According to William Rowe's well-known version of the evidential argument from evil, an instance of evil is gratuitous if and only if it could have been prevented by God without the loss of a greater good or the permission of an evil equally bad or worse. Call this the Theological Premise of Rowe's argument. Further, it seems that such instances of evil do occur, namely, certain instances of pain and suffering. Call this the Evidential Premise. Therefore, Rowe concludes, there probably is no God (Rowe (Reference Rowe1979), 336).Footnote ¹ Most critics of Rowe's argument accept the Theological Premise and so challenge the Evidential Premise, denying that critics of theism have shown that any inscrutable evil is probably gratuitous. Peter van Inwagen, however, challenges the Theological Premise (van Inwagen (Reference van Inwagen1988); (Reference van Inwagen2001); (Reference van Inwagen2006)).

Van Inwagen claims that the argument from gratuitous evil is committed to a faulty assumption: there is a precise minimum amount of evil necessary for God's purposes, and so there is a precise amount of evil God would permit and no more (van Inwagen (Reference van Inwagen1988), 167; (Reference van Inwagen2001), 71; (Reference van Inwagen2006), 100). Call this the Minimum Claim. Van Inwagen rejects it, arguing by way of several analogies that there is no minimum amount of evil necessary for God's purposes. For example, it is clear that the fertility of eighteenth-century England would not have been affected in the least by the subtraction or addition of a single raindrop. There is no precise minimum number of raindrops required to satisfy the conditions of fertility in eighteenth-century England (van Inwagen (Reference van Inwagen2001), 76). By the same reasoning, van Inwagen proposes his No-Minimum Claim,

Van Inwagen thinks that, since there is no minimum amount of evil God can permit in order to achieve His purposes, He must satisfice; that is, God must choose from a range of possibilities, none of which is best, and all of which are good enough.Footnote ³ Further, van Inwagen argues that (N) implies the following claim.

God cannot help but to satisfice; He must draw an arbitrary line and van Inwagen argues that, given the circumstances (N), He is morally permitted to do so (J). If van Inwagen's No-Minimum argument succeeds, the Theological Premise is false: God and gratuitous evil are compossible.

In the first of two recent papers, Jeff Jordan rejects van Inwagen's argument. His target is (N), the No-Minimum Claim, and his argument is formulated, following Rowe, with respect to pain and suffering. Jordan interprets van Inwagen's No-Minimum Claim as itself relying upon a faulty assumption: pain and suffering are infinitely diminishable. Only in this way, says Jordan, does van Inwagen establish that, for any amount of pain and suffering God could permit, there is a lesser amount that would serve His purposes just as well. Jordan argues, on the contrary, that pain and suffering are not infinitely diminishable, that ‘there is a difference in diminishing something and diminishing something in a morally significant way’ (Jordan (Reference Jordan2003), 237). More precisely, he argues that ‘to diminish pain and suffering in a morally significant way requires a detectable diminishing, but pain and suffering, even if diminishable ad infinitum, cannot be diminished in a detectable way ad infinitum’ (ibid., 236–237).Footnote ⁵ Since there is a lower bound on the human ability to detect pain and suffering, van Inwagen has failed to show there is no minimum amount of pain and suffering required for God's purposes.Footnote ⁶ Thus, van Inwagen has failed to establish (N) and so has provided no support for (J). In this way, Jordan thinks he has reinstated the Theological Premise.Footnote ⁷

However, Jordan's argument is vulnerable in two ways. First, he may be too quick to narrow his attention to instances of pain and suffering. Perhaps his intention is to remain faithful to Rowe, who also focuses on instances of pain and suffering. Rowe can do this since, in order to show that gratuitous evil-in-general (probably) exists, it is sufficient for Rowe to show that gratuitous pain and suffering (probably) exists. In contrast, showing that pain and suffering are not infinitely diminishable is insufficient for Jordan's purposes; Jordan must show that evil-in-general is not infinitely diminishable, since, crucially, van Inwagen is interested in evil-in-general. Though he explicitly addresses Rowe in the 2001 and 2003 formulations of his No-Minimum argument, van Inwagen distinguishes between arguing from ‘the fact of evil’ or the ‘global argument’ from evil, and arguing from ‘particular evils’ or the ‘local argument’ from evil.Footnote ⁸ The former is about arguments from evil-in-general while the latter is about arguments from particular evils, such as certain instances of pain and suffering, and van Inwagen thinks his work is relevant for both sorts of arguments. Furthermore, van Inwagen's Reference van Inwagen1988 formulation of the No-Minimum argument is framed as a general theodicy and does not even mention Rowe. Thus, van Inwagen's No-Minimum argument is not meant to address only an argument from pain and suffering, but arguments from evil-in-general.Footnote ⁹

This is important if we admit the possibility of undetectable evils that are not instances of pain and suffering. If there are such evils, then Jordan's argument is unsuccessful, since, in this case, Jordan has not shown that no evil is infinitely diminishable, only that some evil (pain and suffering) is not infinitely diminishable. That there exist undetectable evils, I think, is plausible. Much debate in the philosophy of religion turns on the claim that there exist undetected and undetectable great goods. For example, so-called sceptical theists argue for the existence of undetectable great goods in order to resist the Evidential Premise of Rowe's argument.Footnote ¹⁰ If it is plausible to suppose that there exist undetectable goods, then parity suggests that it is plausible to suppose that there exist undetectable evils. If there are, in fact, divine plans for the sake of which God must permit undetectable evils, then Jordan has not provided a complete argument showing that these evils are not infinitely diminishable.Footnote ¹¹ He has only shown that some evil (pain and suffering) is not infinitely diminishable. Thus, the set of all evils relevant for God's purposes, which plausibly contains both detectable and undetectable evils, may very well be infinitely diminishable. If so, then Jordan's argument against van Inwagen's (N) is incomplete.Footnote ¹²

Even if Jordan provides a plausible rejoinder to the above criticism, his position is still vulnerable to Michael Schrynemakers's argument. Schrynemakers argues that it is ultimately not infinite diminishability in van Inwagen's No-Minimum Claim (N) that is counterpoised against the idea of a minimum amount of evil required for God's purposes; rather it is vagueness. Schrynemakers extracts what he takes to be the heart of van Inwagen's No-Minimum Claim:

Unfortunately, argues Schrynemakers, van Inwagen often writes in terms of infinite diminishability, but the notion van Inwagen should employ is that of a vague concept. Consider an oft-used analogy. The concept of tallness ranges over an indeterminate series of height measurements such that there is no precise height measurement in this series that is necessary and sufficient for the correct minimum application of the term ‘tall’. In the same way, the amount of evil required for God's purposes is vague: it ranges over an indeterminate series of precise amounts of evil, none of which are the minimum required to achieve God's purposes. Thus, any precise height measurement sufficient for the correct application of the term ‘tall’ will exceed the height necessary for tallness, and any amount of evil satisfying God's purposes will exceed the amount of evil necessary for God's purposes. If this is correct, van Inwagen need not argue that evils are infinitely diminishable in order to establish (N). He need only argue from vagueness. Given God's options, van Inwagen holds that God is morally permitted to draw an arbitrary line, and so (J) holds. In this way, Schrynemakers shows that Jordan has failed to engage with van Inwagen's argument, properly construed, and so Jordan has failed to reinstate the Theological Premise.

Very recently, Jordan has responded to Schrynemakers. In his earlier argument, Jordan denies (N). But in his new paper, for the sake of argument, Jordan concedes Schrynemakers's point that vagueness and not infinite diminishability is the key to (N). Instead, he denies the inference from (N) to (J), the latter of which is the claim that God is morally permitted to satisfice. This is because, ‘for any two amounts of suffering V ₁ and V ₂, such that V ₂ involves more suffering than does V ₁, while both may be sufficient for [God's purposes], morality requires that one opt for V ₁ and not V ₂’ (Jordan (Reference Jordan2011), 126). In other words, for any amount of evil V ₁, since there is a lesser amount of evil V ₂ that would serve God's purposes just as well, God would be morally culpable in permitting V ₁, and so God cannot satisfice in permitting V ₁. That is, contrary to van Inwagen, (N) does not imply (J) and so the Theological Premise, in case of (N), implies atheism. Jordan's mistake here is that he does not adequately engage with Schrynemakers and, more importantly, with van Inwagen. He simply denies (J) instead of engaging with van Inwagen's argument for it. Consider another of van Inwagen's analogies (van Inwagen (Reference van Inwagen2001), 73–73). A ten-year sentence is sufficient for the purposes of rehabilitating the criminal, Blodgett, but equally sufficient is a sentence of nine years, three hundred and sixty-four days. Nevertheless, we should surely agree that the judge presiding over Blodgett's case is morally permitted to assign Blodgett a ten-year sentence. Similarly, since God's decision about precisely how much evil to permit is made within necessarily vague parameters, van Inwagen thinks God is justified in permitting some precise amount. Jordan does not engage with this argument but simply asserts that even if God cannot but permit some gratuitous evil, He is morally culpable in permitting any gratuitous evil. Jordan must do more than deny van Inwagen's conclusion; He must engage with van Inwagen's argument.Footnote ¹⁴

Perhaps the best way for Jordan to engage with van Inwagen and Schrynemakers is to investigate the merits of divine satisficing. The importance of doing so is made vivid by looking at another debate in the philosophy of religion: the problem of no-best-world.Footnote ¹⁵ Leibniz famously argues that there is a best of all possible worlds. Further, God must actualize the best world and so, if He actualized this world, it must be the best possible. Today, very few maintain that (a) there is a best possible world. The consensus position is that (b) there is an infinite series of possible worlds, each surpassable in goodness.Footnote ¹⁶ Given (b), some have proposed an a priori argument for atheism, also called the argument from no-best-world.Footnote ¹⁷ According to this argument, God's traditional attributes imply that God could not do better than He actually does. From (b), we know that if God were to actualize any world, there would be (infinitely many) better possible worlds He could have actualized instead. Thus, there are no possible worlds that God could actualize, which means that God does not exist in any possible world.

Several philosophers have rejected this argument by defending a notion of divine satisficing according to which, given (b), God is still able to actualize a world, even though His creation is less than best.Footnote ¹⁸ This reasoning can be reformulated into conditions for satisficing parallel to (N) and (J):

On scenario (b), Jordan's position in the previous debate suggests he should accept (N*) but deny that it implies (J*). This means Jordan's reasoning, translated into this debate, suggests he should deny that God possesses grounds for actualizing any world.Footnote ¹⁹ However, such a rejection would be seriously underdeveloped. After all, (b) is the consensus position involved in the no-best-world debate, and, as Jordan himself notes, a substantial portion of the no-best-world literature is about the merits of divine satisficing.Footnote ²⁰ This means that, in order to defeat arguments in the no-best-world debate employing divine satisficing, Jordan must do more than merely stipulate that satisficing is unacceptable. Since such a response is unacceptable in this context, it seems an analogous response in the problem of evil context is equally unacceptable. Yet, in reply to van Inwagen and Schrynemakers, this is precisely what Jordan does. Given that divine satisficing is directly relevant to van Inwagen's rejection of the Theological Premise, Jordan must do more than dismiss this issue without due diligence; he must directly engage van Inwagen's proposal that God is permitted to satisfice.Footnote ²¹