27 September 2005 – Lecture 5
Hume on the problem of evil

Mackie’s way of putting things:
It would seem that the following three propositions cannot all be true at the same time:
1.	There exists a benevolent God.
2.	There exists an all-powerful/all-knowing God.
3.	There is evil (pain, suffering, etc.) in the world.

Possible solutions to this conundrum:  1.  Deny one of the first two propositions … atheism.  2. Deny the third proposition … Does anyone do this?  3.  Deny that the three propositions are mutually inconsistent … Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds,” for instance.  4.  Plead God’s inscrutability … Augustine, for instance.

The last 2 solutions are versions of theodicy.

Hume, from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
•	note difference between natural and revealed (supernatural) religion.  This excerpt is part of Hume’s project to reject the former.

The argument:
•	If we had antecedently proven God’s existence, then the existence of evil would be perplexing to us, but it would not disprove God’s existence.  
•	However, for those of us (all of us, says Hume) who do not have antecedent proof of God’s existence, and must therefore look for evidence of him in the world, the world as it is – with all of its pain, suffering and evil – provides no reason to believe in God.  
•	Moreover, if we were told that the world was created by a benevolent, all-powerful God, we would imagine the world to be a very different place from what it now is.  (Voltaire’s Candide versus Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds.”)
•	Hume is not saying that God’s existence is logically impossible given the state of the world, only that the empirical evidence that we have does not point to the existence of a benevolent all-powerful being.
•	The metaphor of the poorly constructed house and the architect.  Just as Paley argued that we must treat the universe in the same way that we would treat a watch found on the beach, Hume argues here that we should treat the universe just as we would a very poorly designed building.  

Four circumstances that, according to Hume, are responsible for all/most of the pain/suffering/evil in the world:
1.	Pleasure alone is enough to make creatures seek their benefits.  There is no good reason to design pain as well.  Pain is redundant (and painful!).  It does nothing to improve the world, but does a great deal to worsen it.  Why would anyone designing the world include pain in it?
2.	The world is conducted by general laws which are, necessarily, indifferent to individual concerns.  Surely, an omnipotent being could make individual intercessions in order to increase the overall good.  This is particularly true since our understanding of the laws of nature is sketchy enough that we wouldn’t even notice God’s interventions.
3.	Powers and faculties are distributed with great frugality.  We have only enough to survive and no more.  If we fall into any misfortune, or lose any individual faculty, the consequences are dire for us.  A benevolent designer would surely build in a “contingency plan” so that creatures weren’t always on the brink of disaster.
4.	There are things/events in nature that do not seem to serve any purpose, and which can bring about a great deal of pain and suffering, e.g. hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.  Other things in nature are useful in the right quantity, but can cause pain in excess or defect, e.g. ambition, vanity, love, anger.  (And, these often/mostly occur in excess/defect.)  A benevolent designer would have excluded those parts of the “machine” that don’t serve any (positive) purpose, and would have been more careful in meting out the other parts.  

Hume’s conclusion:
While we cannot prove that God’s existence is incompatible with the world, there is no reason to infer his existence from the world.  The right response is skepticism.

Read the final, striking paragraph for Hume’s deepest conviction… the world was created not by a benevolent God, but by indifferent nature.