A short essay written for Saints, Heretics, and Atheists: An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. The essay discusses the age old problem of evil and examines one response to it.
Read J. L. Mackie’s “Evil and Omnipotence”. In it, Mackie identifies what he considers to be four “fallacious” solutions to the logical problem of evil. Pick one of those four solutions, and briefly argue that it will or won’t work (i.e. for thinking that it is or is not fallacious). The reason(s) you provide do not have to be conclusive.
For some theists, the problem of evil may lead them to question their faith in an all-loving God. After all, if God is loving, God should not let evil exist. In Mackie’s essay “Evil and Omnipotence”, he sets up the problem of evil in a way that is logically impossible to resolve without abandoning one of its assumptions. However, Mackie identifies four common, fallacious solutions that attempt to address the problem of evil without abandoning one of the assumptions and attempts to uncover their fallacies. This essay examines the final solution, that “evil is due to human free will”, and identifies its hidden contradictions.
First, we lay out the problem and the solution. As Mackie states, the solution is only problematic given a certain statement of the problem of evil. Mackie sets up the problem as such: God is omnipotent, God is wholly good, and evil exists. Additionally, good seeks to eliminate evil as far as it can and there are no limits to God’s omnipotence. Thus, any solution arguing that it is impossible for God to eliminate evil violates the assumption that God is omnipotent.
Nonetheless, one common response to the problem is to attribute evil to human free will, which God endows to humanity. This solution argues that it is better that people freely love God than unfreely love God even if that leads to evil.
Mackie states that this solution is unsatisfactory primarily because of the incoherence of the notion of freedom of will. Mackie argues that God could have created humanity such that everyone always freely chooses the good option over the evil. At first pass, this proposal sounds absurd—if God created human such that they freely chose the good option, then logically it appears that they are not free in any conventional sense of the word. But on a second examination, Mackie’s proposal seems more reasonable. It is possible, if everyone has free will, for everyone to make the right decision without God taking any action. Thieves would just need to make the decision not to steal, adulterers to not adulter, etc. If this is possible, then it must be possible for God to make such a world exist. Arguing otherwise would infringe upon God’s omnipotence.
Additionally, one could question why God does not intervene when people make bad choices or prevent the evil consequences. Because God could do these things and does not, the easiest explanation is that the evil actions are, on the whole, good or lead to more good. However, this contradicts the idea that evil is really evil and are left with the conclusion that God is not truly omnipotent.
While there are other possible lines of argumentation one could take, they ultimately all end with accepting a limit on God’s omnipotence. Even Mackie agrees that accepting a limitation on God’s omnipotence is an acceptable solution to the problem of evil, at least on its face. Thus, while the problem of evil still remains an open discussion for theists and theologians, this particular phrasing of the problem of evil helps to color in the negative zones of our conception about God and the world, demonstrating that which cannot be but not identifying that which is.
Although for the most part you do a really lovely job of explaining difficult philosophical ideas clearly (e.g., in your statement of the logical problem itself and in your subsequent discussion of the possibility that we freely only do what’s good), sometimes you need to slow down and take more time to explain your claims. :-) The main case of this is in your penultimate paragraph, in which three different moves are made in three consecutive sentences. It’s hard to follow exactly what you’re suggesting when you don’t devote a whole lot of space to exploring the ideas. In fact, you may have been better off omitting both that paragraph and the final paragraph and replacing them with a discussion of how Mackie would respond to the following proposal: God doesn’t intervene to prevent our evil actions because he can’t, having given us a free will that he can’t control. This proposal, as you’ll recall, leads to his in depth discussion of the Paradox of Omnipotence and the two tiers or orders of omnipotence (first-order and second-order).