Audio only:
In this episode, Trent rebuts Stephen Law’s “evil god” challenge to the existence of God.
Transcription:
Trent:
In 2010, the philosopher Stephen Law published a paper called The Evil God Challenge that tries to prove atheism with a simple thought experiment. And in today’s episode, I’ll show how to answer this challenge and why this variation on the problem of evil does not refute God’s existence. So let’s begin with a video from the Center for free inquiry that explains the evil God challenge. First law lays out the classic problem of evil, which claims there couldn’t be a good God because we’d expect the world to have more good in it and less evil.
CLIP:
Many atheists argue the world contains too much suffering for it to be the creation of a good God. There are walls, diseases, and natural disasters. Horrific human and animal suffering is built into the very fabric of the world we’re forced to inhabit. Isn’t this good evidence that even if there is a creator, he’s not all powerful and all good?
Trent:
Now, you might be thinking evil in the world doesn’t prove God is evil, because God might have good reasons for allowing certain evils like the good of human beings having free will. This allows for other goods to exist like genuine love, even though some people will still freely choose evils like genuine hate. Now, law anticipates this reply and he believes it doesn’t work because it can be turned on its head. If a good God can allow evil to achieve greater goods, then an evil God could allow good in order to achieve greater evils. Here’s how law puts it.
CLIP:
Suppose that after a bump on the head, I come to believe the universe was created not by a good God but by an evil God. I believe there’s a single all powerful creator whose malice knows no bounds and whose wickedness is beyond our comprehension. Who believes in a God like that? Almost no one. Why not? Because the world would look much more like a torture chamber if it were created by such a powerful and wicked being. There’s too much love and laughter and too many people being kind and helping each other for this to be the creation of an evil God. I want
Trent:
To be very clear about what law is doing before we continue. Law is not saying evil. God really exists. Law is only saying that he does not believe good God or God exists for the same alleged reasons. You and I might say we don’t believe evil God exists according to law. If evil God existed, the world should be worse than it is and if good God existed, the world should be better than it is. If it’s silly to think an evil God would allow goodness in order to have more evil, then according to him it’s silly to believe a good God would allow evil in order to have more good.
CLIP:
Yet notice I can explain why my evil God allows good. In the same way religious folk explain why their good God allows evil. I can say my evil God could have made us puppet beings that always did bad things, but if we’re his puppets, we are not responsible for what we do. That’s why evil God cut our strings and set us through to allow us to freely choose to do evil. Unfortunately for evil God, some of us then choose to do good deeds. That’s the prize evil God pays to allow moral evil.
Trent:
The heart of the evil God challenge is that if the problem of good shows evil God does not exist, then the problem of evil should show that the real God does not exist because we don’t accept the solutions to the problem of good for evil. God law writes the challenge I am presenting to those who believe in the God of classical monotheism then is to explain why. If belief in an evil God is highly unreasonable, should we consider belief in a good God significantly more reasonable? We might call this the evil God challenge. By the way, I’m going to show why the label evil God doesn’t make sense, but I’m going to use it throughout the video just for simplicity’s sake. So the main answer to the evil God challenge is to show that the symmetry that allegedly exists between good God and evil God doesn’t really exist.
Law makes it seem like both ideas have roughly the same plausibility and roughly the same evidence for each of them. But if we all agree that evil God doesn’t exist, then according to law, we should believe good God does not exist for the same reasons, because evil God and good God have roughly the same evidence for each one. However, the cases are not symmetrical. Law writes those who embrace the good God hypothesis typically reject the symmetry. Thesis law even admits there are some asymmetries or crucial differences between good God and evil God, though he thinks they are not enough to make good God more likely to exist than evil God. To answer that challenge then I’m going to share three differences between the true good God and the so-called evil God, which show evil God is far less likely to exist and so we’re justified in denying evil God’s existence, but not the true God’s existence. Number one, evil. God is intrinsically less likely to exist than good God. Evil God is a weird idea. It’s much weirder than good God, IE God. And that fact irrespective of the amount of good in the world is what makes us already skeptical of evil. God, the key to overcoming the evil God challenge is to challenge law’s assumption that the reason we reject evil God is simply because of the problem of good or that there’s too much good in the universe for an evil God to have created it.
CLIP:
Most people think belief in an evil God is absurd, and if you ask them why they think that their first port of call is the evidential problem of good, they’ll say, well, yeah, look at out the window. You can see that this is not the creation of a supremely malevolent and powerful deity. It is pretty obvious also it seems to
Trent:
Them that was a clip from a debate between law and the agnostic philosopher Jackses. In June of 2024, Simones released a book length refutation of law’s challenge called defeating the Evil God challenge in defense of God’s goodness, Simones previously thought that law’s challenge is one of the best arguments against God’s existence, but he later changed his mind and while Simones does not believe in God himself and he calls himself an agnostic, he does not consider the evil God challenge to be a refutation of theism. That’s because the idea of a good God is intrinsically more plausible than the idea of an evil God. And so a good God is more likely to exist and cannot be dismissed as easily as one could dismiss an evil God. It’s a simpler hypothesis and simpler hypotheses are more likely to be true.
CLIP:
There’s a simplicity point favoring the good God hypothesis IE God is the greatest being. But then for the evil God hypothesis, they say God is the greatest being, but and they’re evil plus evil. So you’ve got a dual divine attribute doctrine on the evil God hypothesis and a single divine attribute doctrine on the good God hypothesis. And I think there are lots of examples of that and once they build up, what you find is you’ve got quite a strong cumulative case which undermines Stephen’s claim that the symmetry thesis is true.
Trent:
And here’s Joe Schmidt, an agnostic who hosts the Majesty of Reason channel sharing his thoughts on the evil God challenge during his recent appearance on Alex O’Connor’s Within Reason podcast Schmid calls the evil God challenge a mid-tier argument for atheism and explains one of the arguments weaknesses that makes it mid tier rather than top tier. So
CLIP:
I actually do think that there are a number of asymmetries between these hypotheses. I mean one is that it seems like the good God hypothesis is more internally coherent. It meshes well, its various parts mesh better together than the evil God hypothesis and the good God hypothesis says, yeah, it’s got all great making features. So there’s a kind of uniformity there, just like all the balls and like me saying that all of these eight balls together with the next one, they’re all black. The good God hypothesis says, yeah, all of God’s features are great making features, but this is where we come to the evil God hypothesis and that’s actually like your hypothesis that oh, despite the fact that all the eight ones that I drew were black, the next one’s going to be white. So you look at the evil God hypothesis and you start looking at its features, oh my goodness, it’s got necessary existence. Oh my goodness, what a great feature. It’s got a great grip on reality that seems to be like a perfection. It seems to make a being better. Oh my goodness, it’s got omniscience. What a great making feature. It seems to be a perfection because it’s got all this knowledge and knowledge is valuable. Oh my goodness, it’s omnipotent. It’s got another great making feature, but then suddenly we come across another feature and it’s suddenly a terrible feature, namely the feature of being maximally evil or whatever. Great
Trent:
Making properties are those that maximize the kind of goodness being all knowing maximizes the goodness of knowledge existing necessarily maximizes the goodness of existence being all powerful maximizes the goodness of causation. One way to describe God is as a maximally being God is that which contains all great making properties. Now that’s a simple idea, a maximally great being. All the parts coherently fit together and make sense for that kind of thing to exist. Laws challenge makes it seem like evil. God is just the evil version of God, the flip side of the coin if you will, and could be just as likely to exist as good God, but evil God is not an evil maximally great being because there is no such thing. Evil is not a great making property. Instead, evil God would be an almost maximally great being because he lacks the great making property of being all good and an almost maximally great being is kind of weird. Why would something be 99% great making instead of just 100% great making like God? Here’s Joe Schmidt explaining why this is a strange and thus less likely alternative hypothesis.
CLIP:
And so you can see how there’s a kind of, the elements of this hypothesis don’t mesh well together because the very fact that this being has all these other perfections gives us good reason to think that it has all perfect. It gives us inductive reason to think that it has all perfections. But so then if you have hypothesis that no, it’s got all the perfect but one and that one’s a terrible making feature, then your hypothesis, it just doesn’t mesh well with its various parts together and it’s going to be less probable than the good God hypothesis. Because of that,
Trent:
Consider other almost maximally great beings as the cause of the universe. Maybe evil exists because God is all knowing and all good, but God is not all powerful so he can’t stop evil or God is all powerful and all good, but God is not all knowing so he doesn’t know how to stop evil. Suddenly you have alongside evil God as an alternative hypothesis to the true God other gods you have wimpy God or stupid God or many other almost maximally great beings. Each of these alternatives relies on the simple basic idea of a maximally great being who then mysteriously lacks one of the great making properties which raises the question of why there would be such a great being who arbitrarily lacks the last bit of greatness they would need in order to be maximally. Great. If we do an inductive survey of their attributes as law does with evil and God, it would seem like the creator’s final attribute would be as great as all his other attributes.
Law himself notes this weakness writing. There may indeed be asymmetries between the good and evil God hypotheses in terms of simplicity and economy. So right off the bat, we have good reasons to be skeptical of evil God’s existence that do not apply to the traditional idea of God. If the reason anything finite exists is because reality has an infinite foundation, then it makes sense. This foundation is infinite in all the goods of reality instead of just all the goods except for one that makes evil God less likely to exist from the outset and justifies us rejecting him over the true God. Number two, evil God is impossible. One of the biggest reasons we reject the idea of an evil God or one that has all great making properties of knowledge and power but is still maximally evil is because the idea itself is impossible. This so-called evil God cannot exist and philosophers have proposed different reasons for why that’s the case. First, the concept of God is simply a being that is worthy of worship, that’s what God is, and any being that is not morally perfect simply wouldn’t be God. They would at best be an evil creator and if the universe was made by a finite evil creator, we would still need to know who made this finite creator. And so the God hypothesis is back on the table. Here’s William Lane Craig making a similar argument in his 2011 debate with Stephen Law.
CLIP:
Now, I think Dr. Law’s own example of evil. God actually proves my point. Now, first of all, it’s inaccurate to call this being an evil God because God by definition is a being which is necessarily good. Peter Milliken, professor of philosophy at Oxford University says, what makes the supreme being worthy of worship is not simply his power, but rather his moral excellence for the supreme being to be an appropriate object of religious attitudes. Therefore, he must above all be morally good so you cannot have literally speaking an evil God because he would not be worthy of worship. What you could have would be an evil creator of the universe who is not God.
Trent:
Second, maximal evil is an incoherent concept because evil is not a thing that exists apart from good, like how red can exist apart from blue. Evil is a privation or an absence of the good, moral evil exists when someone like a murderer lacks virtue or natural evil exists when the being lacks what it ought to have by nature, such as when a living creature is sick or decaying. CS Lewis put it this way, there can be good without evil, but no evil without good. You know what the biologists mean by a parasite, an animal that lives on another animal, evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse. Since evil always depends on the good in order to exist, nothing can be completely or maximally evil law fails to grasp this point when he thinks the ontological argument could prove evil.
God exists just as much as it could prove the true God exists. Law writes, I can conceive of an evil God, a being than whom no worse can be conceived, but it is worse for such being to exist in reality than in the imagination. Therefore, the being of which I conceive must exist in reality, but the worst possible being is not one that has every great making property except goodness. The worst possible being is one that lacks all goods. For example, the worst possible football player is not the one who scores the most points but has the worst attitude. The worst possible football player is the player who has the fewest touchdowns, the fewest intercepts, the fewest tackles. The worst football player you can imagine is the one who is the worst at playing football and the worst being you can imagine is the one who is worst at simply being. So a maximally evil being IE, the worst possible being wouldn’t just be missing good or goodness, the good of goodness, a being then whom no worse can be conceived, would lack all other goods like knowledge, power, and even the good of existence. The worst possible being would be so bad that wouldn’t have any goods at all, and so it would not exist. Simones puts it this way,
CLIP:
But let’s think about Steven’s worst being that can be conceived well, is it broadly metaphysical? IE. Would the worst being have worse making properties? Well, in that case it would be evil, but the evil God would be not knowledgeable and not powerful and not exist.
Trent:
The opposite of God is not a cartoony evil version of God. It would just be infinite non-being or absolute nothingness because God is infinite being itself. Also, notice that because evil is a parasite on the good human beings choose evil only because they want some kind of good that is attached to evil like pleasure. Even masochists who want to suffer only choose pain because they get a kind of joy out of their pain. This is why the 18th century philosopher Mary Wolfsten craft said it may be confidently asserted that no man chooses evil because it is evil. He only mistakes it for happiness the good he seeks. However, if a being were all knowing, he would know the correct way to choose the good, and if that being was all powerful, nothing would stop that being from choosing the good. So there can’t be a being like evil God that is all knowing and all powerful, but for some reason remains all evil. That’s the point philosopher Richard Swinburne makes in his book The Coherence of Theism. He writes, it is logically necessary that an omniscient and perfectly free being be perfectly good. Alex O’Connor is an atheist who is open to the argument that if moral truths intrinsically motivate us to be moral, then a being that knew all moral truths would be all good by necessity.
CLIP:
If moral realism is true, then if God is omniscient, then he must be omni benevolent as well because he would know all moral truths and maybe moral truths are intrinsically motivating. Maybe they’re not whatever. But there are people who will make arguments of that kind, who will say, well, if there is any kind of God that is all powerful and all knowing it will follow that God is maximally good just by definition, in which case the evil God challenge is undermined because the evil God is not as plausible as the good God. In fact, the evil God is impossible.
Trent:
Once again, the idea of a being that has unlimited knowledge and power but is still evil, is way weirder than just the true God who is unlimited in knowledge, power, goodness, and every other great making property. Humans normally choose evil because we are deficient in either our knowledge, our wills, or our empathy. But a maximally great being wouldn’t have a weak will, wouldn’t be ignorant of moral truths, and it wouldn’t lack empathy like a psychopath. And so such a being would always choose the good. And many atheists agree with this assessment of morality. The late atheist Kay Nielsen proposed in his book Ethics Without God, what he called ideal observer theory. He said, we should do whatever would please a hypothetical ideal observer who has infinite knowledge and infinite empathy, which assumes that knowledge and empathy automatically lead to goodness if you have enough of them.
This view is discussed in David Seg Witch’s article, A God by Any other name, which aptly describes how the ideal observer functions a lot like the traditional concept of God. So we see the very concept of an evil God is nonsensical at best. There might be an evil creator whose existence would still need to be explained, but there could not be a being that has all the great making properties of omniscience and omnipotence but still be maximally evil or evil at all. So we have a reason to reject evil God as being incoherent that we do not have for rejecting the true God who is a coherent, simple, maximally great being, and we can do all of this before we discuss anything related to the problem of evil. Finally, number three, there are reasons to believe God exists that do not apply to evil. God law notes that evil God may indeed be impossible, but he says that doesn’t answer his evil God challenge.
He writes, even supposing an evil God is for some reason X an impossibility. We can still ask the hypothetical question. Setting aside the fact that so-and-so establishes that an evil God is an impossibility, how reasonable would it otherwise be to suppose that such an evil being exists? If the answer is highly unreasonable, IE because of the problem of good, then the evil God challenge can still be run. First. This is like asking even if a shapeless colored object is impossible, how reasonable would it otherwise be to suppose that such an object exists? It’s not reasonable because it can’t exist. People can correctly grasp this conclusion even if they haven’t thought through the reasons that prove it. And second, we have reasons to believe God exists and no similar reasons to believe evil God or an evil creator exists. And so we still don’t have to rely on the problem of good to reject evil God.
Law’s article claims that the traditional arguments for the existence of God do not tell us whether the creator of the universe is all good. I agree that some arguments like the Kal argument or fine tuning show, there is a creator, but they don’t reveal the creator’s moral character. Even if evil God were impossible, a critic might say a theist cannot rule out a finite evil creator who is very powerful and very smart, but not all powerful or all knowing. Now, as I said before, such a finite creator would still stand in need of an ultimate explanation for his own existence, that being God. But more importantly, theists have other reasons to believe that the true God exists that do not apply either to an evil God or to a limited evil creator. Here’s Simones making this point.
CLIP:
Theists don’t begin by assuming God’s goods or hypothesizing that’s good or entertaining the idea that God’s good, they give arguments for
Trent:
It. And here’s William Lane Craig correctly noting that we do not determine God’s moral character merely from counting the amount of good and evil that we see in the world.
CLIP:
I would argue that just as you cannot prove that the creator is evil because of the bad things in life, so you cannot prove that he is good because of the good things in life. The two cases are on a par just as good. Things don’t disprove the existence of anti-God. So bad things don’t disprove the existence of God. I think Dr. Law’s mistake is that he thinks that the theist arrives at the doctrine of God’s goodness by an inductive survey of the world’s events, and that’s simply incorrect. As Michael Bergman and Jeff Brower point out in their response to Dr. Law, traditional theists have never argued for God’s perfect goodness by simply inferring it from the existence of some good in the world. Rather, what the theist can do is to present a moral argument such as I have done for God as the foundation of objective moral values
Trent:
In his original paper law writes, it remains possible that a cogent moral argument along the above lines might yet be constructed. I suspect that for those who reject the symmetry thesis, this is the most promising line of attack. However, to date, it remains even among theists controversial whether any such argument exists. But there are several moral arguments including more recent ones that use abduction or inference to the best explanation that show God makes the most sense of moral features in the universe like intrinsic human value, moral responsibility, and moral obligations. And there’s not any similar kind of moral argument that proves evil. God exists because he must be the objective standard of evil just as darkness is the absence of light. Evil is just the absence of good and something is evil if it simply departs from the objective standard of goodness. Now, in response law says that even Christian philosophers consider the moral argument to be a weaker argument for God’s existence.
So what law’s whole case rests on average people finding evil God to be implausible, but that has to be balanced against average people. Also finding the moral argument to be very persuasive. People’s natural attraction to the moral argument is why CS Lewis made it the central argument for God in his book Mere Christianity, which was based on a series of popular radio addresses that he gave. But it’s not just the moral argument that shows God is good. Consider St. Thomas Aquinas’s argument from motion. This argument shows that motion or change happens when potentials are reduced to actual states, like how water’s potential to be solid is reduced to actual solid ice by some other cause or force. Aquinas shows that just as a train’s motion can only be explained by a special car, a locomotive that gives motion to the train without receiving motion from anything else.
The universe’s motion and change can only be explained by a special category God that gives motion and change to the whole universe without receiving motion or change or actualization of potential from anything else. In order for God to ground an entire chain of potentiality being reduced to actuality, God must not be potential in any way. God must be pure actuality. But remember we said that evil is a privation. It is an absence of the good, but if God has no potentials, that means God has no absences. And if God has no absences, but it’s just pure actuality, that means there is no room in God for evil. There is no privation or deficiency in God in which evil could exist. So this means God must be all good. In fact, since God is infinite being itself and he’s the ground of all reality, we would say God just is goodness itself.
Finally, I want to point out that the evil God challenge it is not that new. In the early church, heretics and pagans often believed that the world was created by a good God or force that was responsible for the goodness we saw and an evil God or an evil force that was responsible for all the evil things that we saw. Good God and evil God. St. Augustine even held something like this view Mei and dualism until his conversion when he realized that evil is not a thing that an evil God would’ve created. It’s just a corruption of the good. This meant a world that is good yet corrupted could only be explained by an incorruptible perfect God that created the world and allowed corruption so that God could finally bring it to Incorruptibility in the future. In his confession, Saint Augustine wrote the following, I inquired Wence is evil and found no result, but you suffered me not to be carried away from the faith by any fluctuations of thought whereby I believed you both to exist and your substance to be unchangeable and that you had a care of and would judgment, and that in Christ, your Son, our Lord, and the holy scriptures, which the authority of your Catholic church pressed upon me, you had planned the way of man’s salvation to that life, which is to come after this death.
Thank you all so much for watching. If you’d like more resources on answering the evil God challenge, check out the links below and please don’t forget to subscribe to this channel and support us@trentorpodcast.com.