Sep

Alvin Plantinga managed the logical problem of natural evil by the traditional move of assimilating it to moral evil. This dialectical move invites rhetorical flak, but it’s perfectly legitimate in the context of the logical problem. It’s at least epistemically possible that all we have are various species of moral evil. Let me suggest a different approach to reconciling the existence of natural evil and God. Grant that God can unrestrictedly actualize a naturally perfect world. We are granting that, necessarily, God can actualize a naturally perfect world. Plantinga famously denies this since it is inconsistent with the possibility of universal transworld depravity. But we can concede more than Plantinga does. A naturally perfect world is, as you might guess, a world in which none of the pain and suffering due to natural events occur. There might be natural events such as hurricanes, droughts, pestilence and the like, in naturally perfect worlds, but there is no suffering and pain due natural events. And so there are no natural evils. Consider the thesis T. T. Necessarily, God actualizes a naturally perfect world. Let’s show that T is false. Suppose all of the naturally perfect worlds are in the set S. It...

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