“Ethical Argument” Against God’s Existence: Some Critical Conciderations

In his recent book, renowned American philosopher James Sterba puts forward an ‘ethical argument’ against the existence of God [Sterba, 2019], arguing for the logical incompatibility of the existence of an all-powerful and all-good God with the existence of moral evil we encounter in the world. This argument marks a new stage in the evolution of the so-called 'problem of evil' in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, shifting from a discussion of metaphysical and epistemological aspects of the problem to ethical ones. Sterba offers a theoretical justification for the 'theological premise' of the atheistic argument from evil, relying on the Pauline principle that one should not do evil for the good that may come from it, from which he concludes that an all-powerful and all-good God would be obliged to prevent certain kinds of moral evil that are actually found in our world. The paper is aimed to critical evaluation of Sterba's argument by means of logical-conceptual analysis, showing that the key premise of Sterba's argument, according to which Pauline principle applies equally to any rational agent, is controversial, because there is a good reason to believe that God is related to moral norm in a different way than His creation is. The first section examines Sterba's ethical argument in support of the incompatibility of God's existence and existence of certain kinds of moral evil in the world. The second section shows that his strategy of refuting the main anti-atheist counterarguments offered by free will apology, soul-making theodicy, and skeptical theism, while not without merit, is not entirely satisfactory. The third section discusses the problem of the divine moral agency, raised by Sterba within his polemic with classical theism. The fourth section demonstrates that the key premise on which Sterba relies in his argument is controversial because it ignores the nature of the divine moral agency.