Problem of Evil Is Evil

Problem of Evil

Is Evil Really a "Problem" for Theists?

Throughout history, the persistence of evil has posed problems for conventional theistic belief systems. Crime, pain, disease, and other "evils" continue to make the world what Hume called "a diversity of distress and sorrow" (72), and yet a God that is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent would logically have acted to prevent such suffering. Generations of philosophers have argued that because we can all point to evil in the absence of equally compelling evidence for a God defined in these terms, God does not exist. However, I would argue that many of these arguments are stated in overly simplistic terms or else themselves frame the relationship between God and evil in overly simplistic ways -- the truth is more complex.

Theistic arguments from evil traditionally begin with the Greeks; Epicurus is often cited as the first recorded figure to ask how a good, strong God can coexist with suffering (Larrimore xix). If we insist on a good God, the argument goes, then the presence of evil makes God weak; if we insist on a strong God, then that God is evidently not good at all. And if an entity is neither strong nor good, can it be divine? While this line of reasoning has "disturbed" theistic philosophers since at least the 3rd Century CE (Lactantius 50), it would be naive to consider it compelling proof of the nonexistence of any divine entity.

In fact, theistic writers have usually conceded that the persistence of suffering only serves as evidence that, on the one hand, "evil" has been misunderstood as being incompatible with ultimate benevolence or, on the other, that God has been misunderstood as being in some way incompatible with the world. The earliest known rebuttals to the argument from evil posit that even a benevolent God can get angry with created entities -- "just" anger motivated to correct evil -- and that even an omnipotent God is not necessarily scrutable. As the early Christian apologist Lactantius notes, God may be omniscient but we are not: "The mind of man, walled in by the darksome dwelling-place of his body, is removed far from an accurate view of truth" (47).

Lactantius employs this notion of human fallibility (an "evil" or flaw in creation in itself, but one that hinges more on free will for its solution) to challenge those who follow the Epicurean conclusions that either God does not exist or has no active moral disposition toward either good or evil. Perhaps the phenomena we commonly (mis-) interpret as "evil" actually serve some inscrutable higher good, and thus negate the apparent contradiction posed by God's putative benevolence. Those who follow this theodicial approach then attempt to explicate this higher good in order to produce evidence of that divine benevolence, whether it resides in the "soul-making" or evolutionary approach recently spearheaded by John Hick (355-61), the more abstract "best of all possible worlds" of Leibniz (191-200), or elsewhere

Modern attempts to defend the argument from evil on evidential or probabilistic grounds gloss over this idea of "hidden" good within apparent evil by focusing on what we currently know. Because "evil" necessarily signifies an experience in which we have not yet been able to locate an underlying good state of affairs, it is somewhat circular to infer that since we cannot currently justify an "evil" phenomenon, no such justification exists, and thus there are rational grounds to suppose that no benevolent, omnipotent God exists (Rowe 236). Once again, the theist can simply point out that human knowledge -- either our own, or in the collective sense -- is not only incomplete but not even necessarily close to complete. Furthermore, inference from incomplete evidence is dangerous; before Columbus, European philosophers would have felt themselves on firm "rational ground" to suppose that no edible starchy tuber existed, and yet the potato would have proved them wrong.

Attempts to prove the nonexistence of God through arguments from evil often founder on either the definition of "God" or the definition of "evil." However, while an imperfectly benevolent or even amoral God does not pose a logical problem for those who prefer to consider the divine as unmoved mover, first cause, or as some other morally neutral cosmological principle, such a God is obviously not the benign deity of modern religious orthodoxy. And while a "mystic" or other theodicial investigator may well find a way to transvaluate vast suffering into comprehensible perfection or even rejoice in its very incomprehensibility, the results still need to be communicated clearly and lucidly in order to be convincing. For the rest of us, the persistence of evil is still disturbing by definition.