Famine, murder, earthquake, disease—millions of people’s futures blighted, young lives needlessly snuffed out, children left orphaned and helpless, agonizing deaths of young and old alike. If you could click your fingers and stop this catalog of misery, you would have to be a heartless monster not to do so. Yet there is supposed to be a being that could sweep it all aside in an instant, a being that is unlimited in its power, knowledge and moral excellence: God. Evil is everywhere, but how can it exist side by side with a god who has, by definition, the capacity to put an end to it? That thorny question is the core of the so-called “problem of evil.”
The problem of evil is without doubt the severest challenge confronting those who would have us believe in God. Faced with some terrible calamity, the most natural question is “How could God let it happen?” The difficulty in coming up with an answer may seriously test the faith of those afflicted.
In 1984–5 drought and famine in Ethiopia, exacerbated by political instability, are reckoned to have caused over one million people to starve agonizingly to death.
In January 2007 seven-year-old Joshua DuRussel of Michigan, USA, died less than a year after doctors discovered a rare and inoperable cancerous tumor that progressively destroyed his brainstem. According to an official at his school, the animal-loving baseball player “had a real struggle, but he never gave up hope and never complained.”
On October 8, 2005 a catastrophic earthquake struck the Pakistan-administered region of Kashmir, annihilating numerous towns and villages. The official death toll reached around 75,000; over 100,000 others were injured and over three million left homeless.
In March 2005 in Florida, USA, the semi-decomposed body of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford was found buried in a small hole. She had suffocated to death, after being kidnapped and raped several weeks earlier by John Couey, a 46-year-old convicted sex offender.
Is God ignorant, impotent, malevolent or nonexistent? The problem arises as a direct consequence of the qualities that are attributed to God within the Judeo-Christian tradition. These properties are essential to the standard conception of God, and none can be jettisoned or modified without doing devastating damage to that conception. According to the traditional theistic account:
With particular regard to the problem of evil, the following inferences can plausibly be drawn from these three basic properties:
If propositions 4 to 6 are true and if God (as defined by propositions 1 to 3) exists, it follows that there will be no pain and suffering in the world, because God will have followed its inclinations and prevented it. But there is—manifestly—pain and suffering in the world, so we must conclude either that God does not exist, or that it does not have one or more of the properties set out in propositions 1 to 3. In sum, the problem of evil appears to have the implication, extremely unpalatable for the theist, namely that God doesn’t know what is going on, doesn’t care, or can’t do anything about it; or that it doesn’t exist.
Although this issue is conventionally called “the problem of evil,” the term “evil” is not entirely apt. In this context the word refers, very broadly, to all the bad things that happen to people which, at one extreme, are too trivial to qualify as evil as normally conceived. The pain and suffering in question are due to both human and natural causes. It is usual to talk of “moral evil” to cover the suffering caused by the immoral actions of human beings (murder, lying, and so on); and “natural evil” to cover suffering caused by factors outside human control (natural disasters such as earthquakes and diseases not brought on by human activity).
Dodging the bullet Attempts to avoid this devastating conclusion involve undermining some stage of the above argument. Denying that there is ultimately any such thing as evil, as advocated by Christian Scientists, solves the problem at a stroke, but such a remedy is too hard for most to swallow. Abandoning any of the three basic properties ascribed to God (limiting its knowledge, power or moral excellence) is too damaging for most theists to accept, so the usual strategy is to try to explain how evil and God (with all its properties intact) can in fact coexist after all. Such attempts most often involve attacking proposition 6 by claiming that there are “morally sufficient reasons” why God might not always choose to eliminate pain and suffering. And underlying this idea is the further assumption that it is in some sense in our interests, in the long run, that God should make such a choice. In sum, the occurrence of evil in the world is, ultimately, good: things are better for us than they would have been if that evil had not occurred.
The problem of evil can take two quite distinct, though related, forms. In the logical version (roughly as presented in the first part of this chapter), the impossibility of evil and God coexisting is demonstrated by deductive argument: it is claimed that the character of God is inconsistent with the occurrence of evil, and hence that belief in God is actually irrational. The evidential version of the problem of evil is in effect an inversion of the design argument (see The argument from design), using the endless tale of horrors in the world to argue the improbability that it is the creation of an all-powerful, all-loving god. This second version is much less ambitious than the logical version, seeking only to urge that God is unlikely to exist, but it is harder to rebut as a result. The logical version is formally defeated by showing that the co-existence of God and evil is merely possible, however improbable this may be thought to be. The evidential version presents a greater challenge for the theist, who must explain how some higher good for humans emerges from the catalog of evil in the world.
So exactly what greater goods are to be gained at the cost of human pain and suffering? Probably the most powerful riposte to the problem of evil is the so-called “freewill defense,” according to which suffering on earth is the price we pay—and a price worth paying—for our freedom to make genuine choices about our actions (see The freewill defense). Another important idea is that true moral character and virtue are forged on the anvil of human suffering: it is only by overcoming adversity, helping the oppressed, opposing the tyrant, etc. that the real worth of the saint or hero is able to shine forth. Attempts to evade the problem of evil tend to run into difficulties when they try to explain the arbitrary distribution and sheer scale of human suffering. So often it is the blameless that suffer most while the vicious go unscathed; so often the amount of suffering is out of all proportion with what might reasonably be required for purposes of character-building. In the face of so much dreadful misery, the theist’s last resort may be to plead that “God moves in mysterious ways”—that it is impudent and presumptuous for feeble-minded humans to second-guess the purposes and intentions of an all-powerful, all-knowing god. This is in effect an appeal to faith—that it is unreasonable to invoke reason to explain the workings of the divine will—and as such is unlikely to carry weight with those who are not already persuaded.
the condensed idea
Why does God let bad
things happen?
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.375BC | The argument from design |
| c.300BC | The problem of evil |
| c.AD400 | The freewill defense |
| 1078 | The ontological argument |
| 1670 | Faith and reason |