The Problem of Evil
“Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence?”
Tarrou nodded. “Yes. But your victories will never be lasting; that’s all.”
Rieux’s face darkened. “Yes, I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.”
“No reason, I agree. Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.”
“Yes. A never ending defeat.”
—Albert Camus, The Plague151
The Problem of Evil in Context
The “problem of evil” is well known. If you believe in a God who is all-powerful and sovereign over the world and at the same time is also perfectly good and just, then the existence of evil and suffering poses a problem. The classic statement of it was given by David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”152 This has also been called the argument against God from evil, or just the argument from evil.
Many insist that this problem is the single strongest objection to the existence of God in general and the plausibility of Christianity in particular. Then why didn’t I address this head-on in chapter one? My reason is because suffering is a lived reality that people and societies have wrestled with for centuries. Before suffering is a philosophical issue, it is a practical crisis—before it is about “why?” it is about “how?” How do I survive this? Therefore, we have looked at suffering historically and culturally, comparing and contrasting how various societies and people have actually engaged evil and sorrow. Our survey has shown that in order to do this, everyone has to have some working theory of what suffering is, what it means (and does not mean), and how we should respond to it. No one can function without some set of beliefs about it all.
If I had begun this volume with the traditional problem of evil against the existence of God, I would have inevitably given the impression that only belief in a traditional God is challenged by the existence of suffering. Most people who see the problems that suffering poses to classical theistic belief move toward a more secular way of thinking. But we have seen that secularism is also a set of beliefs, and it is probably the weakest of all worldviews at helping its adherents understand and endure the “terror of life.” Christianity, though indeed having a problem with evil, does quite well when compared to alternatives. This becomes clear when we look at suffering from all perspectives—sociocultural, practical, and psychological. That is why I started the book in those areas before turning, in this chapter, to the philosophical. Nevertheless, suffering does indeed throw up problems for faith in God, and to those problems we must turn.
As we do so, we should also keep in mind what we learned from Charles Taylor’s history of the development of secularity in Western culture. Awareness of the problem of God’s relationship to evil is at least as old as the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who posed it three hundred years before Christ. But Taylor rightly points out that despite the discussions of philosophers, the argument from evil never had anything like popular appeal and broad attraction until some time after the Enlightenment. Things changed when Western thought came to see God as more remote, and to see the world as ultimately completely understandable through reason. These intellectual trends were reinforced by technological changes that eventually led to the development of the expanded, self-sufficient “buffered self.” Human beings became far more confident in their own powers of reason and perception.
When people inside the immanent frame consider evil and God, the skeptical conclusion is already largely inherent in the premises. Modern discussions of the problem of suffering start with an abstract God—a God who, for the sake of argument, is all-powerful and all-good, but who is not glorious, majestic, infinitely wise, beginningless, and the creator and sustainer of all things. No wonder, then, that modern people are far more prone than their ancestors to conclude that, if they can see no good reason for a particular instance of suffering, God could not have any justifiable reasons for it either. If evil does not make sense to us, well, then evil simply does not make sense.
And so, while the philosophical issues and questions remain, the culture somewhat stacks the deck. Why keep this in mind as we hear the philosophical debate? It is always crucial to remember that our beliefs are formed not only through reason and argument but also through social conditioning.153 Beliefs seem most plausible to us if they are held by people whom we admire and whose approval we desire. Our social and cultural locations make us much more open to some arguments and less open to others. The only way, therefore, to be as thoughtful, balanced, and unprejudiced as possible is to be highly aware of your cultural biases.
If a case comes before a judge involving a company in which the judge has an investment, she would recuse herself from the case because her objectivity could be suspect. We modern people are in the same situation. God is already questionable since our highest value is the freedom and autonomy of the individual self, and the existence of a being like God is the ultimate barrier to that. We are quick to complain about evil and suffering in the world because it aligns with our cultural biases. But we can’t recuse ourselves from hearing this case as the judge can. We must consider the problem. I am only urging my readers, virtually all of whom will share at least some of our Western culture’s biases, to be aware of their prejudices as we survey this subject.
The Argument(s) Against God from Evil
The problem of evil is widely felt among people today and does indeed pose a genuine challenge to belief in God. Any God who is all-powerful and all-good would be expected to stop horrendous evil and suffering, since he would not only want to prevent it, he would have the perfect ability to do so. Yet evil does indeed exist and persist. Therefore, this all-powerful and loving God either cannot exist or probably does not exist. The last sentence hints as a very important point. There are two forms that the argument against God from evil can take. They have been called the logical argument (which seeks to prove that there certainly is no such God) and the evidential argument (which reasons there probably is no such God.) We will look at the more ambitious “logical” argument first.
Up until the 1980s, the argument against God from evil was considered among academic philosophers to be conclusive, a proof that the traditional God of the Bible could not exist. It claimed that evil made Christianity not just less plausible but logically impossible. British philosopher John Mackie, in his oft reprinted article “Evil and Omnipotence,” wrote: “It can be shown, not merely that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another.”154
But things began to change with the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s book God, Freedom, and Evil in 1974, along with his more technical and rigorously argued book The Nature of Necessity the same year.155 In these works, Plantinga argues that “the existence of evil is not logically incompatible (even in the broadly logical sense) with the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God.”156 Plantinga and other philosophers who followed in his wake were so effective that twenty-five years later, it was widely conceded that the logical argument against God didn’t work. The idea that evil disproves the existence of God, wrote philosopher William Alston, “is now acknowledged on (almost) all sides to be completely bankrupt.”157 Instead, skeptical thinkers began to formulate a new version, called the evidential argument against God. In this re-formulation, a much weaker claim was made, namely that suffering is not proof but evidence that makes the existence of God less probable, although not impossible.158 As we will see later, the same arguments that brought down the stronger form of this case against God cast real doubts on the weaker form too.
All this shows that the confident assertion so common “on the street,” that suffering and evil simply disproves the existence of God, has been almost entirely abandoned in professional and academic circles, “because the burden of proof of demonstrating that there is no possibility at all of the coexistence of God and . . . evil is just too heavy for the atheist to bear.”159 The argument against God from evil is no longer seen as being compelling.
How did this happen? We can begin to understand this recent history of philosophical debate by understanding a helpful distinction often made between a theodicy and a defense of God.
“Soul-Making” and Suffering
The distinction between a theodicy and a defense was made by Plantinga in God, Freedom, and Evil. The word theodicy was coined by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, meaning literally a justification of God’s ways to human beings.160 Anyone seeking to provide a theodicy has set a very high bar. A theodicy seeks to give an answer to the big “Why?” question. Its goal is to explain why a just God allows evil to come into existence and to continue. It attempts to reveal the reasons and purposes of God for suffering so listeners will be satisfied that his actions regarding evil and suffering are justified.
One of the first theodicies was that of “soul-making,” formulated by the second-century theologian Irenaeus and promoted in contemporary form by author John Hick. This view says that the evils of life can be justified if we recognize that the world was primarily created to be a place where people find God and grow spiritually into all they were designed to be. This happens through “meeting and eventually mastering temptation . . . rightly making responsible choices in concrete situations,” which results in “a positive and responsible character that comes from the investment of costly personal effort.”161 Hick argues that this kind of soul-making is an infinite good and cannot be achieved by simply being created in a state of innocence or virtue.
The soul-making theodicy helpfully forces us to examine our assumptions. Is the highest good that we become comfortable and trouble-free or that we become spiritually and morally great? If our lives do not go as we have planned, it is natural to question the wisdom of God, but our indignation is greatly magnified by an unexamined premise that God, if he exists, exists to make us happy, as we define happiness. Also, it is hard to imagine the development of virtues such as courage, humility, self-control, and faithfulness if every good deed was immediately rewarded and every bad deed immediately punished. No one would do things simply because they were right and loving to do. We merely would react instinctively to avoid pain and get pleasure. So the unfairness and difficulty of life in the world is a means by which we grow into something more than behaviorally conditioned animals.
However, the soul-making theodicy suffers from some glaring weaknesses. First, pain and evil do not appear in any way to be distributed according to soul-making need. Many people with bad souls get very little of the adversity they apparently need, and many with great souls get an amount that seems to go far beyond what is necessary for spiritual growth. Also, this theodicy does not speak to or account for the suffering of little children or infants who die in pain, or even for the suffering of animals.
God, Freedom, and Evil
The second and perhaps most prominent of these explanations is the free will theodicy. This has a long and ancient history going back to St. Augustine.162 In its simplest form, it might be stated like this: God created us not to be robots or animals of instinct but free, rational agents with the ability to choose and therefore to love. But if God was to make us able to choose the good freely, then he had to make us capable of also choosing evil. So our free will can be abused and that is the reason for evil. But this greater good—for us, of having a rational soul, and for God, of having real loving sons and daughters rather than some kind of “pets”—is worth the evil that inevitably also comes. Jean-Paul Sartre puts this very well: “The man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. . . . If the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone.”163
Along with this account of things usually goes an insistence that God has not actually created evil because it is not a distinct “thing” like other created objects. Augustine, who was later followed by Thomas Aquinas and others, taught that evil is, rather, the condition that results when some good thing that God made is twisted or corrupted from its original design or purpose. So there can be good without evil, but evil, being parasitic, cannot exist without the good on which it preys.164 God, therefore, is not the author of evil but allowed it in order to achieve the greater good of human freedom and love.
Peter van Inwagen summarizes it like this: “The omniscient God knew that, however much evil might result from the elected separation from himself . . . the gift of free will would be, so to speak, worth it. For the existence of an eternity of love depends on this gift, and that eternity outweighs the horrors of the very long, but, in the most literal sense, temporary period of divine-human estrangement.”165
The free will theodicy has become very popular, but it may be so partially because our culture inclines us to find it appealing. It sounds plausible to people in Western civilization, where we have been taught to think of freedom and choice as something almost sacred. But two problems immediately present themselves.
The first is that this seems to explain only a certain category of evil. It is customary to distinguish between moral evil, performed by human beings, and natural evil, which is caused by nonhuman causes such as disasters like hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, as well as many forms of disease. The free will theodicy addresses moral evil—but how can it explain natural evil? Peter van Inwagen responds by offering an expanded version of the free will theodicy. In his St. Andrews University Gifford lectures, he tells the Christian story of the Fall. In this story, humankind is blessed by God in a paradisiacal state but turns from God in disobedience and loses his protection and presence.166 As van Inwagen explains, this means that “natural evil . . . is a consequence of an aboriginal abuse of free will.”167 So human free will can explain the violence of nature.
But a second problem looms—and it is, in my view, much more formidable. Is it really true that God could not create free agents capable of love without making them also capable of evil? The view that he could not has been called the libertarian understanding of free will. It says that God cannot lead us to do the right thing without violating our free will, and so evil is inevitable for free agents.
But the Bible presents God himself as sovereign and free (Ps 115:3), and not just capable of love but the very fountain and source of all love. Nevertheless, he himself cannot be evil. He cannot lie or break a promise (Num 23:19; Titus 1:2), he cannot be tempted by evil (James 1:13), he cannot deny or contradict his perfectly righteous and holy character (2 Tim 2:13; 1 Pet 1:16). If God has a free will yet is not capable of doing wrong—why could not other beings also be likewise constituted? Also biblical authors teach us that eventually God will give us a suffering-free, evil-free world filled with redeemed human beings. Suffering and death will be banished forever. That means we will be in God’s world but not be capable of choosing evil. Yet we will obviously still be capable of love.
Finally, many Christian theologians point out the biblical teaching on the nature of freedom differs sharply from modern views. The Bible characterizes all sin as slavery, never as freedom. Only when we are completely redeemed from all sin will we experience complete freedom (cf. Rom 8:21). We are free only to the extent that we do what God built us to do—to serve him. Therefore, the more capable you are to commit evil, the less free you are. Not until we attain heaven and lose the capability of evil are we truly and completely free. How, then, could the ability to sin be a form of freedom?168
There is another strand of biblical teaching that undermines the free will theodicy. The theodicy assumes that if God gives us the gift of free will, then he cannot control the outcomes of its usage. But the Bible shows in many places that God can sovereignly direct our choices in history without violating our freedom and responsibility for our actions. For example, Jesus’ crucifixion was clearly foreordained and destined to happen, and yet all the people who, by God’s plan, brought it about were still making their choices freely and thus were responsible for what they did (cf. Acts 2:23). This indicates that it is possible to be free and nevertheless to have our course directed by God—at the same time, compatibly. There are scores of other examples of this. So God can give free will and still direct the outcomes of our choices to fit into his plan for history.169
There is a final question about the premises underlying the free will theodicy. It assumes that despite the horrendous evils of history, merely having freedom of choice is worth it. But is it? What if you saw a child walking into the path of an oncoming car? Would you say: “I can’t violate her freedom of choice! She will have to take the consequences.”? Of course not. You would not consider her freedom of choice more important than saving her life. You would violate her freedom of will as fast as you could possibly do it. You would snatch her out of the path of the car and teach her how to keep that from happening again. Why couldn’t God have done that with us? Assume that the Fall of humankind happened the way the Bible says. Why couldn’t God have shown Adam and Eve a lurid, detailed full-length movie of all that would happen to them and to their descendants if they ate of the tree? Surely he could have scared them and convinced them to avoid eating the forbidden fruit.
In short, could the gift and maintenance of free will be the only or main reason God allows evil? The purpose of a theodicy is to reveal sufficiently God’s reasons for allowing evil and suffering so that we think it justified. Does the free will theodicy do this—does it really answer most of the questions? I don’t believe it does, nor do sizable numbers of other people.170 If God has good reasons for allowing the pain and misery we see, the reasons must extend beyond the mere provision of freedom of choice.
The Problem with All Theodicies
There are other theodicies that have been presented throughout history. One has been called the natural law theodicy, put forward by C. S. Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain and by Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne.171 It argues that a world created by God must have a natural order to it—it could not be random, operating differently every moment. If we break natural laws, they must rebound on us. For example, imagine a physical world without a law of gravity. But if we have gravity, then if you jump off a cliff, you will be hurt or killed—whether you are a good person or a bad one. Without natural laws, life is impossible, but suffering is then inevitable. The natural evils that hurt so much are the by-products of something that brings us even greater good.
But most suffering does not happen in an orderly way, proportionate to bad choices. If people only got hurt when they did something stupid like jumping off a cliff, it would be painful, yet it would feel fair. But natural evil does not come to us like that. People do not die only by falling off cliffs but also because the cliff comes down in an avalanche and buries innocent people walking by. Suffering is so often random and horrific, and it comes upon people who seem to have done nothing to warrant it.
This does not exhaust the list of theodicies. Some are ingenious but perhaps too complicated, such as the plenitude theory that God could have created innumerable universes, and the distribution of evil could be different in each one but equitable across them all.172 Others are too simple, like the punishment theodicy, which looks at the beginning of Genesis and concludes that all suffering can be justified because humankind rebelled against God, and the suffering of the world is just our deserved punishment for sin.
But as the book of Job so vividly shows us, that does not explain why, if suffering is punishment for sin, it does not fall on people in proportion to the goodness or evil of their character. Why does God allow the distribution of the “punishment” to be so random and unfair? And this view has one of the same problems of the free will theodicy. Why could God not have convinced our human forebears to follow him without violating their free will, avoiding the punishment? And since in the Bible we understand that God will someday end evil and suffering, why does a loving and all-powerful God allow it to continue?
Taken all together, the various theodicies can account for a great deal of human suffering—each theodicy provides some plausible explanations for some of the evil in the world—but they always fall short, in the end, of explaining all suffering. It is very hard to insist that any of them show convincingly how God would be fully justified in permitting all the evil we see in the world. Peter van Inwagen writes that no major Christian church, denomination, or tradition has ever endorsed a particular theodicy.173 Alvin Plantinga himself wrote: “I must say that most attempts to explain why God permits evil—theodicies, as we may call them—strike me as tepid, shallow and ultimately frivolous.”174 And we can add to these warnings the book of Job itself. Surely one of the messages, as we will see, is that it is both futile and inappropriate to assume that any human mind could comprehend all the reasons God might have for any instance of pain and sorrow, let alone for all evil. It may be that the Bible itself warns us not to try to construct these theories.
In the past few decades, therefore, most Christian thinkers and philosophers have turned away from the very project of seeking full theodicies. Instead, they have increasingly (and to my mind, rightly) recommended that believers not try to formulate theodicies but rather simply mount a defense. A defense shies away from trying to tell a full story that reveals God’s purposes in decreeing or allowing evil. A defense simply seeks to prove that the argument against God from evil fails, that the skeptics have failed to make their case. A defense shows that the existence of evil does not mean God can’t or is unlikely to exist. In making a theodicy, the burden of proof is upon the believer in God. He or she must provide an account so convincing that the listener says to the believer, “Now I see why all the suffering is worth it.” But in a defense, the burden of proof is upon the skeptic. Why?
On the surface, these two statements—“There’s a good, omnipotent God.” and “There is evil in the world.”—are not a direct contradiction. It is up to the skeptic to make a compelling case that they actually contradict each other. He or she must provide an argument so convincing that the listener says to the skeptic: “Now I see why, if evil exists, God cannot or at least is not likely to exist.” But that is not at all an easy case to make.
The Logical Argument and the “Noseeums” Objection
Peter van Inwagen suggested that a person using evil as an argument against the existence of God might say something like this:
Skeptic: “If there were an omnipotent, morally perfect being who knew about the evils we know about—well, they wouldn’t have arisen in the first place, for he’d have prevented their occurrence. Or if, for some reason, he didn’t do that, he’d certainly remove them the instant they began to exist. But we observe evils, and very long-lasting ones. So we must conclude that God does not exist.”175
In short, the argument is:
But the believer in God could respond by pointing out that the argument against God from evil has a hidden premise, namely that God does not have any good reasons to allow evil to exist. He might say:
Believer: “It may be that someone has a very strong desire for something and is able to obtain this thing, but does not act on this desire—because he has reasons for not doing so that seem to him to outweigh the desirability of the thing . . . [so] God might have reasons for allowing evil to exist that, in his mind, outweigh the desirability of the non-existence of evil.”176
If God has good reasons for allowing suffering and evil, then there is no contradiction between his existence and that of evil. So in order for his case not to fail, the skeptic would have to reply that God could not possibly have any such reasons. But it is very hard to prove that.
To show the skeptic that his premise is untrue, the believer could point out that we ourselves often allow suffering in someone’s life in order to bring about some greater good. Doctors often inflict painful procedures and treatments on people, all for the purpose of the greater good of better health and longer life. Parents who punish bad behavior with the loss of toys or privileges are causing pain (especially from the child’s perspective), but the alternative is that the child will grow into an adult with no self-control and would therefore experience far greater suffering. And most people will grant some truth to the saying attributed to Nietzsche: “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Many can point to adversity in their lives that, however excruciating, taught them lessons that helped them avoid greater suffering later.177 So the principle of allowing pain for the good reason of bringing about a greater happiness is valid and one we understand and use ourselves. That means there is no automatic inconsistency between God and the existence of evil and suffering.
The skeptic’s response could be that the inconsistency is not between God and suffering in general but rather between God and the kinds and magnitude of evil and suffering we see in the world. Helpless people often experience horrendous violence and pain that have no obvious purpose toward instruction and character growth. Yes, says the skeptic, there can be good reasons for allowing some kinds of suffering but not the magnitude and types of suffering that exist in the world today. God could not have any warrant for allowing that.
But we can discern another implicit assumption inside the first hidden premise. The assumption is—“if I can’t see any reasons God might have for permitting that evil . . . then probably he doesn’t have any.”178 But that premise is obviously false. Remember that the argument against God from evil starts with the idea of an omnipotent God. It says, “If God is infinitely powerful as you say—why doesn’t he stop evil?” But a God who is infinitely more powerful than us would also be infinitely more knowledgeable than us. So the rejoinder to the skeptic is “If God is infinitely knowledgeable—why couldn’t he have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil that you can’t think of?” To insist that we know as much about life and history as all-powerful God is a logical fallacy, howsoever much the immanent frame of our culture would incline us to feel that way.
Philosopher Stephen John Wykstra came up with the illustration of the “noseeums” to reveal this fallacy in the argument from evil.179 Wykstra was responding to the writings of William Rowe, who argued that because we could not see any “outweighing good” that might justify God’s allowing suffering, therefore there “are no such goods.” Wykstra responds by pointing to a particular species of insect. “In the Midwest we have ‘noseeums’—tiny flies which, while having a painful bite, are so small you ‘no see ’um.’”180 Just because you cannot see noseeums does not mean they are not there. Alvin Plantinga carries on the illustration:
I look inside my pup-tent: I don’t see a St. Bernard. It is then probable that there is no St. Bernard in my tent. That is because if there were one, it is highly likely I would have seen it. It’s not easy for a St. Bernard to avoid detection in a small tent. Again I look inside my tent and I don’t see any noseeums. . . . This time it is not particularly probable that there are no noseeums in my tent. . . . The reason is that even if there were noseeums there I wouldn’t see ’em; they’re too small to see. And now the question is whether God’s reasons, if any, for permitting such evils . . . are more like St. Bernards or more like noseeums. . . . Given that God does have a reason for permitting these evils, why think we would be the first to know? . . . Given that he is omniscient and given our very substantial epistemic limitations, it isn’t at all surprising that his reasons . . . escape us.181
Here we see the Achilles heel of the “logical” argument against God—the case that evil means God cannot exist. We also can understand why it has fallen on such hard times. If you have a God infinite and powerful enough for you to be angry at for allowing evil, then you must at the same time have a God infinite enough to have sufficient reasons for allowing that evil.
And we also now can see why Charles Taylor is right, that the “problem of evil” was not widely perceived to be an objection to God until modern times. Human beings operating within the immanent frame have far more confidence in their reasoning powers and their ability to unlock the mysteries of the universe than did ancient people. The belief—that because we cannot think of something, God cannot think of it either—is more than a fallacy. It is a mark of great pride and faith in one’s own mind.
The Evidential Argument and the Butterfly Effect
But what about the less ambitious form of the argument—what has been called the evidential argument against God that says, more modestly, that evil and suffering simply make God’s existence improbable? A skeptic might say, “Of course we can’t prove that there couldn’t be a God, or that there couldn’t be any sufficient reason for allowing evil. But have you watched a little child die by degrees—eaten out from the inside by cancer? While evil may not technically disprove the existence of a good and powerful God, it still makes his existence highly unlikely.”182
The problem with this argument is that it isn’t fundamentally any different from the logical argument. It rests on the same premises and has the same Achilles heel. If we are unable to prove that God has no morally sufficient reasons for evil, we are certainly unable to assess the level of probability that he has such reasons. To insist that we have a sufficient vantage point from which to evaluate percentages or likelihood is to again forget our knowledge limitations. If there is an infinite God and we are finite, there would be no way for us to lay odds on such things.
Imagine a ball on the crest of a hill that could roll off the hill into any one of several valleys, setting off avalanches and changing landscapes and lives. The route of the ball, however, depends on innumerable tiny differences in initial position and thrust, irregularities in the terrain, and even weather conditions like the wind or atmospheric pressure. Can we know exactly where the ball will go when it is released, and what percentage probability there is for entering each valley? No. The variables are too many to calculate. In the field of chaos theory, scientists have learned that large, macroscopic systems—such as weather—can be sensitive to the tiniest changes. The classic example is the claim that a butterfly’s fluttering in China would be magnified through a ripple effect so as to determine the path of a hurricane in the South Pacific. Yet no one would be able to calculate and predict the actual effects of the butterfly’s flight.
Now, what if every event in time, even the most insignificant, had similar massive and infinitely complex ripple effects? Ray Bradbury depicted this famously in his science fiction short story “A Sound of Thunder.” In the story, the time-travel guide Travis is telling the time traveler Eckels that when he visits the past, he must be absolutely sure not to step off the metal path provided for him. Otherwise he might do something like step on a mouse. That would mean all future descendants of that mouse—maybe millions—would disappear. That would mean that all sorts of other animals that fed on those mice would starve and not have descendants. That would mean that some human beings who would have gotten those animals to eat do not—and would lead them to move or to starve. And for one man or woman to die meant whole families, eventually whole nations, wouldn’t exist.
The stomp of your foot, on one mouse . . . the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. . . . Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest. . . . Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon, across Eternity. . . . So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!183
Now, if even the effects of a butterfly’s flight or the roll of a ball down a hill are too complex to calculate, how much less could any human being look at the tragic, seemingly “senseless” death of a young person and have any idea of what the effects in history will be? If an all-powerful and all-wise God were directing all of history with its infinite number of interactive events toward good ends, it would be folly to think we could look at any particular occurrence and understand a millionth of what it will bring about. The history-butterfly effect means that “only an omniscient mind could grasp the complexities of directing a world of free creatures toward . . . previsioned [good] goals. . . . Certainly many evils seem pointless and unnecessary to us—but we are simply not in a position to judge.”184
The Visceral Argument from Evil
The philosophical arguments and counterarguments we have surveyed are usually written about and discussed with a detached, dispassionate tone. But most people who, in the face of actual evil, object to God’s existence do so not for philosophical reasons but for visceral ones. Peter van Inwagen distinguishes these two modes as the “global” and the “local” problem of evil. In his lecture on the local problem, he recounts the true story of a woman who was assaulted by a man who not only raped her but then chopped off her arms at the elbows, leaving her to die. Somehow she crawled to the side of a road, where she was rescued. She survived but must now live her life without arms and with the memory of the horror of that night.185
Our response to such an incident comes initially from deep within. It evokes a feeling in the stomach before it produces a set of propositions in the head. We might say, “You can keep all your long chains of syllogistic reasoning. I know the arguments. I know the existence of this kind of cruelty does not technically disprove the existence of a personal God. But it makes no sense that things like this are justified in any way. This is just wrong—wrong. I don’t want to believe in a God who would let this happen—whether he exists or not.” That is the visceral argument against God from evil. It is not fair to call it mere emotion, a passing feeling. Evil can make God implausible, unreal to the heart. What can be said in response?
The visceral argument is not a strictly logical operation, and yet it has a moral logic to it. Years ago, I sat with a young family whose husband and father had just been killed, electrocuted while doing some simple maintenance in the crawl space under his house. His dead body was still nearby and the ambulance was on its way. Only the oldest of his three children, a son age nine, was able to articulate what everyone was feeling. “It’s not right! A boy needs his dad. It’s not right.” Like Dylan Thomas, while we may know in our mind that death and suffering are the way of things, we “rage, rage” against them.
Probably the classic example of the visceral argument in our times comes in Elie Wiesel’s Night.186 He vividly describes how the very first night in the Nazi death camp devastated him. That first night, he wrote, “turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.” He looked at the furnaces turning human beings, including little children, into “wreaths of smoke.” The fires of those furnaces utterly destroyed his faith in God.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. . . . Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.187
How can you “argue” with this? It is only with great respect for Wiesel’s experience and brilliance as a writer that we must nevertheless point out that there were others who saw the same sights and came out with their faith in God intact, even strengthened.188 As we have seen, Victor Frankl described how death camp inmates responded in very different ways to the terror. Many lost all hope, but others found it, including religious hope. J. Christiaan Beker, a former professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, lived in a forced labor camp in Berlin as a Nazi slave, eventually hiding from the Germans in an attic for months, in constant fear of betrayal or discovery. He saw many of the sights of horrendous evil and suffered, as a result, from a manic-depressive condition all of his life. Nevertheless, it was during his enslavement that he determined to become a Christian theologian, and eventually to write Suffering and Hope: The Biblical Vision and the Human Predicament.189 The message of the book is that the Christian hope of the resurrection and the renewal of the world enables us to view “the present power of death in terms of its empty future and therefore in the knowledge of its sure defeat.”190
The Boomerang Effect
So not everyone who experiences radical evil automatically loses faith in God. And this must mean that even the visceral reaction to suffering has within it some arguments, some assumptions, that may not be conscious at first. We do not simply respond to nauseating, gut-wrenching evil. Deep down we are telling ourselves something about it, we are interpreting it in a particular way. As Blaise Pascal wrote, “At first a thing pleases or shocks me without my knowing the reason, and yet it shocks me for that reason which I only discover afterwards. . . . The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”191
There is a moral assumption in the minds and hearts of those who find suffering weakening their faith rather than strengthening it. The assumption is that God, if he exists, has failed to do the right thing, that he has violated a moral standard. Evil is only evil if it contravenes a moral norm. When we say, “I can’t believe in a God who would allow this,” we are saying that God is somehow complicit with evil.
But this creates a conundrum for the skeptic who disbelieves in God. It is inarguable that human beings have moral feelings. A moral feeling means I feel some behavior is right and some behavior wrong and even repulsive. Now, if there is no God, where do such strong moral instincts and feelings come from? Today many would say our moral sense comes from evolution. Our feelings about right and wrong are thought to be genetically hardwired into us because they helped our ancestors survive. While that explanation may account for moral feelings, it can’t account for moral obligation. What right have you to tell people they are obligated to stop certain behaviors if their feelings tell them those things are right, but you feel they are wrong? Why should your moral feelings take precedence over theirs? Where do you get a standard by which your moral feelings and sense are judged as true and others as false? On what basis do you say to someone, “What you have done is evil,” if their feelings differ from yours?
We can call this a conundrum because the very basis for disbelief in God—a certainty about evil and the moral obligation not to commit it—dissolves if there truly is no God. The ground on which you make your objection vanishes under your feet. So not only does the argument against God from evil not succeed, but it actually has a “boomerang effect” on the users. Because it shows you that you are assuming something that can’t exist unless God does. And so, in a sense, you are relying on God to make an argument against God. The most famous victim of this boomerang experience was C. S. Lewis.
For years, Lewis rejected the existence of God because he believed the logical argument from evil against God worked. But eventually, he came to realize that evil and suffering were a bigger problem for him as an atheist than as a believer in God. He concluded that the awareness of moral evil in the world was actually an argument for the existence of God, not against it. Lewis describes his awakening to this point in Mere Christianity,192 but he gives a longer exposition in his essay De Futilitate. Lewis explains that “there is, to be sure, one glaringly obvious ground for denying that any moral purpose at all is operative in the universe: namely, the actual course of events in all its wasteful cruelty and apparent indifference, or hostility, to life.”193 So the existence of cruelty and evil in the world was the reason Lewis could not believe there was a good God, a “moral purpose” operating behind the universe.
But then he began to realize that evil in the world was “precisely the ground which we cannot use” to object to God. Why? “Unless we judge this waste and cruelty to be real evils we cannot . . . condemn the universe for exhibiting them. . . . Unless we take our own standard to be something more than ours, to be in fact an objective principle to which we are responding, we cannot regard that standard as valid.”194 Here was the conundrum for Lewis as an atheist. His objection to the existence of God was that he could perceive no moral standard behind the world—the world was just randomly evil and cruel. But then, if there was no God, my definition of evil was just based on a private feeling of mine. So Lewis wrote: “In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it.”195 And he concluded with a vivid idea:
The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really only private whims of his own with no objective and impersonal roots, and if he realized this, he could not go on being indignant. The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still.196
So this leaves us with a question. What if evil and suffering in the world actually make the existence of God more likely? What if our awareness of absolute evil is a clue that we know unavoidably at some level within ourselves that God actually does exist? Alvin Plantinga writes that a secular way of looking at the world “has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort . . . and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness ( . . . and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful . . . argument [for the reality of God].”197
A. N. Wilson, writer and critic, abandoned the Christianity of his youth but more recently wrote an article, “Why I Believe Again.” Crucial to his return was his work on a book on the Wagner family and Nazi Germany. It showed him “what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct.”198 A recent faith-journey memoir titled Faith and Other Flat Tires shows us that this boomerang effect is not something that only academics like Lewis, Plantinga, or Wilson can feel. Andrea Palpant Dilley was raised by Quaker medical missionaries in Kenya, where she was exposed to far more death and darkness than most children in Western countries ever see. By the time she was a teenager, she began to question God’s goodness, and by the time she was in her twenties, she had rejected Christianity altogether. What drove her away was her anger at God over suffering and injustice.
But one night she was in a philosophical discussion with a young man about the existence of God. He was arguing that morality was relative—different to every culture and person. In conclusion, he said, “I think morals are totally subjective: therefore God is unnecessary.” Dilley heard herself responding: “But, if morals are totally subjective, then you can’t say Hitler was wrong. You can’t say there’s anything unjust about letting babies starve. And you can’t condemn evil. How tenable is that? . . . You have to consent to an objective moral standard, up here.” She waved her hand in the air, drawing a horizontal line. “And the possibility of a divine moral mind comes into play.” She realized that she was taking the first steps back into belief.199
Later, Dilley concluded:
When people ask me what drove me out the doors of the church and then what brought me back, my answer to both questions is the same. I left the church in part because I was mad at God about human suffering and injustice. And I came back to church because of that same struggle. I realized that I couldn’t even talk about justice without standing inside of a theistic framework. In a naturalistic worldview, a parentless orphan in the slums of Nairobi can only be explained in terms of survival of the fittest. We’re all just animals slumming it in a godless world, fighting for space and resources. The idea of justice doesn’t really mean anything. To talk about justice, you have to talk about objective morality, and to talk about objective morality, you have to talk about God.200
In summary, the problem of senseless suffering does not go away if you abandon belief in God. If there is no God, why have a sense of outrage and horror when unjust suffering occurs to any group of people? Violence, suffering, and death are completely natural phenomena. On what basis do you say cruelty is wrong? Two famous thinkers gave very different answers to those questions. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” said that if there were no higher divine law—that defined what justice is—there would be no way to tell if any particular human practice or experience was unjust or not. But when Friedrich Nietzsche heard that a natural disaster had destroyed Java in 1883, he wrote a friend: “Two hundred thousand wiped out at a stroke—how magnificent!” Nietzsche was relentless in his logic. Because there is (he said) no God, all value judgments are arbitrary. All definitions of justice are just the results of your culture or temperament.
As different as their views were, King and Nietzsche agreed on one point. If there is no God or higher divine law, then violence is perfectly natural. So abandoning belief in God doesn’t help with the problem of suffering at all and, as we will see, it removes many resources for facing it.
Life Story: Hope in Christ
by Mary
Both my parents were destroyed by alcoholism. I was three when they divorced.
My mother loved me and tried her best, but drinking became her refuge, binges and craziness the norm. I was repeatedly locked out of my house for such things as losing a piano competition or dumping vodka down the drain and had to break the basement window to get back inside.
I was seventeen when Jesus found me. A friend invited me to church and I clung to the minister’s reassuring words of God’s unfailing love. I was hopeful my life would change.
I married a man six years my senior. At first, our relationship comforted me, but he became violent. I was hit repeatedly, once with a dog chain; strangled; kicked in the stomach; and pushed off a dock and down the steps. Unbelievably, I convinced myself I still loved him.
At twenty-three, I found my father again. I thought he would protect and defend me, so I left my husband. Instead, my father sexually abused me. I plummeted into utter despair and attempted suicide. Failing, I screamed at God for allowing me to live. Where was He?
I sought counseling with an extremely intelligent, kind young deacon. After a year, we fell in love, but he was already married. We struggled and pleaded with God for help, but ultimately gave in to sin. He divorced and we were married. We did not deserve the blessing of the three beautiful children God gave us. For the first time, I had a family.
My children were under six when I began experiencing severe headaches, hearing loss, and partial facial paralysis. A specialist discovered a massive brain tumor. Parts of the tumor still remain inoperable and are now causing new complications. I remember feeling strangely calm. Though our lives were turned upside down, my family was still intact.
My children grew and though they were brought up in the church, they were also becoming strongly influenced by the world. All were arrested at some point. The youngest was diagnosed with a schizophrenic disorder. The oldest was incarcerated for two years. We were devastated.
Shortly after, my husband suffered two strokes, leaving his personality drastically altered. I discovered our finances were in ruin. We eventually lost our house. I was so crushed, I could barely speak to a therapist.
Life has not changed. But God is changing me.
What I discovered about heartaches and problems, especially the ones that are way beyond what we can handle, is that maybe those are the problems He does permit precisely because we cannot handle them or the pain and anxiety they cause. But He can. I think He wants us to realize that trusting Him to handle these situations is actually a gift. His gift of peace to us in the midst of the craziness. Problems don’t disappear and life continues, but He replaces the sting of those heartaches with hope, which has been an amazing realization.
I have come to believe that life will not always be as it is now. I find even more comfort in being able to stop focusing on all the heartache, and focus on the One who will someday take heartache away completely and forever.
I spent my entire life looking for, and never finding, a recipe to go from despair to hope. It did not come from anything I did or didn’t do. Hope comes not in the solution to the problem but in focusing on Christ, who facilitates the change.