and from it conclude that God probably does not exist.[*5] While Rowe focused on whether there are goods outweighing the evil in question, my formulation here focuses on reasons similar to Louise Antony’s approach.[*6] Typically, the incompatibility premise is admitted even by theists and the gratuitous evil premise is challenged instead.[*7]
The incompatibility premise in terms of reasons:
Here is a simplified, modus tollens version of the argument, which gives another way to see why gratuitous evils entail the non-existence of God:
1) If God exists, then God is the kind of being such that gratuitous evils do not exist.
2) Gratuitous evils do exist.
3) Therefore, God does not exist (or does exist but is not that kind of being).
I supported the incompatibility premise in Part 1 and Part 2, but now I will expand that support to include the reasons-based approach: if God exists, then God will be the kind of being that is
a) Perfectly rational, and therefore always has good reasons for his actions, and
b) Perfectly loving, and therefore considers reasons pertaining to minimizing the suffering of others to be good reasons to act, and thus
c) God prevents suffering when the reasons to do so outweigh the reasons not to.
Therefore, Premise 1 of the second argument follows: if we encounter an instance of suffering for which the reasons to prevent outweigh the reasons not to, then God, as specified, does not exist.[*8]
It's important to keep in mind, as Rowe points out, that we needn't prove there are gratuitous evils. As long as gratuitous evils are probable, and the incompatibility premise holds, then God's non-existence is probable.
So we end up with three definitions of gratuitous evil, all compatible with (and even entailing) each other:
Gratuitous evil 1 = An instance of badness where the badness outweighs the goodness it produces.
Gratuitous evil 2 = An instance of badness where preventing the badness expresses a greater degree of love than allowing it expresses.
Gratuitous evil 3 = An instance of badness where the reasons to prevent it outweigh the reasons to allow it. (And thus, preventing it expresses a greater degree of rationality than allowing it expresses.)
By my lights it is certain, or close enough, that God is incompatible with gratuitous evil. So with the incompatibility premise thoroughly defended, and with a specific evil in mind, we can now explore the reasons God might have for preventing or allowing evils.
*1 - Parker’s Pensees #59: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WnuhHOsmfg;
2017 Gilford Lecture 3: https://gifford.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/watch-the-2017-lectures/.
*2 - By this definition, non-human animals love each other, though differently than we love. They regard their children as valuable as evidenced by their actions, but it’s a non-propositional and possibly non-emotional kind of love, whereas our love very much accompanies both propositions and emotions. There are certainly times where our loving behaviors run contrary to our emotions, but we perform those behaviors anyway out of devotion or loyalty or a sense of duty or of regarding the other as worth the sacrifice. Someone might say true love is exactly the behaviors that stay when the “lovey” emotions aren’t present.
*3 - You might think of pity as being a counterexample. With pity you don’t love the person exactly, but you still feel compassion for them. I would say that pity is a low degree of love, hence the compassion. It feels bad to be pitied because we wish to be valued more than that. With paradigmatic love, not only do you see the person as valuable, but extremely so. This suggests that God needn’t be all-loving to get the argument from evil up and running, just enough to pity us, as even pity will motivate stepping in and preventing gratuitous evils.
*4 - David Wood, “Surprised By Suffering: Hume, Draper, and the Bayesian Argument From Evil” (2013), pg 4.
*5 - William Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” (1979).
*6 - Louise Antony, “No Good Reason—Exploring the Problem of Evil”, in The Norton Introduction to Philosophy, 2nd ed. (2018), pg 36-45.
*7 - Cf. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Michael Bergmann, and William Rowe, “An exchange on the problem of evil” (2001).
Some people do challenge the incompatibility premise. See Kirk MacGregor, “The Existence and Irrelevance of Gratuitous Evil” (2008). But MacGregor seems to have a confused definition of gratuitous evil. See response: Ross Inman, “Gratuitous Evil Unmotivated: A Reply to MacGregor” (2013).
For another challenge to the incompatibility premise, see Justin Mooney, “How to Solve the Problem of Evil: A Deontological Strategy” (2020).
*8 - For the sake of the argument at hand, we can leave open whether “reasons internalism” or externalism is true. On internalism, God is maximally motivated to prevent gratuitous evils by his compassion. On externalism, God is maximally aware of the real reasons to prevent gratuitous evils and, being perfectly rational, will act according to those reasons.
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