| facts_draper_seems_to_have_gotten_wrong.docx |
O2 , second part of O3. By Draper's own lights, if animals do not suffer in the relevant manner, then this makes theism more probable than HI. Well, look at what William Lane Craig has to say: In his book Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Michael Murray explains on the basis of neurological studies that there is an ascending three-fold hierarchy of pain awareness in nature:
Level 3: Awareness that one is oneself in pain
Level 2: Mental states of pain
Level 1: Aversive reaction to noxious stimuli
Level 3: Awareness that one is oneself in pain
Level 2: Mental states of pain
Level 1: Aversive reaction to noxious stimuli
Organisms which are not sentient, that is, have no mental life, display at most Level 1 reactions. Insects, worms, and other invertebrates react to noxious stimuli but lack the neurological capacity to feel pain. Their avoidance behavior obviously has a selective advantage in the struggle for survival and so is built into them by natural selection. The experience of pain is thus not necessary for an organism to exhibit aversive behavior to contact that may be injurious. Thus when your friend asks, “If you beat an animal, wouldn't it try to avoid the source of pain so that way 'it' wouldn't suffer? Isn't that a form of 'self-awareness?'," you can see that such aversive behavior doesn’t even imply second order pain awareness, much less third order awareness. Avoidance behavior doesn’t require pain awareness, and the neurological capacities of primitive organisms aren’t sufficient to support Level 2 mental states.
Level 2 awareness arrives on the scene with the vertebrates. Their nervous systems are sufficiently developed to have associated with certain brain states mental states of pain. So when we see an animal like a dog, cat, or horse thrashing about or screaming when injured, it is irresistible to ascribe to them second order mental states of pain. It is this experience of animal pain that forms the basis of the objection to God’s goodness from animal suffering. But notice that an experience of Level 2 pain awareness does not imply a Level 3 awareness. Indeed, the biological evidence indicates that very few animals have an awareness that they are themselves in pain.
Level 3 is a higher-order awareness that one is oneself experiencing a Level 2 state. Your friend asks, “How could an animal not be aware of their suffering if they're yelping/screaming out of pain?" Brain studies supply the remarkable answer. Neurological research indicates that there are two independent neural pathways associated with the experience of pain. The one pathway is involved in producing Level 2 mental states of being in pain. But there is an independent neural pathway that is associated with being aware that one is oneself in a Level 2 state. And this second neural pathway is apparently a very late evolutionary development which only emerges in the higher primates, including man. Other animals lack the neural pathways for having the experience of Level 3 pain awareness. So even though animals like zebras and giraffes, for example, experience pain when attacked by a lion, they really aren’t aware of it.
To help understand this, consider an astonishing analogous phenomenon in human experience known as blind sight. The experience of sight is also associated biologically with two independent neural pathways in the brain. The one pathway conveys visual stimuli about what external objects are presented to the viewer. The other pathway is associated with an awareness of the visual states. Incredibly, certain persons, who have experienced impairment to the second neural pathway but whose first neural pathway is functioning normally, exhibit what is called blind sight. That is to say, these people are effectively blind because they are not aware that they can see anything. But in fact, they do “see” in the sense that they correctly register visual stimuli conveyed by the first neural pathway. If you toss a ball to such a person he will catch it because he does see it. But he isn’t aware that he sees it! Phenomenologically, he is like a person who is utterly blind, who doesn’t receive any visual stimuli. Obviously, as Michael Murray says, it would be a pointless undertaking to invite a blind sighted person to spend an afternoon at the art gallery. For even though he, in a sense, sees the paintings on the walls, he isn’t aware that he sees them and so has no experience of the paintings.
Now neurobiology indicates a similar situation with respect to animal pain awareness. All animals but the great apes and man lack the neural pathways associated with Level 3 pain awareness. Being a very late evolutionary development, this pathway is not present throughout the animal world. What that implies is that throughout almost the entirety of the long history of evolutionary development, no creature was ever aware of being in pain.
Viewed theologically, this discovery magnifies the mercy and goodness of God. God has shielded almost the entire animal kingdom throughout its history from an awareness of being in pain! For those of us who are pet owners and lovers of animals, this is a tremendous comfort and a cause of praise to God for His goodness and wondrous, even ingenious, care of creation. Who would have guessed that God had done such a thing? These neurological insights, documented by Murray, greatly reduce the force of the problem of evil posed by animal suffering.
This also means that arguments like Ayala's based on nature's so-called cruelties are guilty of the fallacy of anthropopathism, which is ascribing human feelings to non-human entities. This is hard not to do. We humans have an inveterate tendency to ascribe personal agency to non-human creatures and even objects. We talk to our house plants, our cars, and our computers. In fact some cognitive psychologists think that this tendency is actually hard-wired into the human brain. They call it the Hyper-active Agency Detection Device (HADD). We treat other things, even inanimate objects, as though they were agents. Richard Dawkins, for example, illustrates this tendency by recounting how he once found himself cursing at his bicycle because it wasn't working properly. When we attribute agency and pain awareness to animals, we commit the fallacy of anthropopathism.
Notice that this account of animal suffering would also defeat Draper's O3 where he opines that HI makes biologically gratuitous and appropriate animal suffering more probable. However, it is inaccurate to say that animals ever experience biologically gratuitous and appropriate suffering as subjects at all. Thus, far theism is just as antecedently probable as HI given an in depth model of animal suffering that Draper doesn't even mention. If we stopped here, I think we will have accomplished ST3, but let's drive the nail home. One component of O1 and O3 still remains; that of God being able to create human beings that don't experience pain and pleasure, and the claim that pain and pleasure have nothing to do with moral virtue, but instead, are systematically linked to survival and reproduction. Let's look at each of those in turn.
Indeed, Daniel Howard Snyder argues that all that follows from this argument is that non-moral sentient life should experience diminished pain, but not necessarily no pain at all, “The trouble here is that (iii) does not follow from (i) and (ii). Since nonmoral agents cannot respond to their suffering in ways that moral agents can, then some reasons God might have for permitting moral agents to experience biologically useful pain would not
justify His permitting nonmoral agents to experience biologically useful pain. Thus we might rightly expect that God would permit nonmoral agents to experience somewhat less biologically useful pain than moral agents. (How much less? Who knows? Do they experience less? Who knows.) But to infer from (i) and (ii) that we have reason to expect that nonmoral agents would not experience biologically useful pain at all is completely
unfounded. To draw that inference requires sufficient reason to expect that God has no other morally justifying reasons to permit biologically useful pain, reasons that would justify His permitting nonmoral agents to suffer biologically useful pain. Draper gives us no good reason to expect that; I doubt there is one.
1st part of O1: Could God have created embodied, and self-aware moral-agents that do not experience pain and pleasure; and if so, would there be any overriding deficiencies in doing so that would justify God in creating human beings just as they are?
I think Draper is punting to the logically possible definition of omnipotence here is a very careless manner. There are at least three kinds of logical possibility: 1) Strict, 2) Broad, and 3) Metaphysical. Let's focus on metaphysical possibility. Kripke taught us that even God cannot create water that is not H2O. That is metaphysically impossible. In order for Draper to carry his burden of proof, he would have to demonstrate a possible world where it is metaphysically possible for God to create human beings that do not experience pain and pleasure, but yet, retain every other feature such as self-awareness, language, embodied nature, moral motivation, etc. But how could Draper possibly show this? In fact, it seems impossible for him to show this.
Even if God could do this, are there any plausible overriding deficiencies for Him not to do so? I think there are:
1) "There are three types of cases which display the nature of the distinct pathways. First, as we already seen in the discussion of the fourth CD, are cases in which lobotomized patients report that they continue to sense or experience pain, but without disliking or being displeased by the pain. These patients report that they understand that the pain sensations signal noxious stimuli, but they simply are not motivated to do anything to rid themselves of the sensations. For example, such patients uniformly refuse analgesics which would eliminate or alleviate the sensations. Similarly, patients with induced loss of function in the prefrontal cortex often display a generalized indifference to the threat of pain and other potentially negative consequences of their behavior. As a result, these patients not only engage in practices which knowingly involve noxious stimuli, but they will act in ways that harm their own long term interests (spending money recklessly, engaging in reckless patterns of social behavior). In all of these cases, the patients report that they understand the negative consequences of their behavior, but they are not motivated to do anything to stop those consequences from occurring." So, it seems that if Draper got his wish, things would be worse in some respects, but most importantly, it seems that all moral motivation would be lost which is what Draper is so focused on retaining in the first place.
2) 2nd Part of O1, and 1st part of O3: Draper suggests that on theism, we would antecedently expect, at bottom, some explanation of pain and pleasure in terms of the moral role it plays in the lives of sentient beings whereas on HI we would antecedently expect no such thing. But this is a relevant difference between HI and theism only if the fact that on theism pain and pleasure have a fundamentally moral explanation precludes their also having a fundamentally biological explanation. I can think of no good reason to expect that, on theism, pain and pleasure will not, at bottom, be explicable both in terms of some moral purpose and in terms of some biological explanation. Indeed, if pain and pleasure played two fundamental roles in the lives of sentient beings, that would indicate efficiency on the part of our designer, if it indicated anything at all (Daniel Howard Snyder). Indeed, our biologically is the root of our ethics, “In Wilson’s view, sociobiology makes philosophers, at least temporarily, redundant, when it comes to questions of ethics (see quote in introduction). He believes that ethics can be explained biologically when he writes (ibid. 3, emphasis added):
"The hypothalamus and limbic system … flood our consciousness with all the emotions – hate, love, guilt, fear, and others – that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and the limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics.
Ethics, following this understanding, evolved under the pressure of natural selection. Sociability, altruism, cooperation, mutual aid, etc. are all explicable in terms of the biological roots of human social behavior.
Second, with the development of intellectual faculties, human beings were able to reflect on past actions and their motives and thus approve or disapprove of others as well as themselves. This led to the development of a conscience which became “the supreme judge and monitor” of all actions (ibid. 235). Being influenced by utilitarianism, Darwin believed that the greatest-happiness principle will inevitably come to be regarded as a standard for right and wrong (ibid. 134) by social beings with highly evolved intellectual capacities and a conscience.
Based on these claims, can Darwin answer the two essential questions in ethics? First, how can we distinguish between good and evil? And second, why should we be good? If all his claims were true, they would indeed support answers to the above questions. Darwin’s distinction between good and evil is identical with the distinction made by hedonistic utilitarians. Darwin accepts the greatest-happiness principle as a standard of right and wrong. Hence, an action can be judged as good if it improves the greatest happiness of the greatest number, by either increasing pleasure or decreasing pain (IEP).
Thus, it is precisely in virtue of our evolutionary heritage that pain and pleasure has both a biological and a moral role and both are systematically connected to Darwinian evolution which confirms theism over HI or naturalism according to Draper's own methodology!
3rd Part of O3: Here Draper claims that the distribution of pain and pleasure for sentient life, most notably human beings, does not systematically promote or reflect any discernible moral ends, but instead can systematically be given a Darwinian explanation and that that is less surprising on naturalism? This can be taken in two ways: 1) It appears that the distribution of pain and pleasure in the world doesn't have any discernible moral ends and/or 2) There is nothing about pain and pleasure within human nature that is both Darwinian, and systematically connected to some morally discernable end. If his claim is the first, then this is nothing more than William Rowe's version of the problem of evil and the skeptical theists response is sufficient for that claim:
Humans are not in a position to compare the antecedent probability of O on G to the antecedent probability of O on HI.
The second claim however, has empirical support against it as we have already discussed since it is in virtue of our evolutionary heritage that we both KNOW many moral truths instinctually (ala Hauser Moral Minds) and are MOTIVATED to be moral as well.
One more general point that is fascinating is that on a Leibnizian view of providence, we would expect the world to look eerily like Draper thinks it shouldn't. Consider the following passage from Michael Murray’s article Natural Providence: Reply to Dembski,
“As I cast the exchange between Newton and Leibniz on the issue of providence over nature, Leibniz makes heavy weather over the fact that the Newtonian God appears to be a designer of less than adequate competence. What sort of God would actualize a creation which would require periodic intervention to keep things from collapsing into disorder and chaos? Leibniz’s answer: only one with less than perfect knowledge, power, or goodness.
There is something very attractive about this position. When I bought my first car, the manufacturer recommended a tune up every twenty thousand miles or so. Cars rolling off the assembly line today hardly need anything like a tune up. With many of these cars, the sort of routine service that would be required every twenty thousand miles need only be done every fifty or one hundred thousand miles. Better engineers with greater understanding and better raw materials are now producing better cars. And I think we suppose that were General Motors to take on a few omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good engineers, cars would be utterly maintenance free (less than wholly good engineers might be able to design such cars, but undoubtedly their greed would get the better of them). The same intuition underlies the Leibnizian picture. If God knows how to bring about all of the states of affairs he wishes to bring about in the course of natural history by deck-staking, what would motivate the creation of a universe that was in need of periodic tune ups?
Christian have argued, that there is something unworthy of a theism which countenances a God who once creates the natural order and yet leaves it without the resources to bring about the desired results. The most vocal advocate of this line in the contemporary arena is
Howard Van Till who argues:
I believe that the universe in its present form is to be seen as a potentiality of the creation that has been actualized by the exercise of its God-given creaturely capabilities. For this to be possible, however, the creation’s formational economy must be astoundingly robust and gapless—lacking none of the resources or capabilities necessary to make possible the sort of continuous actualization of new structures and life forms as now envisioned by the natural sciences. The optimally-equipped character of the universe’s formational economy is, I believe, a vivid manifestation of the fact that it is the product, not of mere accident or happenstance, as the worldview of naturalism would have it, but of intention. In other words, the universe bears the marks of being the product of thoughtful conceptualization for the accomplishment of some purpose.”
The startling implications of the Leibnizian concept of providence then is that a perfect God would bring about his desired ends by "front-loading" the universe through nomically regular means that would be empirically equivalent to a world in which Draper argues that we wouldn't expect if a perfect God existed.
In sum, although Draper's argument from evil is partly evidential, it is largely a prior in its justification, and when we perform a little more empirical investigation into the world; more than Draper appears to have done, we find that theism is just as, or as I have tried to show, even less surprising (or antecedently probable) compared to HI.
Level 2 awareness arrives on the scene with the vertebrates. Their nervous systems are sufficiently developed to have associated with certain brain states mental states of pain. So when we see an animal like a dog, cat, or horse thrashing about or screaming when injured, it is irresistible to ascribe to them second order mental states of pain. It is this experience of animal pain that forms the basis of the objection to God’s goodness from animal suffering. But notice that an experience of Level 2 pain awareness does not imply a Level 3 awareness. Indeed, the biological evidence indicates that very few animals have an awareness that they are themselves in pain.
Level 3 is a higher-order awareness that one is oneself experiencing a Level 2 state. Your friend asks, “How could an animal not be aware of their suffering if they're yelping/screaming out of pain?" Brain studies supply the remarkable answer. Neurological research indicates that there are two independent neural pathways associated with the experience of pain. The one pathway is involved in producing Level 2 mental states of being in pain. But there is an independent neural pathway that is associated with being aware that one is oneself in a Level 2 state. And this second neural pathway is apparently a very late evolutionary development which only emerges in the higher primates, including man. Other animals lack the neural pathways for having the experience of Level 3 pain awareness. So even though animals like zebras and giraffes, for example, experience pain when attacked by a lion, they really aren’t aware of it.
To help understand this, consider an astonishing analogous phenomenon in human experience known as blind sight. The experience of sight is also associated biologically with two independent neural pathways in the brain. The one pathway conveys visual stimuli about what external objects are presented to the viewer. The other pathway is associated with an awareness of the visual states. Incredibly, certain persons, who have experienced impairment to the second neural pathway but whose first neural pathway is functioning normally, exhibit what is called blind sight. That is to say, these people are effectively blind because they are not aware that they can see anything. But in fact, they do “see” in the sense that they correctly register visual stimuli conveyed by the first neural pathway. If you toss a ball to such a person he will catch it because he does see it. But he isn’t aware that he sees it! Phenomenologically, he is like a person who is utterly blind, who doesn’t receive any visual stimuli. Obviously, as Michael Murray says, it would be a pointless undertaking to invite a blind sighted person to spend an afternoon at the art gallery. For even though he, in a sense, sees the paintings on the walls, he isn’t aware that he sees them and so has no experience of the paintings.
Now neurobiology indicates a similar situation with respect to animal pain awareness. All animals but the great apes and man lack the neural pathways associated with Level 3 pain awareness. Being a very late evolutionary development, this pathway is not present throughout the animal world. What that implies is that throughout almost the entirety of the long history of evolutionary development, no creature was ever aware of being in pain.
Viewed theologically, this discovery magnifies the mercy and goodness of God. God has shielded almost the entire animal kingdom throughout its history from an awareness of being in pain! For those of us who are pet owners and lovers of animals, this is a tremendous comfort and a cause of praise to God for His goodness and wondrous, even ingenious, care of creation. Who would have guessed that God had done such a thing? These neurological insights, documented by Murray, greatly reduce the force of the problem of evil posed by animal suffering.
This also means that arguments like Ayala's based on nature's so-called cruelties are guilty of the fallacy of anthropopathism, which is ascribing human feelings to non-human entities. This is hard not to do. We humans have an inveterate tendency to ascribe personal agency to non-human creatures and even objects. We talk to our house plants, our cars, and our computers. In fact some cognitive psychologists think that this tendency is actually hard-wired into the human brain. They call it the Hyper-active Agency Detection Device (HADD). We treat other things, even inanimate objects, as though they were agents. Richard Dawkins, for example, illustrates this tendency by recounting how he once found himself cursing at his bicycle because it wasn't working properly. When we attribute agency and pain awareness to animals, we commit the fallacy of anthropopathism.
Notice that this account of animal suffering would also defeat Draper's O3 where he opines that HI makes biologically gratuitous and appropriate animal suffering more probable. However, it is inaccurate to say that animals ever experience biologically gratuitous and appropriate suffering as subjects at all. Thus, far theism is just as antecedently probable as HI given an in depth model of animal suffering that Draper doesn't even mention. If we stopped here, I think we will have accomplished ST3, but let's drive the nail home. One component of O1 and O3 still remains; that of God being able to create human beings that don't experience pain and pleasure, and the claim that pain and pleasure have nothing to do with moral virtue, but instead, are systematically linked to survival and reproduction. Let's look at each of those in turn.
Indeed, Daniel Howard Snyder argues that all that follows from this argument is that non-moral sentient life should experience diminished pain, but not necessarily no pain at all, “The trouble here is that (iii) does not follow from (i) and (ii). Since nonmoral agents cannot respond to their suffering in ways that moral agents can, then some reasons God might have for permitting moral agents to experience biologically useful pain would not
justify His permitting nonmoral agents to experience biologically useful pain. Thus we might rightly expect that God would permit nonmoral agents to experience somewhat less biologically useful pain than moral agents. (How much less? Who knows? Do they experience less? Who knows.) But to infer from (i) and (ii) that we have reason to expect that nonmoral agents would not experience biologically useful pain at all is completely
unfounded. To draw that inference requires sufficient reason to expect that God has no other morally justifying reasons to permit biologically useful pain, reasons that would justify His permitting nonmoral agents to suffer biologically useful pain. Draper gives us no good reason to expect that; I doubt there is one.
1st part of O1: Could God have created embodied, and self-aware moral-agents that do not experience pain and pleasure; and if so, would there be any overriding deficiencies in doing so that would justify God in creating human beings just as they are?
I think Draper is punting to the logically possible definition of omnipotence here is a very careless manner. There are at least three kinds of logical possibility: 1) Strict, 2) Broad, and 3) Metaphysical. Let's focus on metaphysical possibility. Kripke taught us that even God cannot create water that is not H2O. That is metaphysically impossible. In order for Draper to carry his burden of proof, he would have to demonstrate a possible world where it is metaphysically possible for God to create human beings that do not experience pain and pleasure, but yet, retain every other feature such as self-awareness, language, embodied nature, moral motivation, etc. But how could Draper possibly show this? In fact, it seems impossible for him to show this.
Even if God could do this, are there any plausible overriding deficiencies for Him not to do so? I think there are:
1) "There are three types of cases which display the nature of the distinct pathways. First, as we already seen in the discussion of the fourth CD, are cases in which lobotomized patients report that they continue to sense or experience pain, but without disliking or being displeased by the pain. These patients report that they understand that the pain sensations signal noxious stimuli, but they simply are not motivated to do anything to rid themselves of the sensations. For example, such patients uniformly refuse analgesics which would eliminate or alleviate the sensations. Similarly, patients with induced loss of function in the prefrontal cortex often display a generalized indifference to the threat of pain and other potentially negative consequences of their behavior. As a result, these patients not only engage in practices which knowingly involve noxious stimuli, but they will act in ways that harm their own long term interests (spending money recklessly, engaging in reckless patterns of social behavior). In all of these cases, the patients report that they understand the negative consequences of their behavior, but they are not motivated to do anything to stop those consequences from occurring." So, it seems that if Draper got his wish, things would be worse in some respects, but most importantly, it seems that all moral motivation would be lost which is what Draper is so focused on retaining in the first place.
2) 2nd Part of O1, and 1st part of O3: Draper suggests that on theism, we would antecedently expect, at bottom, some explanation of pain and pleasure in terms of the moral role it plays in the lives of sentient beings whereas on HI we would antecedently expect no such thing. But this is a relevant difference between HI and theism only if the fact that on theism pain and pleasure have a fundamentally moral explanation precludes their also having a fundamentally biological explanation. I can think of no good reason to expect that, on theism, pain and pleasure will not, at bottom, be explicable both in terms of some moral purpose and in terms of some biological explanation. Indeed, if pain and pleasure played two fundamental roles in the lives of sentient beings, that would indicate efficiency on the part of our designer, if it indicated anything at all (Daniel Howard Snyder). Indeed, our biologically is the root of our ethics, “In Wilson’s view, sociobiology makes philosophers, at least temporarily, redundant, when it comes to questions of ethics (see quote in introduction). He believes that ethics can be explained biologically when he writes (ibid. 3, emphasis added):
"The hypothalamus and limbic system … flood our consciousness with all the emotions – hate, love, guilt, fear, and others – that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and the limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics.
Ethics, following this understanding, evolved under the pressure of natural selection. Sociability, altruism, cooperation, mutual aid, etc. are all explicable in terms of the biological roots of human social behavior.
Second, with the development of intellectual faculties, human beings were able to reflect on past actions and their motives and thus approve or disapprove of others as well as themselves. This led to the development of a conscience which became “the supreme judge and monitor” of all actions (ibid. 235). Being influenced by utilitarianism, Darwin believed that the greatest-happiness principle will inevitably come to be regarded as a standard for right and wrong (ibid. 134) by social beings with highly evolved intellectual capacities and a conscience.
Based on these claims, can Darwin answer the two essential questions in ethics? First, how can we distinguish between good and evil? And second, why should we be good? If all his claims were true, they would indeed support answers to the above questions. Darwin’s distinction between good and evil is identical with the distinction made by hedonistic utilitarians. Darwin accepts the greatest-happiness principle as a standard of right and wrong. Hence, an action can be judged as good if it improves the greatest happiness of the greatest number, by either increasing pleasure or decreasing pain (IEP).
Thus, it is precisely in virtue of our evolutionary heritage that pain and pleasure has both a biological and a moral role and both are systematically connected to Darwinian evolution which confirms theism over HI or naturalism according to Draper's own methodology!
3rd Part of O3: Here Draper claims that the distribution of pain and pleasure for sentient life, most notably human beings, does not systematically promote or reflect any discernible moral ends, but instead can systematically be given a Darwinian explanation and that that is less surprising on naturalism? This can be taken in two ways: 1) It appears that the distribution of pain and pleasure in the world doesn't have any discernible moral ends and/or 2) There is nothing about pain and pleasure within human nature that is both Darwinian, and systematically connected to some morally discernable end. If his claim is the first, then this is nothing more than William Rowe's version of the problem of evil and the skeptical theists response is sufficient for that claim:
Humans are not in a position to compare the antecedent probability of O on G to the antecedent probability of O on HI.
The second claim however, has empirical support against it as we have already discussed since it is in virtue of our evolutionary heritage that we both KNOW many moral truths instinctually (ala Hauser Moral Minds) and are MOTIVATED to be moral as well.
One more general point that is fascinating is that on a Leibnizian view of providence, we would expect the world to look eerily like Draper thinks it shouldn't. Consider the following passage from Michael Murray’s article Natural Providence: Reply to Dembski,
“As I cast the exchange between Newton and Leibniz on the issue of providence over nature, Leibniz makes heavy weather over the fact that the Newtonian God appears to be a designer of less than adequate competence. What sort of God would actualize a creation which would require periodic intervention to keep things from collapsing into disorder and chaos? Leibniz’s answer: only one with less than perfect knowledge, power, or goodness.
There is something very attractive about this position. When I bought my first car, the manufacturer recommended a tune up every twenty thousand miles or so. Cars rolling off the assembly line today hardly need anything like a tune up. With many of these cars, the sort of routine service that would be required every twenty thousand miles need only be done every fifty or one hundred thousand miles. Better engineers with greater understanding and better raw materials are now producing better cars. And I think we suppose that were General Motors to take on a few omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good engineers, cars would be utterly maintenance free (less than wholly good engineers might be able to design such cars, but undoubtedly their greed would get the better of them). The same intuition underlies the Leibnizian picture. If God knows how to bring about all of the states of affairs he wishes to bring about in the course of natural history by deck-staking, what would motivate the creation of a universe that was in need of periodic tune ups?
Christian have argued, that there is something unworthy of a theism which countenances a God who once creates the natural order and yet leaves it without the resources to bring about the desired results. The most vocal advocate of this line in the contemporary arena is
Howard Van Till who argues:
I believe that the universe in its present form is to be seen as a potentiality of the creation that has been actualized by the exercise of its God-given creaturely capabilities. For this to be possible, however, the creation’s formational economy must be astoundingly robust and gapless—lacking none of the resources or capabilities necessary to make possible the sort of continuous actualization of new structures and life forms as now envisioned by the natural sciences. The optimally-equipped character of the universe’s formational economy is, I believe, a vivid manifestation of the fact that it is the product, not of mere accident or happenstance, as the worldview of naturalism would have it, but of intention. In other words, the universe bears the marks of being the product of thoughtful conceptualization for the accomplishment of some purpose.”
The startling implications of the Leibnizian concept of providence then is that a perfect God would bring about his desired ends by "front-loading" the universe through nomically regular means that would be empirically equivalent to a world in which Draper argues that we wouldn't expect if a perfect God existed.
In sum, although Draper's argument from evil is partly evidential, it is largely a prior in its justification, and when we perform a little more empirical investigation into the world; more than Draper appears to have done, we find that theism is just as, or as I have tried to show, even less surprising (or antecedently probable) compared to HI.
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