Introduction to Theodicy -- How Can God Exist When the World Is Such a Crappy Place?

Back in 1997, 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) posted on alt.christnet a post rejecting Christianity in part because of the existence of evil and suffering. This is the first in a series of posts that constitute my response to some of his objections. You can use this table-of-contents post to read Robert’s original post and then each of my response posts, in the appropriate order.

Robert,

The standard argument against God from evil is, "If God were all-powerful, He could keep evil from happening; if He were good, He would keep evil from happening. But evil happens. Therefore God is either impotent or evil or nonexistent." In short, "Evil Exists, So God Doesn't," an argument which I will herein refer to affectionately as the “Crappy World” argument. ...continue reading...

Usually Crappy World is a logical expression of a deep, prelogical conviction — that is, the contradiction is more a fact one perceives than a conclusion one argues to. I don't want to make unwarranted assumptions, and this may not be so in your case, but if it isn't you will be unusual. Do you not feel that the contradiction is stark and plain as the nose on your face, and that the only way anyone would really need arguments is if he wanted to avoid the obvious conclusion that God doesn't exist (in the Christian sense)? Do you feel that no matter what I say, no matter how many big words and complicated arguments I use, I'll just be clouding the issue, because there's no way a loving God would put up with the sufferings of even a single innocent child? If not — if you already suspect that a solution exists that you just haven't figured out yet — then skip the next paragraph. But if when you examine yourself honestly you realize that your emotional response to any argument I put forward will be not, "I wonder if he's right," but, "Let's see how he's gonna try to wriggle out of it," then you are a dogmatist, and you do not really down deep in your heart believe that there's any chance you could be wrong. Until you do any argument is useless, and before we go on to argument I want to point something out.

Right off the bat it should give you pause to realize that you, who consider suffering so plainly irreconcilable with the existence of a just God, are no more subject to suffering than were the people who thought up the great religions in the first place. All the great religions of mankind arose before the invention of anesthetic. Nor is the evil that man wreaks upon man any worse that it ever has been, except in the number of victims. Genocide is an unspeakable symptom of the depravity of our time, for example. Yet it demonstrates not a new depth of evil, but merely a more technologically efficient implementation of the depths of evil to which any thinking man has always known humanity capable of falling. If you think that man's inhumanity to man is an invention of the twentieth century, you have not read...oh, as just one example, take the scene in Euripides's The Trojan Women in which Andromache's infant son is torn from her breast to be hurled to his death. In your view the fact of suffering bars thinking men from theism, yet thinking men at least as intimate with suffering as, if not more so than yourself, have been theists. Consider the war-shattered Italy of Dante and his years of undeserved exile and poverty and "going up and down upon another's stairs," and ask yourself how, if suffering is so plainly incompossible with God, the Divine Comedy ever came to be written. All this of course doesn't mean that the theists were right. But it should destroy your conviction that there's no way you could be wrong — if you suffer from such a conviction, which you may well not.

Now before we go any further we must see that Crappy World springs from the attempt to answer the question, "Why did this happen?", to which this argument replies, "Because there is no God, or at least no God like the one Christians believe in." Christianity has a different answer to this question, obviously. What is perhaps not obvious is that Christianity actually gives several different answers, because "Why did this happen?" hides several different questions.

When the philosophic skeptic asks, "Why did this happen?" he means, "How can this be reconciled with the concept of a loving and omnipotent God?" The theologian, however, means, "What are the principles that lie behind God's decision to allow such suffering?" A Christian in pain may in obedience be asking, "What does God want me to do about this?" On the other hand, that suffering Christian may in curiosity be asking, "What specific thing is God going to do in my life through this?" Last of all, when somebody who is angry with God asks, "Why did this happen?" he means, "Where does God get off being such a jerk?" Therefore the apparently simple question, "Why did this happen?" could actually be any one of at least five quite different questions, and only context can tell which one we mean.

It is generally recognized that the Bible devotes the entire book of Job to answering the question, "Why do good people suffer?" I think God knows what He's doing, and so I plan to start at the same place He did. To understand Job, however, we must realize that "Why did God let this happen to Job?" could be any one of those five different questions, and we have to figure out which one it is.

Now many people miss the point of Job entirely because they do not understand what question Job is meant to answer. I have forgotten the name of the Jewish author who, during the years after the Holocaust, proclaimed that Job actually won the debate between himself and God, on the grounds that God didn't give Job a real answer but instead bullied him into submission. This author completely missed the point of Job. For Job was not a philosopher sitting in a grove someplace saying, "There would appear to be a logical contradiction between the existence of a just and omnipotent God and the existence of suffering such as that exemplified in my personal experience; I detect no fallacy in the logical procession from the observed facts to the anti-theistic conclusion." No. Job was an angry man saying, "Where does God get off being such a jerk to me?"

With that question we begin.