Earlier there was some discussion of the problem of evil, particularly in relation to Haiti. Here's a bit more on the problem of evil from the Wall Street Journal. I saw the article thanks to the Leiter blog.

'If Leibniz is right, then natural disasters aren't the result of divine punishment for sin. They are the foreseen but unintended consequences of a well-regulated and overall good system of natural laws. So religious believers can explain the causes of earthquakes in purely natural terms (Leibniz was an avid scientist himself), while still maintaining belief in a divine, nonpunitive purpose for allowing such events. The harmonization of natural and theological explanations, reason and faith, is Leibniz's true legacy.'

More on Haiti and evil

Here's an article from the BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8467755.stm

A classic, elegant way of addressing the problem of evil is presented by Leibniz in his Theodicy. This world - our, actual world - is the best of all possible worlds. Indeed, given an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God, what else could this world be? The divine mind can conceive of all the ways things could be and actualises that world - that set of states of affairs - which is best.

A difficulty with this approach arises when we begin to think about possibilities. That is, when we consider how things might be. As vile and devastating as the effects of the earthquake in Haiti have been, it is possible to imagine things being even worse. Indeed, we can think of ways in which the world could be much worse than it actually is. Or, at any rate it seems that we can. On one view of modality (possibility and necessity) to say that something is possible is to say that there is a possible world in which it exists. The dominant approach to analysing modal notions of possibility and necessity has been via the use of possible worlds. For a proposition, p, to be possible (or state of affairs, s, to be possibly the case) we may say that there is a possible world at which p is true or s the case. To be necessary is for it to be the case in all possible worlds (or when we talk of something, x, necessarily or essentially possessing some property, F, it is the case that x is F in all worlds in which there is x). Now, there is extensive discussion and controversy concerning which account is to be preferred of the semantics and metaphysical implications of modal theories. At the risk of oversimplification modal realists maintain that all possible worlds are real, but only ours is actual – with actual functioning as an indexical term. That is, when we talk of a possible world we refer to a world of spatially and temporally related objects. Any world, w, is discrete from any other world in which there are objects not related spatially or temporally to objects in w, and modal locutions are to be understood in terms of quantification over such worlds. Our actual world – the totality of everything existent in space-time – is just one of a plurality of concrete, real worlds. Each world is self-contained and complete in the sense that there are no causal connections between a world and any other, and the history of each world is determined entirely by how things are within that world. For the inhabitant of a world, that world is not only real but actual. The truth of the proposition, ‘this is the actual world’, depends on the context of utterance and it will always be true. Just as it is always true that where I stand is always ‘here’.

Now, though, we come to what has been called the ‘the modal problem of evil ’ (see, for example, Theodore Guleserian ‘God and possible worlds: the modal problem of evil ’, Nous, 17 (1983), 221–238; Laura Garcia ‘A response to the modal problem of evil ’, Faith and Philosophy, 4 (1984), 375–358). Roughly stated, this is the thesis that there is a possible world in which there is a level and kind of evil such that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God would not permit. A dilemma is generated for the theist. If such a wretched world is possible – which, following modal realism, means that such a word exists and is actual for its inhabitants – then the necessity of the divine omnipotence or benevolence is to be abandoned and so the classical conception of God must be modified. Or, one must hold that such a world is not possible, even though it seems entirely reasonable to suppose that a sufficiently vile state of affairs could
be the case.

I've taken the above from a paper discussing the tension between a commitment to divine existence and modal realism, 'Theism and modal realism' in Religious Studies 42, 315–328. You can read the whole thing at http://www.paulsheehy.net/papers_for_download/
Theism%20and%20Modal%20Realism%20Final.pdf

Haiti and the problem of evil (continued)

In his Fighting Words column in the on-line magazine Slate, essayist and well-known critic of religion Christopher Hitchens today gives a brief history of Haiti's woes since colonial times and argues against a divine cause to last week's earthquake.

Haiti and the problem of evil

The devastating earthquake last week in Haiti has unsurprisingly caused much discussion in the press and on the airwaves between believers and non-believers as to how such tragedies can occur if there is an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. Comparisons have been made to the famous earthquake of 1755 in Lisbon which destroyed the city and led to the same sorts of thoughts amongst the intelligentsia of the time. Voltaire famously said that such an event in a devout Catholic country proved false the argument advanced by Leibniz, that this world must be the best of all possible worlds, since God could not have created an imperfect world.

Pat Robertson, a well-known and controversial former minister in America, who has a regular show on the Christian Broadcasting Network has managed to upset almost everyone by claiming that the earthquake was no simple natural disaster but divine retribution for a supposed pact the Haitians made with the devil two hundred years ago in return for which they would be freed from French colonial rule. He has also said that it may be a blessing in disguise:




'Shock-jock' Rush Limbaugh managed to annoy the White House and quite a few others by also saying that Americans already are giving money to Haiti in the form of their income tax and that Obama was using the disaster to enhance his image with the 'light-skinned and dark-skinned black community' in America. MSNBC newscaster Keith Olberman was moved to make this response: