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itive probability to the former, the latter may still outweigh it.
Sinnott-Armstrong tries to block this route by saying that my ar-
guments on behalf of theism do not prove that God is all-powerful
and all-good. But my moral argument, if cogent, certainly does prove
that God is all-good; and the cosmological argument certainly shows
that the Creator of the universe out of nothing has sufficient power
to prevent the evils that afflict our world, so that the success of my
arguments does count against the gratuity of the suffering we ob-
serve. Moreover, my argument from the life, death, and resurrec-
tion of Jesus and my appeal to the proper basicality of belief in God
go to support the existence of the biblical God, who is declared to
be holy and almighty. In any case, Sinnott-Armstrong s atheism
wouldn t be much of an atheism if it were consistent with the exis-
tence of a personal Creator and Designer of the universe, who is the
locus of absolute value and who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ
and Christian experience! Remember, the problem of evil is sup-
posed to be a positive argument for atheism.
In fact, far from being a positive argument for atheism, evil itself
turns out, I believe, to be a positive argument for theism. For much
of the suffering in the world is moral in nature; that is to say, the
suffering inflicted by people on their innocent victims is genuinely
evil. But then we may argue as follows:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Evil exists.
126 God?
3. Therefore, objective moral values exist namely, some things
are evil!
4. Therefore, God exists.
Thus, evil paradoxically goes to prove God s existence, since with-
out God things would not be good or evil as such. Notice that this
argument thus shows the compatibility of God and evil without giv-
ing us a clue as to why God permits evil. We could be as ignorant
of God s reasons as was Job in the Old Testament. But even in the
absence of any answer to the why question, the present argument
proves that evil does not call into question, but actually requires,
God s existence. So although, superficially, evil seems to call into
question God s existence, at a deeper level it actually proves God s
existence, since without God, evil as such would not exist.
So, in summary, we ve seen that Sinnott-Armstrong s attempt to
prove the second premise of his argument:
2. Gratuitous suffering exists
is by no means successful.
But it should also be noted that his first premise:
1. If God exists, gratuitous suffering does not exist
itself is not obviously true. Some theists have suggested that while
God could eliminate this or that specific instance of suffering with-
out decreasing the goodness of the world, nevertheless there must
exist a certain amount of gratuitous suffering in the world if the good-
ness of the world is not to be impaired. Thus the probability that a
certain specified instance of suffering is gratuitous would not ad-
versely affect theism. Indeed, it s not at all improbable that only in
a world in which gratuitous natural and moral evils exist that the op-
timal number of persons would freely come to salvation and the
knowledge of God. Sinnott-Armstrong might say that in that case
the suffering is not really gratuitous after all: it serves the greater
good of securing people s eternal salvation. But if one allows a greater
good of that sort to count against the gratuity of suffering, then that
makes it all the more difficult for one to prove that truly gratuitous
suffering exists, for how could we possibly surmise what in God s
providential plan for history does or does not contribute to the ulti-
mate salvation of the greatest number of people?
Theism Undefeated 127
In conclusion, the intellectual problem of evil whether in its in-
ternal or external versions can be satisfactorily solved, and so does
not constitute a proof of atheism.
To wrap up, none of Sinnott-Armstrong s three arguments for
atheism is, at the end of the day, rationally compelling or, at least,
as rationally compelling as my five reasons in support of Christian
theism. I, therefore, believe that the scales of the evidence tip in fa-
vor of theism rather than atheism.
Notes
1. The plausibility of the principle trades on the ambiguity of the word ev-
idence. If we mean that everything we believe must be inferentially derived
by sound arguments from other beliefs, then contemporary epistemologists rec-
ognize that so stringent a demand would lead to skepticism, since even such
obviously true beliefs as that the external world exists or that the past is real
cannot be proven in this way. Rather such beliefs are properly basic beliefs not
founded on argument. On the other hand, if we take evidence so broadly as
to include the circumstances that ground properly basic beliefs, then it is not
true that belief in God is not grounded by evidence. For a good discussion, see
Alvin Plantinga, Reason and Belief in God, in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin
Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1983), 16 93.
2. See the helpful booklet by Paul K. Moser, Why Isn t God More Obvi-
ous? (Atlanta: RZIM, 2000).
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