The Epistemic Contrast Defense Reconsidered

Here’s how the Epistemic Contrast Defense went.

1. God would permit the types of evil and suffering necessary for us to recognize the good.

2. Any world in which we can recognize the good is better than any world in which we can’t recognize the good.

3. God had a choice between making an all-good world in which we couldn’t recognize good, and a world with evil and suffering in which we could recognize good.

4. God can’t allow us to recognize good without allowing us to experience evil and suffering.

4

B |

2 + 3

A |

1

As we’ve learned, premise 4 is acceptable only if it’s somehow a contradiction in terms for us to recognize good without knowing bad. And is it?

It’s certainly a fact that we can’t form a concept of anything without, in some way, grasping what it is to not fall under that concept. Understanding the concept dog, for example, involves knowing what does and does not count as a dog. But is this fact a function of how we define our terms, in which case not even God could have it any other way, or is it a function of how our minds work, in which case God could, presumably, have constructed our minds otherwise. In short, is our knowledge of good logically, or merely psychologically, dependent upon our knowledge of bad?

To be frank, I haven’t the foggiest notion. And since I don’t know whether idea 4 is true or not, and since the epistemic contrast defense requires a questionable preference-premise as well (Mightn’t it be better to be ignorantly blissful than knowledgeably miserable?) I think we should table this defense. It’s interesting, but probably not quite a solid as the Virtue and Free Will Defenses, so let’s play it safe and stick with those.

Before we wrap up this discussion of the Problem of Evil, have you noticed how the Virtue and Free Will Defenses are similar?