“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”
“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.
“And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy for ever?”
–Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
One of the most vexing problems for any traditional theist is the so-called problem of evil. How, it is asked, can an all-powerful, all-knowing and benevolent* deity permit evil and suffering, especially the amount of suffering that we see in the world around us where the innocent are victimized and the guilty appear to go happily on their way? Where is God in the midst of all this suffering? Doesn’t God, as creator of the world, bear responsibility for evil?
I took an entire seminar on this topic in my graduate school days, and I confess I am not much closer to having a satisfying answer than I was then. For what it’s worth, there seem to be several major tracks various philosophers have taken in dealing with the issue.
The Greater Good Defense. The most noted proponent of this view might be Gottfried Leibniz, the 17th-century philosopher who is also known for co-discovering calculus (along with Isaac Newton, which resulted in an acrimonious debate about who should get credit, but that’s neither here nor there). According to Leibniz, it was impossible that God should have created a world that was anything but the best possible one. Therefore, it must be that evil somehow contributes to the goodness of the whole universe, even if we can’t see how. He compared evil to shadows or garish colors in a painting which, considered in themselves, are ugly, but when viewed properly contribute to the beauty of the whole.
This attempt at theodicy is unsatisfying in large part because it seems to give short shrift to the suffering of individuals. Is it morally acceptable to permit (or inflict) suffering on an innocent for some greater good? Doesn’t this entail treating persons as means to an end rather than as ends-in-themselves?
The Free Will Defense. God created human beings with free will and free will is a great good. Only creatures with free will are capable of choosing good and of freely offering themselves in love. A world of automatons would lack these great goods. But having free will also means having the freedom to choose evil. Therefore, in taking the risk of creating free creatures, God allowed for the possibility of God’s creatures abusing their freedom. You can’t have freedom (and its attendant goods) without the possibility of evil.
One problem with this approach is that it has a hard time accounting for so-called natural evil – suffering caused by such “natural” occurrences as disease, famine, earthquake and flood. A possible response is to say that nature itself is “fallen,” possibly as a result of the rebellion of Satan and other angels who abused their own divinely-given freedom, or that the primal sin of Adam and Eve somehow infected nature itself. However, an age that is dubious about the existence of God probably isn’t going to give much credence to Satan or a literalistic account of the fall either.
Another common response is to say that a certain amount of “natural” evil would be the necessary consequence of a world with any kind of stable physical structure. Otherwise we would have to imagine a world where the laws of physics were magically suspended any time some event threatened to cause harm.
The Inscrutability Defense. This may be the most popular response among non-philosophical believers (and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense!). Its classic expression is in God’s speech to Job:
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone- while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” (Job 38: 4-7)
And then:
“Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself? Do you have an arm like God’s, and can your voice thunder like his? Then adorn yourself with glory and splendor, and clothe yourself in honor and majesty.” (40: 8-10)
Essentially this view holds that God’s knowledge and wisdom is so far beyond that of human beings that we are incapable of judging God’s creation. While there is no doubt truth in this, it’s hard to see how it would convince someone who didn’t already believe in God for other reasons. Besides, we want a God of goodness, not just a God who overawes us with power.
These are all somewhat oversimplified accounts, and each of these views still has its defenders. While I think there’s an element of truth in each (especially the free will defense and the inscrutability defense), I don’t think any of them offers a fully satisfactory answer to the problem of evil. Part of the problem, I think, is the very abstractness of the question. In a later post I’ll explore what that means and what I think might be a more promising approach.
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*There are some who hold that God is “beyond good and evil” and that it is only our limited human perspective that insists on making distinctions between the two. While this obviously solves the problem of evil, it does so at too high a price.
A Thinking Reed 