For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the intersection of experimental philosophy and the enduring challenge of evil.
During the second half of the 20th century, a cohort of philosophers, most notably 2017 Templeton Prize winner Alvin Plantinga, developed what many regard as a definitive rebuttal of the so-called Logical Argument from Evil. That argument holds that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the possibility of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God. The rebuttal goes like this: since it is possible that some evil exists as a necessary condition for some greater good (such as affording humans free will to choose between right and wrong), the existence of evil is not logically incompatible with God’s existence.
According to Ian Church, professor of philosophy at Hillsdale College in Michigan, while many philosophers affirm the logic of the rebuttal, many also still find it deeply unsatisfying. “Even though many philosophers admit that the existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of evil, they argue that given our experience of evil, it still seems unlikely that there’s a God like this,” Church says. “This leads experimental philosophers to wonder what sort of experience, and whose experience, is informing these skeptical sentiments.”