On July 22nd, 2007 two thugs broke into the home of Dr. and Mrs. William Petit and their two daughters in Cheshire, Connecticut. They held the Petits hostage for seven terrifying hours. The doctor was beaten, his wife was raped, his youngest daughter was sexually assaulted and their house set afire. The mother and daughters, having been tied up and doused with gasoline, burned to death. Only the father managed to escape. The crime was unimaginably evil.
It's not uncommon after some terrible event like this has occured to hear someone claim that they can't believe in God because no God who was good would've allowed such senseless evil to happen. A good being of any sort would have a moral obligation to prevent this kind of evil if he could, and the failure to prevent such an evil is a strong argument for the conclusion that God, if He exists at all, is either not able to prevent evil or not willing to do so and thus not good.
In the aftermath of the horror that the Petit's suffered it's easy to feel the emotional power of this argument, and people who are grieving and in shock don't want or need to have their reasoning analyzed. They need to be loved.
Nevertheless, for those not immediately in the throes of emotional devastation it might be noted that this is actually a very odd argument. As has been argued here at VP on many occasions, in order to speak of moral obligations one has to assume that God exists. In a Godless universe there are no moral rights and wrongs and thus no moral duties.
So the skeptic who pleads the existence of horrible moral wrongs as a basis for denying that God exists can use that argument only if God does, in fact, exist.
As I say, this is a very odd argument.
The conviction that the world contains terrible moral evils which God would have a moral obligation to prevent actually makes it more likely, not less likely, that God does exist. Only if there's an objective moral right and wrong can anything be morally evil, and only if there really is a God can there be objective moral right and wrong.
Thus, the belief that what happened to the Petits, or to untold millions of others, is morally evil must presuppose the existence of God.
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga writes that a secular view of the world "has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort...and thus no way to say there's such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there is such a thing as horrifying wickedness, then you have a powerful argument" for the existence of God.
To talk about evil one has to talk about objective moral right and wrong, and to talk about objective moral right and wrong one has to assume that God exists.
If God does not exist then what those two men did to the Petits is neither wrong nor right, it's just a fact about what happened. It may outrage us, but that doesn't make it wrong. It can only be wrong if it 1) violates some objective standard of behavior and 2) if the men who perpetrated the deed will ultimately be held accountable for it.
And neither of those conditions exists unless God does.
