No, There isn't a Problem of Evil for Atheists
Contra Yujin Nagasawa
I’m currently in the middle of writing my exam, so I really shouldn’t be wasting my time blogging. Sadly I made the mistake of listening to the Analytic Christian’s video with Yujin Nagasawa on the problem of evil for atheists, and it ticked me off a little, so here we are. I haven’t read his book, only listened to the interview, so he might very well have addressed my points there (lmk if so, as I was hoping to be convinced of his conclusion lol). Anyways let’s make this quick, so I can get a good grade on the exam.
Nagasawa’s claim is that (axiological) problems of evil derive from what he calls an axiological expectation mismatch: You expect the world to have some axiological characteristics (being good), but it turns out to be some other way (bad). It is clear why this is a problem for theists, as their theory posits a perfectly good omni-God. However, he also claims that this is a problem for atheists. Why? Because many atheists are optimistic; they believe the world to be good (or not bad). For example, people have a positivity bias, tend to see tragedies as better in retrospect, and generally aren’t comfortable with the idea that the world is a very bad place. At the same time, the world is systematically set up to such that it produces very bad states of affairs, e.g. through evolution.
I was very disappointed by this. It seems to me that this trades on an ambiguity between two reasons for being committed to optimism: Having a background theory that commits you to it, and looking at the world and judging that it is not bad.
Suppose that two people are about to look at a wall. Jack believes that there is a very good painter who loves blue, and who has painted the wall, while Jill believes it has been arbitrarily painted by a paint-spitting machine. When they look at the wall they find it with splotches of a bunch of colors, though it has quite a lot of blue—perhaps it might even be predominately blue.
Wait, this raises the problem of redness! They both believe the wall to be blue, yet there are all these other colors too!! This clearly is a problem for Jack, but it obviously isn’t a problem for Jill. Even though they both believe the wall to be blue, there are two differences: 1) Jack had a prior commitment to it, while Jill only formed the commitment after looking at the wall, and 2) the degree to which they should expect the wall to be blue differs quite a lot. I trust you are smart enough to make the connection to the problem of evil.
I actually cheated and did read a bit of the book anyways, and in section 8.4.1, he addresses a very similar objection. As far as I can tell, his response is something like: Evil is not a problem for atheism per se; rather it is a problem for atheism+optimism, and an atheist who wants to maintain optimism will have to give something like a theodicy in the face of systemic evils.
But this again seems to run afoul of the reason for one’s optimism. Theists have background philosophical views that require or suggest optimism, and to the extent that an atheist does as well (something Nagasawa suggests some do), there is a problem of evil for them. However, I suspect the vast majority of atheist optimists will hold to optimism either because they genuinely believe, upon looking at the world, that it is good, or because of psychological bias (or some combination of the two). If they then find systemic evil to be incompatible with their optimism, they should then just cease to be optimists. Nagasawa suggests that an inference from their optimism to not-evil might be warranted, even absent prior philosophical motivations for optimism, but that won’t work for reasons I outline here.
Maybe atheists do have some prior expectation of finding more good than bad. But to the extent that they intellectually accept the indifference hypothesis prior to looking at the moral character of the world, I just think this is explained by psychological bias, and so it shouldn’t present a tension in their worldview—just like my biases when making probability judgements isn’t a problem for my belief in probability theory, but instead just me making an irrational mistake.
Of course if they’re atheists of the sort where their worldview really does commit them to some views about the goodness of the world (such as axiarchism) then there obviously is a problem, but that’s another story.
That’s all! This is probably the quickest post I’ve ever spat out, so any mistakes or sloppy reasoning are the work of the evil archons! Now I have to get back to my exam-writing—wish me luck!
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I’m an atheist optimist who also believes the world is pretty obviously evil, especially with respect to all the animals living terrible lives in the wild and in captivity.
I completely agree with this post; my optimism is more a personality trait and feeling that I got very lucky in the random draw of the universe than it is a statement of my belief about the world. To be honest, it’s easy to detachedly agree the world sucks because of animals I never see or hear and still enjoy the rich human connections and prosperity our species has built. It’s not good that it’s so easy to ignore the evil of the world, but it’s how it is. And evolution wasn’t interested in making my moral sense care about people 500,000 miles away than my friends and family, despite me intellectually valuing our worth the same and wishing I cared and donated more.
If Nagasawa’s argument is as you present it then it clearly doesn’t work, but it does sound like he’s getting close to a point that I do think is true: that to believe the problem of evil is unsolvable commits you to a degree of philosophical pessimism.
I’d go further and argue that to believe in the formulation of the problem of evil that all holds all evil to be unjustifiable, not just some, necessarily commits you to antinatalism.