Why? the Purpose of the Universe by Philip Goff

Author:Philip Goff [Goff, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198883784
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2023-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Digging Deeper

The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways

There have been many, many attempts to explain why the Omni-God would allow suffering, but I personally find Swinburne’s to be the most thoughtful and plausible. I also find it totally inadequate. However, it’s not yet game over for the Omni-God. The cutting-edge discussion of the problem of evil in philosophy departments these days focuses not so much on theodicies but on the view that has become known as ‘skeptical theism.’

A ‘theist’ is someone who believes in the Omni-God. Skeptical theists are distinguished by how they respond to the problem of evil. The first thing to note is that skeptical theists tend to agree with atheists that all of the theodicies that philosophers and theologians have come up with down the ages are inadequate. Here’s a nice quote from skeptical theist Alvin Plantinga:

we cannot see why our world, with all its ills, would be better than others we think we can imagine, or what, in any detail, is God’s reason for permitting a given specific and appalling evil. Not only can we not see this, we can’t think of any very good possibilities. And here I must say that most attempts to explain why God permits evil—theodicies, as we may call them—strike me as tepid, shallow and ultimately frivolous.14

You might be forgiven for thinking this was penned by Richard Dawkins, when in fact Plantinga is a conservative Christian. Plantinga is convinced that the Omni-God exists, and has perfectly good reasons for allowing pain and suffering. We just have no idea what these reasons are.

On first hearing, skeptical theism can sound desperate. If our best minds have not come up with any plausible reason why an all-powerful, loving God might have created a world like this, doesn’t that give us at least a little reason to think that probably there is no reason, and hence that probably the Omni-God doesn’t exist? However, skeptical theists respond that, if the Omni-God does exist, then She is vastly superior to us in knowledge and understanding, and hence we should not expect to understand the Omni-God’s reasons for creating the world. As Saint Paul puts it in the bible:

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord?15

Plantinga has a pithier line:

Why suppose that if God does have a reason for permitting evil, the theist would be the first to know?16

Skeptical theists have come up with various analogies aimed at showing that any inference from ‘we can’t think of a reason why the Omni-God would allow suffering’ to ‘there probably is no reason that could justify the Omni-God allowing suffering’ is hasty and ill-advised:

The Chess Analogy: You’re a chess beginner playing a grandmaster. You can’t understand the reason for their last move. But it would obviously be ill-advised to infer from this that there is no good reason for the move. Given that you’re playing chess with someone vastly

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