The Landslide and the Forty Minutes
At a sixth-form college in Gozo, a landslide after three days of record rainfall has killed 22 people, nine of them children from a primary school. In an assembly of 60 students, a visiting priest says the disaster was 'part of a plan we cannot see'. A philosophy student replies that a good God would not permit the deaths of children for any plan. The principal asks you, a philosophy teacher, to run a 40-minute session on the problem of evil that neither endorses nor ridicules religious belief and that addresses the question the students are actually asking. The student body includes practising Catholics, a small group of atheists, and several students whose families are directly affected. You have no preparation time and one whiteboard.
1. Distinguish the logical from the evidential problem of evil. Which one does the student's challenge actually raise?
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The logical problem. J. L. Mackie's version is deductive: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence and the existence of evil cannot all be true, so the theist's set of beliefs is inconsistent. It succeeds only if the contradiction is formal - if no possible reason could reconcile the terms. That is a very strong claim, and most philosophers think the free-will defence blocks it, since a world with free creatures may be better than a world without, even at the cost of evil.
The evidential problem. William Rowe's version is inductive: the amount, intensity and distribution of suffering makes it improbable that an all-good being exists, because much of it looks pointless. This does not claim contradiction; it claims that the evidence is unfavourable. It is much harder to answer, because it does not need a proof - it needs an assessment of likelihoods.
What the student said. 'Would not permit the deaths of children for any plan' is not a formal contradiction; it claims that no available good could justify these deaths, or at least that a good God would not permit them. That is the evidential problem, with an axiological core: a claim about what goods can justify what evils. Note too that the landslide is natural evil, so the standard free-will defence - which explains moral evil by human choice - does not apply directly and must be extended.
Why the distinction matters in the room. The priest's 'plan we cannot see' answers the logical problem by asserting a possible reason; it does not begin to answer the evidential problem, which asks whether such reasons are credible given the evidence.
2. Assess the free-will defence and the soul-making theodicy as responses to this particular case.
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Free-will defence. Its direct form explains moral evil by human freedom. A landslide is not chosen, so the defence must be extended: a world of regular natural laws - needed for prediction, science, and hence for genuine agency - will produce earthquakes and landslides. A world where the laws were suspended whenever harm threatened would be a world without reliable action.
The weakness of that extension. It shows, at most, that some natural evil is unavoidable if there is to be a law-governed world. It does not show that this much is required. The evidential problem survives: why an island with three days of rain and an unstable slope, why the primary school, why nine children. A defence that justifies natural evil in general does not justify this distribution.
Soul-making theodicy (Hick). Suffering is justified because it is a necessary condition of moral and spiritual development: courage requires danger, compassion requires distress. In a hedonic paradise, certain virtues would have no occasion.
Three specific objections. (1) The beneficiaries are not the victims. The children who died did not grow; the good is located in survivors, and it is not obvious that gain to others can justify death to them. (2) Proportion. Soul-making may justify some suffering; it strains to justify 22 deaths in an instant, since development requires a survivable, tractable amount of adversity. (3) Distributive unfairness. The soul-making world distributes its formative suffering arbitrarily, and those who get most of it seem to need it least.
Conclusion. Both defences have real structure, and both are answerable to the evidence of this particular case, not merely to the abstract problem.
3. Is skeptical theism a legitimate response to this objection, or does it cost more than it is worth? How would you handle it in forty minutes with a grieving audience?
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What it claims. Skeptical theism holds that our cognitive limits make it unsurprising that we cannot see God's reasons; the inference from 'no good reason is apparent' to 'no good reason exists' is unreliable, because we see only a fragment of the whole.
Where it is strong. Against the logical problem it is powerful: the atheist needs to show that no possible reason exists, and finite knowers cannot rule that out. It also has a general epistemic warrant - we routinely cannot see why things happen and are right not to infer that they are pointless.
Where it costs too much. The same move threatens moral knowledge generally. If our judgments about which evils are justified are systematically unreliable, then we cannot trust the judgment that any suffering is unjustified - including the judgment that a good God would not do this. The view risks undercutting its own premise: the theist's confidence in God's goodness rests on the same faculties that skeptical theism tells us are unreliable about goods and evils. That is the self-defeat worry, and it is the strongest objection available in the room.
Handling the forty minutes. Do not adjudicate. Give the students the distinctions on the board, name the strongest point on each side, and separate two questions that the assembly had merged: the intellectual question (is belief in God consistent with this?) and the pastoral question (what do we say to the bereaved?). Skeptical theism may be a legitimate answer to the first and a poor one to the second: 'we cannot know' is an honest limit, but it is not consolation. Close by noting that the philosophy student's challenge was not a refusal to grieve but a demand that the grief be taken seriously - which is a moral stance, not an attack.