Introducing The Problem of Evil
By: Lizzie Bestow
Tags: Life Lessons, Evil, Society, Life, Philosophy

Introducing The Problem of Evil

Exploring theodicy

Photo by Jake Colling on Unsplash

The problem of evil is something we hear talked about a lot: if an omnibenevolent God exists, then why is there evil in the world? The proponent of the design argument claims that the existence of a certain feature proves that God exists; one often appealed to characteristic is the eye. The eye is so intricate and beautiful, so the argument goes, that it must have been designed; such a complicated machination cannot have come about naturally.

The problem of evil works in the reverse direction: our experience of the magnitude of suffering in the world should lead us to infer that God probably doesn’t exist; or not, at least, the God we hope exists. And that’s important. The existence of evil doesn’t question the possibility of a God existing altogether, but moreover the possibility of the kind of God we want to exist.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume postulated the existence of a whole host of deficient deities to which we have the dubious honour of being designed by; ‘some infant Deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance’ or it is ‘the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated Deity’. All of Hume’s examples draw from his belief that there’s something that’s far-from-perfect about us. We humans are just not really that great, and so if we have been designed, we’re certainly the product of a poor designer.

What’s Evil?

Before we jump right into theodicy, it’s worth thinking a little on the etymology of the term evil. Quite often, as a starting point, philosophers will draw on the meanings or myriad possible interpretations of a word in their search to make some sense of it.

Recently I became fully immersed in the world of Georges Perec; I’m currently reading Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. I’m simultaneously learning French (or rather re-learning it). I remember reading about a book Perec has written about his childhood called ‘W: Or The Memory of Childhood’. At first I thought this was a pretty strange title. It’s a book which is split in half: the first half depicts Perec’s childhood through the eyes of the young Perec, and the latter half is Perec’s adult reflections on that period in his life. Whilst learning French, I realized that the letter W is pronounced like “double-V” in French, whereas in English we pronounce it “double-U”. Then I read that Perec had intended for the W to represent the two reflections, the “double-V”. That makes sense if you know French, but it doesn’t make much sense if you don’t. So the meaning of the title was transformed when I learnt how it had come about.

What does evil mean? When we think about evil we tend to think of wickedness, moral evil, a particularly bad act, something denoting a particularly awful form of wickedness. It might be easier to ask why suffering exists. But that’s not altogether correct; after all, badness isn’t just suffering. Some bad things do not seem to involve suffering (a painless killing, for example). Evil here is being understood as badness. If God exists, why do bad things happen?

The Logical Problem of Evil

The logical problem of evil involves the triumvirate of characteristics that Judaeo-Christian God is considered to hold.

If God is omniscient (he knows all that has happened, is happening and will happen), and he is omnibenevolent (all-good) then why does he not stop bad things happening?

If he is omnipotent (all-powerful) then he is able to stop those bad things happening. The problem becomes non-existent if we take one of these characteristics out of the question: maybe God isn’t omnibenevolent, and he is indifferent to our suffering; then he’ll have no reason to stop bad things happening.

Maybe he isn’t omniscient, and he doesn’t know that bad things happen; he’ll be unable to stop them. Similarly, if he’s not omnipotent, he’s helpless in preventing those bad things from happening.

Biting the Bullet

As with any argument, there have been a few who have chosen to bite the bullet. So what — maybe God isn’t all-powerful, or all-knowing, or kind towards his creations? Maybe he’s like Hume’s gods. Maybe God is not entirely good (look at the God of the Old Testament!), or claim that the devil has power. Maybe God himself isn’t wholly good, maybe he doesn’t conform to our standards of goodness. The notion of moral goodness presupposes one’s notion of a community in which people are vulnerable and rely on others — could a being even be morally good if He is so different from other beings. Most religious people would say that God is good in the same way that saints are good, but just more so. Most religious people would not raise these problems.

But that isn’t the kind of God most Judaeo-Christian religious persons want to have watching over them. Most people want a God that they think will look down kindly on them, that wants to help them, and that is powerful and able to help them.

Moral Reason

Maybe God has a good moral reason for allowing these things to happen? That seems to be the most fruitful response possible. William Rowe begins with a horrible instance of suffering:

“In some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering” (Rowe 1979: 337).

Rowe remarks that the fawn’s suffering is evidence against the existence of God, even if it is not a proof of atheism. This is the problem of evil to which we ought to respond. Why is there so much needless bad in the world?

The Christian response is to appeal to the theological significance of Christ’s suffering.

Theodicy

A theodicy is indeed an attempt to show that God has a morally sufficient reason for allowing evils to occur. If God is in the dock, and an atheist is the prosecutor, then a theodicy would be for the counsel of the defence. A huge amount of emphasis has been put on the theodicy in the philosophy of religion.

Some philosophers of religion have expressed concern over this one-sided focus on theodicies (i.e. feminist philosophers): trying to justify God’s allowing for suffering. Instead of trying to bring together a defence for the existence of evil in the world, these philosophers say, we’d be better off actually attempting to mitigate the suffering found in the world.

However, this seems to miss the mark a little; while it is a bit of a pointless question, from an empirical standpoint — we’ll never really know why evil exists, or indeed if there is a God — it’s a question that belies something of what it is to be human. It’s a little like what we see when victims of tsunamis or earthquakes shout “why me?” into the ether. It’s a kind of struggling to find out why we’re here, why we have to withstand suffering.

Punishment Theodicy

The Punishment Theodicy is an argument stating that bad things are there because they are God’s way of punishing us for sin. It originates, often, from “original” sin; looking at Adam and Eve and the fall from Grace. In Isiah, the Bible states that ‘I will punish the world for their evil for…and for their deceit’. Adam and Eve had never sinned before they tasted the forbidden fruit, and sin thus entered into the world. They are banished from the Garden of Eden, and made to suffer; suddenly a whole host of things become painful, like childbirth and menstruation.

There are simple and obvious objections here: lots of people suffer greatly but have not had a chance to sin (i.e. babies). Some may retort and claim that God’s omniscience means he knows that they will commit a sin, but this opens a whole other can of worms (do we not have the freedom to choose to commit a sin? Should we be judged, Minority Report style, on sins we haven’t yet committed).

The notion that incurable diseases can be punishments does not reflect well on such a God’s character. You’re unlikely to want to give praise to some entity that gives you cancer because you swore at your cat when he scratched your leg. Consequently, a much more popular theodicy: much evil is the result of what people freely choose to do. It is good that agents should act freely, and so God does not intervene in human being’s choices.

Free Will Theodicy

Even an omnipotent God cannot force free agents to do the right thing. So much evil is explicable in terms of God justifiably putting up with the consequences of his willing a great good. This is much more plausible than the previous theodicy. Intuitively, we wouldn’t necessarily want a God that intervenes every time we behave badly anyway.

It smacks of the overzealous parent, and reminds me of The Clockwork Orange, where a young man is brainwashed to always do the right thing. This is better for society; he is no longer a delinquent youth, and becomes a model citizen. But is he behaving in the right way if he can no longer choose how he behaves? The argument rests on the intuition that the young man may be behaving morally, but he’s lost his autonomy, which is a far greater evil than his choosing to behave badly.

Again, there are various objections here. What should we do about natural evils? While moral evils are the result of the free actions of individuals (individuals like Adolf Hitler), natural evils are the result of some natural phenomenon often entirely unlinked to human intervention (i.e. tsunamis, earthquakes). Of course, as we live in an age of increasing climate change, it’s becoming more and more apparent that much negative environmental activity is the result of our own doing, some is entirely unrelated to human beings messing up the world. An earthquake is a genuinely natural evil.

Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne has an interesting response; for Swinburne, in order for people to have moral knowledge they must be able to predict with some accuracy the consequences of their actions. If I didn’t realise that throwing a heavy object at someone would cause injury, I cannot be held accountable. This is why the courts have an insanity defence, and shorter sentences for minors. This has been called the “free will theodicy for natural evil”.

Similarly, in order to have moral knowledge I must be able to predict the consequences of my actions. There must exist laws of nature for this to happen. If these laws of nature exist they will govern the behavior of all things (whatever physical laws that govern the trajectory of heavy objects, will also govern the cause of avalanches, or landslides).

We must have a world governed by such laws, so we will have the unwelcome by-product of tsunamis, volcanoes and the like. These natural phenomena depend on the physical laws, and give us some insight into the way the world works. In order to choose the good path or choose wrongly, one must have knowledge of what the consequences must be. There must be physical laws that apply to the world as a whole for us to have this knowledge.

Natural evil is therefore an unnatural by-product. Much of this can of course be contested. If God is omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipotent, surely he could have created a world which lacks the physical disasters, and still provides the certainty laws of natures give us?

Hick

John Hick, theologian and philosopher, was inspired by St. Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 140–202). For most Christians, humans have suffered a fall from grace (at the time of Adam and Eve, humans were at their most perfect state).

Irenaeus

Irenaeus believed that to be created in the image of God is to have the potential to develop towards perfection. For most, human beings began in a perfect state and experienced a fall in greatness. Instead, Irenaeus believes that human beings are developing towards perfection. Hick takes up this argument, claiming that each and every human being is developing throughout their life towards perfection. They are slowly becoming more perfect.

Perfection?

Many have questioned Hick’s logic: why didn’t God create us perfect to begin with? Remember we’re assuming that God does indeed have those attributes we spoke about at the beginning like omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence. We’re assuming that God has the power, desire and ability to create us in a perfect way.

Hick provides two answers: the first, that to become more perfect, is an idea of developing certain virtues of character (think about this in virtue ethical terms). Imagine if God had created us from the outset immediately aware of his divine presence. In that case, we would not have been able to choose to worship God. In order to have some measure of freedom humans must be born into existence at a certain epistemic difference from God (not, importantly, a spatial difference). We must have been created not immediately aware of God’s presence. Say we were created basking in the divine radius of his very presence, we would have no choice to freely worship God.

Development towards perfection involves attainment of virtues. If we are to perfect ourselves we must have the freedom to choose to do what is right. We could not have that freedom if we were created immediately aware of God’s presence. So our initial position is one of distance, maybe even estrangement from God. Hick claims that virtue is something that must be attained. In order for virtue to be attained, human beings must find themselves in an environment in which they face challenges to overcome.

Soul-making

If everything was all hunky dory we would not be able to overcome challenges, because everything would be okay. You cannot just be created virtuous — you must become virtuous by meeting the challenges the world throws at you. This is what Hicks calls soul-making — drawing from Keats, who wrote that ‘the world is a veil of soul-making’. If we are to develop compassion, we must find ourselves in a world in which beings suffer — the evil of suffering is there so we can develop the virtue of compassion. The same can be said for natural disasters — humans develop courage, and this is one step further towards attainment of other virtues. This kind of theodicy naturally applies to natural evils, whereas the free will theodicy needs some manoeuvrings to allow for this. Natural evils, for Hick, are just part of that soul-making; that seemingly purposeless evil that is in actual fact purposeful.

There are problems with this line of thinking. Sometimes human beings don’t overcome great suffering. Sometimes you go through a terribly awful thing and it destroys you. Rhian Mannings recently won a Pride of Britain award after starting a charity which has saved lives. Mannings lost her baby son George from pneumonia, and found that she and her husband were stranded without support. Her partner sadly committed suicide just five days later. While Rhian was ultimately able to make something beautiful of the tragedy she suffered, her husband wasn’t. Also, what of those who are killed by natural disasters; are they just fodder for their relatives’ enlightenment?

Marilyn McCord Adams calls these kind of evils ‘horrendous evils’; like the death of a child. These kind of evils do seem to cause a problem for Hick, because they often don’t end up with someone being able to overcome it. For every heart-warming ending like Mannings’ and her award, there’s fifteen or twenty stories about people who were overcome by the evil that happened to them. The film Requiem for a Dream is the perfect example of a whole group of people ultimately overcome by the evil that occurs to them. Hick responds to this by claiming that, in a world without apparently purposeless evils, ‘human misery would not evoke deep personal sympathy’. The evils must seen to be senseless, incapable of being rationalized, for Hick’s theory to work.

Nonhuman Animal Suffering

Yet what about the suffering of nonhuman animals? As we’ve seen previously, Rowe gives the example of a baby deer caught in a fire that no human being ever witnesses. If no-one sees or knows that such an evil has occurred, then why would God allow an evil like that to happen? Why would nonhuman animals inflict such pain and brutality upon one another if we gain no education from it, because we don’t see it? Hick would claim that this is a case in point. We have to know that such things exist — even if we don’t witness them — to develop compassion. However, this does also seem very anthropocentric: animals suffer for the benefit of human beings, so that we can develop virtues and attain perfection.

Stanley Kane, in response, notes that there seems a superfluous amount of evil than what would be required for Hick’s postulation. Is it necessary that so much suffering occurs, that there’s such awful things happening to people? What is the point of the suffering of dinosaurs; why should any animal have had to suffer before human beings came along? It’s a similar point to Adams’, but different in subtle ways.

Feminist Philosophy

Grace Jantzen and Morny Joy are two feminist philosophers who have questioned Hicks’ account. Both note that many of the worlds evils are particularised in some way; some evil is gendered (directed towards one gender or another) whilst other evil is may be directed towards people of color, or people of a certain sexual orientation. Whilst some evil is random and meaningless, some is not. For Hick, however, genuine virtue is developed by meeting life’s challenges.

It’s also worth noting that Hick’s thesis might also not cast God’s character in a good light. Imagine if we found the cure for cancer; would scientists prevent people from accessing it because they wanted people to suffer from having such a disease, because it helps develop virtues? Hick’s response may be to claim this is a false equivalency; he is proposing that God getting rid of all the evil in the world would not help us in our quest for soul-making (which, put like that, sounds like something out of the Lord of the Rings).

Other Responses

There are a whole host of responses to the debate, and this article would go on for days if I were to list them all here. For further reading, the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has a really good article on this very topic.

One common response is to point to the possibility of a shared attribute in evil things. What is it for something to be yellow? Yellow things all have something in common; they all share a color, a certain way of appearing in the world. You can have yellow bananas and yellow lemons. They are both foodstuffs, but you can also have yellow cars, which obviously aren’t edible (unless you make a cake that looks just like a car, like the ones you see on the TV show The Great British Bake Off, aka the pride of my nation).

Conversely, there doesn’t seem to be something that all bad things have in common. There’s bad essays, bad TV shows and bad goalkeepers. There’s no property that all of these things share. My father is a pretty bad goalkeeper, as he once let in fourteen goals. However, he’s not a bad dad. But he wasn’t a bad goalkeeper in the same way that the last season of Dexter was a bad TV show. That, arguably, was much to do with the TV show being on for far too long; it ran its course, as they say. Arguably, it echoes curse of the sequels — the latter film never failing to reach the awe-inspiring heights of the former.

Bad things are just bad. For some, evil designates a lack: it says that a certain entity is falling short of an ideal. It is that intuition that one finds briefly summarized in Aquinas. Aquinas claims that evil ‘does not exist’. When you create something bad, you are creating something that falls short in some way. Badness is not something that God is responsible for — badness is the privation of good. Other philosophers disagree, like Robert Nozick, who believes that evil opposes good. It’s a force against good, not a certain lack of something.

J.L. Mackie, in ‘Evil and Omnipotence’ claims that evil is not merely a privation of good. Like Nozick, he believes that evil actively opposes goodness. Perhaps it is not a conceptual truth that we can have good without evil. We can conceive of a world in which everything is red, so we can conceive of a world that contains nothing but goodness.

Sceptical Theism

Sceptical theism is (in part) inspired by the Biblical book of Job. The book of Job relates a story where Satan is attempting to tempt Job. Job asks God why this is the case. He realizes that God has reasons for allowing bad things to happen, but we can never understand them (mere mortals we are). William Alston draws on the experience of someone watching a grandmaster playing chess. If you watch the chess game and you’ve not seen much chess before, you probably won’t understand why he moves a piece to a certain square.

Even if you are an experienced player of chess, you’ll probably still be a little nonplussed as to why the grandmaster has positioned that piece there. It may seem like he is going to lose. Then, he’ll pull it out the bag — and he wins! The person watching realizes that the grandmaster had a certain plan, but that he himself (as a mere watcher) was not privy to it. God must have his reasons for allowing this to happen. There is a justification for the bad that happens in the world, just one that is inaccessible to us. But that doesn’t really seem all that satisfactory — at least to me — because it doesn’t really explain why.