9

If Everything Happens for

a Reason, Then We Don’t
Know What Reasons Are
Why the Price of Theism is Normative
Skepticism

Sharon Street

1 Introduction
I have argued elsewhere, in a secular metaethical context, that normative
realism— the position that there are robustly mind-independent truths about
how to live—faces the following epistemological problem. On the supposition
that normative realism is true, we must conclude that in all likelihood we are
hopeless at discovering how to live. This skeptical conclusion is so
implausible that we are forced to reject the realist supposition that leads to it.1 In
this essay, I explore a structurally analogous argument according to which
theism—the position that there is a God in the sense of an omnisci- ent,
omnipotent, and morally perfect being—also leads to normative skepticism,
and therefore should likewise be rejected.
According to the argument I will suggest: (P1) if theism is true, then (as the
saying goes) “everything happens for a reason”; (P2) if everything happens for a
reason, then we are hopeless judges of what reasons there are; but (P3) we are not
hopeless judges of what reasons there are (a thoroughgoing normative skepticism
is (i) implausible, (ii) practi- cally paralyzing, and (iii) undermining of theism
itself); therefore, (C) theism is false. For reasons of space, I focus almost exclusively
on defending (P1) and (P2). I take it, however, that if (P1) and (P2) can be upheld,
then (P3) and (C) carry a great deal of plausibility.
Normative antirealism and atheism are widely misunderstood. In the
context of secular metaethics, it is often suggested that if antirealism is true, then
“anything goes.”
1
I argue for these points in Street 2006, 2008b, 2011a, 2011b, and Unpublished b.
 IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON 173

Similarly, in the context of debates about the existence of God, it is often

suggested that if atheism is true, then “everything is permitted.” These thoughts
are incorrect. While the point requires a positive case too large to make here,
normative antirealism and atheism are both perfectly compatible with morality,
and with a healthy degree of normative objectivity more generally.2 In my view, it
is actually normative realism and theism that are unable to make sense of
normative objectivity in the end. I argue else- where that if normative realism is
true, then we have no idea “what goes.” I will argue here that if theism is true, then
we have no idea what is permitted. Theism, far from being a precondition for
moral conviction, is ultimately incompatible with it, leading to a normative
skepticism so deep that, as I will try to show, if we are theists and some
horrendous evil starts to unfold in front of us, then we should be in doubt as to
whether there is any good reason for us to try to stop it from happening.

2 At Issue: The Existence of God in the

Standard Monotheistic Sense
The concept God is extraordinarily vague, and it is not my position that there is
nothing answering to some recognizable version or other of the concept. It’s worth
jumping up and down about this, since it is too easy to hear an argument of the kind I
will be offering as an attack on broader ideas of a kind that I am emphatically not
attacking—for example, the idea that our lives have meaning and value, or the
idea that most of us have good reason to live morally, or the idea that there might
be something of transcendent meaning and value in which we all are participating,
and with which we are all in some sense capable of connecting. While I won’t say any
more about it here, I think these broader ideas are true. Indeed, my entire argument
is premised on the assumption that we can make moral sense of our lives. The
complaint about theism is that it does not allow us to do that.
So it is not my position that there is nothing answering to any version of the God
concept. But it is my position that there is nothing answering to the concept of
God in what I’ll call the standard monotheistic sense, namely the sense of an
omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect being. I deny, in other words, the
thought that Alvin Plantinga calls “central to the great monotheistic
religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam,” namely “the thought that there is such a
person as God: a personal agent who has created the world and is all-powerful,
all-knowing, and perfectly good” (2011:ix). Throughout the essay, unless
otherwise noted, whenever I say God I mean God in the standard monotheistic
sense. By theism I mean the view that God in the standard monotheistic sense
exists; by atheism I mean the view that God in the standard mono- theistic sense
does not exist.

2
I defend the compatibility of normative antirealism with a healthy degree of normative objectivity
in Street 2008a, 2009, and 2012.
174 SHARON STREET

3 Varieties of the Argument from Evil

The argument I will be making is just another version of the age-old argument
from evil. The bottom-line thought is the same as always, namely that it is
impossible ration- ally to reconcile the moral evils that we see in this world with
the supposition that God in the standard monotheistic sense exists. I hope,
though, to press the age-old worry in a slightly new form. The argument I will
offer differs from deductive versions of the argument from evil because it is
granted at the outset that it is a perfectly coherent logi- cal possibility that God
and evil coexist. The argument differs from typical inductive versions of the
argument from evil insofar as instances of evil are not put forward as pieces of
evidence that God doesn’t exist. The model is not one of collecting instances of evil
as one might collect fingerprints for a criminal trial, aiming gradually to
assemble enough evidence to tip the scale in the direction of proof beyond a
reasonable doubt.
The form of the argument, instead, is more akin to a reductio. The strategy is to
sup-
pose, with the theist, that God exists, and then to argue that this supposition,
when coupled with factual observations about the kinds of things that happen in
this world, has implausible substantive normative implications concerning the
kinds of moral reasons for action there are, indeed to such an extent that on the
supposition that the- ism is true, we must come to distrust our faculty of moral
judgment across the board. This skeptical conclusion is unacceptable for a
variety of reasons. First, it is extremely implausible. In particular, it is
significantly less plausible than the supposition that “God” in one very
particular sense of that expression (the standard monotheistic sense) exists.
Second, the conclusion entails practical paralysis if genuinely accepted. Third,
the skeptical conclusion means that theism is self-undermining insofar as the-
ism itself is (as I will argue in section 6) a substantive normative claim.
The argument bears closest resemblance to a line of objection that has been
devel- oped against the theistic position known as “skeptical theism.”3
According to this line of objection, the skeptical theist cannot successfully
contain his or her putatively restricted area of skepticism; instead, that
skepticism inevitably spills out beyond its intended domain and becomes
crippling. Almeida and Oppy (2003), Jordan (2006), Maitzen (2007, 2009,
Forthcoming), and Sehon (2010), for example, all argue that the skeptical theist’s
moral skepticism, in particular, cannot be contained. One difference between
those arguments and mine is that mine is offered as a free-standing argument; it is
not embedded in the particular dialectic of the evidential argument from evil,
the skeptical theist’s response to that argument, and one way of objecting to that
response. Another difference is the emphasis I wish to place on the point that
theism is a sub- stantive normative claim with substantive normative
implications. In ways that I will try to bring out, the entire argument is offered
from within the moral point of view on the world—a point of view that takes for
granted the existence and authority of moral

3
See Bergmann 2001 for a key statement and defense of skeptical theism.
 IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON 175

reasons, and then discovers, within that point of view, reasons to reject the
specific moral hypothesis of theism.

4 Moral Common Sense

Given the way atheists are often stereotyped in the culture at large, it is worth
drawing attention to the fact that arguments from evil against the existence of
God start from a place of moral conviction and moral common sense. More
importantly, as I will try to bring out, they refuse to leave that place in the face of
skeptical challenges from the theist. In the exact reverse of what is often
supposed, it is the atheist who insists on tak- ing moral appearances at face value
until given a strong reason to do otherwise, and the theist who pushes a deeply
skeptical hypothesis according to which moral reality is very different from what
it appears to us to be.
So let us begin with some moral common sense. The example I’m about to
give is disturbing, but if the subject of discussion is evil and what, morally, to
make of it, then it is essential that we have in mind real-life cases. Philosophical
positions concerning evil that might sound plausible in the abstract need to be
tested against reality, whose horrors outstrip on a routine basis anything that one
might otherwise have imagined was possible.
One among endless possible examples of a horrific real-life evil is a drunk-
driving accident that occurred in the early morning hours of July 2, 2005, in
Long Island, New York. In this accident, a drunk driver traveling 70 miles an hour
the wrong way on a highway struck a limousine that was carrying six family
members home from a wed- ding that had taken place earlier that day. In the
crash, a seven-year-old girl, who had been a flower girl at the wedding, was
decapitated. The limousine driver was also killed on impact, and the flower girl’s
five-year-old sister, father, and maternal grandparents were critically injured. In
the minutes that followed, the flower girl’s mother, who had also been in the
limousine, pulled herself from the wreckage and began searching for her family.
She knew that her five-year-old daughter was alive because she could hear her
moans, but as she searched the wreckage she found her seven-year-old daughter’s
decapitated head. The mother picked it up and clung to it, screaming to her
husband that “Katie is dead.” In spite of repeated requests by emergency
personnel, the mother refused to give up her daughter’s head, holding onto it for
nearly an hour as she watched the rest of her family being cut from wreckage.4
The idea that there was a good moral reason to permit this scene of
unimaginable horror to take place defies every last shred of moral common
sense. This is so in the sense that if there was such a reason, then the moral
reality of the world is very dif- ferent from what our everyday moral and factual
capacities are capable of discern- ing. I assume that no one among the likely
readership of this essay would seriously

4
See Elliott and Fisher (2005) for one of many press accounts.
176 SHARON STREET

entertain the thought that any of the parties involved deserved this. What, then?
When we examine the world as we might have thought we knew it, we can find
no circum- stance—moral, empirical, or otherwise—that would seem to supply
any good reason to permit such an event to occur. Importantly, for our purposes,
this is not to say that there couldn’t be a morally good reason to permit such an
event to occur. Of course there could be. There could be a morally good reason
to permit anything. But it is to suggest that cleaving to the view that there was a
morally good reason to permit this crash to happen—which, as I will argue,
belief in God entails—might come at a very high price. It might come, in
particular, at the price of our ability to trust our own fac- ulty of moral judgment
going forward. If there was a morally good reason to permit this to happen, in
other words, then we are hopeless judges of moral reasons. The rest of this essay
consists in a more formal exploration and development of that idea.

5 Moral Common Ground

I said a moment ago that there could be a morally good reason to permit
anything. That point requires some explanation since, for many of us, the mind
almost ceases to compute when asked to suppose that there could have been a
good moral reason to permit the crash of July 2, 2005. However, while many of us
find it nearly impossible to imagine it as a live possibility that there was good
moral reason to permit this accident to occur, we all should agree that it is a
perfectly good conceptual possibility that there was such a reason. Theodicies of
the kind offered by theists may be seen as helping to establish the point, but we
don’t need a theodicy to see it. The secular moral theorist can make the same
point by noting that, in a bizarre enough set of circumstances, there could be good
moral reason to permit a crash like the one that occurred on July 2, 2005. For
example, if for some reason there was a forced choice between permitting this
trag- edy to happen and permitting an even more horrendous evil to occur (in
which, for example, scenes of equal or worse horror were played out a thousand
times over), then there could be good moral reason to permit the crash to happen.
All parties to the discussion, then—theist, atheist, and otherwise—can and
should agree that as a matter of conceptual possibility, there could exist a good
moral rea- son to permit the drunk-driving crash of July 2, 2005, to take place.
Additionally, all parties to the discussion can and should agree on a whole range
of moral platitudes concerning the case that we can state with the help of an
“other things being equal” clause. For example, all parties to the discussion can and
should agree that other things being equal—where this is to say, assuming, for
the sake of argument, the absence of any other good reasons, moral or
otherwise, bearing on the situation one way or the other—it would be morally
impermissible to (1) know this drunk-driving crash was going to occur unless
one did something, (2) be capable of preventing it, and yet
(3) decline to do so. Indeed, that, presumably, is an understatement. Presumably
we can all agree that in such circumstances it would be morally depraved not to
prevent the
 IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON 177

accident. Imagine, for instance, that a stranger somehow knew for certain that
unless he acted, this drunk-driving crash in all its horror was about to happen,
and that all he needed to do to stop it was to flip a switch at his fingertips
(thereby, say, holding the limousine at a red light for an extra few seconds and
ensuring that everyone got home safely that night). Presumably we can all agree
that in such a case, in which everything else was equal and the agent knew it to be
so, it would be morally depraved not to flip the switch.
Notice the breadth and depth of moral agreement between the theist and atheist
thus far. First, all parties to the discussion are starting from a place of non-
skepticism about morality: all parties to the discussion agree that some things
are morally permissible and other things aren’t; that some actions are morally
depraved and some aren’t; and so on. Second, the theist and atheist are also
largely agreed on substantive moral mat- ters, agreeing on a wide range of moral
platitudes that may be stated with the help of an “other things being equal” clause.
They all agree, for example, that other things being equal, one is morally obligated
to prevent, if one can, the decapitation of an innocent child, the violent death of
a limousine driver just doing his job, the sudden disruption of a family’s happiness
by unspeakable tragedy, and so on. The matter at issue between the theist and the
atheist concerns none of these things—in other words, whether there are moral
reasons for action, nor even, for the most part, what those moral reasons are.
Instead, their disagreement concerns the much larger, holistic question of how to
make best overall moral sense of the world, and in particular, whether it makes
sense, given the other things we think we know about morality and the way the
world works, to suppose the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and
morally perfect being. While obviously this is a major point on which to
disagree, it is important to see how large the moral common ground is, common
ground in terms of which the debate may go forward. The question whether God
exists is a moral question that is being posed from within a largely shared moral
point of view.

6 Theism as a Substantive Normative Claim

When one first entertains the question whether God exists, it is natural to assume
that one is asking a purely non-normative question about whether, as a matter of
empirical, metaphysical, or perhaps logical fact, a certain kind of being does or
doesn’t exist “out there,” somewhere, in the universe. One might suppose one is
asking something analo- gous to the question whether anyone is at home in the
house across the street, just on a much grander scale. But this natural way of
thinking about the question is a mistake. Whatever else it is, theism is a
substantive normative claim, and the question whether God exists is a substantive
normative question.
To see the point, consider an analogy. Suppose someone points to the house
across the street and says, “The man who lives there is a good man.” On first blush,
this claim might appear to say little or nothing about how anyone morally
ought to live. But
178 SHARON STREET

that appearance is misleading, for in picking out a particular agent and

predicating moral goodness of him, the claim implicitly stakes out the
position that the actions this man takes, and the character traits this man
displays, are morally good actions to take and character traits to have. In this
way, the claim says something of potentially action-guiding relevance to us all.
The full normative content that lies disguised within the claim becomes
evident when we encounter reason to question it. Suppose that one day you see
the man from across the street standing there and watching impassively while
one of his children drowns in front of him in the family swimming pool. The
natural response to this fac- tual observation would be to revise one’s view that
the man from across the street is a good man. If one did so, one would be
revising one’s view on the basis of a further moral assumption along the lines of
“A good man does not stand by and do nothing while his child drowns in front of
him.” Notice, however, that logic alone does not dic- tate that response. Another
logically available option is to hold fixed the moral idea that the man from
across the street is a good man, and instead revise one’s view that “A good man
does not stand by and watch while his child drowns.” If, for some rea- son, one
was unshakably convinced that the man from across the street was a good man,
then even if one had no idea the man’s reason for standing there impassively and
watching while his child drowned, one might opt to revise one’s commitment to
the general moral principle about what a good man does, and conclude that
“There can sometimes be good moral reason for a man to stand by and watch his
child drown, and this was one of those cases, even though I don’t know what the
reason was.” Now of course in the case at hand, the first of these two possible ways
of revising one’s belief system does far less violence to our overall moral and
factual view of the world than the second. But we see from the example how it is
a question of what is most plausible all things considered, and how a claim
concerning the moral goodness a particular agent could, if one cleaves to it, have
far-reaching implications concerning the kinds of behaviors that are morally
permissible.
Return to the claim that God exists. Like the claim that the man who lives
across
the street is a good man, theism picks out a particular agent (in this case,
positing the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent being) and predicates
moral goodness of him. In so doing, theism implicitly stakes out the position
that the actions this agent takes, and the character traits he displays, are morally
good actions to take and char- acter traits to have. Theism is therefore a
substantive normative claim in the following sense: When combined with non-
normative observations about what actually hap- pens in the universe, it
necessarily entails conclusions concerning what good moral reasons for action
there are.
The interesting and difficult question, to which we turn next, is whether it has
any implications concerning our reasons for action. The point for the moment,
though, is this. If theism is a substantive normative claim, then we should think
about it and assess it in the same way we would any other substantive
normative claim, which is to say by examining its substantive normative
implications and assessing them for
 IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON 179

plausibility. In the remaining sections of the paper, that is what I will do. On the
anal- ogy I wish to explore, in much the same way that we should reject the
moral claim that One should always save the greater number on the grounds that it
implies that one should sometimes cut up a healthy person to distribute his organs
to five others in need of transplants,5 so too we should reject the claim that There is
an omniscient, omnipo- tent, and morally perfect being on the grounds that it
implies that in a case in which one could easily save children from an impending
catastrophe by calling 911, one should be in doubt as to whether there is reason to
do so. Atheism, on this way of thinking about things, turns out to be the most
plausible moral theory.

7 God’s Reasons and Our Reasons

Return to the horrific crash of July 2, 2005, and assume for the sake of argument
that God exists. Since God is omniscient, he knew, in some morally relevant
sense, that the crash was going to happen unless he intervened to stop it. Since
God is omnipotent, he was capable, in some morally relevant sense, of
preventing it. For example, presum- ably it was physically possible for him to
prevent the crash from happening, whether by somehow “reaching into” this
world and stopping it, or by electing at the outset to create a different total
possible world in which the crash didn’t occur.6 Now, we also know that other
things being equal, it would be morally impermissible to (1) know the drunk-
driving crash of July 2, 2005 was going to happen unless one did something to
prevent it, (2) be capable of preventing it, and yet (3) not do so. As we saw
earlier, this is just a moral platitude upon which all parties to the discussion can
agree. Since God is morally perfect, he never does anything morally
impermissible. From all of this combined with the fact that the crash occurred, it
follows that other things are not, or were not, equal. In other words, there must be,
or must have been, some circumstance or other that constituted a morally good
reason for God to allow something to happen that it otherwise would have been
morally impermissible to allow to happen.7
Let us call this circumstance, or set of circumstances, whatever they might be, cir-
cumstances C. They might be moral circumstances of which we’re unaware; they
might be factual circumstances of which we’re unaware; or they might be some
combination

5
Foot (1967) was among the first to discuss such examples. See also Harman (1977:3–4).
6
One might argue that omniscience is somehow compatible with not being confident (even at
the last moment) that the crash of July 2, 2005 (or some other morally comparable horror) was
going to happen (unless one intervened to stop it), or that omnipotence is somehow compatible with
being physically unable to stop the crash from happening (even if only by electing to create a
different total world in which the crash didn’t occur). To pursue these lines of argument, however, is
to depart utterly from what anyone means in ordinary language by omniscience and omnipotence,
and therefore implicitly to concede that God in the standard monotheistic sense does not exist.
7
There is no assumption here that permitting the July 2, 2005 crash was the unique morally
permissible course of action available to God. In other words, there is no assumption that there was
good moral reason to permit this particular evil to happen (as opposed to others, say). There might be
countlessly many equally morally permissible ways God could have permitted things to unfold, this
being just one of them.
180 SHARON STREET

of the two. We will assume nothing about their precise nature; we pick them out
simply as those circumstances, whatever they might be, such that other things
were not equal. Some theists will have views about the likely general nature of
those circumstances. The circumstances might, for example, have something to
do with the good of free will, or the value of experiences of intimacy with God,
but we needn’t ourselves assume anything one way or another on this score. The
point is just that on the supposition that God exists, these circumstances certainly
exist, and whatever their exact nature, they supply the “reasons-why” or the
“beyond-our-ken justification”8 for God’s permitting the horrific crash to happen.
Since the same reasoning applies to every evil that has ever occurred, we may
conclude the following, on the assumption that God exists: For every evil that has
ever happened, there existed some circumstance or other C which con- stituted a
morally good reason for God to permit it to happen. This is a substantive nor- mative
implication of theism. Our task now is to see what further consequences we
may draw from this.
So take some arbitrary evil E and let’s begin thinking in a general way about
circum- stances C. The first thing to note is that we already have some non-
negligible informa- tion about the character of those circumstances, simply in
virtue of the fact that talk of moral goodness is not empty. For example, while we
have no idea the exact character of circumstances C—indeed, we don’t even
know whether they are factual, moral, or some combination of the two—we can,
at the very least, rule out possibilities such as the following: that the
circumstances in question are things like that God thought it would be funny; or
that God enjoys seeing people suffer; or that God was going for drama and suspense
rather than a happy ending; and so forth. Were we not to rule out such
possibilities, predicating moral goodness of God would have no meaningful
content. God would be “morally good” only in the sense of that expression that
allows that he might be a sadist or an amoral aesthete, which is to say not morally
good at all.
Are there further implications we can draw out? Here we reach a key fork in the
road. Take any given evil that we know to have taken place, and think again
about circum- stances C. The question we need to focus on now is this: We know
that circumstances C constituted a good moral reason for God to permit the evil.
But what reason-giving status (if any) do those same circumstances have with
respect to us? In particular, do circumstances C also count as a good reason for us
to permit the evil? Or do they count as no such reason?
To state this question with sufficient clarity, we need to distinguish between
reasons in the fact-relative sense and reasons in the evidence-relative sense.9 The
distinction is illustrated by cases like the following. Suppose that unbeknownst
to you or anyone else, if you deliberately stick out your foot and trip the
pedestrian next to you on the sidewalk, you will, as a matter of fact, save her life
by preventing her from being hit by a

8
I take this term from Wielenberg (2010:510).
9
I take the fact-relative versus evidence-relative terminology from Parfit (2012:150–1).
 IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON 181

car a short time afterward. Suppose, however, that there is no evidence available to
you or anyone else that this is the case. Regarding such a scenario, we may say
that, unbe- knownst to you, you have overwhelming reason in the fact-relative
sense to trip the person (the reason in question being that doing so will save her
life). At the same time, since all the evidence available to you suggests that
tripping her would be nothing but an act of gratuitous harm, you have
overwhelming reason in the evidence-relative sense not to trip the person.
Returning to our question and formulating it with the aid of this distinction, we
may ask: For any given evil E, do the circumstances C that supply God with a
good moral reason for permitting E also supply us with a good moral reason, in
the fact-relative sense, to permit the evil? Or do they supply us with no such
reason, in the fact-relative sense?
In entertaining this question, there are two main possibilities to consider. One
possi- bility is that circumstances C constitute a good moral reason (in the fact-
relative sense) for any agent (whether God or human being 10) to permit the evil
to happen. On this scenario, God’s reason for permitting the evil is what we may
call agent-neutral—in other words, supplying anyone with a good reason to
permit the evil. The other pos- sibility is that circumstances C constitute a good
moral reason for God to permit the evil, while providing no such reason for us.
On this scenario, God’s reason for permit- ting the evil is what we may call agent-
relative—counting as a good reason for God to permit the evil, but supplying us
with no similar reason.11
If we now step back and consider the world as a whole with all its evils, then
there
are three large-scale moral scenarios to consider. On the first, God’s morally
good reason(s) for permitting evils are always agent-neutral. On the second,
those reasons are always agent-relative. On the third scenario, God’s reasons for
permitting evils are sometimes agent-neutral, other times agent-relative
(though presumably we don’t know which in any given case). There is no
obvious reason to assume that one versus another of these three scenarios is the
one that obtains, so let us examine them all.

8 Scenario One: God’s Reasons for

Permitting Evils are Always Agent-Neutral
On the first scenario, God’s reasons for permitting evils are always agent-neutral
(in the fact-relative sense). At first glance, this appears to be a perfectly
plausible possi- bility. After all, we know that circumstances C, whatever their
exact nature, consti- tute morally good reasons, and that fact alone encourages
the thought that whatever

10
For simplicity’s sake, I am assuming that no agents apart from God and human beings are
involved in the situation. Invoking the possibility of other agents (such as angels or the Devil) will
not help the theist with the epistemological problems I am pressing.
11
See Nagel (1986:ch.8) for a classic statement of the agent-neutral/agent-relative distinction. As
dis- cussed in Ridge (2011), it is not a straightforward matter how to understand the distinction in
the end, but the way I use it here assumes nothing controversial for the purposes of my argument.
182 SHARON STREET

the circumstances in question are, they might easily count as good reasons for us
too. Moreover, given our ignorance of the exact nature of the reasons, we might
think there is no problem involved in assuming them to have normative weight
for us too. In par- ticular, since the circumstances in question are reasons for us
only in the fact-relative sense—with no one but God having any idea what they
actually consist in—it might seem that these reasons are practically innocuous
as far as we’re concerned—having no bearing (none that we can take into account,
anyway) on our own actions.
But that thought is a mistake. To see why, assume for the sake of argument, in
accordance with Scenario One, that circumstances C, whatever they are, always
pro- vide agent-neutral reasons in the sense that they constitute good moral
reasons (in the fact-relative sense) for anyone to permit the evil. The basic point
to notice about this scenario is that, contrary to what one at first might have
thought, on it we sud- denly have at our disposal a great deal of information
about the kinds of things that there is often morally good reason to permit to
happen. Specifically, all of history, and each additional passing moment, is a
source of such information. For example, on the supposition that God exists and
that his reasons for permitting evils are always agent-neutral, we know that:
1. There is often (every 53 minutes, on average, in the United States12) morally
good reason to permit a fatal drunk-driving accident to occur.
2. There is sometimes morally good reason to permit an innocent child to be
decapitated.
3. There is frequently morally good reason to permit an infant or child
under the age of five to die of disease, malnutrition, or other causes.
For example, in the year 2011, there was morally good reason to permit
this on 6.9 million occasions.13
4. There is sometimes morally good reason to permit groups of human
beings to go forward with the mass extermination of fellow human beings,
for example, in gas chambers or with machetes.
5. There is often morally good reason to permit people to be killed in natural
disas- ters such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Sometimes there is morally
good reason to permit tens of thousands of people to die at a time.
So far, this is hardly an argument with regard to Scenario One, though if claims
1–5 generate some moral unease, they should. So far, all I have done is to state a
handful of direct logical consequences of the substantive normative claim
implied by the thesis that God exists, phrasing them in language that highlights
the possibility that we are now considering—namely that God’s reasons for
permitting evils are agent-neutral.

12
Figure retrieved from <http://www.madd.org/drunk-driving/about/drunk-driving-
statistics.html> on May 7, 2013.
13
Figure retrieved from <http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs178/en/index.html> on
May 7, 2013.
 IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON 183

The next thing to note is how bizarre our moral epistemological situation is on
this scenario. Theism is usually associated with an insistence on a certain kind
of moral ignorance on the part of human beings, in the sense that theists often
emphasize that we don’t know God’s deeper reasons for doing or allowing many
of the things he does. And that no doubt has to be part of the position; it would
be arrogance and delusion of the highest order, presumably, to claim that one
knows why there was good moral reason to permit a seven-year-old girl to be
decapitated, or for millions of people one never met to die in natural disasters,
war, mass exterminations, and so on. But it turns out that on Scenario One, we
have a terrific amount of reliable information about moral matters. For on this
scenario, we know a great deal about what there tends to be good moral reason to
permit, even while simultaneously being in ignorance about why there is morally
good reason to permit it. In other words, while we have no idea what those
“circumstances C” are, in virtue of which everything that happens is something
there was morally good reason to allow to happen, we always know (as soon as
what- ever happens happens) that there was a good moral reason for permitting
it. And this implication is highly problematic.
Here is an example to illustrate the point. Imagine you are at a highway rest stop
when you see a stranger, intoxicated to the point of being almost unable to
stand, get behind the wheel and turn on the engine. There are two children in the
back of his car and they look frightened. The car pulls away, speeding and
weaving, and then you see the driver turn the wrong way up an exit ramp onto a
busy highway. You have your cell phone with you and could call the police with
the license plate number and a descrip- tion. Should you? Few things could be
more obvious, from a moral point of view, than that you should. On Scenario
One, however, the theist is unable to accommodate this point.
Consider the following reasoning. On the assumption that God exists and per-
mits evils for agent-neutral reasons, it follows, as we’ve seen, that there is often
(every 53 minutes, on average in the United States) morally good reason to permit a
fatal drunk-driving accident to occur (and let’s suppose you are in the United
States). Suppose you know, moreover, that roughly every 90 seconds, on average,
someone is injured in a drunk-driving accident.14 That’s a lot of drunk-driving
accidents, and you know that whenever they happen, there is a morally good
reason for allowing them to happen. So now, when faced with a potential drunk-
driving accident, it seems reason- able to wonder: “Might this be one of the ‘good’
cases?” That is, might this be one of the cases in which there is morally good
reason to permit the accident to go forward? You know, of course, that if it is one of
those cases, then it will be in virtue of circum- stances of which you’re completely
ignorant. The thing is, you know that whatever the relevant circumstances are that
are capable of providing good moral reason to permit a drunk-driving accident
to happen, they occur on a regular basis—on average every

14
Figure retrieved from <http://www.madd.org/drunk-driving/about/drunk-driving-
statistics.html> on May 7, 2013.
184 SHARON STREET

90 seconds. If the past is any guide, then, those circumstances—the ones that
provide morally good reasons for permitting such accidents—could easily be in
play here too. Of course your everyday moral intuitions would have suggested
that there is no mor- ally good reason to permit such horrors to happen, but if
we assume Scenario One to be the case, then your everyday moral intuitions
about such matters are demon- strably unreliable. After all, you would have
thought that 1–5 above are all false, but on the assumption that God exists and
always acts for agent-neutral reasons, they are certainly true.
More broadly, under Scenario One it might appear that inductive reasoning is
your best bet for discovering what there is morally good reason to allow to
happen. For example, suppose you happen to know that far fewer drunk-driving
accidents have occurred this year than is statistically normal by this time. Does
that count in favor of not calling 911 about this drunk driver? The question is
absurd. Yet on the assump- tion that God’s reasons for permitting evils are
agent-neutral, it at least seems like a reasonable question to ask. Indeed, one
might wonder, since everything that happens is a guide to what there can be
morally good reason to permit, perhaps one should live one’s life by
investigating what is statistically normal and then calibrating one’s responses to
unfolding potential evils to that. On reflection, though, even that way of
proceeding would seem to be a mistake. After all, what actually happens can, in
any given case, diverge from what is statistically normal, and in such cases what
actually happens, and not what would have been statistically normal, will turn
out to be the thing that we can be certain there was morally good reason to permit.
Practically, then, under Scenario One, one finds oneself at an utter loss about
how to proceed. This is because for any potential evil that one might see
coming—whether murder, tsunami, or drunk-driving accident—there will
always be a way of categorizing it such that one knows for a fact that there are, on
a regular basis, morally good reasons to permit such things to happen, and so it
will be only rational to take seriously the possibility that the case in point is one of
those.
The upshot is that on the assumption of Scenario One, we should suspend all
confi- dence in our commonsense views about what there is morally good reason to
permit to happen. The one thing we know for certain, on Scenario One, is that our
common- sense views about how there is morally good reason to respond to
unfolding evils are completely unreliable, as claims 1 through 5 above make clear.
Notice what has hap- pened: On Scenario One, all of history is converted to a
source of evidence about our fact-relative reasons with respect to evils. And as soon
as one has evidence that one has a fact-relative reason of a certain kind, one has
information of direct practical rel- evance; in other words, one now has an
evidence-relative reason too. On the assump- tion of Scenario One, we have
indisputable evidence that there is, on a regular basis, fact-relative reason for us to
permit evils. The only rational response to this evidence is to increase one’s
credence, in the case of any given unfolding potential evil, that there is good
reason to permit the evil to occur, even though one won’t have any idea in virtue
of what.
 IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON 185

9 Scenario Two: God’s Reasons for Permitting

Evils are Always Agent-Relative
Scenario One has disastrous consequences with respect to our moral
epistemological situation. So let us turn to Scenario Two, in which, by
hypothesis, God’s morally good reasons are always agent-relative—constituting
good reasons for him to permit the evil while providing no such reasons for us.
Just as there were some prima facie reasons to think Scenario One might be a
plausible possibility, so there are here too. After all, agent-relative reasons are a
familiar feature of human life, and one of the most promi- nent contexts in which
they show up is the context of special relationships, many of which are
characterized by some of the same features—for example, asymmetries of
knowledge, power, and authority—that characterize the relationship between
God (on the assumption he exists) and human beings.
As a mundane example of an agent-relative reason, consider a case in which a
child is about to trip over a toy and it is likely the child will be slightly hurt and
the toy will be broken. Person A might have good moral reason to permit this
accident to happen if A is the child’s parent, and has repeatedly warned the
child about such scenarios and believes this is the only way for the child to
learn an important lesson and grow in character. But that doesn’t mean that
some other person B—for example, a sitter left in charge for a few hours—has
good moral reason to permit the accident to hap- pen. As such cases illustrate,
the mere fact that one agent has morally good reason to permit a certain evil to
happen is not necessarily any indication that some other agent has morally good
reason to permit it. So the model of agent-relative reasons seems to hold out
promise as a way of understanding the relationship between God’s reasons for
permitting evils and our own reasons with respect to those same evils. In short,
on Scenario Two, there is no relationship, and we may infer nothing at all about
our own reasons from what we know, thanks to factual observations of what
happens in the world, about God’s reasons.
What, then, is the problem with this scenario? The problem reveals itself
when we start asking how, on this scenario, we are supposed to figure out what
our moral reasons are.
One possibility is that there is a secular answer to this question. After all,
nothing prevents the theist, when asked how we’re supposed to figure out what
our moral rea- sons are, from relying on a secular moral epistemology. There are
two sub-possibilities to consider, depending on whether one assumes a realist or
antirealist metaethical view.15 On a realist account, there are truths about
normative reasons that hold in a way that is robustly independent of our
evaluative attitudes. If the theist assumes a realist account and proposes to
couple it with a secular moral epistemology to explain how we are supposed to
figure out what our moral reasons are, then here I wish to rely on

15
There are important complexities associated with drawing the realism/antirealism distinction in
metae- thics. For more on how I am understanding the distinction, see Street 2006, 2008b, 2010, and
Unpublished b.
186 SHARON STREET

arguments I’ve made elsewhere that realism about normative reasons has no
tenable secular epistemology.16 What about the other sub-possibility, which is to
assume an antirealist account of normative reasons and couple it with a secular
moral epistemol- ogy? (The thought is that the theist might draw on these
accounts to explain how we know what our moral reasons are, while
simultaneously accepting theism.) I return to this possibility in the conclusion,
arguing that here too theism leads to normative skepticism.
Assuming, then, that the theist has no acceptable secular moral epistemology,
what are his or her remaining options for explaining how, on Scenario Two, we’re
supposed to learn what our moral reasons are? We saw already that under
Scenario Two, we can’t learn about our reasons by looking to what God permits. So
it seems the only thing left is to look to what God says. It would appear, in other
words, that our only option is to learn about our moral reasons by way of
communications from God. We should not, of course, make any assumptions at
the outset about the form those communications might take. For example, we
shouldn’t assume that those communications will be in the form of spoken
words; presumably they could also come in the form of a “voice of conscience,”
private religious experiences, or an innate moral sense with which we are born.
But this is where we hit epistemological trouble again. If we are to learn
about our moral reasons by way of communications from God, then it is of
course a prerequisite that we be able to identify those communications. As I’ll
now argue, however, on the assumption that God exists, we have no way of
doing that.
Begin with another piece of moral common sense upon which the theist and
atheist may presumably agree. It is natural to think that other things being equal,
in a situation in which there is a massive asymmetry of knowledge, power, and
moral goodness, and in which the less powerful party is reliant on
communications from the more powerful party for information about how there
is most reason to conduct his or her life—una- ble to glean that information from
independent sources, for example, or from the more powerful party’s observable
behavior—the more powerful party has reason to com- municate with the less
powerful party in terms that are clear and unambiguous, such that given the
known cognitive powers of the less powerful party, there is little chance of
mistaking the message or its source. While that statement is slightly
complicated, I take it that it articulates a very basic moral intuition.
Now for a factual observation: God does not communicate with human beings
in
this way. I won’t dwell on this point, which I take to be obvious, but here are a few
con- siderations. First, to the extent there is anything remotely resembling a
shared univer- sal “voice of conscience”—an innate “moral sense” that one might
otherwise perhaps reasonably interpret as the voice of God in all of us—there is
a secular evolutionary explanation of this that makes it reasonable to question
the source.17 The plausibility

16
See Street 2006, 2008b, 2011a, 2011b, and Unpublished b.
17
See, for example, Sober and Wilson 1998.
 IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON 187

of this alternative explanation would seem to count as an ingenious attempt by

God to cover his tracks and speak to us in a less than clear and unambiguous
fashion. The same may be said of extant religious texts, accounts of miracles,
and so forth. Given the compelling alternative explanations of such phenomena,
and given what we know (and what presumably God knows) of human cognitive
traits and powers, it is not rea- sonable to expect that all human beings will be
persuaded by such evidence.
Since some people believe, based on their own experiences, that they have
received clear and unambiguous communications from God, it is worth
pointing out that at the very least, it would seem that God does not
communicate in clear and unambiguous terms with huge portions of the human
population. One might of course try to explain why he doesn’t, or else explain
this appearance away. One suggestion might be that God is communicating
with all human beings in clear and unambiguous terms, but in virtue of some
cognitive or moral deficiency, many people do not recognize his com-
munications as such. Not only is this implausible, but it puts the theist in the
awkward position of charging everyone who in good faith claims not to have
received any clear and unambiguous communications from God with a
cognitive or moral deficiency. Another suggestion is that God is not
communicating with many people in clear and unambiguous terms, but that is
because they don’t morally deserve to be communicated with. This suggestion,
however, leads to the conclusion that we are hopeless judges of moral desert,
and therefore of how we ourselves should live, since at least based on what we
can see in terms of moral worthiness, there is no clear pattern in God’s choices
about whom to communicate with in clear and unambiguous terms. A third
possibil- ity is that it is impossible to communicate with humanity in clear and
unambiguous terms—or at the very least in any clearer or less ambiguous terms
than what we see now. This is completely implausible, however, essentially
constituting an abandonment of the claim that God is omnipotent.
If we (1) take our “other things being equal” moral thought about how we might oth-
erwise have thought it would make sense for God to communicate with us, (2)
com- bine it with the factual observation that he does not communicate with us
in this way, and (3) assume for the sake of argument that God exists, then here too,
as elsewhere, we may infer that other things are not equal. In particular, we may
conclude that God has some morally good reason not to communicate with
humanity in a clear and unam- biguous way. It is hard to see what such a reason
could be, of course, but then again it is also hard to see what reason there could
be to permit the drunk-driving accident of July 2, 2005.
On the assumption of Scenario Two, then, we may be certain that God has
some morally good reason not to be communicating with us in clear and
unambiguous terms that any human being who is not cognitively deficient could
reasonably be expected to recognize. But this knowledge, in turn, gives us reason
to doubt that we have properly identified his communications. One was inclined
to think one should call 911 to pre- vent a drunk-driving accident, but given
what we now know to be God’s reasons not to communicate with us in clear and
unambiguous terms, can we be confident we’ve
188 SHARON STREET

properly interpreted his communications on such matters? Recall that we have no

par- ticular reason to believe that we are even in Scenario Two, as opposed to
Scenarios One or Three. Given that uncertainty, and given God’s known reason
or reasons not to be clear with us, what reason do we really have to be confident
that calling 911 is the best course? Actions speak louder than words, after all,
one might reason. So maybe we should in fact be looking for guidance to what
God himself permits.
Notice what has happened under Scenario Two as compared with Scenario
One. Under Scenario One, information about God’s practical reasons
translated directly into information about our own practical reasons. Under
Scenario Two, the informa- tion about God’s practical reasons doesn’t translate
directly into information about our own practical reasons, but it translates
nonetheless. The mechanism of translation in the latter case is that knowledge
of God’s practical reasons gives us reason to doubt that we have properly
identified his communications regarding our practical reasons (which, by
stipulation under Scenario Two, may not be gleaned by attending to his). And
that in turn has implications for our actions, insofar as we gain epistemic reason
to doubt that we know what our practical reasons are. The problem is
compounded by the fact that we don’t even know which of the three scenarios we
are in.
One might object to this as follows: “But wait, what about the moral common
sense that you yourself keep appealing to? We do have pretty strong, shared
intuitions about many moral matters, as you yourself keep pointing out. God
wouldn’t make our moral common sense unreliable. So we should understand
this moral common sense (about calling 911, etc.) as coming from God. These
are his communications to us; we have identified them.”
The problem with this response is that it depends on an assumption about what
God would or wouldn’t do. In particular, the thought is that God wouldn’t make
our “moral common sense” unreliable, presumably because (we think) his doing so
would be mor- ally extremely puzzling. But in having that thought, we rely on
moral common sense as a guide to what God would or wouldn’t do. From the
point of view of moral common sense, it doesn’t seem to make sense that God
would make what we’ve been calling “moral common sense” unreliable. But
everything we have seen so far is that moral com- mon sense is no guide whatsoever to
what God would or wouldn’t do with regard to any matter. Moral common sense
would have suggested that God would prevent a flower girl’s decapitation, that
he would not permit tsunamis that kill tens of thousands of innocent people at
a time, that he would communicate with us in clear and unambigu- ous terms
concerning his existence and how we have reason to live, and so forth. But in
every case without exception, moral common sense has turned out to be no guide
at all to what God will or won’t do. So in seeking to identify God’s
communications—in trying to separate out the signal from the noise, so to
speak—we have no basis at all for making predictions as to how God might or
might not communicate with us. In par- ticular, we are not entitled to assume
that our own common sense is a reliable guide to what God will or won’t do. That
assumption is eviscerated on a daily basis by every hor- rendous evil that God
permits to happen for reasons that are completely opaque to us.
 IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON 189

One might now object that I am asking the theist to prove, without in any
way relying on moral common sense, that he or she is entitled to rely on moral
common sense. And this, one might continue, is no more interesting than
pointing out that you can’t prove that you’re not a brain in a vat without making
a question-begging assumption according to which you are not. But this
objection rests on a misun- derstanding of where we are in the dialectic. The
problem that the theist is now facing—in being asked to give some account of
how, on the assumption of Scenario Two, human beings are supposed to figure
out what our moral reasons for action are—is a problem that has arisen entirely
from within the moral point of view. The line of reasoning that has brought us
to this point is one that began by assuming that there are such things as moral
reasons for action and we have some idea what they are, and that we’re all
entitled to trust moral common sense until we find some good reason to think
otherwise. All we have been doing since is (1) noticing that theism itself
involves a substantive normative claim, and then (2) exploring the substantive
normative implications of that claim by examining what follows when we
couple it with non-normative observations about the way the world is. This line
of inquiry is no more a radical skeptical undertaking than evaluating the moral
claim that One should always save the greater number by looking at what it
implies about particu- lar cases. We reject the latter principle because it leads
to the conclusion that one should sometimes cut up a healthy person to give his
organs to others. We should reject theism because it leads to a battery of
conclusions concerning God’s reasons which in turn force us (whether by way
of the agent-neutral or the agent-relative scenario) to conclude that we don’t
know what our moral reasons are.
Scenario Three needs no separate treatment. We don’t know what the mix
of agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons would be under Scenario Three, after
all, and from our examination of Scenarios One and Two, we’ve seen that it doesn’t
really mat- ter. No matter what the nature of God’s reasons for permitting
evils—agent-neutral, agent-relative, or some combination—we are at sea. Our
common-sense views about normative reasons, when coupled with the
substantive normative claim of theism, lead over and over again to the
conclusion that our common-sense views about normative reasons cannot be
trusted.

10 Conclusion
What about the possibility that I bracketed earlier—the possibility of theism
conjoined with normative antirealism? I close with a few brief remarks about this
possibility.
According to normative antirealism, our normative reasons are mind-
dependent in the sense that they depend for their existence on our (mortal)
evaluative point of view on the world. On the particular constructivist view that I
favor, whether some fact X is a normative reason for a given agent A to Y
ultimately depends on that agent’s evalu- ative point of view, and in particular on
whether the conclusion that X is a normative
190 SHARON STREET

reason for A to Y follows from A’s global set of evaluative attitudes in combination
with the non-normative facts.18 There is plenty of room for error about
normative reasons on such a view, and the view is, at least in principle,
compatible with a very strong form of moral objectivity.19 Taken by itself, an
antirealist view faces no epistemological problems, in my view. Interestingly,
however, if one adopts an antirealist view and then couples it with theism, then
normative skepticism is once again the result.
To see why, note first off that it is not impossible that, even on an antirealist
account of normative reasons, everything happens for a reason. Return one last
time to the crash of July 2, 2005. On an antirealist account, what would it be for
this event to have hap- pened for a good reason? Roughly speaking, it would be
for there to be non-normative facts (of which we are presumably unaware),
which, by our own evaluative lights, supply a good reason for permitting the
accident to happen. And that in turn is not impossible. As we saw earlier, there
are many conceivable examples of such facts— for example, a forced choice
between permitting this tragedy to happen and allowing scenes of equal or
worse horror to be played out a thousand times over. If such a forced choice did in
fact exist, and some powerful being opted to permit the accident for that very
reason, then the accident happened for a reason after all.
So the antirealist can agree that it’s possible that everything happens for a reason.
But
to take that possibility seriously, the antirealist is going to have to find it plausible
that either we don’t really understand our own “evaluative lights”—in other words,
our own deepest loves, values, hopes, and aspirations—or else that the non-
normative facts of the universe are very different from what they appear to us to
be. (A third possibility is that we are making some gross logical or instrumental
error that so far we have been unable to detect.) But these in turn are just far-
fetched skeptical scenarios. In other words, the antirealist is going to agree that
it’s not impossible that the crash of July 2, 2005 happened for a good reason, any
more than it is impossible that the earth is flat, in spite of all our evidence to the
contrary, but this possibility is going to strike him or her as one that involves
giving up on the thought that we have any real idea of what is going on in this
world.
Moreover, it seems to me this is how the possibility should strike anyone,
regardless of his or her metaethics. If we simply pay attention to how things
appear to us—both morally and factually—then the accident of July 2, 2005
would appear to be an utterly unmitigated evil. It would appear that there is
nothing redeeming about its having hap- pened, that there is nothing in the world
that makes it okay that it happened. These are appearances that I think we should
take at face value until we find an extremely good reason to do otherwise. To go
with theism is to deny these appearances. It is to claim that, contrary to how
things look, such horrors are not unmitigated after all—that

18
See Street 2008a, 2009, 2010, 2012, and Unpublished a.
19
I have in mind here the possibility of “Kantian constructivism,” as characterized in Street 2012,
though as I argue there I don’t think this sort of view (in which one tries to show how morality is
rationally entailed from within any agential perspective) succeeds in the end.
 IF EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON 191

in spite of how it might seem, there is something redeeming about this thing
having happened, that there is something that makes it okay that this happened.
To my mind, this is not only a radical denial of the appearances, but also a
moral disservice to the people who were involved. It furthermore seems to me a
disservice to any force at work in the universe that is worthy of the name “God.”
Nothing makes it okay that this acci- dent happened. While we can’t be certain of
this, we should be as sure of this as we are of pretty much anything. In a choice
between all outward moral and factual appear- ances and one specific
conception of God, it seems to me clear which one should go.
Recall that to abandon the idea that God in the standard monotheistic sense
exists is not to abandon the idea that there might be something at work in the
universe that is worthy of the name “God.” Nor is it to abandon the idea that there
might be true and comforting things to say to the victims of moral catastrophes,
and to each other, when we contemplate these catastrophes. It is to abandon the
idea that one of those true and comforting things is that the catastrophe
happened for a reason. That does not mean that there was nothing deserving of
the name “God” present on the Meadowbrook Parkway on July 2, 2005, nor does
it mean that there is nothing deserving of that name present now. What it does
mean is that if there is such a presence at work in the uni- verse, then it is not
omnipotent in anything remotely resembling the ordinary sense of that word. We
reach this conclusion based on the same old reasoning that has always driven
the argument from evil, namely that if such a presence were omnipotent, then it
would have stopped this horror from happening, just as the best part of every one
of us would have done.20

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I am grateful to Michael Bergmann, Patrick Kain, and Eric Wielenberg for their generous and
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