A philosophy student was discussing philosopher
Stephen Law’s ‘Evil God Challenge’, and I chipped in on his thread with this
comment, which I made before on my own page:
“Stephen Law's ‘Evil God Challenge’ seems popular and well regarded in many atheistic circles – but while it’s a neat tool for exploring a contentious matter, I don’t think it’s a convincing philosophical device in the end. I think an evil God would not have the genius to create the kind of love, grace, kindness, forgiveness or laughter we see in the world. But a good God might quite conceivably create a world in which the absence of the best qualities produce hate, bitterness, unkindness, resentment and despair.”
The philosophy student asked a good question in response:
“But if omniscience is built into the hypothesis, why wouldn’t evil god have the know-how to create those things?”
Here was my reply, which I think touches something deep, and may be of wider interest, hence the re-posting here:
“I think this is a qualitative matter. Omniscience might grant the know-how of a good God or an evil God to create love or beauty, but we are really considering motivational plausibility here, not technical capability. Omniscience grants the possession of knowledge - not its application in any particular moral direction. Qualitatively, in the creation framework, it’s more plausible to believe bad things in creation can serve ultimately good ends than gratuitous joy, deep and selfless love, or acts of redemptive grace can go on to serve a darker end. That is, qualitatively, the good God and the evil God hypotheses do not seem equiprobable, even if we could grant that omniscience contains the knowledge for both.
There is also probably something even more profound in the notion of creational capacity, regarding know-how, which may be hard to get our heads around – but would be something like this. Even with omniscience, evil God might not have the know-how to create such profound beauty and goodness, because it takes a certain qualitative depth of goodness to be able to create goodness in creation. You might call it an ontological asymmetry between good and evil, one that transcends mere power or information – a kind of metaphysical limitation. Suppose we have two musical geniuses, a good one and a bad one – and they both know everything about the theory of music. The good genius can certainly create dissonance, tension, even moments of ugliness - but only because they understand harmony, tonality, and structure. They have the inner ear for beauty, and they can subvert it meaningfully. The bad one knows the theory, and can create dissonance, tension, even moments of ugliness, but if they have a deaf spot that prevents them from hearing beauty or harmony, they could not generate it on a piano. Technically, perhaps the bad genius could reproduce the notes, but I don’t think we would say they created beauty in the way that the good genius did. The art would ring hollow, because the very source from which it springs - an attunement to beauty - is absent.”
