Evil, Suffering, and the Justice of God
In early 1997, I wandered briefly through alt.christnet and happened to notice a post by a gentleman whom I'll just call Robert (he has requested that I not use his full name in this age of personal google searches). Robert had had an extremely negative experience with “Christianity,” and had written a post about it. The responses he received from Christians...well, despite being a conservative Christian myself, I found myself entirely in sympathy with Robert and out of sympathy with the Christians. So I began to write out an answer for Robert.
But Robert had asked some very fundamental questions, questions that could not be disposed of with trite responses. (Which is, of course, the reason the pat answers of his Christian correspondents had been so inadequate as to be insulting.) I didn’t finish that first day, so I saved my start. It was several days before I could return to the post, and when I did, I still didn’t finish. And so it went: the “post” grew and grew until it had consumed two months and fifty pages, and when finally I returned to the newsgroup, Robert had gone.
I have not been able to locate him since. For a long time, I continued to hope that I would track him down someday with a Web search engine or something. After almost eight years, though, even if I were to track him down, I assume he’s long since moved past interest in the questions that concerned him all those years ago.
A few days ago, though, a commenter over at All Things Beautiful mentioned that his fianceé was troubled by the suffering of a child who was dying from leukemia, and that he hadn’t known what to say. Now, in Robert’s post he leans on two principal objections to Christianity, one of which is the problem of evil (in both major forms of the argument, viz. that God allows evil, and that God commits evil). So I thought I’d pull out the part of my response that had to do with theodicy (that is, the justice – or lack thereof – of God) and post it. But in order for that response to make sense, you need to know what I was responding to. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, here after an eight-year time-lag is today’s guest blogger, Robert. And if anybody knows the dude, I’d sure like to hear from him.
My response will follow in a separate series of posts.
By the way, one important caveat: I will at times sound like I am accusing Robert of various bad attitudes. I do not mean to say anything at all about his actual emotions or attitudes. When I say that a certain theological position entails rampant egomania, for example, and it happens to be a position he holds, I'm not trying to call him an egomaniac. I'm saying that he probably has not thought out all the logical consequences of his position, for if he had, and he acknowledged those consequences, and he still insisted on holding his position, then he would be an raving egomaniac. But of course all of us hold all sorts of opinions that we haven't fully worked out. If I really thought he a close-minded egomaniac, I wouldn't have gone to all this trouble on what would have been, ex hypothesi a colossal waste of time.
1. A Deist’s Take on Christianity (by Robert).
2. Introduction to Theodicy -- How Can God Exist When the World Is Such a Crappy Place? -- how the question of “Why did X (some bad thing) happen?” could really be one of several different questions, each requiring a different answer.
3. Where Does God Get Off Being Such a Jerk? -- meditations on the meaning of the book of Job.
4a. Theodicy Proper: How Can Evil and Suffering Be Reconciled with the Existence of a Loving and Omnipotent God? -- mostly philosophy and apologetics
4b. Theodicy and Eternal Suffering: Hell and Predestination -- more philosophy and apologetics
4c. Theodicy and Temporal Suffering -- yet more philosophy and apologetics.
4d. Final Conclusions in re Theodicy Proper -- wrapping up most of the philosophy and apologetics
5. Other Questions about Why Bad Things Happen -- more speculative and meditative, drifting away from apologetics and into musings about God and His character purposes and the underlying principles He has built into our world. Non-Christians will probably find things to be outraged about herein, but then if a non-Christian has yet to be outraged by Christianity, he probably doesn’t know much about it yet.
posted by Ken Pierce @ 9:09 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
The old argument of Epicurus comes to mind:
If God is willing to prevent evil but not able, he is not omnipotent.
If he is able but not willing, he is not omnibenevolent.
If he is both willing and able, then where does evil come from?
If he is neither willing nor able, then he isn't God.
The third proposition, as you'll have noticed, is the weak spot.
It's actually the second that causes the argument to fail, I'd say. And the first is questionable because of lack of clarity in the definition of the terms.
Really, the whole argument pretty much blows. [grinning]
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Robert,
I can't tell you how delighted I am to hear from you.
I think I actually wrote more pages dealing with your historical propositions about how Christianity comes from other religions, than I did about theodicy; but I didn't post that part because it's not of general interest. That is, practically everybody wrestles with the problems of theodicy at some point in their journey; but only persons who aspire to membership in the intelligentsia go off in the direction of comparative history of religion. (Since I went to Princeton I am certainly included in the class of "persons who aspire to membership in the intelligentsia" and therefore either you should consider that not to be meant as an insult, or you should consider me to have insulted myself as much as you.)
There's another reason I didn't post the latter half of my response. We have both, obviously, spent fifteen or twenty years moving on from when you wrote your post and I wrote my response. And part of my own movement has been away from apologetics and away from dealing with religious "scholarship." Fifteen years ago I was much more up to date on the recent stuff than I am now, and so there are things I said confidently back then, that today I would be hard pressed to defend -- in much the same way that fifteen years ago I could have solved the Black-Scholes differential equation and today I wouldn't even try.
Now, on the political point you tossed in: I think you and your fellow Democrats are making a disastrous mistake if you think of these elections as being a repudiation of the Bush administration. The results of the election are much more a repudiation of the Republican Congress -- whose approval ratings, don't forget, were abysmally lower than Dubya's. I think you guys find it congenial to think that the American public has come around to your view of Bush and the Iraq War. But if the Republican Congress had spent the last two years behaving the way the Republican base expects a Republican Congress to behave, you wouldn't have seen the bloodbath you saw.
Because everything is about Bush for you guys, you make everything about Bush, and that causes you to misinterpret other people's reasons for acting as they do. But the Republican base was sending a major message to the Republican Congress -- not to Dubya, but to the Republican Congress -- and that message was not, "You guys should start acting like Democrats because the American people has decided that Democrats are right about the war." The message was, "If you guys don't stop acting like Democrats and start acting like Republicans then we aren't going to bother electing you."
Nancy Pelosi's support of Jack Murtha is, I think, a clear sign that Democratic Congressional leadership is interpreting the election results the same way you are. But you need to remember this:
1. You won two House seats by keeping Republicans off the ballot entirely in district where you couldn't possibly have won if a viable Republican candidate had been allowed onto the ballot; you won a number of other seats due to scandals that had everything to do with Republicans in Congressional or state offices and nothing at all to do with Dubya.
2. In a number of other cases you elected Democrats only by running DINO's like Heath Schuler.
3. Several Republican Senators who fell, fell predominantly because they were on the wrong side of the spending issue -- that is, because the Republican base considered them to be acting too much like Democrats, not because they were opposed to the war.
4. In the one race that was clearly, unambiguously, a single-issue referendum, a race in which the single issue was the war on Iraq and the sitting Congressman's support of Bush's Iraq policies, Joe Lieberman absolutely spanked the anti-Bush candidate.
If you draw from these elections the conclusion that the American people as a whole have rejected Bush's foreign policy leadership and embraced the John Kerry/Nancy Pelosi/Jack Murtha attitudes toward foreign policy, then you are drawing a disastrously false conclusion. Most of the Republicans I know who were in the mood to throw the bastards out, did so in complete confidence that a Pelosi-led House would draw all the wrong conclusions and would proceed to spend two years ensuring that the 2008 elections would be a Republican landslide at every level. What with Pelosi so very publicly pushing to get Jack Murtha into leadership in the House, I expect those friends are leaning back in their chairs and saying smugly, "I told you so."
Just a friendly word of caution there, from somebody who is no fan either of Bush or of the Republican Congress, but who also is not a Democrat and not blinded by Bush-hatred.
Again, I'm just delighted to hear from you. It sounds like the last fifteen years have been good to you, and I'm very pleased to hear it.
I'll think about posting the rest of that old response.
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