Major Gaps in Sterba’s New Atheological Argument from Evil

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript puts forward very clear arguments and explains them in detail and convincingly. It is also well written and well organized. Therefore, I really liked reading this manuscript which is an important addition to the literature. Below, there are, in my view, a number of ways in which the paper could be strengthened. I list two comments of mine in the order they occurred to me as I read the paper. Based on those comments, I recommend minor revision.

 

First, the author has two core arguments, “humans consent” and “greater reward”. In the first, humans knew that the earth would be full of evils including horrendous ones. Still, they accepted to exist in this world. In the second, suffering from horrendous evil will be rewarded by a greater good (soul-making and many others) and therefore the victim will retroactively acknowledge their pain. Are these two arguments related to each other? Have humans consented to suffering because their suffering has greater rewards?   Moreover, how can we conceive the consent we do not remember in this world when we encounter the horrendous evil? How can it justify the existence of evil?

Second, from the human perspective, it might be rationally preferable to suffer for greater reward. But this argument leads us to an understanding of God that allows man to suffer in order to give a greater reward. How this understanding of God is compatible with the all-good God understanding? Does God create/allow horrendous evils to give better rewards? I think free-will argument prevents us from imagining such a God. According to this argument, the horrendous evil is the inevitable side-effect of God's creation of free will (Humans’ awareness of God’ monitoring act is a good point here), and therefore God gives the reward to compensate such suffering. Otherwise, it is possible to interpret the greater good as the cause of suffering from horrendous evil.

Author Response

I am glad the reviewer found the arguments convincing. As I responded to the second reviewer, I clarified (and somewhat modified) the scenarios I presented, and strengthened the case that it would be morally permissible for God to allow evil for a greater good in these scenarios.  I did not spell out all the ramifications for how we think about God or the role of evil in the world since my purpose in the paper was not to show that there is no possible plausible response to these scenarios, but only to show that if Sterba is to make his purported logical argument against the existence of God from evil he would have to eliminate these scenarios.  So, the ball is now in his court.

That said, the questions the reviewer raised are important to address, but only in future work after Sterba has had a chance to respond.  Then ii might be valuable to further develop the scenarios and address the type of questions the reviewer raises. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Please see the attachment.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

I revised the paper to more fully support the moral permissibility of the prior-consent and other scenarios.  In particular, I clarified the various scenarios, and then for each presented examples of similar cases where allowing evil for a greater good intuitively seems morally permissible. I further backed the moral permissibility of these scenarios by arguing that the Kantian principle that persons should never be treated as mere means to some end, but as ends in themselves better captures the intuitions underlying the Pauline Principle and that a good case can be made that under the Kantian principle these scenarios are morally permissible. I also addressed various possible responses Sterba could give. Finally, I clarified and strengthened the arguments in the last section which the reviewer did not comment on.

As the reviewer noted, "However, I agree with the author that Sterba too is very brief on consent, and, to be sure, there is room for responses on that front." Thus, it was not possible to address in detail the reasons Sterba has for rejecting the consent scenarios but I only could further develop the argument that the sort of consent I envision would be sufficient to make God's allowing the evils of this world morally acceptable. I think at this point the burden is on Sterba to more fully address the consent scenario and other scenarios I present in order for his argument to succeed. This is the main point of the paper as given by the title: there are serious gaps in Sterba's argument that Sterba needs to address.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I find the revised version to be much more compelling, as the main focus is on the first set of problems (the scenarios) and they are better developed.