A. The Free Will Defense
We said in chapter 12 that the basic atheistic argument from evil could be written like this:
1. If the God of theism exists, then there would be no suffering or evil in the world.
2. But there is suffering and evil in the world.
Therefore, the God of theism does not exist.
The argument is written here as a deductive argument, and we pointed out in the previous chapter that one way to undermine a deductive argument is to show that at least one of the premises is not true. We also pointed out that pantheists may want to challenge premise no. 2, but theists would be disinclined. Within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, God is said to be opposed to evil or even to “fight” against evil, especially moral evil or sin. This, however, clearly implies that evil exists.
The real crux of the matter for theism, then, concerns premise no. 1. As we mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, the way to challenge the first premise is to find a situation in which the statements “God exists” and “evil or suffering exists” could both be true, for that would make the statement “If God exists, then there would be no evil or suffering” false. We said that a counterexample to the first premise might be the simple situation in which a parent deprives a child of dessert in order to get the child to pick up his room.
Now, this counterexample is relevant enough to the argument, but it actually needs to be pressed farther. An atheist might reply to the theist’s counterexample by claiming that, well, certainly the suffering involved in going without dessert is trivial, and it might even be helpful in prompting the child to pick up his room (although experience often shows that it is not!). Still, the atheist might continue, it seems relevant to ask why human beings are the sort of weak, ignorant, or malevolent creatures who do not just pick up their rooms on their own but have to be the recipients of suffering in order to do what they should. Why did God not just make human beings so that they always did the right thing and hence did not need to experience even trivial suffering such as our example illustrates? Indeed, the atheist might say that the real problem here has little to do with going without dessert, but that it has everything to do with why human beings are the sort of creatures that need to be coerced to begin with. In short, why are human beings evil?
A standard answer given by theists to this question for a very long time now is that a world with beings possessing free will would seem to be better than a world without beings possessing free will. Since this is so, it is not at all surprising that God made human beings with free will and, hence, with a significant degree of moral freedom. If God wanted a world with free beings in it, however, then God had to make a world that included the possibility of evil, for it would be impossible for God to make us free and yet make us incapable of evil. A creature with a free will that did not have the power to commit evil, the theistic argument concludes, would be a square circle—a logical impossibility.
Thus, while the example of the denied dessert may be a little simple for criticizing the basic argument from evil and suffering, the general principle that free will is consistent with God’s existence serves as a thorough demonstration, the theist says, that the first premise of the atheistic argument is untenable. Since it is possible both for God to exist and for evil to exist in our world, the argument of the atheist fails. This basic theistic defense against the argument from evil and suffering is usually referred to as “the free will defense”.
B. The Limitations of the Free Will Defense
The appeal of many theists to free will is not as unqualifiedly successful against the argument from evil as we have made it seem so far, however. Notice what the theist’s appeal to free will suggests: it suggests that God made us free because he realized that a world with free beings in it is better than a world with only nonfree beings. The first and most obvious question that arises is, “How do theists know this?” Apparently the only way to know it is to know the mind of God, and claiming that one knows the mind of God is traditionally said to be an evil itself—namely, the evil of arrogance.
In order to solve this problem, it is helpful to theists to distinguish between a theodicy and a defense. The word “theodicy” usually means something like “justifying God”; a thinker who offers a theodicy, then, explains why God permits there to be evil in the world. In this book, however, the word will be taken to mean something a little more specific; namely, we will say that the person who offers a theodicy not only explains why God may permit evil in the world, but why God does do so. The theodicy-maker is different from a theistic thinker offering a defense, because the person offering a defense only explains why God may permit evil and does not go on to assert that this is actually what God is thinking. If the terms “theodicy” and “defense” are defined in this way, then a theodicy would seem to be an overreach for the theist, for the theodicy-maker claims to know what is in God’s mind and to be able to understand that divine mind with his human mind. The defense-maker, however, only says that it is logically possible that the reason why God permits evil in the world is because God thought it important for there to be free creatures in the world. The defense-maker merely says that it could be the case that the theistic God desires a world with creatures with significant moral freedom, and, given such creatures, perhaps God cannot guarantee that such freedom will not be misused. The defense-maker, then, avoids the overreach of saying just why God undertook an action, but still refutes the first premise of the atheist’s argument by stating that it is logically possible both for God to exist and for evil to exist. It is better, therefore, for the theist to make a “free will defense” of God than a “free will theodicy”.
The distinction between theodicy and defense can perhaps be more easily explained by reminding our readers of the difference between saying that someone is “innocent” and saying that someone is “not guilty”. In a criminal trial in the United States, for example, the lawyers defending the accused are not required to prove that the accused is innocent; what they are asked to show is that the accused has not been proven guilty. The question posed to the jurors, then, is not “Is this person innocent?” but “Has this person been proven guilty?” Indeed, it is considered perfectly legitimate for a juror to conclude, “Well, I think the accused may well have done it, but the prosecutors were not able to prove that he did it.” By analogy, we can say that the theist who offers a theodicy is trying to show that God is “innocent”, whereas the theist who offers a defense is more modestly trying to show only that God’s guilt has not been proven or that he “may be innocent”.
The free will defense, then, turns out to be important for the theist. It permits the theist to avoid overreaching, but it also permits the theist to refute the atheist’s argument from evil. A defense, however, does not establish as “much” as a theodicy would if a theodicy were possible. A defense only says, “Well, God may permit evil because. . .”; it does not say, “Well, God does permit evil because. . .” As a result, while the free will defense is sufficient to refute the first premise of the atheist’s argument from evil, it strikes many as somewhat speculative and lacking in vigor. Even theists may ask, “Is that the best we can do?”
In addition to the limited natures of “defenses” generally, a second limitation of the “free will defense”—and one that a good many theists have themselves noted—is that the free will defense has to be careful about exaggerating the realm of free will. That is, it seems that human beings may not be as free as we sometimes want to think. When we think of free will, we might imagine a human being standing at the midpoint between two options. One of the options is “good” and one of the options is “bad”. The human being is at first no closer to one option than the other, but in a neutral position from whence he can study the choices dispassionately and make an “informed” decision, as we like to say. Sometimes human choices really do seem to be like this, but notice that if we really were always in such a position, it is hard to understand why we would ever choose to do something bad or evil. If it is getting to be supper time, and we open the refrigerator and notice that we have a nice steak in it as well as an opened can of cat food, it seems that we would always choose the former.
But sometimes—indeed, all too often—we choose the cat food. That is, we choose wrongly, and generally the reason for choosing wrongly is because we are in fact not halfway between the good and the bad options, in some neutral position between the two. Instead, we are passionately disposed toward one of the options—sometimes the bad one. The bad choice appeals to us; we are drawn toward it. Perhaps the alcoholic is always free in some abstract sense not to take the next drink. But how free is he actually, especially if the bottle is sitting right there on the table? In other words, it seems that we are antecedently predisposed toward evil, even before actually choosing it.
Many theists have thought about this problem, with Augustine being the most famous, if not the first and certainly not the last theist to do so. Indeed, it is precisely this problem that Christians often point to with their doctrine of “the Fall”, or “original sin”. That doctrine is treated with great profundity and symbolism in the story about the man, the woman, and the fruit in the garden in the Book of Genesis, but it is also a doctrine for which there is plenty of empirical evidence. As one of our teachers once pointed out to us, “Take a walk through the toughest part of town, and just look at how people behave when the cops have their backs turned!” Christian theists do not think that the Fall has distorted human willing so thoroughly that human beings are not free in any sense at all; the point is rather that even Christian theists have to admit that the scope of free will is quite limited, and, hence, there is a need to avoid exaggeration when appealing to it.
A third limitation of the free will defense is easily seen if we remind ourselves of the distinction made in chapter 12 between moral and nonmoral evil. The free will defense seems to be most useful in refuting the atheistic argument if it is based on moral evil. If a friend should betray us so that we feel anguish, or if a robber should strike us so that we feel pain, the moral evil would clearly seem to be in the free will of the friend or the robber, just as the free will defender claims. But what about nonmoral evils such as earthquakes and diseases that cause pain and anguish? How does the free will defense help the theist against arguments that appeal to that sort of evil? Professor Alvin Plantinga, for one, has pointed out that it is possible that nonmoral evils are due to the malevolence of powerful beings in the world; after all, it seems impossible to prove that the demons and powers and principalities alluded to by theists in earlier ages do not exist. There is also the original sin of human beings to consider. Some theists, meditating upon the story of the sin in the garden in Genesis, have suggested that such a sin, though committed through free will, so disturbed the creation that nonmoral evils resulted. In other words, perhaps all evils are ultimately moral evils, caused by fallen angels, fallen or falling human beings, or other freely fallen spiritual powers. Most theists in recent times, however, have chosen not to emphasize such arguments.
So, all in all, the free will defense is of limited if nevertheless valuable utility to theists. First, it is limited in that it can only say that it is logically possible for evil and God to co-exist. Second, it is limited in that the range or scope of free will is probably more narrow than we might commonly think. Third, it is limited in that while the free will defense might address atheistic arguments based on moral evil, at least some people think that it would not address successfully arguments that appeal to nonmoral evil.
C. The Free Will Defense and the Integration of Faith and Reason
To be sure, simply by undermining the initial premise of the atheistic argument from suffering and evil, the free will defense accomplishes something very important for theists. It shows that theism is not inconsistent in asserting that both God and evil exist. It shows that the basic, deductive form of the atheistic argument is not sound.
But theists seeking the integration of faith and reason would like to be able to show more than this, if possible, and over the centuries many theists have tried to press the free will defense to do more. We mentioned some examples of this “pressing” in the previous section. With respect to the first limitation, the theists have sometimes tried to turn the free will defense into or toward a “free will theodicy”. With respect to the second limitation, they have sometimes argued that the limited scope of human willing is due to a primordial catastrophe that occurred when human beings did possess a full and unrestricted free will but still chose evil and thereby limited and perverted their own wills. The basis for reaching such a claim has often been established by invoking the story of the man, the woman, and the fruit in the garden in Genesis 3. With respect to the third limitation, some theists have suggested that what seems to be nonmoral evil is actually moral evil, for what is seemingly nonmoral evil is actually the work of evil spirits or men who were created with complete free will but chose to inflict evil on creation rather than remain true to God. Such claims may be founded by appealing to certain passages of the Scriptures that perhaps discuss the existence and malevolence of demons, Satan, and fallen angels.
In both of the latter two attempts to push the boundaries of the free will defense, religious theists tend to turn to holy Scriptures for support. This is not contrary to the project of integrating faith and reason, of course, but the free will defense started out as a response to an atheistic argument appealing to reason alone. These extensions of the argument by appeal to the Scriptures would seem to move us from reason into faith, and it is necessary for theists to be clear that they are doing this in their argumentation.
Perhaps this move from reason into faith can best be explained by beginning with a return to our Venn diagram:
Remember that region 1 of the diagram represents those teachings that can be acknowledged as truths only if accepted by faith in the revelation of Scripture, that region 3 of the diagram represents those truths that have not been revealed but are acknowledged as truth through reason alone, and that region 2 represents teachings that can be accepted in both ways. The basic free will defense, affirming the possibility of the co-existence of God and evil, started out in region 2, for it appealed simply to reason for support, even though it is obviously also attested to by Scripture and by the Church. The “expanded” free will defense, however, apparently bases itself on Scripture alone, or at least that is how the “expanded” free will defense is often interpreted. Theists developing an “expanded” free will defense need to be careful, though, not in their conclusions about God and evil, but in their method of discussing those conclusions. Their appeals to Scripture may well reassure believers who of course accept the Scriptures, but they will presumably not be helpful in refuting the atheistic argument from evil, which appeals only to reason.
We remember from chapter 3 that Thomas Aquinas explained that arguments appealing to the Scriptures or the traditions of the Church will not persuade “infidels” or nonbelievers. Persuading nonbelievers is not the point just now, of course; the question is whether it is possible to integrate faith and reason, and we are considering reasons brought against theistic claims about integrating faith and reason. The question is thus whether atheistic arguments basing themselves in an appeal to the existence of moral evil are compelling. Theistic attempts to refute such atheistic challenges through the free will defense may quite possibly turn out to be successful, but they will not be successful if they base themselves on appeals to Scripture—or at least on appeals to Scripture alone.
D. Nonmoral Evil and the Character-Building or Soul-Making Defense
Since the free will defense, while successful against the basic, deductive atheistic argument from evil, still has the limitations described above, it is not surprising that theists have, over the centuries, attempted a great many other theodicies and defenses. To our mind, the most plausible and the most interesting of these supplementary theodicies and defenses is the “character-building” defense.
This defense points out that oftentimes those who experience suffering due to either nonmoral evil or moral evil seem to become better people because of it. One of the authors of this book, for example, notes that a woman in his parish died of cancer when he was a teenager. After her death, a journal was made public in which the woman wrote poignantly to God about her struggles against her disease. Toward the end of the journal, the woman thanked God for her cancer, because she recognized that the disease had made her a better person.
Another example would be the remarkable case of the famous Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned by the Soviet Union for making remarks in a private letter to a friend that were deemed anti-Stalinist. The letter was intercepted by censors, and Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent, along with a great many other political prisoners, into the Soviet penal system known by its acronym, GULAG. The horrors of that system of prison camps are known today largely because Solzhenitsyn, unlike millions of others, somehow managed to survive his prison term and then to write a sort of history of the Soviet camps that he titled The Gulag Archipelago. In the central chapters of that long work, he explains that most people, upon being sent into the camps, compromised themselves. Prisoners stole from each other, snitched on each other, debased themselves to their jailers, and performed all sorts of inhumane acts simply in order to stay alive. Some of the prisoners, however, decided early on in their sentences not to do such things and thereby risked a greater likelihood of death. This second group, however, somehow became better people. And Solzhenitsyn, after his harrowing years in the camps, was able to look back on the experience and thank God for sending him into the Gulag. Without that experience of suffering, he says, he might have become as bad as the Soviet guards who ruled the camps ruthlessly.
According to this sort of defense, then, suffering pain and anguish because of evil may build our characters. Why is this? One reason would seem to be that if it were not for suffering, perhaps others would not need us so much, nor we them. One would not want to conclude that suffering is necessary for love, so that suffering would be present in heaven, but certainly the existence of suffering in this life calls us to love, to improve ourselves, and to help others at the same time. Robert Spitzer, S.J., used to tell the following parable in helping to teach the course upon which this book is based; the story was told to him, he says, by his Jewish father: Once a great feast was given. The long table of the feast was filled with a great many dishes of fine, sumptuous foods. Those who had been invited to the feast sat down in great expectation, but then they noticed that they did not have any elbows or wrists. As a result, they were unable to bring any of the fine food to their mouths—they were unable to eat from any of the sumptuous dishes. They began to grumble and complain. “Why did God make us like this,” they asked, “without the ability to enjoy this fine food, but only to be tormented by the sight and smell of it?” But then one of the guests at the feast reached out with an elbowless and wristless arm and, taking some of the food with a spoon, reached across the table and began to feed the person sitting opposite.
E. The Limitations of the Character-Building Defense
The character-building defense faces some of the same limitations that the free will defense faces. First, the character-building defense cannot say bluntly that reason can show that “God permits evil so that we will become better people”, because this implies that one can read the mind of God. What the character-building defense can say is that “Sometimes evil and the suffering it produces prompt us to become better people, so it is possible that this is why God permits evil in the world.” In other words, the advocates of the character-building defense need to limit themselves to a “defense” and not attempt what we have defined as a “theodicy”.
The second limitation of the free will defense was that it is possibly tempted to overstate the range of freedom that the human will actually possesses. Similarly, the character-building defense must be cautioned against overstating the range of the instances of suffering that actually build character. In other words, while one can think of instances in which suffering really does build character, one can think of instances wherein it at least seems that suffering does not lead to character building. Solzhenitsyn himself admitted that while suffering in the camps did lead to the moral improvement of some, it did not lead to the moral improvement of others. One might also point to the suffering of innocent infants and children as possible examples of noncharacter-building suffering.
The third limitation of the free will defense was that while it would apply to moral evil, it does not address nonmoral evil. Here the character-building defense seems to have an advantage, for it directs itself, not to evil, which we have defined as the origin or cause of suffering, but to suffering itself, both in the form of pain and in the form of anguish. Both moral and nonmoral evil cause suffering, and it is suffering, the character-building defense claims, that may improve our souls.
We concluded our discussion of the free will defense by pointing out that, in order to respond to its limitations, some religious theists turn to revelation for support. Advocates of the character-building defense sometimes do the same thing. Christians can easily see the Passion and crucifixion of Jesus as a call for character-building through suffering. Jews would presumably at least be tempted to understand their long experience of exile in a similar way. In any case, religious theists should keep in mind that, while appeal to faith is hardly “out of bounds” for the project of integrating faith and reason, it will not prove effective if one’s goal is simply to answer the arguments of nonbelievers.
F. Conclusion
Our conclusions, then, are the following:
1. The free will defense shows that it is logically possible for God and evil to co-exist. (In other words, it is always possible that evil exists because God wanted a world with free creatures in it.)
2. The character-building defense shows that it is logically possible for God and suffering to co-exist. (In other words, it is always possible that suffering exists because God wants us to improve our souls by means of such suffering.)
Either of these defenses, then, would seem to be sufficient to refute what we have called the “basic” deductive atheistic argument from evil, for either defense would seem to undermine the first premise of that argument. These defenses, then, are consistent with reason, but they cannot be themselves rationally demonstrated actually to be the case, for they are only defenses and not theodicies. In other words, they show that the argument offered against theistic faith is not sound, but they do not rationally establish the teaching of theistic faith.
Both of these defenses are also consistent with the teachings of religious theism, for they do not contradict the teachings of the theistic religions. Indeed, not only are these defenses consistent with theism; they are actually compatible with at least some forms of religious theism, because they coincide with and lend credence to them. As such, they support the project of integrating faith and reason. They do not rationally prove any of the teachings of faith, as, say, the cosmological argument for the existence of God purports to do. But they offer explanations showing that there is a “fit” between faith and reason.
In addition to the “basic” deductive argument from evil and suffering described in the previous chapter, we also indicated that there were refinements of that argument advocated by the more sophisticated proponents of the atheological argument from evil and suffering. One of these refinements appealed to the existence of “gratuitous” evil in the world as providing strong evidence that the theistic God does not exist. This version of the atheistic argument might be able to admit that the causes of evil can sometimes be attributed to free will or that suffering can sometimes be understood as leading to character improvement. But the atheistic argument appealing to gratuitous suffering insists that sometimes neither situation obtains, for only then can evil or suffering be understood as truly gratuitous, and it is precisely gratuitous evil that, the atheist claims, is inconsistent with the notion of God. In current debates regarding the argument from evil and suffering, such refinements are precisely what are being focused on and considered with careful attention. According to the two defenses we have discussed, however, it may be the case that there is no such thing as gratuitous evil, for evil or the suffering it produces may be the result of free will or it may be the result of God’s desire that we improve our souls (or both). In this context, “gratuitous” suffering would seem to mean suffering that results from no reason, but if possible reasons for the suffering do exist, then the suffering is not necessarily gratuitous at all.
Another refinement of the basic atheological argument from evil discussed in chapter 12 was to change the argument from a deductive argument to an inductive argument, so that the initial premise of the argument is “If God exists, then it is unlikely that there would be evil in the world.” Stated differently, the inductive argument claims that the existence of evil makes it likely that atheism is true.
The theistic response to such an inductive claim would be that, well, perhaps evil should be permitted to count as one piece of evidence against God, but if we admit this evidence, then we have to admit evidence to the contrary. Such inductive evidence in support of theism has not been discussed yet in this book (some deductive contrary claims have been treated in chapters 9 through 11), but some such evidence will be discussed in part 3. In other words, if the argument is going to be about what is likely and what is not, then all arguments and all evidence have to be considered. What will be needed, then, is a cumulative case argument. Such an argument can only be made when we get to the end of this book, so it is in the epilogue that we will return to it.