God, Conceivability, and Necessary Goodness

It is a basic principle of logic that if S entails B and necessarily S, then necessarily B. So, if it is true that God, an omnipotent and omniscient being, is necessarily good, and a good God would not allow a world to exist where there is more evil than good, then necessarily there cannot exist a world where more evil exists than good. Theodore Guleserian has a problem with this. He argues that we can easily conceive of a world where more evil than good exists. He says:

Think of a world, we will call it 'B' in which the only sentient beings whose existence is contingent are non-rational animals of various sorts or are sentient beings a good deal like the higher non-rational animals in our world - all of which suffer long spontaneous bouts of excruciating pain, and spend the few hours between bouts barely doing what is necessary to survive. We can draw the picture as detailed as we like: in this world, mutations do not take place, so the species to which these animals belong do not evolve. Perhaps they exist for an infinite stretch of time. And during this eternity they never experience anything we would call pleasure - only relief from pain. Pain-avoidance and other innate drives would be the only factors motivating their behaviour. (God and Possible Worlds: The Modal Problem of Evil, Nous, 1983)

Guleserian argues that given we can easily conceive of this world, it would appear that it is possible; there is, after all, nothing logically inconsistent about it. But this leaves us with the following options. Either (1) we say that an omniscient, omnipotent, and good (OOG) being would allow for a world where more evil than good exists, which entails that there is not one world that an OOG being would prevent, or (2) we say that a world with more evil than good is impossible, or (3) we deny that God is necessarily good.

To hold (1), he says, would go against our most fundamental moral intuitions and therefore should be rejected. We ought to reject (2) because we can conceive of a world where more evil exists than good, and it is in our basic intuition that what is conceivable is possible, at least in this case. We should accept (3) for it is the option that requires the least sacrifice on our basic intuitions: for even if we are convinced in the existence of God, and even that God is a OOG being, to reject that God has any of these attributes necessarily is not to reject that he has them at all, say contingently. 

I agree with Guleserian that (1) ought to be rejected. However, there are serious problems with his rejection of (2). Here is why.

First, Guleserian’s argument is founded upon the controversial idea that conceivability is a guide to possibility. This principle is popular amongst Cartesians who believe that the mind is separate from the body because one can conceive of thinking without a body - see Swinburne. But as pointed out by opponents of Cartesian dualism, how does the Cartesian know that he does not think this only because he poorly understands the mind? Like how someone with a poor grasp of a Euclidean triangles might think it possible for such a triangle to have angles that add up to something other than 180 degrees. Similarly, perhaps a greater understanding of God and good and evil would show that it is actually impossible. For this reason, I am of yet unsure if conceivability is a good guide to possibility.  

Second, the idea that God's existence makes a world with more evil than good impossible is not as counterintuitive as Guleserian claims. For contrary to Guleserian’s claims, many theists rely on the idea that an OOG being could not create a world with more evil than good to justify the very existence of evil, by appealing to sceptical theism. The sceptical theist response to evil argues that the reasons for why God allows suffering are beyond our ken. We are not in the epistemic position to judge the reasons that God might have for allowing the evil that he does. Nevertheless, we know that since He is good, and necessarily so, there must necessarily be good reasons for why He allows evil.

Third, if we believe that it is a great making property to be good rather than evil, then we have good reason to believe that God is necessarily good, despite what intuition may say otherwise. This reasoning being that the Ontological Argument proves that a maximally great being - a being that has all great making properties and no lesser making properties - exists necessarily. Guleserian anticipates this objection and argues that it is a weak argument as there are few supporters of the Ontological argument. However, this is just incorrect. The Ontological Argument is a well established and accepted argument within philosophical theology and has many supporters today, such as Plantinga and Craig, to mention a few. It is therefore not something that can be dismissed out of hand easily.

For these reasons, Guleserian’s argument is to be rejected.