I just wanted to draw your attention to this 4 page essay by Joe Manzari, which is the best darn summary of the state of the art on the problems of evil and suffering I have seen. The problem of evil is an objection to the existence of God based on the presence of evil or suffering in the world. The arguments basically infer that if God is all-good and all-powerful, then there should not be any evil or suffering.
There are two kinds of problem of evil.
The Logical/Deductive Problem of Evil:
The first kind is called “the deductive problem of evil” or “the logical problem of evil”. An exampel of evil would be Saddam Hussein murdering some journalist who told the truth about him. This version of the problem of evil tries to introduce a logical contradiction between the attributes of God and the presence of evil, like this:
(1) God exists.
(2) God is omnipotent.
(3) God is omniscient.
(4) God is omni-benevolent.
(5) Evil exists.
(6) A good being always eliminates evil as far as it can.
(7) There are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do.
In order to avoid a contradiction, we need to explain how there could still be evil, since the conclusion of this argument is that there should not be any evil!So how are we going to get out of this mess? The solution is to attack premises 6 and 7.
Premise 6 is false because in order to eliminate human evil, you would have to eliminate free will. But eliminating free will is worse than allowing it, because good things like love are impossible without free will.
It is in response to this proposition that the Free Will Theodicy of G. W. Leibniz applies. God, valuing man’s freedom, decided to provide him with a will that was free to choose good over evil, rather than constraining his will, allowing him to choose only good.
Premise 7 is false because there are limits on what an omnipotent being can do. God cannot perform contradictory things, because contradictory things are impossible. God cannot make a married bachelor. Similarly, God cannot force free creatures to do his will.
In the same manner that God cannot create a square circle, he cannot make someone freely choose to do something. Thus, if God grants people genuine freedom, then it is impossible for him to determine what they will do. All that God can do is create the circumstances in which a person can make free choices and then stand back and let them make the choices.
One last point. In order to solve the problem of natural evil for this argument, you can point out that free will requires predictable and regular natural laws in order to make free will meaningful. Natural laws mean that individuals can predict what will happen when they act, allowing for moral responsibility. More on that next time.
Inductive/Probabilistic Problem of Evil
There is a second version of the problem of evil, though, which is more dangerous than the first. This is the one you see being argued in debates, whereas the first version is not used because it has been defused as seen above. Here is the second one:
(1) If God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist.
(2) Gratuitous evil exists.
(3) Therefore, God does not exist.
This argument tries to argue that while God may have some reason for allowing free will, there are other evils in the world that are not the result of human action that God has no reason for permitting. Theists usually like to argue that God has morally-sufficient reasons for allowing some evil in the world, in order for the character of humans to develop through suffering and endurance. But what about gratuitous evil, which doesn’t have any point?
Consider the case of a fawn running in the forest, who falls and breaks his leg. Ouch! Then a forest fire starts and the poor fawn suffocates to death in the smoke. Why would God allow this poor small animal suffer like that? And notice that there is no morally sufficient reason for allowing it, because no human knows about this and so no human’s character or relationship with God is impacted by it.
The solution to this problem is to deny premise 2. (You can also deny 1 if you want). The problem with premise 2 is that the atheist is claiming to know that some instance of evil really is gratuitous. But since they are making the claim to know, they have to be able to show that God’s permission of that evil achieves nothing. But how do they know 2 is true?
The problem with 2 is that the atheist is not in a position to know that the permission of some evil X really doesn’t achieve anything. This is because the atheist cannot look forward into the future, or see into other places, in order to know for certain that there is no morally sufficient reason for allowing God’s allowing evil X to occur. But since the atheist argues based on premise 2, he must be able to show that premise 2 is more probable than not.
Manzari’s article also argues why apparently gratuitous evil is less problematic for Christians in particular, because of certain Christian doctrines. He lists four doctrines that make the apparently gratuitous evil that we observe more compatible with an all-good, all-powerful God.
- The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God.
Some of the things that we experience may wreck our feelings of contentment, but we need to remember that God may be permitting those troubles in order to remind us not to get too comfortable with life on earth, and to think ahead to the after-life. And remember, even Jesus learned endurance through suffering. His suffering was not pointless and neither is ours. - Mankind is in a state of rebellion against God and God’s purposes.
We humans seem to be on a dead run away from God, trying to keep our autonomy by knowing as little about him as possible. Part of knowing God is knowing what he designed us to do – to love him and to love others. And so, the less we know about God, the more we stray from his design for our lives. - God’s purpose is not restricted to this life but spills over beyond the grave into eternity.
Sometimes it seems as if our sufferings really are catastrophic, but when you realize that you are offered eternal life without any suffering after you die, the sufferings of this life are a lot less upsetting than they would be if this life was all we had. - The knowledge of God is an incommensurable good.
This one is the biggest for me. Knowing God and knowing his actual character by studying the historical Jesus is a wonderful counterbalance for all the problems and sufferings of this life. A little bit of historical study reveals that Jesus was not spared the worst kind of suffering in his life, making it is a lot easier for us to bear with whatever God allows us to face.
In section 3, Manzari shows how you can also argue against this version of the problem by supplying evidence for God, such as from the big bang, the fine-tuning, the origin of life, the origin of free will, the origin of the first living organism, the origin of the mind, the sudden emergence of phyla in the fossil record, molecular machines, irreducible complexity, the resurrection miracle, and the objective morality argument.
The argument goes like this:
(1) If God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist.
(2) God exists.
(3) Therefore, gratuitous evil does not exist.
Just support 2 with some evidence, and you win, especially when they can’t support their claim to know that gratuitous evil exists.
The Argument for God from Evil
In the paper, Manzari actually makes an argument for God from evil. That’s right. Far from disproving God, the presence of evil (a departure from the way things out to be), actually affirms God’s existence. How?
(1) If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
(2) Evil exists.
(3) Therefore, objective moral values do exist.
(4) Therefore, God exists.
That’s right. If evil exists in any sense such that it is not a personal or cultural preference, then objective morality exists. If objective morality exists, then there is an objective moral lawgiver. Game over. If the atheist backtracks and says that the existence of evil is just his opinion or his cultural preference, then this standard does not apply to God, and you win again. Game over again. More on this argument for God’s existence from evil here.
So, although the problems of evil look pretty tough, they are actually easy. The toughest part of evil and suffering is the emotional problem. I could tell you stories about what I’ve been through… but then, that’s why the arguments matter. You can hold your position under tremendous fire when you have the arguments and evidence to ground you.
For more on the problem of evil, listen to this lecture by Douglas Geivett, professor of philosophy at Biola University. Then you must listen to this debate between William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (with summary by me). Another debate transcript is here, with William Lane Craig and Kai Nielsen. Here’s a book debate between William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, published by Oxford University Press, 2004.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
That was an AWESOME analysis sir!
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Wintery an atheist brought this up to me during a debate online. Its a quote by Epicurus that I hadn’t heard until then.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
– Epicurus
She was discussing how a friend of hers was raped by a youth pastor and caused her to lose her faith. She titled the debate, ‘Lost and Found’ that is to say Lost [faith] and Found [reality].
I believe your article answers it perfectly.
Thankyou!
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In the first argument, Premise 7 is where I’ve come to as well. For God to give us free will and then override it would be a contradiction that He couldn’t do. Like God making a promise and then breaking it….He’s never done that (and can’t because He is holy).
God is all-powerful but there are some “things” He can’t do like you listed above:
1) Lie
2) Break a promise
3) Contradict himself…such as to give humans free wills to choose to love Him but then immediately force their love.
.
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My objections to their arguments starts with No. 4 – omni-benevolence. To me, the idea of God being omni-benevolent is right up there with believing that God’s job is to make everyone happy, or that God is some sort of magical wish fulfiller in the sky.
I like to use a parental metaphor. As infants, our parents take care of everything for us; we cannot survive without them. As we get older, in order for us to fully develop, we have to experience challenges and failure. We struggle to lift our heads, roll over, crawl, walk, run, etc. Each step of the way, we get our bumps and bruises; we fall and experience pain. We try to do things too quickly, or we attempt things that are dangerous. As parents, we protect our children as much as we can, but we don’t do everything for them; if we do, we actually cause more harm. Our children would not develop properly, and we would stifle them physically, intellectually and emotionally.
At some point, we must allow our children to learn from their own mistakes, even when our own experience means we can foresee consequences they cannot. For a lot of children, as they test their wings to enter the adult world independant of us, they will challenge us and rebel against us. We have to learn to let go and hope they will someday realize their mistake and come back to us.
This is where I think humanity is. We’ve gone through infancy and toddlerhood, we have passed through childhood and are now struggling with adulthood. God is allowing us to spread our wings. A lot of us make mistakes and turn to God when those mistakes are realized, like prodigal sons. Some expect God to take care of all our needs, like the adult-child who lives in Mom and Dad’s basement, pretends to be independant, but still expects Mom to do the laundry and Dad to pay the bills. Still others reject God completely, because God is not what they think He should be – they are like children who have become convinced they are actually adopted or something, because if their parents were *really* their parents, they would cater to their every whim, or keep bad things from happening to them, or give them what they want. When that doesn’t happen, they disown their parents completely. The metaphor can go on.
The thing is, as parents, we can’t wrap our children in bubble wrap, do everything for them or prevent all harm from coming to them. We would have to keep them completely sheltered from the real world, and not allow them to experience anything. That sort of parent would, rightfully, be considered abusive, yet that is exactly what many demand of God, without recognising that if God did this, we would never develop to our full potential.
The other issue I have is with how the term “evil” is used. To me, declaring something is evil implies motive. A person who accidentally kills, or who kills in defence, is not evil. A person who murders for pleasure, is. A natural disaster, no matter how many people are killed or harmed, is a tragedy, but not an evil. God doesn’t “allow” it to happen; it’s part of the world we live in. Do people really expect God to step in every time there’s an earthquake or a hurricane and magically move people out of harms way? Or stop the events from happening at all? Why? How is this God’s place in the world? God is not a helicopter parent, hoving over us so we never get hurt. I don’t see why we should expet that of Him, nor do I see why that’s even desireable.
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Gerard Baker, a week after the 2004 Boxing Day Indian Ocean tsunami killed 250,000 people, writing in The Times:
(quote on)
But for those of us who consider ourselves theists of a slightly less flaccid sort, this emerging consensus that “God doesn’t exist because if he did there would be no disasters” is rather lame. The tsunami cannot, in reason, have any possible bearing, by itself, on the question of whether or not there is a God. It cannot amount to a revelation, or even a confirmation, that God does not exist. In logic, the poor suffering Muslims in Indonesia who think it was a sign of God’s wrath are less evidently wrong than those who insist that it disproves God’s existence.
We ask: why would God allow such suffering? A perfectly legitimate question, of course. But it seems to suppose that there is an uniquely belief-undermining quality about a human calamity on such a massive scale. Why on earth should that be? We know all too well that undeserved pain, injury, disease, and loss of life are daily facts of life for hundreds of millions of people on the planet. Indeed, presumably in the course of human history, billions of people, rich and poor, weak and strong, have suffered and died from causes not of their own making but as a result of a terrible accident.
We tend to see natural disasters as especially faith-threatening, I suppose, partly because of their scale, but partly also because for most of the first few thousand centuries of human history such events were ascribed to some divine force. It is as though, somewhere in our genes, there is a tendency to take a little too literally the insurance company terminology that describes earthquakes and hurricanes as “acts of God”.
If, then, what the atheists are attacking is the notion of an all-seeing, all-powerful benign deity, constantly engaged in and altering the tide of human events, they do not need a tsunami to prove their point. The knowledge that just one child somewhere was dying of cancer would bring the whole fantasy crumbing down.
As the atheist Ivan Karamazov puts it to his devout brother Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s novel: “Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature … in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”
We can stipulate then, as American lawyers like to say, that the tsunami, tragic and horrific as it is, is simply irrelevant, or at least supernumerary, to the question of whether a benign God exists.
This not some idle tilt at the atheists. Putting a natural disaster such as this in the context of the anonymous enormity of human suffering helps us to understand a little more clearly, what it is that believers believe about humanity, and the complex nature of its relationship with life and God.
Put it this way: imagine for a moment, that there were not only no earthquakes, floods and storms, but that there was no innocent suffering and never had been in the history of the earth. Imagine if, every time a faulty gene was on its way to being transmitted to an unborn child, the hand of God dipped in and the gene was corrected. Imagine a God frantically circling the globe redirecting every train headed for a faulty bridge, reprogramming every failed computer in a hospital operating theatre, and printing money every time some undeserving chap got down on his luck.
Imagine, in other words, if everyone since the beginning of time lived to a ripe old age and died in his bed, or at least died a death precisely commensurate with his moral contribution to the earth’s happiness.
Such a fair, challengeless world might be a wonderful place to live. But I don’t think that it would be recognisably human. If we have reason to doubt the point of our existence in this world, surely we would understand it even less in that one. And if I were God, and had created Man, I am not quite sure that I would see the point either.
The whole piece is here:
http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2012/03/tornados-and-disaster-drivel.html
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