Evolutionary Theodicy and the Type-Token Distinction: A Reply to Eikrem and Søvik

Abstract

Summary How can the immense amount of suffering and waste inherent in the evolutionary process be reconciled with the existence of a perfectly good and omnipotent God? A widely embraced proposal in the area of “evolutionary theodicy” is the so-called “Only Way”-argument. This argument contends that certain valuable goods – in particular, creaturely independence and human freedom – can only come about through a genuinely indeterministic and partly uncontrolled process of evolution. In a previous article, I have argued that the “Only Way”-argument can be defeated by a “Twin Earth”-thought experiment: If God is omnipotent, he could have created – directly, without evolution – creatures that are molecule-for-molecule identical to those that he actually created through evolution. If the creatures that he actually created have freedom and independence, there is no valid reason to deny that the non-evolved “twin creatures” would also be free and independent. Recently, Eikrem and Søvik (ES) have suggested a way of blocking my Twin Earth-argument by appealing to the distinction between type-values and token-values (or type-goods and token-goods). While ES admit that the Twin Earth-argument shows the non-necessity of evolution for the existence of certain type-goods, they argue that an evolutionary creation can be justified by appeal to valuable token-goods (unique particulars) that could not have existed without evolution. In this article, I respond to ES’s token-goods argument by showing that it is incompatible with a basic presupposition of “Only Way” evolutionary theodicies, namely the claim that the evolutionary process is genuinely indeterministic and partly uncontrolled.