The Problem of Evil

The problem of evil refers to the existence of evil in the world. If God is good, why does He permit evil to occur? Ivan takes the question a bit further by putting it this: he can understand evil happening to those who deserve it, who are not good—but why would a good God allow evil to be visited upon a child? It is what Adams refers to as “horrendous evil” (26)—evil so bad and so uncalled for and so unnecessary that it seems beyond rationalizing, beyond justification, and beyond any type of explanation for how a good Being Who cares for His creation could possibly sit by and watch and allows such horrendous evil—such as the torture of an innocent child to occur. Yet, Christians should not be shocked by the suffering of child—the Slaughter of the Innocents marked the first instances of death wrought by the Incarnation (Matthew 2:16-18). Christ’s own death upon the cross would seem a horrendous evil—and He even predicted it would scandalize some. Yet God typically does not interfere in the use of men’s free will. It is almost that Rowe and Ivan are all lamenting that God should give men free use of their will. What each one argues for is a policeman God—a Minority Report God—a God Who will stop all evil-doers from doing evil before they do it. They want an Authoritarian God—but that is not the Triune God, nor is it necessarily a good God that they have in mind. The essence of the Triune God is love and love gives liberty to choose: it does not force or coerce. It presents itself as an object to be loved in and of itself for its own sake—but to insist that one love it when one does not will it so is to contradict its nature. Ivan sees evil and thinks God must not exist, otherwise He would intervene. But evil is no argument against God. It is rather the best argument for why Christ is so dearly needed and why love must be willed all the more in the face of it—which is essentially what Alyosha does for Ivan when he kisses the latter just as Christ kissed his accusers. Alyosha shows the Christ-like love that Ivan complains he has never seen before. By displaying it, Alyosha proves that evil is not all that exists—that good exists as well, and that love is the source of all that is good.
Still, the problem of evil exists for traditional Christians because of a primary lack of faith in the goodness of God and the idea that God can even use evil for His own purposes and bring a greater good out of a horrendous evil (Plantinga). Denying the free will of the soul is also out of keeping with God’s infinite generosity: “God has not compelled men to sin just because He created them and gave them the power to choose between sinning and not sinning. There are angels who have never sinned and never will sin. Such is the generosity of God’s goodness that He has not refrained from creating even that creature which He foreknew would not only sin, but remain in the will to sin” (Plantinga 30). In other words, God does not will out of existence someone who may commit unspeakable evils—horrendous evil—because God can write straight with crooked lines. God’s goodness is still nonetheless capable of being seen even in the face of evil, because it is God who has given the freedom of will to the person committing the evil. Were that freedom taken away, there would be no humanity—no choice to love God of one’s own free will. Humankind would be like robots—automatons who know to do only what they are programmed to do. The fact that human beings have a choice and make choices shows that they have free will and are not motivated purely by instinct as the animals. And since they have free will, it is an indication that they have intelligence along with memory—and all three can be said to be qualities or characteristics of the soul. And if man has a soul out of which he can will good or evil for others, then man must have a creator who put these ideas and breathed this life into him. Thus, even the existence of evil is no real argument against the existence of God (Lewis).
Ivan’s stories of abuse and torture of children link to the thorny issue of the “problem of evil,” however, because they come from a man who is without faith. Just as Rowe is without faith when he argues from evil that there can be no God, Ivan too makes the same argument from a standpoint of disbelief (Adams, Adams). He is already confirmed in his own disbelief and is looking for reasons to validate his position. He latches onto the abuse of the innocent as though here he has discovered the indisputable proof that there can be no God or at least no good God in Heaven—because a good God would not allow innocents to suffer.
But of course this argument ignores the very birth of Christ, which led to the slaughter of every newborn under the age of 2 by the cruel Herod who felt threatened by the birth of a new King. The very Incarnation, as Sheen shows, was a lesson for the world in suffering. The Holy Innocents were the first to shed their blood for Christ, Who would in turn shed His own Blood for the sins of man—for the very horrendous evil that Rowe and Ivan and others could not abide. The suffering of innocents is what scandalizes Ivan—but it is the suffering of the Cross: it is the same suffering as Christ underwent in the Garden of Gethsemane and throughout the Crucifixion. Christ was no less innocent than the Holy Innocents slaughtered by Herod or than Ivan’s tortured child in his story. Yet Ivan is scandalized that God would allow such suffering. Christ foresaw that reaction, however, and stated: “Blessed is he that shall not be scandalized in me” (Matthew 11:6). Christ knew that the suffering of the Innocent—of the Pure Lamb—would be a stumbling block for those without faith.
Faith is the key to this conundrum. It is not understanding that is wanting. It is faith that is missing. Faith is what holds Ivan and Rowe back. Faith is an act of the mind and the will. It is the consent of the mind to the harmony of Christianity, to the reality of God’s omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence. It is faith that Ivan rejects. He does not want to believe in a God that would allow such things to happen. He is like the man who asks what is needed to attain salvation, and Christ tells him to sell everything and follow Him. The man turns around and departs and is sad, for he does not want to give up everything and follow in the way of the Cross. For Ivan it is not as though he has many possessions—rather he is too full of self-love: to follow Christ he would have to give up his own love of self, and that is what afflicts Ivan and makes him sad. His pride is the obstacle between himself and God—it is the obstacle preventing him from making an act of faith. To follow Christ is to give up a belief or inherent trust in one’s own self. It is to trust implicitly in God and in God’s goodness. Ivan is enamored of his own intelligence, as though it came from him, and he does not want to admit that God’s ways are beyond him.
It is not even as if Ivan is unaware of the harmony of God’s justice and God’s essence and God’s ability to allow evil to exist as it is clear that a greater good can come from it—he states after all: “I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear” (Dostoevsky 12). That is not the problem—i.e., his rejection of God is not from a lack of understanding. It is from a problem in the will. Ivan will not consent. He states plainly that “what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony” (Dostoevsky 12). Ivan cannot accept it because there is an element of mystery to it. No man can know the mind of God (1 Corinthians 2:11)—yet that is exactly what Ivan wants to do and it is why he is angry and sad in his own life. It is why he is so vexing and antagonistic towards his brother, who does have faith and does believe in Christ.
A traditional theist like Hick would respond to the problem of evil by pointing out simply, as has already been stated here, that the problem of moral evil is bound up in the mystery of free will. As Hick states rather clearly, “Christian thought has always considered moral evil in its relation to human freedom and responsibility. To be a person is to be a finite center of freedom, a (relatively) free and self-directing agent responsible for one's own decisions. This involves being free to act wrongly as well as to act rightly” (464). It is this element of free will that Ivan glosses over—mainly because he glosses over the concept of Original Sin—the Fall of Man. He glosses over the Biblical story of creation, in which God created a paradise for man, and that man ruined his own happiness by disobeying God’s one commandment. Death, suffering, cold, wretchedness, the loss of control of the emotions—these were all effects of Original Sin. Mankind was now cut off from God because of Man’s offense to God. That is what Ivan glosses over. He imagines that the world as it is now is how God created it from the beginning. This is evident in his question to Alyosha at the end of their discussion: “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” (Dostoevsky 13). Alyosha says that he would not consent—truthfully—to such a world, and he is right to do so, for such a world would not have been created fairly or justly by a good God. And, indeed, that is not a fair depiction of the world God created. The Biblical depiction of creation is what Christianity is based upon—not Ivan’s depiction. Ivan assumes that the world as it is today is as it always was from the beginning. He again fails to consent to the idea of a Fall—an Original Sin. Were he to do so, it would put everything into order: harmony would be seen and felt. But he has already stated that he will not consent to this harmony. He will not accept the mystery of free will as a valid reason for the suffering of the innocent. The reason is that were he to do so it would put Ivan in his place. He would be small. God would be bigger than He is—and Ivan does not want to be small. He does not to be made humble. He wants to think he is big like God, that he knows the mind of God. It is Sheen’s argument for why people reject faith in Christ: faith demands that they make themselves small, that they look to Someone greater than themselves, that they put their trust in a Being Who is Infinitely better than they are. Ivan will not consent to such a Being. He wants to cling to his pride—but it is a sinking ship, and he knows it, and he is sad because of it.
Obviously I side with the traditional theist on this point. The mystery of suffering and the mystery of iniquity and the mystery of free will—none of these can be understood sufficiently without the mystery of Christ. Christ is what sheds just enough light on the universe, on the mystery of life itself, to make it all meaningful—to make the tension between love and hate meaningful. It truly is an either/or moment—the moment at which Ivan has arrived, has worked himself up to with Alyosha. Unable to make the leap of faith, of course, Ivan loses his mind at the end of the book—and that makes complete sense as well. The either/or is this: it is either nihilism or Christianity. It is either nothing or Christ. Dostoevsky painted that choice clearly in many of his works, from Crime and Punishment to Demons to The Adolescent, The Idiot and finally to The Brothers Karamazov. That either/or is really all there is to it. For me, nothingness does not explain where love comes from. And I think part of Ivan’s problem is that he has never truly experienced real love before—and that is why he is so drawn to his brother Alyosha. Alyosha is full of love, and if Ivan could get just a hint of this love, a sense of this love for himself it is as though he might suddenly be able to see.
Yet even seeing is not the same as believing. Believing still requires consent of the mind and an act of the will. When Alyosha does show Ivan genuine, real love, Ivan thanks him but still refuses to be swayed. Ivan is at that moment like Pontius washing his hands. He is exercising his free will—deliberately making his choice to go towards nothingness rather than to go towards God, the source of love. Alyosha has faced the question: if there is no God, where does love come from? It is the question of Zossima. It is the reason Ivan wants to keep Ivan from Zossima. Zossima represents Christ: the man who gives all to God and asks others to follow in His footsteps. Ivan wants to keep Alyosha for himself: he does not want to give up the one loving man he knows to God. Ivan is, ultimately, selfish in his isolation. Nihilism is selfish and self-oriented. Christ is other-oriented. Christ’s first and second commandments are other-directed: 1) love God, and 2) love your neighbor. In Christ is the epitome of love, and anyone who understands love understands that. However, one must still make an act of faith to truly believe and to follow after Christ—otherwise one risks falling away and joining with Ivan in his refusal and ultimate madness.



Works Cited
Adams, Marilyn McCord. 1999. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press.
Adams, Marily McCord and Robert Merrihew Adams. The Problem of Evil. Oxford
University Press, 1990.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. “The Problem of Evil.”
https://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/articles/dostoevsky-a.pdf
Hick, John. “The Problem of Evil.”
http://hettingern.people.cofc.edu/Philosophy_of_Religion/Hick_The_Problem_of_Evil.pdf
Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. Samizdat University Press, 2016.
Plantinga, Alvin. God, Freedom and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing, 1974.
Sheen, Fulton. Life of Christ. NY: Image Books, 2008.