Jonathan discusses “his favourite solution to the problem of evil”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/Archives/004449.html, so I’ll take that as a reason to also discuss my favourite solution. It’s modal realism, of a sort, to the rescue.

Before I start, I should note that nothing I say here is going to be original. But what with it being Sunday night, and this being a blog not a journal, I’m not actually going to footnote anything. (UPDATE: For the proper citations, see Ned Markosian’s comment below.) Just don’t credit me for anything here – I’m merely repeating my favourite solution. Do, however, blame me for mistakes in presentation. (In general, if you want to read real scholarly work online on the problem of evil, I’d recommend not reading this blog and instead reading “Daniel Howard-Snyder’s writings”:http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~howardd/papersandbooks.html.)

OK onto the solution. Let’s assume the following metaphysical claims are all true.

* There is a class of abstract possible worlds W. (I’m not going to say what abstract and concrete amount to in any of this – on this distinction see “Gideon Rosen’s SEP entry”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/.) In other words, weak modal realism is true.
* God cannot _change_ any of those worlds without destroying it – what happens in a world is essential to its nature.
* What God can do is make any of them that He chooses concrete. Abstract possible worlds have no moral value, but concrete worlds do have value, or disvalue if they are bad, so this choice is morally loaded.
* God’s creation is timeless, so He can’t create one and then tinker with it. For each world He faces a take-it-or-leave-it choice.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying these are true. I’m just saying they are a plausible set of views about the nature of modality and the nature of God’s powers. Note that the only ‘restriction’ on God’s powers here are of the form “God can’t do this metaphysically impossible thing”, i.e. make something lack one of its essential properties, so in that respect this isn’t meant to be a revisionary theology. (It’s revisionary metaphysics, not revisionary theology.)

If all this is true, what should God do? Well, I think He should create all and only the worlds such that it is better that they exist than that they not exist. And that will include worlds, like this one, that are not perfect but that contain more goodness than suffering. So the existence of this world as concrete entity is compatible with God’s existence, and indeed His omnipotence and benevolence.

To repair the argument from evil at this stage, the atheist has to do one of three things. First, she can argue that the metaphysics presented is implausible. She might have a point. Second, she can argue that the metaphysics doesn’t really stop God making a world concrete then tinkering with it. I sort of mean to rule that out by stipulation, but that does make the first problem somewhat worse. Third, she can argue that it would be better that the world not exist than it exist. Some days thinking about how awful things are for most animals in the wild I can almost believe this. (There’s a reason they call a really bad situation Law of the Jungle.) But I can never really believe this, and I bet even the most dedicated proponent of the Argument from Evil can’t either. So I think all the action is at the level of metaphysics, which is a nice place to locate the disagreement.

By the way, I feel like I’ve written this post before sometime, but a quick Google of the archives reveals nothing, so maybe I never got around to posting it or something. Apologies if I really am just repeating myself.