The original:
About as far back as theology as we understand it today has existed, people have been asking a really simple question: “If God is so good and so powerful, then why do bad things happen to good people?” A lot of theologians will dismiss this question as childish trolling, along the lines of “Could God make a rock so big that even he couldn’t lift it?” Any religious person worth our time won’t be dismissive here, because both of these criticisms, although they are simple enough for a child to formulate, are actually serious problems for people of faith (though we won’t address the latter in this blog post, its answer is pretty interesting).
The question as posed takes this structure:
P1: God is omnipotent
P2: God is omniscient
P3: God is omnibenevolent
C1: Any God who fits this description has the power, knowledge, and motivation to end suffering in the world
P4: Evil and suffering exist
C2: God does not exist
Formulated thus, this argument is called the
Logical Problem of Evil (LPE). This has been around since at least the days of Epicurus and isn’t in any way breaking news to anyone, even the most devoutly religious person. As long as this argument has been around, theists have been formulating responses to this line of reasoning, i.e., ways to ‘get God off the hook.’ Any line of argumentation that attempts to do this is called a
theodicy. Over the years, many philosophers and theologians have come up with a variety of really clever ways to do this. In fact, my Introduction to Philosophy professor made a game out of it a la Family Feud in which he allowed the Christian students in my class to list all the theodicies they could think of and he’d yell “Survey Says!” as he put them up on the board. I won’t say that every possible theodicy has been thought of already; however, the cool one you have in your head to get God off the hook is extremely likely to have been thought of before now.
Popular ones have included fun things like
Free Will and
The Devil Did It. (there’s also one more major one that will be addressed by the main theme of this post) The latter is remarkably easy to parry, as the Devil, assuming he exists, must also have been created by the All Knowing God. If God is omniscient, he’d know the devil would do evil and would have either not created him or used his omnipotence to create him differently. Current mainline Protestantism in America treats this argument by saying that God gave the Devil Free Will, which brings us back to the former argument.
I don’t want to waste a huge amount of time on Free Will here. More philosophical ink has been spilt on this topic than any other and at any rate I’ve written extensively on it previously in a paper I may post here later. The short version of the theological argument against free will is that it violates P1, P2, and P3 in the LPE above. Free Will allows humans to choose to act against God’s wishes–if they couldn’t, it wouldn’t be free. Free Will enables humans to choose to act in ways God can’t predict–if they couldn’t, it wouldn’t be free. And most damning, if God knew that giving humans free will would cause evil to befall them, then his giving humans free will was not an act of benevolence in the first place.
If you’re still interested in Free Will, Sam Harris has a new book out on it and no one does a better job than he does on these matters.I
crossed this out because I think the author of the blog post is talking bollocks at this point. See the critique of Sam Harris' book by Daniel Dennett: http://www.naturalism.org/Dennett_reflections_on_Harris%27s_Free_Will.pdf
While I think I’ve made it clear above that I don’t think that any of these theodicies or rhetorical responses to the LPE are convincing, many philosophers have tried to re-formulate the the Problem of Evil to get around them. The result of that is the
Experiential Problem of Evil (EPE), which goes a little like this: Imagine for a second you’ve never been alive in this universe but have grown up in a in-between universes place. Someone comes up to you and asks you to imagine a universe created by an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. You might imagine a universe where suffering is minimized, where death is not a concept or where one life form chosen by God lives without problem in paradise. Now open your eyes. Is that the kind of universe you observe around you? If not, then you have serious reason to doubt the existence of God.
There are only two identified theodicies that might work at this point. The first says, “God created a paradise for Adam and Eve, but human Free Will brought evil into the world. All the evil which exists in the world befalls humans because we are the posterity inheriting the wages of their sin.”
The classic response to this theodicy is called
Rowe’s Fawn, named after the philosopher who first told the story. The story goes like this: Imagine one spring day, a fawn rises from its bed near a Doe and a Stag and goes for a short walk through the forest. The sun is shining, flowers are just beginning to bloom and the whole forest is alive with renewal. Imagine Bambi, if you need to. Just now, the fawn is stopping to get a drink from a fresh stream coming down from the mountain full of new-melted snow. Suddenly, there’s a cracking sound and the deer freezes, looking for a predator on the horizon. The sound is only the harbinger of a gigantic tree trunk which falls on the fawn and snaps its spine. However, its internal organs are all intact and the fawn lays there, well fed and well watered, paralyzed for days. Because disease exists in the world, scavenger animals such as vultures prefer to eat an animal that is still alive and has not yet begun to rot. Such is the fate of our deer, as first vultures, then hyenas, then the myriad creepy crawlies which inhabit a forest feast upon its still living flesh until it finally succumbs.
Even without video evidence, the statistical laws governing the population of deer and the number of trees in forests demand, via the law of large numbers, that a case like this has happened at least once somewhere. Did the deer sin? Is the deer being held accountable for the sins of Adam? Are fawns particularly despised by God? Are vultures equally exalted? This argument is the final nail in the coffin for the Free Will theodicy–even animals without free will or who are not accountable for the free will of others still suffer horrors on a grand scale in the universe created by our God. Only one theodicy remains.
At this point, the only way a theist can get God off the hook is to claim that, while the evil which exists in the world is quite terrible, God created
the Best of all Possible Worlds for His children to inhabit. For example, creating a world without certain kinds of suffering would demand the non-existence of Free Will (ugh, again?), which itself is such a virtue that its very existence counterbalances the evil needed to pay for it. And so on–God makes hard work difficult so that we’ll appreciate the value of the fruits of our labors. There are dozens of practical uses for this argument, and it takes a real pessimist to not see how much better this world, even with all its suffering, is than other worlds we can imagine.
Fortunately, we have a real pessimist on hand: gentlemen of the jury, I give you Arthur Schopenhauer. I was going to include a lengthy write up of how Arthur Friggin’ Schopenhauer completely destroys this “best of all possible worlds” argument, but honestly I can’t put it more succinctly or accurately than this comic:
In short, if life got any harder on this planet, everyone would just die off. If everyone died, there’d be no one around to suffer. Ergo, we are at or at least very close to the maximum allowance of suffering possible in our universe. If this is simultaneously the best and worst of all possible universes, then there is a shockingly narrow band of possible universes. While that may be true, it strains credulity.
Consider the example of the Malthusian Catastrophe. Given a food source, a population is going to grow to meet the supply of food. At that point, every one of those creatures is now in a fight for the remaining food, which will ultimately be a fight to the death, with only near-starvation being the victors’ prize. If their population gets higher than the food source, then the food source is depleted and the entire population collapses. Which contains more suffering: a population that is struggling to survive indefinitely or a population that is already dead? Exactly.
By the way, one doesn’t really need Schopenhauerian pessimism to defeat this theodicy. Imagine a world exactly like ours, but with one fewer child being raped, one fewer homeless person starving to death, one fewer school child who talks over his teacher while his teacher attempts to answer the question he just asked. If only one of those things were prevented in all of human history and everything else were exactly the same, it would still be a massively better universe than the one God created. So ask yourself–does the universe you observe bespeak a benevolent creator?
For my last paragraph, I wanted to end by discussing the two more important theodicies which exist today. Interestingly, both of them were written by Notre Dame faculty members.
The first is from Alvin Plantinga, a really important and well-respected philosopher. His idea is actually not considered a theodicy at all, rather a defense. As such, he doesn’t have to prove that his is correct, just that it’s logically plausible. His idea is one we encountered above: “A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.” This argument has two problems that I already noted: Number one, it relies on Free Will which is both scientifically and theologically dubious. Secondly, it’s so steeped in Enlightenment Age deism that it forgets that the question of whether God can intervene is still unresolved. If God can intervene, then one miracle to save someone from suffering makes this defense, which is still based on weighted evil universes, unreasonable.
The second is from Peter van Inwagen and also involves Free Will, in the context of a rather strange story in which humans used to have magical powers but lost them when we used our free will for evil purposes. As a result of losing those magical powers, we suffer evils we would not have suffered otherwise. Apart from being not very parsimonious, rather strange, and unsupported by any a posteriori logic, his story relies entirely on speculation. Like Plantinga before him, van Inwagen is trying only to offer a defense, not a theodicy: that is, he says it’s possible that this is the story and if so God’s off the hook. He’s not saying that definitely this happened so definitely God is off the hook. An interesting work-around but ultimately this is unsatisfactory to anyone who isn’t already a believer.
Topic: Rowe’s Fawn, Theodicy, and the Problem of Evil