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A Perfectly Good Personal Foundation: Some Reasons for Doubt

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Is God the Best Explanation of Things?

Abstract

This chapter kicks off the final section of the book by offering a range of data that have a bearing on whether foundational reality is perfectly good. Toward that end, I do two main things. First, I explicate and defend a deductive version of the problem of evil, with an aim to note the key moves in the recent history of the debate on the argument, and to show where things stand at the present moment. I offer reasons for thinking that despite a long run of apparent victory on the side of the critic (esp. Plantinga), things are no longer so clear. Second, I offer a cumulative case argument against a good personal foundation of reality: horrors, hiddenness, revulsion, inhospitable environment, teleological evil, religious diversity, evolution, languishing, pointless pain, the ineffectiveness of prayer, and idolatry. I conclude by arguing that the deductive argument from evil, along with the cumulative case from the other 11 lines of data, makes the hypothesis of Liberal Naturalism at least as probable as theism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Poston, Ted. 2014. “Social Evil,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Vol. 5) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 209–233.

  2. 2.

    It is sometimes thought that God is only responsible for evil he causes, rather than merely allows. However, a moment’s reflection reveals that this can’t be right. Compare: An able-bodied father, with a sober, present mind that’s in good working order, watches his child walk into the street to fetch a stray toy ball. He then notices that a car has turned the corner and is racing toward the child. The father has plenty of time to get the child out of the street. However, rather than doing so, or even calling out to the child to alert them, the father sits back in his lawn chair, takes a sip of his beer, and says to himself, “this should be interesting.” The child is seriously injured. Most would say the parent in this scenario is less than perfectly good, despite the fact that the parent didn’t cause, but merely allowed, the child to get hit by the car.

  3. 3.

    Mackie (1955).

  4. 4.

    For an important defense of this view of divine foreknowledge, see Flint (1998).

  5. 5.

    Plantinga’s key insight turns on the semantics of counterfactuals, i.e., statements of the form, “If x were the case then y would have been the case.” For canonical accounts of the semantics of counterfactuals, see Lewis (1973) and Stalnaker (1968).

  6. 6.

    Plantinga (2009).

  7. 7.

    For a similar worry that’s much more carefully and forcefully argued, see Rasmussen (2004).

  8. 8.

    Howard-Snyder (2013, p. 27).

  9. 9.

    Howard-Snyder and O’Leary-Hawthorne (1998).

  10. 10.

    Anders et al. (2014).

  11. 11.

    I should also note that J. L. Schellenberg has recently developed and defended a new version of the deductive argument from evil—one that is designed to be immune to the free will defense; see, e.g., Schellenberg (2013).

  12. 12.

    Cf. Morriston (2000) and Timpe (2016).

  13. 13.

    Cf. Morriston (2000).

  14. 14.

    Ibid.

  15. 15.

    Ibid.

  16. 16.

    The lines of data here are only meant to be a representative sampling. For other lines of data that might be raised against the perfectly good foundation hypothesis (and some data that bear indirectly on this hypothesis by means of data against classical theism more broadly), see, e.g., Aikin (2010), Aikin and Jones (2015), Cordry (2006), Craig (2016), Crummett (2017), Davidson (1999, 2015), Draper (1989, 2002, 2012, 2017), Everitt (2003), Feldman (2007), Hassoun (2014), Kahane (2011), Kodaj (2014), Leon (2019a, b), Lewis (2007), Lovering (2010, 2013), Maring (2012), Maitzen (2004, 2005, 2006), Megill and Linford (2016), Mizrahi (2014), Oppy (2013), Poston (2012), Rowe (1979, 2006), Schellenberg (2004, 2006, 2013), Sider (2002), Thornhill-Miller and Millican (2015), and Wielenberg (2018).

  17. 17.

    Schellenberg, J. L. (2007, pp. 243–244). This is Schellenberg’s nice paraphrase of Marilyn McCord Adams’ (1999) definition of ‘horrorendous evils’.

  18. 18.

    Rowe (2007).

  19. 19.

    Draper (2002).

  20. 20.

    Ibid.

  21. 21.

    Draper (2012).

  22. 22.

    Ibid., p. 61.

  23. 23.

    Draper (1989).

  24. 24.

    Ibid.

  25. 25.

    Aviles, J.M., S.E. Whelan, D.A. Hernke, B.A. Williams, K.E. Kenny, W.M. O’Fallon, S.L. Kopecky. 2001. “Intercessory Prayer and Cardiovascular Disease Progression in a Coronary Care Unit Population: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 76 (12):1192–1198.

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  1. El Camino College, Torrance, CA, USA

    Felipe Leon

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Leon, F. (2019). A Perfectly Good Personal Foundation: Some Reasons for Doubt. In: Is God the Best Explanation of Things?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23752-3_14

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