Not both ontologies face a problem: On Nagasawa’s argument from systemic evil

Abstract According to Yujin Nagasawa (2018, 2024), theists are better equipped than atheists to address the problem of evil arising from natural selection because their ontology is wider and subsumes the ontology of atheists. We see the world as fundamentally and overall not bad, yet the existence of evil creates a mismatch between this expectation and the reality of the world, a mismatch that, Nagasawa argues, theists can address more effectively than atheists. However, I contend that this conclusion is false. I argue that a wider ontology does not always provide better explanations than a narrower one, even when the latter is subsumed by the former; on the contrary, a narrower ontology could provide better answers. I argue that since the theistic ontology is larger than the atheistic one, it comes with a large explanatory burden, which makes the theistic ontology more demanded to provide an answer than the atheistic one. And contrary to Nagasawa’s claim, I argue that the ontology of atheists is not entirely subsumed by that of theists, which provides atheists with a potential response that theists cannot borrow.