Nagasawa's existential problem of evolutionary evil

Richard Dawkins once remarked that: ‘We have cause to give thanks for our highly improbable existence, and the law-like evolutionary processes that gave rise to it.’Footnote ³ Elsewhere, Dawkins offered a gloomier view of evolution, saying that: ‘[N]atural selection is out there and it is a very unpleasant process. Nature is red in tooth and claw. But I don't want to live in that kind of a world. . .’Footnote ⁴

Nagasawa suggests that Dawkins's two remarks illustrate two inconsistent commitments held by many atheists.

One of these commitments is expressed in Dawkins's remark about the unpleasantness of natural selection. That's an understatement since the process of natural selection involved the suffering and death of trillions of sentient beings, over many hundreds of millions of years. That is already a massive amount of evil, or, better, badness, but Nagasawa suggests that evolution is associated with an evil that is over and above that first-order badness. Nagasawa calls this ‘systemic evil’. We shall explore this idea later.

For now, though, let us state this commitment as

The second commitment is supposed to be expressed by the Dawkins's first remark. Nagasawa calls it Existential Optimism (EO), the thesis that ‘The world is, overall, a good place and we should be grateful for our existence in it.’Footnote ⁵

Nagasawa argues that these two commitments are incompatible. He writes: ‘If the “law-like evolutionary processes” guarantee pain and suffering for uncountably many humans and other sentient animals, it seems impossible for atheists like Dawkins to consistently defend existential optimism.’Footnote ⁶ By contrast, while theists may have difficulty explaining why EE is true, Nagasawa argues that they have less difficulty reconciling EE and EO within the theist framework, which is not confined to the natural world and offers greater space for further, supernatural value to overturn whatever deficit EE may generate.Footnote ⁷

Nagasawa therefore concludes that:

Before we assess this argument, we should first ask whether atheists really do have these commitments. Few if any reflective atheists would deny that evolution is associated with massive natural evil: after all, many of them make extensive appeal to that evil in arguing for their atheism. The commitment to Existential Optimism, however, is trickier. This view combines an axiological claim:

and a claim about fitting attitudes:

I will focus first on Axiological Optimism. It is natural to interpret it as the claim that the world overall contains more good than badFootnote ⁹ – that is after all exactly what pessimists such as Schopenhauer deny.Footnote ¹⁰ It is not clear whether by ‘world’ Nagasawa means the entire cosmos, across space and time, or just what is going on here on Earth. I will consider both readings here.

Now Nagasawa rightly rejects the idea that all atheists are ‘negative, nihilistic, pessimistic people who think that life is miserable or absurd’ who think that ‘there is nothing about our mortal existence for which we should feel happy or grateful’.Footnote ¹¹ But that's still a far cry from literal endorsement of Axiological Optimism. In fact, neither Dawkins, nor the other atheists Nagasawa quotes,Footnote ¹² says anything that directly expresses commitment to Axiological Optimism. They merely express gratitude for existing. Nagasawa thinks, however, that people like Dawkins wouldn't express gratitude for existing if they thought that there were surrounded by utter misery. He writes: ‘Otherwise, their view would be a form of pessimism except about themselves; existential optimism is a worldview, rather than the plain assertion that “I am happy and grateful to be alive (but I do not know about others)”.’Footnote ¹³ But as we'll see later, attitudes such as gratitude needn't directly mirror our value judgements about the world and we therefore cannot simply infer the latter from the former. Moreover, we can believe that things are good in ways that go beyond our personal lives without thinking that the world is good, let alone without thinking that about the entire cosmos. It's likely that Dawkins believes that the lives of very many other people are good, or good enough. It is a massive step from that to the conclusion that, say, things on Earth, or even just terrestrial history till now, is overall good. In fact, I would be surprised if Dawkins, or most people, have interesting views on such grand axiological questions. Agnosticism on such questions is not a form of pessimism. And, as we shall see below, such agnosticism is also appropriate.Footnote ¹⁴ It seems to me doubtful that we can attribute to people a strong commitment to a view they never explicitly endorse and which can be supported by little to no evidence.

An argument against atheism?

Setting this aside, we can ask next whether Nagasawa's problem really offers reason to give up atheism. Interpreted as an explicit argument, the key idea seems to be the following:

The Existential Problem of Evolutionary Evil

1. (A) Evolutionary Evil (EE): Terrestrial evolutionary history contains a vast amount of badness.

2. (B) The Bleak Upshot : If atheism is true then, because of EE, Existential Optimism (EO) is (probably) false.

3. (C) It is easier to reconcile theism with EO.

Therefore,

1. (D) Atheists who accept EO have reason to give up atheism and adopt theism.

Let us first consider the final step of Nagasawa's argument.Footnote ¹⁵ Let us assume for now that, if we assume that atheism is true, then EE and EO are indeed somehow incompatible. Would this give us ‘a reason to give up atheism and a motivation to adopt theism’?

Notice first that, as the above makes clear, this isn't a general argument against atheism. It is an argument against atheists who also endorse EO, an independent view. It's obvious that atheism entails nothing about gratitude. But, on its own, atheism also entails nothing about the overall goodness of the world. Atheism just asserts that a certain supernatural being does not exist. Since that being is supposed to be supremely good, atheism entails that this good is missing from the world. So atheism does have a certain ‘negative’ axiological commitment. But that leaves the question of the overall value of a godless world entirely open.Footnote ¹⁶

Let us set aside the earlier worry that we have little evidence that many (or any) atheists endorse EO. It still seems odd to think that atheists who also accept EO must conclude that atheism is false if they accept the Bleak Upshot. If atheists discover that EE is in tension with EO, how could that be, on its own, a reason to conclude that the argument from evil, and their other arguments against theism, are mistaken? That would be like concluding, from a failed exam, not that you're not as good as you thought but that the teacher must be conspiring against you. In most cases, when we encounter strong evidence that things are worse than we had assumed, that's a bad reason to reject that evidence and hold on to our rosy assumption. To be motivated to adopt theism on these grounds would be an instance of wishful thinking – an epistemic vice. Moreover, it is a vice that atheists often accuse theists of succumbing to. So surely what atheists should conclude instead is that EO is false.Footnote ¹⁷

We might be able to revive the argument by showing that there are independent grounds for holding on to EO. As an analogue, consider the moral argument for theism. One version of the moral argument goes roughly like this: atheism, it is argued, entails that there is no morality, but since we know with far greater certainty that, for example, torturing infants for fun is wrong than we know that any of the arguments for atheism are successful, we should reject atheism. Now there are many problems with this argument. But it has one major advantage over Nagasawa's argument. It is plausible that we can have a priori knowledge of basic moral propositions. But it's very hard to see how, on atheism, we could have a priori knowledge of the overall value of the world. The value of the world is a function of what is in it. And what is in our world is a contingent matter – and, as we shall soon see, we are not in a position to know many of the relevant facts.Footnote ¹⁸

As an axiological argument

I argued that even if the Bleak Upshot were true, this would give us no reason to think that atheism is false. I now turn to consider whether we should accept the Bleak Upshot. Moreover, even if we reject the argument's last step, the truth of the Bleak Upshot would still be important. It can potentially bear on questions relating to what has been called the axiology of theism:Footnote ¹⁹ just as we may want to know whether or not God does exist, we may also wish to know whether, if atheism is true, things would be considerably worse in certain respects, or even overall bad. We may also wish to know what attitudes we should have towards the world, if we find that there is no God. Even if it would be an epistemic vice to be motivated to adopt theism just because atheism has bleak implications, it might be perfectly appropriate to wish, in response, that God exists (or had existed).

Let us turn then to what I take to be Nagasawa's argument for the Bleak Upshot:

The Axiological Argument from Evolutionary Evil

1. (1) EE: Terrestrial evolutionary history contains a vast amount of badness.

2. (2) If atheism is true, nothing exists beyond the material universe.

Therefore,

1. (3) If atheism is true, Axiological Optimism is (probably) false: the universe isn't overall good.

Therefore,

1. (4) If atheism is true, Attitudinal Optimism is (probably) false: we shouldn't be thankful that we, and the world, exist.

Before considering this argument, it's worth noting that, if successful, this argument is likely to establish something stronger. According to the Bleak Upshot, atheism is likely to mean that the world isn't overall good, or merits our gratitude. This is compatible with the world having overall neutral value, being neither good nor bad. But it is unlikely that all the good and bad in it exactly cancel each other out. So it is almost certain that the argument should really support

1. (3′) If atheism is true, then Axiological Pessimism is (probably) also true: The universe is overall bad.

And if (3) supports (4), then (3′) should arguably support

1. (4′) If atheism is true, then Attitudinal Pessimism is (probably) also true: we should regret that we, and the world, exist.

I'll start by asking whether (1) and (2) can support such axiological conclusions. I'll later consider whether, if it did, the further attitudinal claims would follow.

Notice first that this argument purports to establish a categorical claim about the value of the world under atheism. Thus, when we consider the work (2) is doing in the argument, we need to bracket comparative claims to the effect that, for example, it would be better if theism is true, or categorical claims about the value of the world under theism; atheism could entail that the world is not good even if theism was somehow also incompatible with Axiological Optimism and even if things would have been even worse under theism. I will therefore postpone discussion of these further axiological claims.

Now strictly speaking (2) isn't quite right. Atheism does not entail metaphysical naturalism and, conversely, theism is of course more than supernaturalism. But Nagasawa is obviously right that contemporary atheists are typically naturalists. Still, this means that the above argument cannot show that atheism has bleak implications, only that naturalist atheism does. Moreover, this way of marking the axiological upshots of atheism does not engage with what is axiologically distinctive about the theist alternative – both positively and negatively. We'll return to this when we discuss the categorical axiological properties of theism.

More directly relevant for our current purposes is that (2) is merely a negative claim. It tells us nothing about the value that the world would contain if atheism is true. It just tells us that the only entities and properties which determine that value are those contained in the natural world. No supernatural cavalry can come to the rescue to redeem all those millions of years of agony. Still, in itself, that's neither bad nor good news – it may exclude God and His immense value, but also Satan and all kind of malignant supernatural forces.

So all the positive work must be done by (1). But while (1) is clearly true, and refers to a staggering amount of badness, there is plainly a vast gap between (1) and (3), since (1) refers only to the badness contained in what is a spatiotemporal part of the world (whether the latter is understood to refer to the cosmos as a whole or just to Earth). Moreover, (1) does not yet establish the overall value of that spatiotemporal region since it leaves it open that all that badness is counterbalanced or even outweighed by the good contained in this region. However, before we can consider these gaps in the argument, we need to get clearer about the nature of the natural evil to which (1) refers. In particular, we need to examine Nagasawa's claim that evolution involves a distinctive kind of ‘systemic evil’.

Systemic vs first-order evil

Nagasawa argues that the ‘cruelty of nature’ raises a problem of evil that is ‘fundamentally different’ from more familiar formulations that focus on specific events, such as the Holocaust, or specific types of events (e.g. earthquakes or murder). By contrast, here we are considering an entire biological system that is ‘fundamentally evil’ because it ‘involves competition for survival. For approximately four billion years, uncountably many organisms have competed and struggled for survival. In this cruel, blind system, the weaker are eliminated, and even the survivors will eventually die, often painfully and miserably.’Footnote ²⁰ And because this problem of systemic evil is focused on something more fundamental than specific events or types of events, it's more forceful than the standard problem.

The intended axiological import of these claims is unclear. Axiological Optimism makes a claim about the overall value of the world. It's not specific events or types of events that decide that value, but their aggregate. So what matters for that is not a particular event of a sentient animal being devoured alive, or predation more generally, but the aggregate sum of the suffering that was endured over this immense period.

At least that is how such axiological questions would be typically addressed, and that is how I will understand evolutionary evil. But Nagasawa seems to have something else in mind. He may think that, because natural selection is the source of all that suffering, it's more fundamental. Of course, natural selection is causally more fundamental than its products. But that just makes it a prodigious instrumental bad. However, that's irrelevant: merely instrumental value adds nothing to the overall value of the world. (Cancer is similarly the causal source of an immense amount of suffering but only the suffering it produces matters intrinsically: the world would have been just as bad had that suffering been caused by something else.)

Now, on some views, acts of cruelty and injustice add to the badness of the world over and above their consequences. But although Nagasawa describes nature as cruel and unjust, these are surely merely metaphors, if atheism is true. Or perhaps the world is made worse by being causally wired up such that pain is its guaranteed product? I am open to this idea, though it involves a controversial value claim. But even if correct, it seems very doubtful that this badness is more significant than the first-order suffering itself. Otherwise it would be better if a world contained even more suffering if, say, that suffering was accidental and didn't have its source in such a biological system. This seems wrong.Footnote ²¹

So the idea of systemic evil requires further clarification. In what follows I will therefore focus on the aggregate of evolutionary suffering. But this seems to me to make the argument stronger, not weaker. And Nagasawa himself in fact repeatedly appeals to that first-order suffering.Footnote ²²

Evolutionary evil and the goodness of the world

The amount of suffering that is associated with natural selection, operating over hundreds of millions of years, is staggering. We can only respond to it with horror, even though our minds are too feeble to fully grasp suffering on such a scale. But all that natural evil, I said, doesn't even establish

That would depend on whether that evil is outweighed by competing goods: there is pleasure and other positive affective states that most animals also experience, and perhaps also the value of the existence of sentient beings – as well as, on some views, of all living things in their immense variety.

Whether evolutionary history contains more bad than good is a difficult empirical question. However, several authors argue that the lives of most animals in the wild contain more bad than good.Footnote ²³ If this argument about suffering in the wild is correct then it could be generalized into a general claim about evolutionary history.Footnote ²⁴

But even that is just a claim about one part of the past. Once humans arrive on the scene, they potentially bring into play distinctive goods – such as the value of rational agency, moral virtue, deep personal relationship, knowledge, achievement and aesthetic creation and appreciation – that are widely held to possess far greater value than mere sentience.Footnote ²⁵ So to show even just that terrestrial history is overall bad until now, Nagasawa will need to show either that human history is itself overall bad, or that even if it is good, it's not enough to outweigh the prior bad.Footnote ²⁶

In passages that try to address something like this worry, Nagasawa tells us to suppose that:

However, Nagasawa holds that natural selection reveals that ‘this perception of life and the world is inaccurate’, and ‘If a large part of the material universe and a large part of life in it are painted grey, atheists have to give up existential optimism, which entails that these components are painted mostly yellow.’Footnote ²⁸ This passage can suggest that Nagasawa is assuming a spatiotemporal understanding of ‘overall value’ (at least within the natural world):Footnote ²⁹ we ask, of a given spatiotemporal part of the world, whether it's overall negative or positive, and then see whether the world is on the whole more positive or negative. And, indeed, since evolution has unfolded over billions of years, while human history is comparatively incredibly brief, then, if Evolutionary Pessimism is correct, you can see why it might seem that the overall balance is negative.

But that would be a mistaken conclusion. To begin with, since most of the universe is basically empty, the universe itself is nearly entirely devoid of value (neither grey or yellow). So by this logic we should conclude that the world is neither good nor bad. More importantly, questions about overall value are not concerned with whether things are positive/negative per square mile. A world in which billions feel utter bliss in one spot, and a handful feel mild agony in the rest of the world, would count as an overall bad place by this odd measure. Questions about overall value are concerned with the aggregate of value out there, not about its spatiotemporal spread.

Now while temporal and spatial spread are in themselves irrelevant, numbers do make a difference, and the number of sentient beings who had suffered greatly over many millions of years is mind-boggling. If Evolutionary Pessimism is true, and we are hedonists, that badness is likely to swamp whatever opposing good human history may contribute. But if we reject hedonism, and accept at least some of the non-hedonic goods I mentioned above, then answering the question of the overall value of terrestrial history so far would involve an enormous undertaking that is obviously beyond the scope of this article.Footnote ³⁰

In any event, even if we arrive at a grim answer to that question, this will not begin to settle the question of the overall value of the world as a whole. For there is, to begin with, our own future. Humanity might go extinct soon or go on for many millions of years. The future may be utopian or dystopian or anything in between. We simply don't know. And if we have in mind the universe as a whole, the Earth is anyway an incredibly tiny part of that. Now, if we are alone in the universe then and sentient beings are the only source of value, then this doesn't matter: whatever conclusions we reach about the Earth also apply to the universe as a whole.Footnote ³¹ But these are large assumptions. For all we know, there may be a multitude of advanced intergalactic civilizations, meaning that what happens on little planet Earth is of negligible significance in deciding the value of the universe as a whole. Nagasawa could reply that all sentient and rational beings in a naturalist framework must be products of natural selection and, therefore, if there's life elsewhere that just massively adds to the overall amount of evil. But this assumes that evolution cannot take more benign forms in profoundly different contexts. And even if evolution does operate in similar ways everywhere, it is less likely that all rational beings produced by evolution must be similar to us. So whatever conclusions we reach about the case of the Earth cannot be assumed to generalize. Since we are clueless about the answer to all these questions about the future, and life outside the Earth, we simply aren't in a position to even guess whether Axiological Optimism is true, on atheism, at either the terrestrial or cosmic level.Footnote ³²

Atheism, pessimism, and gratitude

It remains true that, if Evolutionary Pessimism is correct, then there is a massive axiological deficit that needs to be overturned to avoid global pessimism. While we are not remotely in a position to know that, it is perfectly possible that things will overall turn out bad. Now that would be a depressing fact about the universe. But it is not obvious that this should drive us to despair. Now more familiar pessimist views, such as Schopenhauer's or Benatar's, also make such a claim about the world as a whole.Footnote ³³ But they arrive at that general claim via the claim that human lives are overall bad, perhaps even inescapably so. The kind of pessimism we are considering is different: that even though our own lives are going reasonably well, this good is just a part of a whole that is overall bad.Footnote ³⁴

As I pointed out earlier, people rarely orient their lives in relation to such grand axiological questions. Nor would accepting global pessimism force us to change how we live. It is hard to see, for example, why it would undermine morality, or make our personal projects pointless. And our acts could still make the world as a whole better, perhaps even make a great difference; though it would sadly also be true that even if we all did our best, at most we could make the world less awful.Footnote ³⁵

Global pessimism may dampen our motivation but it need not change what we do. Should it, however, change how we feel? Nagasawa's argument assumes that, if Axiological Optimism is false, we should not feel thankful that we, and the world, exist. But the relation between axiology and attitudes such as gratitude is more complex than that.

We should first consider the falsity of axiological optimism. If optimism is false, the world isn't overall good. But if the world has neutral value, then it is not bad either. We can say, of such a world, that it's neither better, nor worse, than nothing. By contrast, if global pessimism is true then the world is worse than nothing. It would have been better if the world did not exist, or at least if sentient life never emerged within it. That's a bleak view.

Still, how this should affect our attitudes depends on which perspective we adopt. When we consider things from the point of view of the universe, as Sidgwick famously put it, then we should respond with indifference to a universe with neutral value, and with sadness to one with negative value. Attitudes such as gratitude or regret, however, essentially involve a comparison with some alternative, so how we should feel about the world, even from such a lofty standpoint, depends on what is the relevant alternative. However, that alternative needs to be broadly realistic: it makes no sense to feel deep gratitude that, say, I was not kidnapped by malevolent extraterrestrials.Footnote ³⁶ I argued earlier that even if the world is overall bad, this does not give us a reason to reject atheism. But if theism isn't a realistic alternative from an atheist standpoint, then neither can it motivate regretting that God does not exist (though it may motivate preferring His existence).

The naturalist framework does offer more realistic alternatives. For example, if the very emergence of sentient life is extremely unlikely, then a lifeless universe would be such an alternative. So if global pessimism is true, we should regret, from such a cosmic standpoint, that sentient life ever emerged (though if the world has merely neutral value this contrast does not really matter).

We rarely, however, see things from such a high altitude. When we are glad about our own lives, or the lives of those we care about, we do so from our own personal standpoint. Still, we want such partial attitudes to be morally defensible. Now, if our own lives are good, and the falsity of Axiological Optimism just means the world has neutral value, then I see no problem in being unreservedly glad that we exist. If the alternative is nothing of value, why not prefer the current world, which has the same overall value, but also contains us?

It is less obvious how we should feel if our own lives are good yet the world around us is awful. If, for example, life will inevitably emerge somewhere in our universe, with evolutionary evil in its wake, then there is no realistic impartially better alternative, and we can again be defensibly glad that, out of this range of awful options, at least the one that contains us was realized. And we can be even more clearly glad that we exist if the closest alternatives were ones with evolutionary evil but where no intelligent species evolves. If, however, life is a rare and contingent thing, and an utterly lifeless universe was in the offing, then it is harder to hold, as our all-in attitude, a preference for this awfulness just because, within it, we are nevertheless having a good time. But even this does not mean we cannot be glad we exist. It just means our gladness shouldn't be all-in.Footnote ³⁷ It needs to be conditional: given that things have gone so badly, we are still personally pleased that, against the odds, we somehow still arrived and are doing reasonably well. While such gladness is conditional, it can still be deep and heartfelt. Indeed, most instances of gladness implicitly have that structure. And dark surroundings often amplify, rather than dampen, the gladness we feel about glimmers of good.

So lack of overall good, and even overall badness, are perfectly compatible with justified gladness about what's still good. But it is worth noting that overall value and attitude can also come apart in the other direction. For something to be overall good is a low bar. There are few people whose lives are so bad that they aren't even worth living. Yet that hardly means that virtually everyone should be glad about their lives. Most of us will insist that a life that has just a little bit more good than bad just is not good enough. That can also be true of the world as a whole: if good just barely edges out the bad, that's hardly cause for celebration. It may still make for a very disappointing world.Footnote ³⁸

Let me end this section by briefly considering a strand of Nagasawa's discussion that I have deliberately avoided so far. Nagasawa draws parallels between his ‘existential problem of evil’ and Janna Thompson's ‘apology paradox’.Footnote ³⁹ Suppose a country apologizes for, say, injustices committed in its colonialist past. To sincerely apologize for such injustices is presumably also to regret them, to wish they never happened. Yet if history had been better in this way, neither we, nor the descendants of the victims of such injustices, would have come to exist. So such apologies seem to conflict with our gladness that we, and those we care about, exist.

Nagasawa is correct to see a parallel between the dependence of our individual existence on past injustice and the dependence of our existence, and of that of humanity as a whole, on the occurrence of evolutionary evil. So there is a similar tension between regretting evolutionary evil and being glad that we exist.

However, when Nagasawa writes that the thrust of his argument is the question ‘Why should we think that the world is overall good and that we should be happy and grateful to be alive in it if our existence depends fundamentally on a violent, cruel, and unfair biological system which guarantees pain and suffering for uncountably many sentient animals?’,Footnote ⁴⁰ he is, I believe, conflating two distinct issues. While the existence of great past evil obviously bears on the question of whether the world is overall good, our dependence on past evil does not. To see this, consider on the one hand that the world might be an overall bad place even if our existence in no way depended on any past suffering or injustice (imagine, for example, that we humans are the product of an intervention by extraterrestrials). On the other, our existence would depend on all that past suffering even if the world as a whole is a wonderful place. Indeed, this dependence could be troubling even if the value we humans bring about massively outweighs the badness in the evolutionary past. So although both kinds of considerations seem to challenge our gladness that we exist, they are distinct. Since I have touched on the issue of our dependence on past sentient suffering elsewhere,Footnote ⁴¹ I will set this aside here.

Categorical value and the axiology of theism

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in axiological questions about theism. That discussion asks, not whether God exists, but whether it would be better if God exists, with pro-theists holding that it would be, and anti-theists arguing that God's existence would makes things worse.Footnote ⁴² The axiological claims we have been considering, however, involve value claims that are importantly different from the ones on which the debate in the axiology of theism has so far focused. Whereas that debate has focused on comparative value – on relations such as better, worse, or equal – here we have been discussing categorical value – good, bad or neutral.

This difference is significant in several ways. First, the axiology of theism has typically assumed a fairly mild view of atheism. Even pro-theists assume, at least implicitly, that things can be fairly good if God doesn't exist. They just argue that they will be far better if He does. But Nagasawa's argument for what I called the Bleak Upshot makes a more ambitious claim: that things might be positively bleak if God doesn't exist, not merely inferior. Many people will shrug at the obvious point that things are not perfect; we can still be, and perhaps should be, perfectly satisfied if the actual world is good enough. This will not be so if the world is positively bad. Second, one worry about the project of the axiology of theism is that God is supposed to be a necessary being. Some worry that this means that, if God exists, to compare it with the atheist alternative is to compare it with an impossibility.Footnote ⁴³ Conversely, if the very idea of God is incoherent, as some atheists argue, then there again seems to be no viable alternative to atheism. By contrast, the kind of categorical argument we have been considering would go through whether or not there is a viable theist alternative.

We can still ask, however, how such a categorical argument, if successful, would link with the more widely discussed comparative questions. Suppose that, if atheism is true, the world as a whole is overall bad. If the theist alternative is good – even minimally good – this would entail what is known as wide impersonal pro-theism, the claim that the world as a whole would be overall better if God exists. And of course it would give us powerful impersonal reasons to want God to exist (or to have existed).Footnote ⁴⁴

Still, that would follow only if we can show that, had God existed, the world would be overall good. So I now turn to the question of the categorical value implications of the truth of theism.

The categorical value implications of theism

Nagasawa's core argument claims that if God doesn't exist, then the world (probably) is not overall good. As we just saw, this is silent on whether

But Nagasawa suggests that, although the evil associated with evolution should also trouble theists, they are in a much better position to hold on to Existential Optimism. He highlights, as we saw earlier, that theism offers a transcendent realm, and wider ontology, that could provide the materials to overturn whatever badness reigns in the natural world. But, to repeat, this is compatible with that transcendent realm making things even worse. Nagasawa does also mention more distinctive aspects of theism – the afterlife, and of course the existence of a perfectly good, omniscient and omnipotent being, though he doesn't spell out their axiological import. But it's plausible that if God is the perfect being, God adds superlative, likely infinite value to the world. And an eternal, blissful afterlife also seems to contribute infinite good both to each such blissful life, and to the world as a whole. Nagasawa doesn't mention that, in addition, if God's existence entails that every evil that occurs only does so because it is necessary for some greater good, then all the evils we see around us, including evolutionary evil, are of necessity outweighed by greater goods.Footnote ⁴⁵ If so, then it seems that a theist world would, of necessity, be not just good, but supremely or even infinitely good.

However, another thing that Nagasawa doesn't discuss is the possibility that God's existence has distinctive downsides, as anti-theists argue. Unless such downsides are ruled out, then the goods entailed by God's existence cannot, on their own, decide the world's overall value. For example, your eternal bliss in the afterlife might be outweighed by the badness of the never-ending violation of your privacy.Footnote ⁴⁶ If so, then under theism the world might not be an ‘overall good place’.

This may seem surprising. After all, Leibniz famously argued that God created the best of all possible worlds, and even those who reject this claim assume that God must create a world that's at least good enough. Notice, however, that if we admit ‘atheist’ worlds into the space of possible worlds – as Nagasawa's argument assumes – then Leibniz's claim is misleading: since God cannot create such atheist worlds, the claim should really be that God created (or would have created) the best of all the possible worlds available to Him. But on either reading, Leibniz's comparative claim entails nothing categorical about the world that God will create: Nozick tells the old joke about the optimist who says this is the best of all worlds; the pessimist agrees.Footnote ⁴⁷ The best might still be bad.

Why, however, would God create a world, if that world is not good? To begin with, atheists needn't accept that, had God existed, He would have created anything. Second, God having good reason to create the world only requires that a world containing only God is no better, or worse, than God plus the (or a) world; and the latter might still be bad (or no good), even if better.Footnote ⁴⁸

I concede that Theist Optimism is plausible. But this must be defended as a substantive value claim. It is not simply entailed by the concept of God.Footnote ⁴⁹