Zimmerman, Dean

Dean is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He specializes in metaphysics (causation and the laws of nature) and the philosophy of religion (whether God is “outside of time). With Peter van Inwagen, he is the author of Persons: Human and Divine and the editor of Metaphysics: The Big Questions; and with Michael Loux, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics. Following is how Dean begins to frame the problem of evil: “David Hume raises what is usually called “the problem of evil” by asking a series of sobering questions: ‘Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?’ The believer in a God of infinite love, power, and knowledge cannot but feel the force of Hume’s questions. Pain and suffering abound, as do many other apparent ‘evils’ in a broader sense of the word. For Hume’s questions can be raised about the occurrence of any seemingly ‘suboptimal states of affairs’, not just pain and suffering. Many situations or circumstances, although perhaps not qualifying as positively evil, are nevertheless not nearly so good as one might have expected, on the assumption that the world is ruled by a beneficent, omniscient, and omnipotent deity. And Hume’s questions can be raised about these suboptimal features of the world, as well….Furthermore, God could have seen to it that we were always confronted with momentous choices under less ambiguous circumstances — we could, for instance, have had clearer knowledge of right and wrong than most of us have when facing significant moral choices. So, even if it is a good thing to create free creatures who sometimes choose well and sometimes poorly; nevertheless, the good that justifies allowing such freedom could have been achieved much more efficiently. A truly beneficent deity would not have used the patently suboptimal means one finds in our world. Or so one might come to believe….”