More than four years ago I wrote the ‘Moral anti-realism and the problem of evil’ post, primarily in response to claims that I had heard being made on the Stand to Reason radio show \ podcast. Since that time, I have kept the podcast in my rotation and have heard the same claim repeated over the years – namely, that skeptics (or moral anti-realists, to be precise) cannot legitimately raise the problem of evil because they do not have a foundation for the existence of evil. This last Tuesday, I finally got up the nerve to call in and discuss this with Greg Koukl. It went OK, but I also think I may have been too acquiescent, as I tried to keep the discussion congenial and focused on my question. In fact, I was so agreeable that he assumed that I agreed with his perspective throughout the full duration of the call!

Regardless, Greg did agree that it is legitimate for an anti-realist to raise the problem of evil on the grounds that it reveals an incoherence within the theist’s worldview (though he of course disagrees with that claim itself), and he also acknowledged that he is omitting this “nuance” when he says that anti-realists cannot raise the problem of evil. That said, I also don’t foresee that he’ll be routinely adding this point of clarity into his discourse any time soon – and I didn’t really give him reason to do so. There were several points that I could have pursued further, but didn’t:

1. I think that he severely underestimates the degree to which presentations of the problem of evil are raising the problem as one of incoherence for the theistic position. In my experience, the central point of the objection is the issue of the incoherence – but I grant that it’s also possible that I’m the one who is misreading that, or that my experience is strongly biased toward arguments with “nuance”, as he puts it.
2. Greg rejected any possibility of legitimately raising the problem of evil without this “nuance”. As I argued in that post four years ago, the availability of revealed Christian morality, and its overlap with our moral sense, means that the moral ontology of the person raising the problem of evil doesn’t matter – even if they are just pointing to their perception of evil in the world. If the gratuitous evil accords with the revealed Christian morality, then this is sufficient to claim that the theistic worldview appears to have a problem. I was ready to redirect the conversation in this direction the next time he gave me the floor, but then he said that the time was up and signed off. Note that I say “the theistic worldview appears to have a problem” because the theist can always propose that God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil.
3. This view, that God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil, is the dominant view and is what Greg endorsed during the call. I agree that this is a possible reconciliation – and a barrier to the deductive problem of evil – but that is not the end of the discussion. Possible does not equal probable. In particular, this response does not eliminate the entailment that the actualized world is the best God could do. I would be interested to know whether he believes that our world actually is the best world attainable by God. As a proponent of the reformed tradition, I suspect he would. Regardless, when the issue is framed this way, the evidential problem becomes particularly stark because it is both easy to imagine ways in which God could have actualized better worlds, and difficult to comprehend that every single apparently gratuitous evil is actually necessary for some outweighing good. See my Pick Your Poison … post for a related argument.
4. He completely disregarded the viability of subjective accounts of evil, implying that they are absurd and powerless. His contention that everybody knows that there’s evil in the world assumed that our moral intuitions in this regard necessarily include an overwhelming conviction of objectivity. I can speak from personal experience that this simply isn’t true, and I don’t understand why it is often implied that this should lead me to a cold, emotionless view of the world, or to withhold critique on the moral positions held by others – as I previously noted in my Moral Ontology post.
5. He suggested that evolutionary accounts of morality fall flat because the mind is not physical, and because those accounts lack evidence for their claims. Though I disagree for numerous reasons (again, see my Moral Ontology post), I’m glad I didn’t try to offer any rejoinder to this at the moment. There just wasn’t room to open that can of worms and do it any justice, and I think it would have detracted from the original purpose of the call.

With all this in mind, I’m tempted to call back and use this engagement as a springboard for further conversation, but I am also interested to hear your reaction to the discussion. Take a listen to the show, where I come on at the 43:25 mark, and let me know what you think. If I were to call back, what do you think should be the focus of the discussion? It seems like point #3 could be a productive path toward understanding how he can be so often seem to be dismissive about the problem of evil, but I’m also intrigued by the possibility of opening with “when I said that I had encountered relativists who view morality as a product of evolution, I was talking about myself,” and then seeing where the conversation leads.