Excessive Gratuitous Evil

This paper draws together and engages with two recent – and independent – discussions of the problem of evil. Bruce Russell (2018) examines four arguments for atheism that appeal to suffering. He rejects the first three, but defends the fourth. Meanwhile, separately, William Hasker has discussed close variants of the third and fourth arguments. In an important but underappreciated series of papers, he criticizes the former (Hasker 1992, 1997, 2004b, 2008). More recently, he has deployed this criticism against the latter as well (Hasker 2019). The order in which Russell treats these four arguments is helpful and instructive, and so I will follow it. I will briefly discuss the first and second. I will then set out Hasker’s criticism of the third argument, and offer some resistance to his most recent defence of it. I then turn to the final argument, which I call the argument from excessive gratuitous evil. Russell and Hasker both think that it constitutes a formidable problem for theism. I agree. I do not discuss Russell’s (indirect) defence of it. Instead, I examine Hasker’s latest objections to it – including his new deployment of his earlier criticism – and I find them all wanting.