Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 65
Two other weak responses are the following. (1) God has a reason for
allowing evil but we do not know what it is. Well, we know that God does
not have a reason for allowing round squares because the notion of a round
square is an inconsistent one. So if this answer is to work it must depend on
one of the other defences. (2) It may be said that evil can enhance goodness,
just as ugly chords can enhance a piece of music. I doubt whether the mother
of the child dying of cancer would be impressed by this idea. A closely related
idea, on which I touched when discussing Pascal’s Wager, is that if the
universe contains an infinite amount of goodness then a finite amount of
badness leaves us with still an equal infinity of goodness.
Let a be the total amount of badness in the world, and let there be an
infinite series of good things, b + b + b + .... Then it may be held that
−a + b + b + b + ... = b + b + b + . . . . In Cantor’s set theory the union of a
finite set with an infinite set has the same transfinite number as the infinite set.
The set that contains all the stars in our galaxy together with all the integers
is no bigger than the set of all the integers itself. So if (rather absurdly) we
were to assign a value v to each star and also to each integer, the value of
the set containing both the stars and the integers would be no greater than
that of the set containing only the integers. (There would be other curiosities,
such as that the value of all the even integers would be equal to the value of
all the even and odd integers.) I conclude that analogies inspired by Cantorian
set theory are unhelpful, even if not positively absurd. We should say that
the value of the universe containing positive evils is less than that of the
infinitely good universe containing no positive evils. So God would perhaps
have allowed the b + b + b + . . . universe but would not have allowed
the −a + b + b + b + . . . universe. He would not have allowed the universe
with the child dying of cancer.
This consideration that even an infinitely good universe should contain no
positive evils within it enables me to deal with another, and more interesting,
defence of theism. 106 This is that it is unfair to ask of even an omnipotent
God that he should create the best possible universe, since of any universe we
can conceive of a better. This might lead us to some interesting speculations
related to the theory of transfinite cardinal numbers, but let us for the sake of
argument concede the point. If it is logically impossible that any universe is
the best possible, then indeed even omnipotence could not create such a
universe. Nevertheless, surely we would expect an omnipotent and benevolent
God to have created a universe without positive evils.
Contemplating evil, I feel the attractions of a philosophy, such as
that of the bdvaita Vedanta, according to which reality is very different
from what it seems or what we could possibly know, and that the world as we
think we know it, including both good things and bad things, is illusory.
However, such a philosophy cannot be stated without absurdity. Though