God and the Problem of Evil

Let me lay my motivational cards on the table and begin by explaining why I believe "The Problem of Evil" is relevant in our modern world. Many of the problem's early proponents were motivated by a desire to call attention to an apparent fundamental inconsistency in Christian thought. They attacked the Christian tradition by claiming that the notion of God proposed by Christians could not allow horrible evil to exist, and thus, argued that there must be no God (or at least not a Christian one). I think that this is a flawed approach to the problem of evil. If the only purpose of the study of this problem is to uncover an inconsistency in Christian thought, we might save ourselves the time and consider obvious and glaring inconsistencies in the Bible, such as the commandment "Thou Shalt Not Kill," and the simultaneous Old Testament style of justice known as "An eye for an eye." Additionally, there are many reasons why we cannot use the problem of evil to convince Christians, Jews, or Muslims that because the problem of evil provides a serious challenge to their beliefs, they ought to reject them.

In the first place, careful consideration of the problem of evil often does not motivate most people's belief in God. They might find arguments for the existence of God compelling enough to render even the most troubling implications of the problem of evil irrelevant in their minds. Or maybe their belief in God doesn't stem from reason at all, but from a deep abiding faith. To those people, no matter how adroit my arguments for or against the theist position are, they will have little impact on the feelings/beliefs that motivate their faith. Secondly, most Christians that I know, when posed with articulate challenges to the theist conception of God, admit that they don't endorse that view at all. For them, the problem of evil doesn't even exist since they're willing to give up one or more of the core beliefs that lie at the center of theism. Finally, I have addressed every theist argument I have come across (and to the best of my knowledge, refuted them all). However, I am not sufficiently conceited to assert that there cannot in principle be a justification for the existence of evil. I merely want to suggest that none of the theist arguments I've heard are satisfactory.

Instead of trying to convince the faithful that they are right or wrong, I suggest that the problem of evil has a more important dimension for us to consider. Instead of seeking to prove or disprove the existence of God to his believers (or her believers if the writers of the film Dogma are correct) on logical grounds, those of us who have lost our faith may find, in considering this problem, a rational grounds for our rejection of faith.

II. What is "the problem of evil"?

Philosopher J.L. Mackie in his oft-quoted, "Evil and Omnipotence" provides perhaps the most coherent explication of the problem. He writes, "In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil still exists" (Rowe 78). While this formulation seems simple, it is important to mention that each of the properties granted to the theist are under consideration. Many, for instance, challenge God's omnipotence with questions like "Can God create a rock so large he cannot lift it?" and "Can God make a triangle with four sides?" Now that I've explicated the pernicious nature of the claims that we grant to the theist, we can consider how the problem of evil emerges. In God and Evil, Michael Peterson sets forth the argument as follows (18):

While the first four propositions may be simultaneously entertained sans contradiction, the fifth conflicts with the preceding three properties of God (2-4). The challenge to theism is to explain how God can be omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, and yet still allow evil to exist.

II. The easy answer (and its refutation)

At first glance it appears that the theist has at his disposal an initially plausible defence. Maybe God allows evil to exist because it is necessary for some greater good. This contention is best illustrated through an example, for which I am indebted to Nelson Pike in his essay, "Hume on Evil" (Rowe 59). Consider a parent forcing a child to take particularly bad-tasting medicine, or to have some painful surgery. Viewed from the child's perspective, his parent's action appears to be a heinous evil. But in reality, the parent is administering the medicine/surgery for the child's interest. The child is ignorant of the parent's real reason for forcing him to undergo the temporary pain, and so the child finds his treatment unjust, when in reality, it is not.

So perhaps we can extend the metaphor of the child's perception of his parent's action to God and our perception of his creation of evil. This analogy has a deal of intuitive support. Even the esteemed anti-theist William L. Rowe acknowledges this analogy. He writes (129), "For we cannot deny that some good the child's mind cannot even conceive may justify the parents in permitting the child to suffer. And by analogy, won't the same be true of God in relation to us as his children?" And yet Rowe concurs with me that this analogy fails for a number of reasons.

First, while we may grant the necessity of evil in producing some goods, there are many evils that do not seem to conduce towards any good, let alone a good substantial enough to counter-balance the evil. Take for instance the Holocaust. In Rowe's words (130), "Can we seriously think that an infinitely powerful, all-knowing deity was powerless to prevent the horrors of Auschwitz?" Let's be clear--the argument that Rowe and I offer is not a knock-down argument against the theist claim here (that all evils can be explained away as they might conduce towards a greater good that we can't conceive of). Instead, Rowe and I ask whether or not it is a reasonable claim. Sure it's possible that the brutal rape of children could conceivably serve to promote a greater good, but it doesn't seem likely. My mother had a great sense of assessing the plausibility of arguments like the above theist claim. In high school, when I became interested in debate, I saw many different ways to use my newly developed rhetorical talents to explain away my daily misdeeds. Once, when she started up the car and noticed that the gas tank was half empty (after I drove it), she questioned me about how this state of affairs came about. I would offer explanations such as "Perhaps in the night our neighbours stole silently over our fence, stealthily broke into the garage, and siphoned out fuel from our car?" or "Perhaps our gas tank is host to a wormhole to another Universe through which the fuel in the car disappeared." She would always grant that while those explanations were possible, they simply weren't plausible. Like me in my sophomoric years, someone who offers a defence against this attack won't be appealing to reason, but instead will turn to faith or wilful self-deception.

Additionally, the analogy is a bad one for the theist to forward since there is a fundamental distinction between the good parent and the good God. Rowe argues (130-31):

The contention here is that when a parent allows a child to suffer, he makes a conspicuous effort, if not to explain why he is allowing this suffering to occur, then at least to assure the child that he still loves him. Like Rowe, I doubt very much if the victims of Auschwitz felt any comfort from God at all. Rather, I suggest that they felt abandoned and found themselves asking God why he would permit this atrocity to happen. If God was a parent to the victims of the Holocaust, then he was at minimum a cold-hearted and criminally negligent one.

Again, as in our former contention, the theist may reply that God may have a good reason for not reassuring us of his love. He is right. Technically, Rowe and I haven't proved that it is impossible for a parent to permit a child to suffer and not reassure it that we have its own best interests in mind. But at this point, the theist argument, at least to me, smacks of deceit. Let's reconsider what the theist wants us to believe. He wants us to suspend reason and take on blind faith the fact that God lets events like the violent rape of children and the Holocaust occur because they make it possible for some greater good (which he will neither show us nor even admit that it is possible for us to know of) to come about. At this point, it must be recognised that the theist isn't engaging in honest philosophical thought because his defence here isn't grounded in reason and reasonableness, but rather on faith and the barest sense of possibility.

III. The necessity of evil

The theist has a second ostensibly plausible defence to employ. He can argue that evil exists as a necessary counterpart to good. I will call this the "Bulgakov Defence" in honour of Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and his development of this contention in his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. The Devil (Woland), when confronted by a pseudo-angelic figure (Levi Matvei) about why he is evil asks (305), "But would you kindly ponder this question: what would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?" The argument here is that good and evil are relative terms, and without evil, the notion of goodness is incoherent.

First of all, let's realise that it is very dangerous for a theist to speak of good and evil as relative terms. They must simultaneously speak of God as perfectly good and of goodness as relative. If God is merely relatively good, in comparison to everything else, then this clashes with the idea of "perfectly good" in the absolute sense in which theists use the word. One may object that cohabitation of God's "goodness as perfection" and the idea of goodness as relative are fundamentally contradictory--and they are justified in this belief. But let's grant the theists yet another point and consider other objections.

One very simple way we can object to this defence is to suggest that it puts a limit on God's power. If God couldn't help but create evil along with good, then God is not really omnipotent. I spoke briefly in my introduction to how the problem of evil emerges about the legitimacy of allowing theists to limit God's power (since it would violate the omnipotent criterion). Again, the anti-theist has no obligation to grant this revision to the theist--he can simply stand his ground and suggest that if God is bound by the rules of logic and reason, then he is clearly not omnipotent .

Finally, we can object that even if evil is necessary for goodness, evil is not necessary to the enormous extent with which we find the world permeated. Consider other relative properties such as tallness . In order to posit that something is 'tall,' the only necessary state of affairs that must exist is that there is at least one thing that is not tall. Even if there was only one short thing in the world, that would suffice as a contrast to make the idea of tallness coherent. So if theists want to claim that goodness is like other common properties such as tallness (a move which I've already shown results in a fundamental contradiction), this only justifies them in claiming that a little bit of evil is necessary to exist. I think most of us would be willing to tolerate minor pains (headaches, sore throats, stubbed toes) in order that goodness can exist. And that's all that's required in order to have goodness as a property. But that's not how the world is. We have genocide, rape, and painful terminal illness to live with. Evils of this magnitude are simply not necessary in order to provide a counterpart to goodness.

Let's evaluate how this argument works for the theist. If he proposes it, he introduces a qualification of the term "omnipotent" that many theists will reject as invalid (due to the "Paradox of Omnipotence"). Second, if he forwards this argument he reduces God's goodness to a relative property--a move which is unacceptable to most, if not all theists. Finally, after all his hard work defending against the first two objections, he finds that the argument gains him almost nothing. He manages to justify minor evils (just enough to make the term good coherent), but still cannot explain gratuitous evils (which are the very evils to which the anti-theist is opposed to in the first place). So while this argument seemed initially plausible, after some consideration we see that using it entails making claims unacceptable to most theists for no relevant gain.

IV. Anselm, Leibniz, perfect worlds, and existence as a predicate

Leibniz was likely led to his "perfect world" argument from St. Anselm's "proof" for the existence of God. Anselm argues that God is a being which has every perfection. (This is true as a matter of definition.) Existence is a perfection. Hence God exists. From this, it is logical to see how Leibniz would build off of this proof to offer the following defense against the challenge posed by the "problem of evil." Leibniz argues that since God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect, the world he created MUST be the best of all possible worlds since a perfect creator must necessarily create a perfect world. Let's briefly discuss Anselm's proof first. To begin with, if Leibniz were to make this argument in a modern philosophy department (especially one with particular strength in the Philosophy of Language), he would find that his assumption that existence is a first-level predicate would be denied . Aside from this quite technical analytic disproof of Anselm's contention, consider just how silly this idea is. Imagine trying to sort through the existent and non-existent shirts in your closet.

While this essay does not attempt to answer all arguments for the existence of God, I am obliged by the nature of this argument to address a classical proof of God's existence. Anselm's "proof" that God exists makes another misstep--why should we believe that for any object x, there is a perfect version of x that exists? While we can talk coherently about the perfection of certain things (like mathematical proofs or circles), there's no reason to think that all things have perfect versions. What would a perfect island look like? The fact that some oranges are better than others doesn't entail that there is a perfect orange.

Let's consider how Leibniz's "perfect world" argument works. Leibniz says that if God exists, he must be omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect (all by definition). Then, on whatever grounds you want to believe , Leibniz starts with the assumption that God exists. From that he concludes that since God exists, then any world that he created must reflect his omnipotence, omniscience, and perfection, since a perfect creator couldn't create an inferior world. Now, in order to refute Leibniz, all we have to do is work backwards. I'm sure that we all agree that we can imagine a better world. Whether the improvement you suggest is that maybe, just maybe, we could have a world without the rape of children or that maybe the world would have been better without the Holocaust, we all agree that we can imagine a better world. Thus working backwards, since our world is not perfect, it couldn't have been created by a perfect creator, and hence, God is either not perfect, or he doesn't exist at all. It seems to me that Liebniz's argument is self-refuting--the conclusion Leibniz wants you to reach (that this world is perfect) is patently false.

V. The free-will defence

Most contemporary writers on the problem of evil agree that this is the theist's strongest argument. It claims that evil came about as a result of God granting man free will. With this move, they acknowledge that there may be more evil in the world than good, yet still absolve God of responsibility for this state of affairs by pinning the blame squarely on man. In all honesty, I think that this is one of the worst arguments the theist can employ.

First, the anti-theist can argue that God has it within his power to create a world in which men have free will but are simply not tempted by evils (have no desire for gratuitous sexual activity--lust, excessive eating--gluttony, extreme desire for material wealth--greed, etc.). It is entirely possible to consider men so constituted--in fact, the Catholic Church (or at least its priesthood) claims to be entirely constituted of such individuals. So it wasn't necessary that men be tempted so easily by so many evils. I find it hard to believe that God thought it better to create a world populated by child-molesters, rapists, murderers, and thieves than to create a world of saints.

Second, this argument trades on the fact that God created man with the capacity for both good and evil. But unlike men who have no future sight, part of God's omniscience is his foreknowledge. Classical theists claim that before we are born, God knows exactly what we will do throughout our lives . Thus, unlike men who create something and are genuinely unsure of how their creation will act, God knows exactly how each of us will act (if he is omniscient). Thus, we cannot exculpate God on these grounds. He was not ignorant of the consequences of his actions like mere mortal creators, but rather knew the outcome of his creation before he even created it! If a theist wants to claim that God does not have this foresight, he must give up the criteria of omniscience. Mackie concurs: "And since God is omniscient, and since his creation of things is total, he both determines and foresees the ways in which his creatures will act" (Rowe 89).

Third, the idea of God both giving man free will and being the ultimate creator of the Universe are fundamentally at odds. Mackie refers to this as the "Paradox of Sovereignty." If God is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of the Universe, then we cannot say that he gave man free will, for in so doing, he would have to give up his omnipotence--because if man has free will in any real sense God cannot step in and make man act differently than he chose (Rowe 89).

Finally, but perhaps most significantly, is the limited scope of the Free Will Defence. The Free Will Defence is designed to explain the existence of human evil, such as murder. It provides no defence whatsoever against natural evil. Natural evils are evils that come about without the influence of human agency. Peterson explains the distinction between the two as follows: "Alvin Platinga writes that 'we must distinguish between moral evil and natural evil. The former is evil which results from free human activity; natural is any other kind of evil'" (Peterson 73). Rowe provides the following example of a natural evil: "A helpless fawn is trapped in a forest fire and suffers horribly for days before dying" (Peterson 73). The Free Will Defence cannot account for instances of natural evil, so even if it were viable (and we've shown that it isn't), it doesn't get the theist out of trouble.

VI. The fallacy of defence

A macroscopic view of the debate about the problem of evil yields the following observation: the theist arguments end up either substantially modifying one of the three main tenets of theism or appeal to faith instead of reason in order to avoid the anti-theist arguments.

The theist can consistently hold 1-4, but the addition of 5 results in an inconsistency. In order to add the fifth, at least one of 2-4 must be abandoned or substantially modified. J.L. Mackie reaches the same conclusion about the theist position:

In the case of the first theist answer (that evil may be necessary as a means to good) the theist must appeal to faith in order to convince us that God allows evil to exist as a means to produce a greater good. He cannot show us any good that can counter-balance the heinous evils that plague our existence. The theist then has the gall to tell us that he doesn't even have to maintain that this elusive good probably exists, but only to suggest that it is possible (in the barest sense of the term) for it to exist. At its best for the theist, this argument is impossibly inconclusive. Anti-theists demand that he show us some good or at absolute minimum suggest that it is probable that some good exists. The theist cannot. However, since the anti-theist hasn't shown that this good cannot exist, the theist is not bound to concede the argument. But the anti-theist can ask us to judge based on our personal experiences whether or not it is likely that there exists some good that justifies not just minor evils (like headaches), but heinous, gratuitous evils, such as the Holocaust or the recently uncovered rape rooms in Baghdad.

In the case of the second theist argument, that evil exists as a necessary counterpart to good, the theist either radically redefines God's property of goodness from an absolute property "infinite and immeasurable in being and perfection; having no attributes in common with other things" to a relative property, or modifies God's property of omnipotence. (If God is truly omnipotent, he cannot be bound by the rules of logic and hence didn't have to create both good and evil.) Finally, the famed Free Will Defence requires the theist forsake either God's omniscience or his omnipotence. The theist must forsake God's omniscience if he wants to exonerate him on grounds that he didn't know whether or not man would do good or evil. Or, the theist can give up God's omnipotence if he wants to give man free will--for if men are free to act as they choose without the possibility of divine intervention, then God cannot be omnipotent (free to act in any way he chooses).

Based on these considerations, it is hard to understand how one can reasonably believe in God in light of the existence of glaring and gratuitous evils. Religious people can still avoid all of these arguments by claiming that their faith in God is not motivated by reason alone, but rather by their faith in God. And that's fine. But at the same time, atheists can claim, if nothing else, that they are justified in their atheism.

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. Translated by Mirra Ginsberg. New York: Grove Press, 1995.

Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989. (Originally 1779.)

Knight, K. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Volume II. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 2003.

Lamont, John. St. Andrews University Lecture. St. Andrews, Scotland (U.K.): St. Andrews University, 2005. (Transcript available upon request.)

Peterson, Michael. God and Evil : An Introduction to the Issues. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998.

Pickett, Joseph P., et al. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 4th Edition. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.

Rowe, William L. God and the Problem of Evil. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.