What if evil doesn really exist

It is now widely agreed that this intuition is correct. Responding to this formulation of the problem requires much more than simply describing a logically possible scenario in which God and evil co-exist. It has not, however, been the only such response.

Hick rejects the traditional view of the Fall, which pictures humans as being created in a finitely perfect and finished state from which they disastrously fell away.

Instead, Hick claims that human beings are unfinished and in the midst of being made all that God intended them to be. A world full of suffering, trials and temptations is more conducive to the process of soul-making than a world full of constant pleasure and the complete absence of pain.

Hick , pp. The value-judgment that is implicitly being invoked here is that one who has attained to goodness by meeting and eventually mastering temptations, and thus by rightly making responsible choices in concrete situations, is good in a richer and more valuable sense than would be one created ab initio in a state either of innocence or of virtue….

I suggest, then, that it is an ethically reasonable judgment… that human goodness slowly built up through personal histories of moral effort has a value in the eyes of the Creator which justifies even the long travail of the soul-making process.

Eleonore Stump offers another response to the problem of evil that brings a range of distinctively Christian theological commitments to bear on the issue. She writes,. It tends to humble him, show him his frailty, make him reflect on the transience of temporal goods, and turn his affections towards other-worldly things, away from the things of this world. No amount of moral or natural evil, of course, can guarantee that a man will [place his faith in God]….

But evil of this sort is the best hope, I think, and maybe the only effective means, for bringing men to such a state. Stump , p. Stump claims that, although the sin of Adam—and not any act of God—first brought moral and natural evil into this world, God providentially uses both kinds of evil in order to bring about the greatest good that a fallen, sinful human being can experience: a repaired will and eternal union with God.

The responses of both Hick and Stump are intended to cover not only the logical problem of evil but also any other formulation of the problem as well.

Regardless of the details of these alternatives, the fact remains that all they need to do in order to rebut the logical problem of evil is to describe a logically possible way that God and evil can co-exist. A variety of morally sufficient reasons can be proposed as possible explanations of why a perfect God might allow evil and suffering to exist. Because the suggestions of Hick and Stump are clearly logically possible, they, too, succeed in undermining the logical problem of evil.

One point of conflict concerns the possibility of human free will in heaven. Plantinga claims that if someone is incapable of doing evil, that person cannot have morally significant free will. He also maintains that part of what makes us the creatures we are is that we possess morally significant freedom. If that freedom were to be taken away, we might very well cease to be the creatures we are. However, consider the sort of freedom enjoyed by the redeemed in heaven.

According to classical theism, believers in heaven will somehow be changed so that they will no longer commit any sins. It is not that they will contingently always do what is right and contingently always avoid what is wrong. They will somehow no longer be capable of doing wrong. In other words, their good behavior will be necessary rather than contingent. It seems that God could have actualized whatever greater goods are made possible by the existence of persons without allowing horrible instances of evil and suffering to exist in this world.

However, they reveal that some of the central claims of his defense conflict with other important theistic doctrines. Although Plantinga claimed that his Free Will Defense offered merely possible and not necessarily actual reasons God might have for allowing evil and suffering, it may be difficult for other theists to embrace his defense if it runs contrary to what theism says is actually the case in heaven. God, it seems, is incapable of doing anything wrong.

Thus, it does not appear that, with respect to any choice of morally good and morally bad options, God is free to choose a bad option. He seems constitutionally incapable of choosing or even wanting to do what is wrong. They could never be praiseworthy. That certainly runs contrary to central doctrines of theism. If, as theists must surely maintain, God does possess morally significant freedom, then perhaps this sort of freedom does not preclude an inability to choose what is wrong.

But if it is possible for God to possess morally significant freedom and for him to be unable to do wrong, then W 3 once again appears to be possible after all. Originally, Plantinga claimed that W 3 is not a logically possible world because the description of that world is logically inconsistent.

If W 3 is possible, then the complaint lodged by Flew and Mackie above that God could and therefore should have created a world full of creatures who always did what is right is not answered. There may be ways for Plantinga to resolve the difficulties sketched above, so that the Free Will Defense can be shown to be compatible with theistic doctrines about heaven and divine freedom. As it stands, however, some important challenges to the Free Will Defense remain unanswered.

James R. Logical Problem of Evil The existence of evil and suffering in our world seems to pose a serious challenge to belief in the existence of a perfect God. Introducing the Problem Journalist and best-selling author Lee Strobel commissioned George Barna, the public-opinion pollster, to conduct a nationwide survey.

McCloskey , p. Mackie and McCloskey can be understood as claiming that it is impossible for all of the following statements to be true at the same time: 1 God is omnipotent that is, all-powerful. They reason as follows: 6 If God is omnipotent, he would be able to prevent all of the evil and suffering in the world. Atheologians claim that, if we reflect upon 6 through 8 in light of the fact of evil and suffering in our world, we should be led to the following conclusions: 9 If God knows about all of the evil and suffering in the world, knows how to eliminate or prevent it, is powerful enough to prevent it, and yet does not prevent it, he must not be perfectly good.

From 9 through 11 we can infer: 12 If evil and suffering exist, then God is either not omnipotent, not omniscient, or not perfectly good. Since evil and suffering obviously do exist, we get: 13 God is either not omnipotent, not omniscient, or not perfectly good.

Logical Consistency Theists who want to rebut the logical problem of evil need to find a way to show that 1 through 4 —perhaps despite initial appearances—are consistent after all. In other words, 15 A set of statements is logically consistent if and only if it is possible for all of them to be true at the same time.

In other words, 16 It is not possible for God and evil to co-exist. Logical Consistency and the Logical Problem of Evil How might a theist go about demonstrating that 16 is false? An implicit assumption behind this part of the debate over the logical problem of evil is the following: 18 It is not morally permissible for God to allow evil and suffering to occur unless he has a morally sufficient reason for doing so.

If 19 and 20 are true, then the God of orthodox theism does not exist. W 1 : a God creates persons with morally significant free will; b God does not causally determine people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong; and c There is evil and suffering in W 1.

W 2 : a God does not create persons with morally significant free will; b God causally determines people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong; and c There is no evil or suffering in W 2. W 3 : a God creates persons with morally significant free will; b God causally determines people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong; and c There is no evil or suffering in W 3. W 4 : a God creates persons with morally significant free will; b God does not causally determine people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong; and c There is no evil or suffering in W 4.

Plantinga concurs. He writes, A world containing creatures who are sometimes significantly free and freely perform more good than evil actions is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Divine Omnipotence and the Free Will Defense Some scholars maintain that Plantinga has rejected the idea of an omnipotent God because he claims there are some things God cannot do—namely, logically impossible things.

According to Edward Madden and Peter Hare , p. Moral evil, they continue, includes both moral wrong-doing such as lying, cheating, stealing, torturing, and murdering and character defects like greed, deceit, cruelty, wantonness, cowardice, and selfishness.

In the description of the sixth day of creation God says to Adam and Eve, I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it.

Recall that the logical problem of evil can be summarized as the following claim: 16 It is not possible for God and evil to co-exist. When someone claims 40 Situation x is impossible, what is the least that you would have to prove in order to show that 40 is false?

The claim 41 Situation x is possible is the contradictory of It was, after all, Mackie himself who characterized the problem of evil as one of logical inconsistency: Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another.

Problems with the Free Will Defense A. References and Further Reading a. References Clark, Kelly James. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Flew, Anthony. New Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York: Macmillan. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love , revised ed. On Being a Christian , trans. Edward Quinn. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Kushner, Harold S. New York: Schocken Books. Lewis, C. Mere Christianity.

Mackie, J. The Miracle of Theism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madden, Edward and Peter Hare. Evil and the Concept of God. Springfield, IL: Charles C. So let us begin by considering what is involved in these three different, general types of responses. This threefold classification can be arrived at by the following line of thought. An advocate of the argument from evil is claiming, in the first place, that there are facts about the evils in the world that make it prima facie unreasonable to believe in the existence of God, and, in the second place, that the situation is not altered when those facts are conjoined with all the other things that one is justified in believing, both inferentially and non-inferentially, so that belief in the existence of God is also unreasonable relative to the total evidence available, together with all relevant basis states.

In responding to the argument from evil, then, one might challenge either of these claims. Alternatively, one might defend the more radical thesis that there are no facts about evil in the world that make it even prima facie unreasonable to believe in the existence of God.

If the latter thesis is correct, the argument from evil does not even get started. Such responses to the argument from evil are naturally classified, therefore, as attempted, total refutations of the argument. The proposition that relevant facts about evil do not make it even prima facie unreasonable to believe in the existence of God probably strikes most philosophers, of course, as rather implausible.

We shall see, however, that a number of philosophical theists have attempted to defend this type of response to the argument from evil. The alternative course is to grant that there are facts about intrinsically undesirable states of the world that make it prima facie unreasonable to believe that God exists, but then to argue that belief in the existence of God is not unreasonable, all things considered.

This response may take, however, two slightly different forms. One possibility is the offering of a complete theodicy. As I shall use that term, this involves the thesis that, for every actual evil found in the world, one can describe some state of affairs that it is reasonable to believe exists, and which is such that, if it exists, will provide an omnipotent and omniscient being with a morally sufficient reason for allowing the evil in question.

Alvin Plantinga a, 10; a, 35 and Robert Adams , use the term in that way, but, as has been pointed out by a number of writers, including Richard Swinburne , , and William Hasker , 5 , that is to saddle the theodicist with an unnecessarily ambitious program.

The other possibility is that of offering a defense. But what is a defense? In the context of abstract, incompatibility versions of the argument from evil, this term is generally used to refer to attempts to show that there is no logical incompatibility between the existence of evil and the existence of God.

Such attempts involve setting out a story that entails the existence of both God and evil, and that is logically consistent. But as soon as one focuses upon evidential formulations of the argument from evil, a different interpretation is needed if the term is to remain a useful one, since the production of a logically consistent story that involves the existence of both God and evil will do nothing to show that evil does not render the existence of God unlikely, or even very unlikely.

So what more is required beyond a logically consistent story of a certain sort? One answer that is suggested by some discussions is that the story needs to be one that is true for all we know. It seems very unlikely, however, that its merely being the case that one does not know that the story is false can suffice, since it may very well be the case that, though one does not know that p is false, one does have very strong evidence that it is.

But if one has strong evidence that a story is false, it is hard to see how the story on its own could possibly counter an evidential argument from evil. It is also hard to see, however, how this can be sufficient either. Suppose, for example, that one tells a story about God and the Holocaust, which is such that if it were true, an omnipotent being would have been morally justified in not preventing the Holocaust.

Suppose, further, that one claims that there is a twenty percent chance that the story is true. A twenty percent chance is certainly a real possibility, but how would that twenty percent chance undermine a version of the argument from evil whose conclusion was that the probability that an omnipotent being would be justified in allowing the Holocaust was very low? Given the apparent failure of the previous two suggestions, a natural conclusion is that the story that is involved in a defense must be one that is likely to be true.

But if this is right, how does a defense differ from a theodicy? The answer is that while a theodicy must specify reasons that would suffice to justify an omnipotent and omniscient being in allowing all of the evils found in the world, a defense need merely show that it is likely that there are reasons which would justify an omnipotent and omniscient being in not preventing the evils that one finds in the world, even if one does not know what those reasons are. A defense differs from a theodicy, then, in that a defense attempts to show only that some God-justifying reasons probably exist; it does not attempt to specify what they are.

There is, however, one final possibility that needs to be considered. This is the idea that what is needed in a defense is not a story that can be shown to be likely to be true, but, rather, a story that, for all we know, is not unlikely.

The thought here is that, even if there is some probability that the story has relative to our evidential base, we may not be able to determine what that probability is, or even any reasonably delimited range in which that probability falls. If so, it cannot be shown that the story is likely to be true, but neither can it be shown that the story is unlikely to be true. One thought might be that if one can assign no probability to a proposition, one should treat it as equally likely to be true as to be false.

But propositions vary dramatically in logical form: some are such as might naturally be viewed as atomic, others are sweeping generalizations, others are complex conjunctions, and so on. If one treated any proposition to which one could not assign a probability as equally likely to be true as to be false, the result would be an incoherent assignment of probabilities.

On the other hand, if one adopts this idea only in the case of atomic propositions, then given that stories that are advanced in defenses and theodicies are typically quite complex, those stories will wind up getting assigned low probabilities, and it is then unclear how they could undercut an inductive argument from evil.

There are at least three main ways in which one might attempt to show that the argument from evil does not succeed in establishing that evil is even prima facie evidence against the existence of God, let alone that the existence of God is improbable relative to our total evidence.

The first appeals to human epistemological limitations; the second, to the claim that there is no best of all possible worlds; and the third, to the ontological argument. The most popular attempt at a total refutation of the argument from evil claims that, because of human cognitive limitations, there is no sound inductive argument that can enable one to move from the premise that there are states of affairs that, taking into account only what we know, it would be morally very wrong for an omnipotent and omniscient person to allow to exist, to the conclusion that there are states of affairs such that it is likely that, all things considered, it would be morally very wrong for an omnipotent and omniscient person to allow those states of affairs to exist.

The appeal to human cognitive limitations does raise a very important issue, and we have seen that one very natural account of the logical form of the inductive step in the case of a direct inductive argument is not satisfactory. But, as we have seen in sections 3. Secondly, the appeal to human cognitive limitations provides no reason at all for rejecting the version of the argument from evil that appeals to fundamental equiprobability principles of inductive logic, principles that arguably must obtain if any sort of induction is ever justified.

Short of embracing compete inductive skepticism, then, it would seem that an appeal to human cognitive limitations cannot provide an answer to evidential versions of the argument from evil. A second way of attempting to show that the argument from evil does not even get started is by appealing to the proposition that there is no best of all possible worlds.

Here the basic idea is that if for every possible world, however good, there is a better one, then the fact that this world could be improved upon does not give one any reason for concluding that, if there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, that being cannot be morally perfect. This response to the argument from evil has been around for quite a while.

The natural response to this attempt to refute the argument from evil was set out very clearly some years ago by Nicholas La Para and Haig Khatchadourian among others, and it has been developed in an especially forceful and detailed way in an article by Keith Chrzan The basic thrust of this response is that the argument from evil, when properly formulated in a deontological fashion, does not turn upon the claim that this world could be improved upon, or upon the claim that it is not the best of all possible worlds: it turns instead upon the claim that there are good reasons for holding that the world contains evils, including instances of suffering, that it would be morally wrong, all things considered, for an omnipotent and omniscient being to allow.

As a consequence, the proposition that there might be better and better worlds without limit is simply irrelevant to the argument from evil, properly formulated. If one accepts a deontological approach to ethics, this response seems decisive.

For assume that the following things are true:. Then it follows that it is impossible for an omnipotent and omniscient being to perform a morally wrong action, and therefore that the failure of such a being to prevent various evils in this world cannot be morally wrong.

Consider an omnipotent and omniscient being that creates a world with zillions of innocent persons, all of whom endure extraordinarily intense suffering forever. If 1 , 2 , and 3 are right, then such a being does not do anything morally wrong. But this conclusion, surely, is unacceptable, and so if a given version of consequentialism entails this conclusion, then that form of consequentialism must be rejected. Can consequentialism avoid this conclusion?

Can it be formulated in such a way that it entails the conclusion that allowing very great, undeserved suffering is morally very different, and much more serious, than merely refraining from creating as many happy individuals as possible, or merely refraining from creating individuals who are not as ecstatically happy as they might be?

If it cannot, then it would seem that the correct conclusion to draw is that consequentialism is unsound. A final way in which one could attempt to show that facts about evil cannot constitute even prima facie evidence against the existence of God is by appealing to the ontological argument.

Relatively few philosophers have held, of course, that the ontological argument is sound. But there have certainly been notable exceptions—such as Anselm and Descartes, and, in the last century, Charles Hartshorne , Norman Malcolm , and Alvin Plantinga a, b. If the ontological argument were sound, it would provide a rather decisive refutation of the argument from evil.

For in showing not merely that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect being, but also that it is necessary that such a being exists, it would entail that the proposition that God does not exist must have probability zero on any body of evidence whatever.

The only question, accordingly, is whether the ontological argument is sound. The vast majority of present-day philosophers believe that it is not, and one way of arguing for that view is by appealing to strengthened Gaunilo-type objections—where the idea behind a strengthened Gaunilo-type objection is that, rather than merely paralleling the ontological argument, as Gaunilo did in responding to Anselm, in order to show that there is an overpopulation problem for reality in the form of perfect islands, perfect unicorns, and so on, one can instead construct versions that lead to mutually incompatible conclusions, such as the conclusion that there is a perfect solvent, together with the conclusion that there is a perfectly insoluble substance Tooley, But if the logical form of the ontological argument is such that arguments of precisely the same form generate contradictions, then the ontological argument must be unsound.

A more satisfying response to the ontological argument would, of course, show not merely that the ontological argument is unsound, but also precisely why it is unsound.

Such a response, however, requires a satisfactory account of the truth conditions of modal statements—something that lies outside the scope of this article. In this section, we shall consider three attempts to show that it is reasonable to believe that every evil is such that an omnipotent and omniscient person would have a morally sufficient reason for not preventing its existence, even if one is not able to say, in every case, what that morally sufficient reason might be.

Theists, however, have often contended that there are a variety of arguments that, even if they do not prove that God exists, provide positive evidence. May not this positive evidence outweigh, then, the negative evidence of apparently unjustified evils? Starting out from this line of thought, a number of philosophers have gone on to claim that in order to be justified in asserting that there are evils in the world that establish that it is unlikely that God exists, one would first have to examine all of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, and show that none of them is sound.

Now it is certainly true that if one is defending a version of the argument from evil that supports only a probabilistic conclusion, one needs to consider what sorts of positive reasons might be offered in support of the existence of God. But Plantinga and Reichenbach are advancing a rather stronger claim here, for they are saying that one needs to look at all of the traditional theistic arguments, such as the cosmological and the teleological. They are claiming, in short, that if one of those arguments turned out to be defensible, then it might well serve to undercut the argument from evil.

But this view seems mistaken. Consider the cosmological argument. In some versions, the conclusion is that there is an unmoved mover. In others, that there is a first cause. In others, that there is a necessary being, having its necessity of itself.

None of these conclusions involves any claims about the moral character of the entity in question, let alone the claim that it is a morally perfect person. But in the absence of such a claim, how could such arguments, even if they turned out to be sound, serve to undercut the argument from evil?

The situation is not essentially different in the case of the argument from order, or in the case of the fine-tuning argument. For while those arguments, if they were sound, would provide grounds for drawing some tentative conclusion concerning the moral character of the designer or creator of the universe, the conclusion in question would not be one that could be used to overthrow the argument from evil.

For given the mixture of good and evil that one finds in the world, the argument from order can hardly provide support even for the existence of a designer or creator who is very good, let alone one who is morally perfect. So it is very hard to see how any teleological argument, any more than any cosmological, could overturn the argument from evil. A similar conclusion can be defended with respect to other arguments, such as those that appeal to purported miracles, or religious experiences.

So, contrary to the claim advanced by Robert Adams , , even if there were veridical religious experiences, they would not provide one with a satisfactory defense against the argument from evil.

A good way of underlining the basic point here is by setting out an alternative formulation of the argument from evil in which it is granted, for the sake of argument, that there is an omnipotent and omniscient person. The result of doing this is that the conclusion at which one initially arrives is not that there is no omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect person, but rather that, although there is an omnipotent and omniscient person, that person is not morally perfect, from which it then follows that that there is no omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect person.

When the argument from evil is reformulated in that way, it becomes clear that the vast majority of considerations that have been offered as reasons for believing in God can be of little assistance to the person who is trying to resist the argument from evil. For most of them provide, at best, very tenuous grounds for any conclusion concerning the moral character of any omnipotent and omniscient being who may happen to exist, and almost none of them provides any support for the hypothesis that there is an omnipotent and omniscient being who is also morally perfect.

The ontological argument is, of course, a notable exception, and, consequently, the advocate of the argument from evil certainly needs to be able to show that it is unsound.

But almost all of the other standard arguments are simply not to the point. What if, rather than holding that there is positive evidence that lends support to the existence of God, one holds instead that the belief that God exists is non-inferentially justified? The claim in question is an interesting one, and a thorough evaluation of it would involve consideration of some deep issues in epistemology.

Fortunately, it does not seem to make any real difference in the present context whether or not the claim is true. The reason emerges if one considers the epistemology of perception. But direct realists as much as indirect realists admit that there can be cases where a person would be justified in believing that a certain physical state of affairs obtained were it not for the fact that he has good evidence that he is hallucinating, or else subject to perceptual illusion.

Moreover, given evidence of the relevant sort, it makes no difference whether direct realism is true, or indirect realism: the belief in question is undermined to precisely the same extent in either case. The situation is the same in the case of religious experience. Swinburne , —8 argued in support of the conclusion that theism does need a theodicy.

In doing so, however, he noted one minor qualification—namely, that if one could show, for a sufficiently impressive range of evils that initially seemed problematic, that it was likely that an omnipotent and omniscient person would be morally justified in not having prevented them, then one might very well be justified in believing that the same would be true of other evils, even if one could not specify, in those other cases, what the morally sufficient reason for allowing them might be.

What Swinburne says here is surely very reasonable, and I can see no objection in principle to a defense of this sort. The problem with it is that no theodicy that has ever been proposed has been successful in the relevant way—that is, there is no impressive range of undesirable states of affairs where people initially think that the wrongmaking properties of allowing such states of affairs to exist greatly outweigh any rightmaking properties associated with doing so, but where, confronted with some proposed theodicy, people come to believe that it would be morally permissible to allow such states of affairs to exist.

Indeed, it is hard to find any such cases, let alone an impressive range. What are the prospects for a complete, or nearly complete theodicy? Others, including many theists, are much less hopeful. Plantinga, for example remarks:. What types of theodicies that have been proposed? An exhaustive survey is not possible here, but among the most important are theodicies that appeal, first, to the value of acquiring desirable traits of character in the face of suffering; secondly, to the value of libertarian free will; thirdly, to the value of the freedom to inflict horrendous evils upon others; and fourthly, to the value of a world that is governed by natural laws.

One very important type of theodicy, championed especially by John Hick, involves the idea that the evils that the world contains can be seen to be justified if one views the world as designed by God to be an environment in which people, through their free choices, can undergo spiritual growth that will ultimately fit them for communion with God:.

Is this theodicy satisfactory? There are a number of reasons for holding that it is not. First, what about the horrendous suffering that people undergo, either at the hands of others—as in the Holocaust—or because of terminal illnesses such as cancer? One writer—Eleonore Stump—has suggested that the terrible suffering that many people undergo at the ends of their lives, in cases where it cannot be alleviated, is to be viewed as suffering that has been ordained by God for the spiritual health of the individual in question b, More generally, there seems to be no reason at all why a world must contain horrendous suffering if it is to provide a good environment for the development of character in response to challenges and temptations.

The world could perfectly well have contained only human persons, or only human persons plus herbivores. Thirdly, the soul-making theodicy also provides no account of the suffering that young, innocent children endure, either because of terrible diseases, or at the hands of adults. For here, as in the case of animals, there is no soul-making purpose that is served. It is very hard to see that it would. Some people die young, before they have had any chance at all to master temptations, to respond to challenges, and to develop morally.

Others endure suffering so great that it is virtually impossible for them to develop those moral traits that involve relationships with others. Still others enjoy lives of ease and luxury where there is virtually nothing that challenges them to undergo moral growth. A second important approach to theodicy involves the following ideas: first, that libertarian free will is of great value; secondly, that because it is part of the definition of libertarian free will that an action that is free in that sense cannot be caused by anything outside of the agent, not even God can cause a person to freely do what is right; and thirdly, that because of the great value of libertarian free will, it is better that God create a world in which agents possess libertarian free will, even though they may misuse it, and do what is wrong, than that God create a world where agents lack libertarian free will.

One problem with an appeal to libertarian free will is that no satisfactory account of the concept of libertarian free will is yet available. Thus, while the requirement that, in order to be free in the libertarian sense, an action not have any cause that lies outside the agent is unproblematic, this is obviously not a sufficient condition, since this condition would be satisfied if the behavior in question were caused by random events within the agent.

So one needs to add that the agent is, in some sense, the cause of the action. But how is the causation in question to be understood? Present accounts of the metaphysics of causation typically treat causes as states of affairs. If, however, one adopts such an approach, then it seems that all that one has when an action is freely done, in the libertarian sense, is that there is some uncaused mental state of the agent that causally gives rise to the relevant behavior, and why freedom, thus understood, should be thought valuable, is far from clear.

But then the question is whether there is any satisfactory account of causation where causation is not a relation between states of affairs. But even if the difficulty concerning the nature of libertarian free will is set aside, there are still very strong objections to the free-will approach.

First, and most important, the fact that libertarian free will is valuable does not entail that one should never intervene in the exercise of libertarian free will. Indeed, very few people think that one should not intervene to prevent someone from committing rape or murder.

On the contrary, almost everyone would hold that a failure to prevent heinously evil actions when one can do so would be seriously wrong. Secondly, the proposition that libertarian free will is valuable does not entail that it is a good thing for people to have the power to inflict great harm upon others. So individuals could, for example, have libertarian free will, but not have the power to torture and murder others. Thirdly, many evils are caused by natural processes, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and other weather conditions, and by a wide variety of diseases.

Such evils certainly do not appear to result from morally wrong actions. If that is right, then an appeal to free will provides no answer to an argument from evil that focuses upon such evils. Some writers, such as C. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga, have suggested that such evils may ultimately be due to the immoral actions of supernatural beings Lewis, , —3; Plantinga, a, At the heart of Manichean theology was the idea of a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil.

This, of course, proposes one possible solution to the problem of evil: all goodness, purity and light comes from God, and the darkness of evil has a different source. However, Augustine came to regard this cosmic dualism as heretical, since it undermined God's sovereignty. Of course, he wanted to hold on to the absolute goodness of God.

But if God is the source of all things, where did evil come from? Augustine's radical answer to this question is that evil does not actually come from anywhere. Rejecting the idea that evil is a positive force, he argues that it is merely a "name for nothing other than the absence of good".

At first glance this looks like a philosophical sleight of hand. Augustine might try to define evil out of existence, but this cannot diminish the reality of the pain, suffering and cruelty that prompt the question of evil in the first place. As the 20th-century Catholic writer Charles Journet put it, the non-being of evil "can have a terrible reality, like letters carved out of stone". Any defence of Augustine's position has to begin by pointing out that his account of evil is metaphysical rather than empirical.

That discussion, however, is beyond the scope of this column. Humans experience desires, drives, and impulses, which can affect decision making, but free will itself operates independently of these urges. Free will is the agency of humans to make decisions based on conscience—which is the assimilation of intellect, emotion, and spirituality. In discussing whether to shoot up a grocery store or buy bananas, Professor Colb describes appeal as a confounding factor of decision making, comparing it to deciding whether to drink fruit or aloe juice.

While this might be a serious reflection of observed phenomena, classical moral theology would argue that it misses the essential nature of human free will. As the account goes, moral actions are rational choices between good and evil. Rather, humans as rational beings are responsible.

Thus, when humans commit evil acts, it is because of their humanity. Important to the consideration of the exercise of free will and the formation of the conscience of the individual is their relationship to the community.

Individual freedom would argue that on any basis, rational or otherwise, or without a basis at all, one could act. However, that perspective disregards the relationship to the community. While an individual is personally responsible for his or her rational choices, formation of that reason, the conscience, is influenced by both God and the community.

Additionally, profoundly evil acts affect the community, not just the individual. Thus, while humanity possesses free will, the development and exercise occur within the context of relationship and community.

This pathology results in a lack of empathy and a defective conscience. It is not purely psychological, spiritual, or physical, but affects all three aspects of the human.