Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Articles
Introduction
J. L. Schellenberg's work in the philosophy of religion is original, powerful, and deeply interesting. It's an honour to contribute an article to this assessment of his recent trilogy.
My topic is his atheistic argument from horrors.1After briefly explaining the argument, I raise an epistemic objection, arguing that no one could be justified in believing its conclusion on the basis of its premises. Then I adumbrate a notion of the divine which is different in various ways from the God of classical theism and argue that Schellenberg's argument makes no trouble for belief in the existence of God so construed.
Schellenberg's argument from horrors explained
Schellenberg's argument takes its start by noting several considerations neglected by contemporary discussions of the problem of evil. The first is that a God who is both perfect and personal (the notion of God presupposed by Schellenberg's argument is that of a perfect and personal creator of any universe there may be: necessarily omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and loving) would have maximally complete knowledge by acquaintance of every possible occasion of horrific suffering (where he follows Marylyn Adams in thinking of horrific suffering as suffering of such a magnitude as to give the perpetrator and/or the victim a prima facie reason for thinking her life not worth living).
Note the strength of the claim. Schellenberg isn't proposing that God has maximally complete knowledge by acquaintance of every actual experience of horrific suffering. The claim, rather, is that God has knowledge by acquaintance of every possible experience of suffering, where that is a matter of his having undergone courses of experience qualitatively indistinguishable from every possible horrific experience. Only then, he thinks, would God possess the sort of 'maximally rich and penetrating and meaningful understanding of suffering that we must surely associate with divine perfection'.2By way of brief complaint, this isn't obvious. True, human ability to attain depth of understanding into the nature of suffering seems to require having oneself experienced a certain amount of suffering, but it's not clear why that would be true of God. Why not think his3ability to project himself imaginatively into a course of suffering without actually experiencing that suffering...