Problem of Evil God, Evil,

Problem of Evil

God, Evil, and the Endless Debate

The problem of evil has bedeviled theists and atheists alike for thousands of years, leaving both sides at what appears to be a perpetual impasse. Atheistic thinkers generally argue that a conventionally defined God (omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent) is logically incompatible with an apparently flawed creation in order to disprove religious claims, forcing theologians to defend their own belief on logical grounds. Neither attack nor defense has been perfectly convincing, and so the argument grinds on.

If history's great thinkers have been unable to resolve the problem, I find myself forced to focus on the persistence of the impasse in itself as the most fertile approach. The alternative is to acknowledge that yes, the experience of evil is a compelling argument against the existence of a conventional God, and yet the very fact that this argument has failed to persuade many people whose experience of evil has been the most profound points to limits in the applicability of reason itself. And in the meantime, theistic defenses, while inconclusive in themselves as active proofs for God's existence, have generated a rich body of insight about how the divine is to be defined and what its relationship to the world may or may not entail.

On the surface, the argument from evil is simple. Since pre-classical times, the gods were conventionally characterized as being functionally all-powerful and all-seeing, and a moralistic (or at least legalistic) component of religion often evolved to make the divine world the arbiter of right and wrong behavior as well.

However, as Epicurus pointed out, belief in an entity who is simultaneously all-powerful, all-seeing, and perfectly benevolent contradicts our experience of a world that is manifestly less than perfect, not to mention often "horrendous" in its capacity to hurt the innocent and reward the wicked.

As such, either God falls short of this conventional definition in some way or we must radically reevaluate our own experience in order to read apparent evil as a form of obscure good. Otherwise, God would simply not allow it to happen.

While this apparent paradox is often advanced as a self-evident justification for atheism, its actual ramifications are actually quite different:

Epicurus could have simply denied that gods exist. […] This solution, though, would have been unpersuasive to a Greco-Roman world that acknowledged and paid tribute to numerous, anthropomorphic deities with carefully circumscribed spheres of influence. Moreover, Epicurus […] was convinced that the universal belief in the gods could be explained only by their objective reality. The gods, then, existed.

The logical contradiction between God and an evil world, for Epicurus, was resolved by refining the definition of God to exclude active benevolence: God, to an Epicurean, exists and is theoretically all-powerful, but simply does not care what happens to human beings. This conception of a deity who is both real and "beyond good and evil," to use the Nietzschean phrase, is a difficult one for many moderns to embrace, and as such is largely ignored.

Those who insist on divine benevolence generally attack the Epicurean argument on one of two primary fronts. Many, perhaps most, have concentrated on the human experience of apparent "evil" as a failure to interpret a greater good accurately; after all, while God may be defined as omniscient, "The mind of man, walled in by the darksome dwelling-place of his body, is removed far from an accurate view of truth."

Variations on this approach recognize that suffering is neither illusory nor immediately optimal, but posit that it is either a necessary condition of some greater good -- variously construed as free will, pedagogy or "soul making," or in other terms -- or simply the optimal outcome that even an omnipotent deity can create given logical necessities.

Believers writing for other believers often strive to uncover this teleological or theodicial "value" or meaning behind evil in order to resolve the apparent contradiction between it and an otherwise "good" creator.

Such efforts to find divine order in what would otherwise be a senseless universe have been summarized in verse by Alexander Pope:

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good.

But while their advocates may find these theodicies personally persuasive, others have found it easy enough to dismiss them as, at best, idealistic attempts to simply recast objectively "evil" phenomena in Candidean terms. In his epochal "Evil and Omnipotence," J.L. Mackie is pragmatic: Such solutions to the problem are indeed "adequate" if fully embraced, "but often enough these adequate solutions are only almost adopted. […] Those who say that evil is only an illusion may also be thinking, inconsistently, that this illusion is itself an evil."

Mackie extends this pragmatism to those who attempt to resolve the problem by refining the definition of God's omnipotence or omniscience. Once again, these lexical defenses are logically valid in theory, since it is possible to imagine a deity who may desire the highest good, yet either lacks the power to achieve it or is otherwise constrained in some way. For example, we might separate the existence of evil from God's apparent ability to eradicate it, or ascribe suffering to the effects of natural law to which even God is subject.

It is also possible to restrict divine omniscience so that God can be surprised when a nominally optimal creation freely generates evil, and so free will becomes a divine "gamble."

While Mackie again concedes that "if you are prepared to say that God is […] not quite omnipotent or […] there are limits to what an omnipotent thing can do, then the problem of evil will not exist for you," he notes that relatively few have consistently applied these limits to their thinking about God in any comprehensive way.

Efforts to sharpen the logical argument from evil by focusing on the idea that a bad world makes a good God less likely have likewise foundered on both sides. While a vast amount of work has been done in this field (chiefly by Plantinga on the theistic side and by Draper and others arguing for skepticism), the debate is something of a sideline for at least three major reasons. First, while probability can be a fair predictor of actuality, it is almost never completely accurate, and so we may well be living in a world where God is vanishingly unlikely but nonetheless real. (if anything, this truism returns to questions of free will as sentient creatures' -- or a creation's -- ability to break observed probabilistic patterns and so generate surprises.) Second, our probabilistic models are necessarily limited to local experience, and so as long as we ourselves are not omniscient, "we are in no position to judge" whether the sum of all facts confirms the existence of God or not.

Third, as we suffer (that is, as our localized experience of evil increases), we often become more likely to appeal to a benign God as a counterweight to pain, and so rather than necessarily implying God's absence, evil and faith actually tend to travel together in human experience. As Hume somewhat cynically but astutely notes:

Each […] from a consciousness of his imbecility and misery, rather than from any reasoning, is led to seek protection from that Being on whom he and all nature is dependent. […] the best, and indeed, the only method of bringing everyone to a due sense of religion is by just representations of the misery and wickedness of men.