Boethius, Anicius. The Consolation of Philosophy. (521 AD)
Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Parts X and XI. For statement of the problem.
New Catholic Encyclopaedia (McGraw Hill, N.Y. 1967), Vol. V, pp. 665-671, article by R. Jolivet on "Evil".
Maritain, Jacques. Existence and the Existent. Vintage Books, Random House, N.Y., 1948. Esp. Ch. IV.
Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. 1940. Published by Harper-Collins.
Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. Fontana, Collins, 1966.
Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Beacon, Boston, 1967.
Smart, Ninian. Philosophers and Religious Truth. SCM, London, 1969. Ch. VI.
Griffin, David Ray. God, Power and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1976.
Hartshorne, Charles. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. State Univ. of N.Y. Press, Albany, N.Y., 1984.
Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. The End of Evil. State Univ. of N.Y., 1988.
Lambrecht, Jan, and Collins, Raymond F. God and Hume Suffering. Peeters Press, Louvain, 1990. For an extensive bibliography on suffering and evil, see pp. 235ff.
Griffin, David Ray. Evil Revisited. SUNY, Albany, N.Y., 1991.
(i) some of these difficulties are intellectual problems, which may be treated of on a theoretical level; more often the difficulty is a problem of living or a practical issue.
(ii) both the theoretical and practical issues have two aspects, depending on the type of evil involved: --there are practical or theoretical issues raised by the presence of human or animal suffering, or physical evil as it is sometimes called; --there are the practical or theoretical issues raised by the experience of one's own capacity for doing evil, or the capacity of someone else or the race or the endemic social evil implicit in social structures, commonly termed moral evil.
[Sometimes this distinction is made differently, not in terms of type of evil but in terms of origin of that evil:
physical or 'natural' evil: evil that does not arise from the free decisions of human beings and other possible persons (e.g. devils, etc.), e.g. earthquakes;
moral evil: evil that arises from free decisions of persons, both sin itself and the consequences of sin in terms of suffering, wars, environmental damage etc.
This distinction is actually the more useful when it comes to various responses to the problem of evil, the 'free will defence' and suchlike.]
(iii)to go over into the metaphysical mode in the context of the practical problem may sometimes be positively inappropriate and even counterproductive. On the other hand, the problems are not entirely disconnected. Theoretical considerations can help to remove obstacles in the way of hope and trust for the future, the perception that the cosmos and even God is against us for example. On the other side, too easy theodicies by appearing to justify the evils can be an obstacle to the resolution of the practical problems, and may need to be got out of the way.
(b) Part of the difficulty with dealing with the Problem of Evil in philosophy is that we are limited to philosophical arguments. It may well be the case that a 'solution' can be found only on the basis of particular experiences of particular people, e.g. the incarnation, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus and the rest of us joined into this mystery; or perhaps a successful carrying out of the Buddhist project of enlightenment. It may be that the best philosophy can do is show that a religious or theological solution is not impossible, i.e. to preserve compatibility.
(c) while our experience of evil is usually and with good reason construed as a problem for theistically inclined philosophers and theologians, it may also be looked on as an opportunity. An affirmation of the Divine may be regarded as necessary for our involvement in doing something about evil of both kinds, God as the Principle of Hope. Our experience of evil may also be a call to re-think our notion of the Divine and of the relation between God and Creation. To explore this latter a little bit: In the context of evil and our involvement in doing something about it, we experience the Divine as liberating and redemptive. What must the Divine be like in order to be experienced like this, as liberating and redemptive?
W.r.t. power:
--not in complete control, in the sense of ordaining everything to the last detail: this would legitimate the evil, put God/the Divine on the side of the torturers and oppressors;
but in some kind of strong control, in overall control of the situation: otherwise there is no hope, no liberation possible;
-capable of drawing straight with crooked lines,
-more powerful than the oppressors
--promoting rather than restricting the involvement of the oppressed in their own liberation: an empowering Force, the empowering Spirit.
--a power which is of present and not only of future or beyond life relevance: otherwise it risks becoming an opium
but not only for the present: otherwise it risks becoming unrealistically utopian.
W.r.t. GOODNESS
--good in a sense like the human, only that S/HE forgives as well as overcomes enemies, brings about reconciliation though not necessarily an easy reconciliation, an option for the oppressed which pays tribute to the victims but still redeems the sinners;
implies at least as good as a good human being, and more than this ("infinite" cannot be used as an excuse).
Otherwise, no end to strive, no final reconciliation.
The question then arises: can there be a God like this?
But usually it is put the other way: if God is thus and thus, how can there be evil and how come so much?
We will attend for the rest to this more usual, more traditional problem of evil in its theoretical forms.
In this regard, one may speak of at least three different families of theoretical problems:
· The Consistency or Compatibility Problems
· Inference Problems having to do with the difficulty or impossibility of inferring Gods goodness from the state of the universe.
· Inductive or Probabilistic arguments against the existence of God from Evil, the so-called A-teleological Argument, usually starting with instances of gratuitous suffering.
We will spend the bulk of our time on the Consistency or Compatibility Problems, as this has been the focus in the bulk of the literature since classical times.
Return to top.
Consistency Problems I and II: whether the presence of any evil at all (problem I), or the presence of the amount of evil that we do in fact find (problem II) is consistent with/ can be reconciled with the existence of a God who is unlimited in both goodness and power.
The problem has been put into the form of a dilemma, going back originally to Epicurus:
For anything or anyone to be a God as classically conceived, it has to be all powerful and all good.
But there is evil, and there is lots of it.
The supposed God is either helpless to prevent this evil, hence not all powerful; or has chosen not to prevent it, hence is not all good; or both and so is neither one nor the other.
Consequently, God as classically conceived does not exist.
In addition to these Consistency problems, as already noted, there is the so-called INFERENCE PROBLEM: even if consistent, whether the existence of an all powerful and all good God could plausibly be inferred from the universe as we commonly experience it, given the ambiguity of the actual experience. See later for this one.
(a) the major move is the so called FREE WILL DEFENCE: God cannot be held blame-able for the evil that human beings freely originate, which evil God allows for the sake of a greater good which is human freedom, the capacity to freely respond in love to God and neighbour. This incorporates a version of the Principle of Double Effect a kind of Cosmic Principle of Double Effect.
To make the defence stick in its context within classical theism, some way has to be found to reconcile the divine creative power with an genuinely independent human origination of evil.
This is usually done with the help of the doctrine of evil as PRIVATION, rather than as something positive, an absence of being, of something which should be there, rather than a kind of being in its own right for which God the Creator would have to be held responsible (cf. Augustine, out of Neo-Platonism); together with the notion that human free sinful acts include a moment of free privating, of what the Thomist Jacques Maritain calls 'nihiliating', freely not doing something, not considering the relevant norm or rule, a non-consideration of the rule rather than something positive. God does not need to be responsible for this freely introduced non-being: in evil, human beings have the first initiative, not God. God just goes along, permits it in so far as to do anything else would usually be to disturb the flow of the universe, and to make genuine response in love impossible. God still remains sovereign over the creation despite this initiative for evil, in so far as these free acts known in their presentness throughout all eternity are taken into account from all eternity in God's eternal plan. As St Thomas says, quoting Augustine: Since God is highest good, God would not allow any evil to exist in God's works, unless God's omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.
The general idea for this whole approach can be found already in Plato, 10th Book of The Laws, where he ascribes the existence of evil in the universe to a soul or souls other than the demiurge - versus the solution elsewhere, e.g. the Timaeus, where evil derives from the recalcitrance of matter. The notion of evil as privation is derived directly from the neo-platonists and is already in Plotinus, from whom Augustine derived it. One of its advantages is that, as with Augustine, it helps us to avoid Manicheeism, i.e. the doctrine of two Gods, one responsible for the good, one for the evil
(i) Some people e.g. John Hick, Process thinkers, question the doctrine of evil as privation: · .cruelty is not merely an extreme absence of kindness, but something with a demonic power of its own... · .this supposed 'nihiliating' is an "I will not" rather than an "I not-will", a refusal to consider it rather than a just happening not to consider it. The nihiliating is thus still something different from a mere doing nothing - a stone can do nothing but only a human being can nihiliate.
(ii) the free will defence is further confused by the admission of a large part of the tradition that God could make creatures who always freely do the good --like angels and saints in heaven. There are two kinds of liberty, the fallible and the infallible.
Some of the options in response:
1) God could have made creatures who always freely do the right thing, and that would have been better, but God does not have to. As omnipotent, God can always do better than God actually does, so all that can reasonably be required of a God is that creation be good overall.
2) God could have made creatures who always freely do the right, but what God has done is actually better, either because a world with sin plus incarnation-redemption would realize goodness even more than a sinless world without redemption -O Felix Culpa; or because, as Hick has it, the other would put God into a position of arranging beforehand that God would be loved --like an hypnotist; this might be the same experientially from our side, but would definitely not be the same from God's.
3) the third possibility is to reject the admission: infallible freedom is a contradiction in terms. Either the saints in heaven could conceivably go wrong but don't or freedom as capacity to do evil as well as good is not such as we would want to retain in the final result.
(b) the next major move in the tradition is to extend the free will defence to cover most or even all of the evils that afflict human beings and the natural world by means of talk of ORIGINAL SIN and the fall of the angels etc. Thus the dominant Augustinian tradition in the West: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Salvation.
Philosophically: the idea that a lot, maybe the majority of the evil that afflicts us and the created world, is our doing, not God's, or if not just ours, that of other creatures also endowed with free will.
John Hick and some others, e.g. Ninian Smart, reject this Augustinian tradition of creation and fall, necessitating redemption, in favour of the Irenaean tradition. According to the Irenaean tradition, the history of salvation is not the correction of a creation gone wrong through people's fault but as in Irenaeus the performance of the second stage of the creative work. Cf. the educational image of Gal. 3:24. This according to Hick and Smart fits much better with what we know of human evolution.
(c) An account can be given of a certain proportion of natural evil independently of the free will defence: some of our problems at least are a consequence of the rule of general laws. The rule of general law is a presupposition for rational adaptation to circumstances. No walking without gravity, but once we have gravity we can fall down steps. It would also seem to be a condition for the existence of any cosmos whatsoever, though maybe all that is needed are reliable probabilistic laws.
(a) Instead of keeping omnipotence as traditionally defined, and trying to reconcile it with goodness in the face of evil, give up omnipotence/redefine it, or, better, use the difficulty of the classical problem of evil as a further argument for seeing omnipotence in another way, for which interpretation there are also other reasons, having to do with the development of a more critical and more New Testament concept of 'power' and 'the perfection of power'.
Omnipotence does not mean a power not limited by anything else, or a capacity to do whatever is logically possible. The perfection of power is persuasive, responsive love rather than despotic determination of all the details.
(b) A second move made by Process Theism is the extension of creativity and initiative in the universe beyond the human realm, effectively to all of creation. The Free Will Defence is extended, to become the Free Process Defence.
God may be cosmically persuasive but God is not and provided there is creation at all cannot be the only source of creativity in the universe. Indeed everything has some degree of initiative, not only human beings but even sub-atomic particles, to be is to play a part; many players, indeed all the players, make a contribution to the cosmic process and not only by nihiliating.
(c) A third consideration deployed by many process thinkers is that what we call evil takes a variety of different forms and derives from a variety of different sources.
h evil is disorder, disharmony, rather than privation; though there is also the evil of boredom and lack of achievement.
Some of these evils result from the creativity and initiative of created agents, deliberately introduced into the drama so to speak; some evils on the other hand are no one's fault, the unpredictable result of different initiatives.
The work of the Divine is a necessary condition for any cosmos whatsoever, and God presides over the cosmic process at it goes along. The Divine lure is everywhere pervasive and cosmically and eternally persuasive, but does not fully determine the nature of the cosmos in actual fact.
1) whether there is enough evil to disturb even this rather more accommodating system;
2) is this such a God that can be adored? From the classical viewpoint, the problem is solved by giving up God. Cf. Mascall. But cf. above, reflection on what God must be like in order to be liberating and redemptive.
3) Some people would prefer to be in the Hands of the Living God even if apparently wrathful at the moment, even if mysterious, than either the plaything of Chance or at the mercy of all the other creativities and our own weaknesses. Cf. Paul in Romans, about the refusal of the Jewish people to accept Jesus. He cannot conceive that it might have been just the way things worked out in the circumstances.
For more on Process Thought and the Problem of Evil, see my paper, "God and Evil in Process Relational Thought".
1) These are both genuine difficulties for people whose sole or main reason for believing in the goodness of God is commonly shared experience of the way the universe actually is. For example, people who rely too much on the argument from design: the argument from design is good for establishing intelligence, not so good for establishing benevolence (cf. Hume, Van der Veken). Furthermore, commonly available experience might push some people in the direction of Manichaeism, two principles, one good and one evil; or perhaps a God neutral between Good and Evil as we understand them.
2) This is less of a problem for people who rely on particular experiences of particular people including themselves, had within the context of one or other of the religious traditions for example. But then we are no longer doing philosophy, the conversation of human kind, which as such can only rely on generally available experience.
3) It is less of a problem also for people who rely more on the other ways cosmological, ontological, or truth goodness beauty love and duty, in order to establish the goodness of the Divine Mystery.
4) The major difference this makes is in respect of the burden of proof. What people in 2) and 3) have to do is to give reasons for believing that the various different evils might be reconcilable with his/her previously grounded position. We don't know everything after all: God's mysterious ways, etc. Cf. Hume. Also Job. We have grounds for believing that they are reconcilable, cf. our reasons for believing in the goodness of God in the first place, even though we don't know the how. However, if we wanted to establish the goodness of God in the first place, the onus of argument shifts to the believer: we have to show that the universe is indeed very good and that the various different evils are in fact only allowed by God, and this only for the sake of a greater good.
5) For everyone, however, the evils and sufferings in life do go into the basket of considerations when it comes to choosing theism over its competitors, functioning not totally in a negative fashion however (see considerations under 1, above.).
St Thomas' reply to the problem of evil (obj. 1 of S.T. 1,2,3) is good for the advocate of 2) and 3) but not so much for 1), who has yet to show in the first place that God is the greatest good.
Possibilities:
1) that this is the best logically possible world (Leibniz, Theodicy). After all, in our human experience we consider a person who always chooses the best of all courses of action open to them as better than the person who prefers a lesser course of action. And only the logically impossible is beyond the power of the almighty. Objection: logical impossibility does not in fact place any restrictions on the perfection of the universe. For whatever thing God has made, God being omnipotent could make a better one, and so on indefinitely. For whatever world God created, it could be asked, why didn't God make a better one. It is therefore unfair to ask.
2) that God's universe is at least good in the last resort and that God is not directly responsible for the evil = the standard Scholastic view. Though God is perfectly free to create one world rather than another one less good or more so, God being good the universe at least has to be good rather than evil: God is bound so to regulate the universe God does create together with the evil which ravages it so that there is at least an ultimate triumph of good. Every evil in the universe exists for the sake of a greater good, where 'greater good' refers not so much to a particular good individual thing as to the good of a whole, though it may refer to the former also. And of course, God can't be directly responsible for evil, can't be a criminal: God doesn't do evil, but only permits it: produces people and states of affairs good in themselves from which evil in fact derives, for the sake of a greater good. A kind of Cosmic Principle of Double Effect.
3) that this world is the best possible world given the purpose for which God created it, as implicit in the kind of world that it is.
John Hick would see a stronger requirement than 2): God is perfectly free to create one type of world rather than another less good or more so, e.g. God could have left human beings out or could have made human beings infallibly good. But unlimited goodness does oblige the Divine to see that the purpose implicit in that type of world which God does decide to create be fulfilled to the greatest degree possible. God could always make a better type of universe, but logical possibility does place a restriction on the perfection of any specific type of universe. For Hick, this means among other things that there can be no hell in fact: God in Divine goodness will never cease to desire and work for the salvation of each created person. It is morally, even though not logically impossible that infinite resourcefulness of infinite love working in unlimited time should be eternally frustrated, and the creature eternally reject its own good.
(i) A doctrine which puts the majority or even a large minority of ordinary people, millions or billions of sentient creatures, into a hell of everlasting torment is so morally and psychologically repugnant as to rob the notion of an all powerful and all good God of any psychologically or morally relevant content. The persistence of such a doctrine within certain varieties of Christianity is something that requires explanation rather than defence, e.g. as an extrapolation of miserable experiences of this life, or of the miserable experience of death itself.
(ii) What about keeping hell as still a possibility for everyone and/or a likelihood in certain extreme cases? A more 'moderate' variety of doctrine. Is this reconcilable with the existence of an all powerful and all good God? Like other evils, Hell can't exist as a factual possibility in the universe of such a God except for the sake of a greater good.
One of Hick's arguments against the eternity of hell is that eternal suffering is necessarily pointless and absurd.
True enough, admits the tradition, such suffering is in no way redemptive and does nothing to help the sufferer in either short, medium or long term; but, says some parts of the tradition, the suffering still has a point in so far as it proclaims the divinity of the one true God which they have denied and the correctness of the order of the universe which they have offended against. And it is also necessary in order to affirm the seriousness of our moral endeavours. And it may also be necessary to pay tribute to the victims. :God is in no sense the cause of the sinfulness of those who are in hell. God wills the punishment of these persons. But even this is willed only in an indirect way: God wills his own divinity and he wills the order of creation and the seriousness of moral endeavour and also the dignity of the victims, that is, he wills that which the damned have come into collision with through their own fault. Implied in this very positive willing of God is the will that unrepentant sinners be made aware that they have deprived themselves of their own greatest good and also that creation manifest itself as hostile to the sinner, etc.
How well does this argument stand up to criticism? Perhaps not all that well:
1) the idea that God has such low self-esteem as to need to 'proclaim the divinity' in the face of the sins of the petty creatures seems an atrocious idea. We don't even think this way about our fellow human beings. It is an indication of insecurity to worry about such things. Cf. Hume's Dialogues, Part XII, p. 226 of Kemp Smith edition. In any case, God's glory would be better served if there were an ultimate triumph in which God would be all in all.
2) an eternal hell is not required to protect the seriousness of moral endeavour, any more than everlasting punishment is required to protect the seriousness of the civil or criminal law. We may even improve the protection by abolishing the eternity, by making it more imaginable.
3) Similarly with respect to paying tribute to the victims: eternal suffering is not necessary, and if they were Christian would not be wanted by the victims themselves. No easy reconciliation, but reconciliation possible nonetheless.
4) The idea of 'protecting the order of the universe' is very strange, to say the least.
(iii) It could be that, at the moment of death, given the nature of human beings as body-persons or something like that, one's basic orientation for or against God-neighbour-created world is fixed. This could be so, but should we assume it? Compare the religious traditions which believe in some form of re-incarnation. Also the Catholic and Orthodox doctrines of purgatory, according to which growth is still possible after death, though this is not supposed to change the basic orientation. But would we make a fuss about this basic orientation business if we didn't already believe in hell? I reckon we just don't know. It may be a bit of a double edged sword in any case: in the absence of other reasons for an eternal hell, the theist could be left with a universe in which there did exist an absolutely pointless evil of a rather extreme variety, an evil which did not exist for the sake of a greater good.
(iv) A further possibility is that of John Scotus Eriugena and others, that in fact we all go to the same 'place' after death, but that some enjoy it more than others. People who get their thrills out of being nasty to other people, for example, will be largely 'thrill-less', in so far as God will be all in all and their efforts to hurt will all be frustrated. Even here, however, one might ask whether God would want such a state of affairs, even if hardly God's fault, to go on for all eternity.
(v) One thing that probably does have to be preserved: that the love of the creature is never forced, we don't have to say yes. According to Hick, cf. above, though logically possible it is extremely unlikely that we could persist in such stubbornness for all time. But of course no individual can actually rely on this latter: it is possible for us to persist in stubbornness, we don't have to say yes, we don't have to be taken up in love, we don't have to admit that we are really worth while after all. We might even blame God for our own stubbornness, blame God for 'putting us in hell for all eternity', whereas it really is just us continuing to say no. We blame the person we are rejecting for our rejecting, like we often do in this life, which only makes the reconciliation all the more difficult. But there is no reason for thinking that God gives up. This may be all we are absolutely committed to, in our 'belief' in hell??
Conclusion: With this last proviso, I tend to agree with Hick, that a populated everlasting hell provides an insuperable obstacle to Christian theism.
Return now to Philosophy of Religion,
or go to "God and Evil in Process Relational Thought".