Dr. Washington's Argument From Harm

A couple of weeks ago I posted some analysis of Dr. Corey Washington's argument that the Christian conception of God is contradictory. In that spirit, I decided to post analysis of his "Argument from Harm," which is a sort of argument from evil. And here it is:

One of the most important areas of philosophy is the philosophy of religion. This area is vital because it has such a bearing on how we should structure our lives. For instance, it would make sense, if God exists, to live differently than we would if He didn’t exist. This paper deals with that very question: Does God exist?

The Argument from Harm
Dr. Washington’s salvo is what he refers to as the Argument from Harm (AFH). AFH is more commonly called the Argument from Evil. The first thing Dr. Washington does is lay the groundwork for AFH by providing a definition for God:

“…God is all-knowing, or as I’ll say sometimes omniscient. God is all-powerful, or as I’ll say omnipotent. God is morally perfect or all-good, or as I’ll say omnibenevolent. We’re also assuming that God is personal. And we believe this God can causally interact with the world.”

According to Dr. Washington an argument for a God that does not have all of these characteristics will not help the theist in this situation. He states that the theist must argue specifically for the Christian conception of God. This will come into play below, but AFH is our current problem. Let’s examine:

Dr. Washington lays out the argument itself in this fashion:

1. Given God’s omnibenevolence, He should desire to have a world in which there is as little suffering as possible, perhaps none.
2. God is omniscient, so God is supposed to figure out how to design a world that has basically no harm at all.
3. God is omnipotent so, so any design that God brings into being, God can actually implement.
4. Given these premises, there should be very little or no harm in the world.
5. There is a great deal of harm.
6. Therefore, the Christian conception of God does not exist.

Dr. Washington has made his argument a deductive argument. Therefore, all the theist has to do is demonstrate that it does not follow that the existence of evil necessitates the non-existence of God. AFH as it is presented is susceptible to what has been called the Free-Will Defense (FWD). Dr. Alvin Plantinga raised this line of argument in a paper called, appropriately enough, “The Free Will Defense”. How can this be done? We must first see if the argument is valid. Does the conclusion follow from the premises? Even if we grant that it does the argument still will not stand because not all of the premises are true.

Premise 3 in particular is problematic for Dr. Washington. At first blush, one would think that it is true that God should be able to create any world He desires. After all, He is omnipotent! Surely God could conceive of some possible world in which we all do rightly of our own free will! As Dr. Plantinga shows, this is not the case.

Say that two friends, Thomas and Bill, are standing in a field. Perhaps neither are particularly bright, or they’ve had a few too many, so they decide to go ‘cow tipping’. They come upon a particularly large cow and both hesitate. Neither Thomas nor Bill want to tip the cow because of its size. It just so happens that Thomas has $100, which he offers to Bill to tip the cow. It also happens that Bill would have never tipped the cow for less than $100, but since he has been offered $100 he tips the cow.

Under no circumstance would Bill have, of his own free will, tipped the cow for less than $100. Could God make Bill tip the cow for less than $100? Certainly, but then God would have been determining Bill’s action, which is not a free act by definition. Bear in mind that in both cases (tipping for less than $100 and not tipping for less than $100) each and every aspect of history of the world is the same up until the monetary offer. That is to say God did not alter some aspect of history to make Bill more favorable to the idea of tipping the cow.
This silly story generalizes to all of humanity. It could be that God chose to actualize the world with the amount of harm it has because He values free will in His creatures. This ‘could be’ is all that we need to show that there is no logical contradiction with the existence of harm and the existence of God. Therefore the AFH fails.