Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

60 J.J.C. Smart
rather tendencies to these traits, since character depends also on education
and environment. For example, human combativeness is a very bad and dangerous
trait in our H-bomb age, but it presumably had survival value in
prehistoric times. (Perhaps the combative man is more likely to be killed, but
if he helps to preserve his near relatives some of his genes will be passed on.
In any case attack may be the best method of defence.) The more aggressive
tribes may kill off the less aggressive ones. So what is a bad trait in an
H-bomb era has evolved. ( Just as the bad placement of the sump hole of our
sinuses evolved when our ancestors had four legs and held their heads downwards.)
Moreover, bad traits can arise in special cases without selection. If we
think of human biology in an ‘as if ’ or pseudo-teleological way we can think
of ourselves as machines that simply go wrong, as all machines tend to do.
There are more ways of going wrong than there are of going right.
So we should not be at all surprised at the existence of human criminality
and general badness. Nor need we be surprised, as naturalistically minded
people, at natural evils. There are earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes and
bacteria and viruses that harm us. Would it not surprise us if the world
were not such as to contain things that harm us ‘poor forked creatures’? There
is no problem for the atheist in the existence of good things and bad things
alike.
On the other hand for the theist evil is a big problem. If God is omniscient
he knows how to prevent evil, if he is omnipotent he can prevent evil, and if
he is benevolent he wants to prevent evil. The theist believes that God is
omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent. If the theist’s beliefs are correct, how
then can there be evil? Unless the theist is prepared to settle for a finite ‘big
brother’ God, his or her problem seems insoluble. However, as I observed
earlier, a finite ‘big brother’ God would be just one big thing in the universe,
not the infinite God of the great monotheistic religions, the God who created
the universe.
There have indeed been countless attempts to solve this apparently insoluble
problem for theism. The literature of these attempts is called ‘theodicy’,
derived from the Greek words for ‘God’ and ‘just’. Whole books have been
written on this subject, and it is impossible in a short space to deal with all
the attempts that have been made. It looks as though the theistic hypothesis
is an empirically refutable one, so that theism becomes a refuted scientific
theory. The argument goes: (1) If God exists then there is no evil, (2) There
is evil, therefore (3) It is not the case that God exists. Premiss (1) seems to
follow from our characterization of God as an omnipotent, omniscient and
benevolent being. (2) is empirical. We can hardly reject (2). It seems therefore
that the theist has to find something wrong with (1) and this is not easy.
I shall discuss only some standard ways in which philosophers and theologians
have tried to reconcile the existence of God with that of evil. The