The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [107]
1. Metallic arrows are highly effective against Ganon.
2. Metallic arrows are useless against Ganon.
Now we know that both of these statements can’t possibly be true since they contradict one another. For these two statements it’s pretty much obvious to those who have played Link to the Past which is correct, but for the sake of example let’s say we need to come up with the third true statement that will help prove one of them to be wrong (forgetting, for the moment, that we could use trial-and-error to find out the answer):
3. In A Link to the Past, silver arrows are needed to defeat Ganon.
From this we easily reason that since silver arrows are metallic arrows and are necessary to defeat Ganon, the second statement is logically inconsistent with the first and can’t be true if the first is true. The third statement tells us which of the first two statements is the correct one.
When one attempts to do this with a more abstract problem such as the co-existence of God and evil the process becomes a little more complicated. What, then, are the two original statements for the logical problem of evil? As we’ve already stated, we’re going to assume that evil exists—this is Mackie’s first premise of the logical problem of evil. On Earth there are numerous examples around us of evil and suffering. In Hyrule, it’s pretty much a given that evil exists in the form of Ganondorf and his ilk.
The second premise in the logical problem of evil is also one of the assumptions outlined earlier—that God exists and is all good, all powerful, and all knowing, all the time. This one is a little more difficult to prove—on Earth it’s considered to be something taken on faith. When it comes to Hyrule, there’s not much that we know for certain about the Goddesses who created Hyrule. We know that the three Goddesses were definitely powerful if they were able to create an entire world, but we do not know if they were all-powerful. This is a very important distinction that should be kept in mind when attempting to solve the logical version of this problem for the Hylian people.
So this leaves us with our two statements for the logical problem of evil:
On Earth:
(e1) God exists and is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good;
(e2) Evil exists
In Hyrule:
(h1) The Goddesses exist;
(h2) Ganondorf (evil) exists
Now we can start to see the problem. For Earth, consider the two points above: God is all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing yet evil exists. There is a fundamental conflict between those two premises—if God is all-good, then why would that God allow evil to exist? Perhaps, you may suggest, God cannot simply will evil out of existence? Ah, but God is supposedly all-powerful and all-knowing—nothing would be able to be beyond God’s power in this case.
This leads us to the third statement which the logical problem of evil makes use of to disprove the existence of God (Mackie does not attempt to disprove the existence of evil because there is empirical evidence that evil exists, while in the case of God the evidence is much less concrete which makes it an easy target):
(e3) An all-good being would try to eliminate evil as much as possible.
This statement is reasonably true to the effect that it implies the following: any all-good being could not sit by and let evil exist if they were capable of eliminating it. This would mean that evil and the existence of the type of God we’ve described cannot co-exist because that God could and would destroy all evil in the world, if that God were truly all-good and all-powerful.
In Hyrule, however, applying the same argument does not matter . On Hyrule, there is no evidence or claim that the Goddesses were either all-good, all-powerful, or all-knowing. In this case their existence alongside Ganondorf’s is not inconsistent since it could be claimed that they have neither the power nor the inclination to eliminate him