Tooley, Michael

Michael is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Representing the atheist’s point of view, his research areas are Metaphysics (time, causation, laws of nature) and the Philosophy of Religion (the argument from evil, miracles). His forthcoming book is Knowledge of God (a written debate with Alvin Plantinga). As for his strongest evidence that there is no God, Michael goes right to the Argument from Evil. He states: “Consider various evils in the world. I think of the Holocaust and Hitler, or Stalin’s killing of the millions of people. And there are other things. There’s the suffering that animals undergo. It’s a world where if you’re the wrong sort of animals, good chance you’ll be dinner for another sort of animal. And on the whole that doesn’t look like a pleasant way to end one’s life. There’s the suffering that children undergo. There’s the suffering that adults undergo, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, mental illness, cancer. I would say that there are very few people who deserve to undergo that sort of suffering. These are the sorts of evils experienced by adults, by children, by animals. So the question is, how does such massive evil fit together with the idea there’s a very powerful being, ideally all-powerful, all-knowing, who is perfectly good, how can you make sense of that? And that’s basically the problem: what sort of story one can tell that enables one to fit the two things together, the evil with God. I approach the argument from evil probabilistically, and what it says is that the existence of evil in the world lowers the probability, the likelihood, that God exists. I then want to make the stronger claim. I want to say that when you look at the massive amount of evil, it makes the probability that God exists very low indeed. But I’m not ‘happy’ that God doesn’t exist. I have atheistic friends who say, ‘I wouldn’t want to see God exist.’ Why not, I ask? God is all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good. It seems to me that such a Being would be just the sort you would want to exist. For one thing, I don’t think my chances of surviving death are particularly good if there’s no God.”