Theodicy Proper: How Can Evil and Suffering Be Reconciled with the Existence of a Loving and Omnipotent God?

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 third 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,

Okay, so much for the question, "Why is God such a jerk?" Now we can look at the philosophical question, "How can evil's existence be reconciled with a loving and omnipotent God?" Let me refresh our memory by restating Crappy World: "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." Where does this argument go wrong? ...continue reading...

First of all, the argument turns on one's definition of the term "good." If by "good" you mean, "in accordance with my personal taste," then you can disprove the existence of God either from the existence of the Holocaust (if you are Robert) or from the existence of Jews (if you are Adolph Hitler). Logically the arguments are equally valid — which is to say, not valid at all. (And don't complain that my example is offensive, or ridiculous, or frivolous. After I first wrote this paragraph I ran across a quote from a letter written by Eva Braun from Hitler's bunker during the siege of Berlin. Ms. Braun expresses her theodical concerns thusly: "I can't understand how all this can happen. It's enough to make one lose one's faith in God!" Honest, I hadn't read that when I picked Hitler complaining about Jews as my example of a logically equivalent but obviously ridiculous Crappy Worlder.)

If, on the other hand, by good you mean, "in accordance with some objective standard," then where do you derive that standard? I think that you, like most people, have a deeply felt conviction that Hitler was evil. I think you believe in your heart that, "Hitler was evil," means something more real and objective than, "Hitler's kind of behavior is not my style." But either that conviction is a genuine insight into a transcendent reality, or else it is an illusion, a survivally-useful glorification of the herd instinct or whatever. If the latter, then there's no particular reason that God couldn't exist and be what your preconceptions label evil, nor — however shocking it may seem — any rational reason to condemn a person who worships that "evil" God (thinking, perhaps, that such worship increases his chances of survival). If the former, then something like God exists despite the presence of evil, and we have to face the possibility that we don't understand what's going on — in other words, that in some way beyond our imaginings God can be good and yet allow evil.

In short, Crappy World, which is meant to disprove the existence of God, actually presupposes the existence of a transcendent standard of Good, an adequate ground of which can only be found in something, or someone, like God.

But of course you may argue that this Ground of Good may be like the traditional image of God in that it is moral, and yet unlike the traditional God in that it is neither omniscient nor all-powerful. In fact I think that's almost certainly exactly what you would argue, given your personal brand of Deism. And there would be nothing wrong with that argument...well, there would, but the philosophy gets abstruse and, in the context of your present views, pretty unconvincing. So at this point we should turn to the second logical fallacy in Crappy World.

The second problem is that the use of the term "evil" is ambiguous. What it almost always means is not really "evil," but suffering.

You may complain that you are actually talking about evil, as for example when you adduce the behavior of Hitler. From reading your examples, however, I think (could be wrong, of course) that if you stop and look at your feelings, you'll realize that what bothers you the most isn't that Hitler was evil, but that he was able to inflict so much suffering on other people.

Imagine that God has imposed different rules. Hitler starts out just as evil as ever. But this time God snatches him up before he does any harm and says, "Look here, you, if you want to be good I'll help you be good, but if you insist on being evil then I'll put you someplace where you can't hurt anyone else." And let's imagine that Hitler then says, "Go *@# yourself, God, I'm never going to change," and God puts him in permanent quarantine so that nobody else will have to deal with him. Now in that scenario, would you still feel deep moral outrage? Most people would not, even though Hitler, and therefore evil, would still exist. For most people are upset not by evil, but by suffering.

If you would still complain even in that scenario, then you have only two options. First, you could think that God has no business giving people free will. You could be saying, "Look, even if the only person hurt by the evil were the person who chooses evil, that still would outweigh any good that could come from free will." If so, well, surely you can see that CKIAS is in full bloom here. Second, you could believe that Hitler wouldn't really have a free choice. In that case, once again you are complaining not about evil, but about suffering — because you are complaining that Hitler has suffered the fate of being evil, not chosen it. You are casting Hitler in the role of victim, not agent.

There is one argument which I will turn aside to mention, not because you use it, but because as sure as I leave it out, somebody is bound to post it. It is an ontological argument that runs roughly, "God is the source of everything that exists. Evil exists. Therefore God is the source of evil, and therefore He is not purely good." I'm not going to waste much time on this, for several reasons. First, it's not your argument. Second, people who are sophisticated enough to use the argument are usually sophisticated enough to know what the fallacy in it is (in a word, equivocation in the term "source" resulting in a non sequitur in the last sentence). Third, you can look up the refutation yourself in St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 64. And fourth, because the only way you can make the argument even appear to work is to deny the reality of free will — which brings us right back to where we were at the end of the last paragraph.

Unless, then, you are staking a claim to omniscience yourself, your complaint is really not with evil, but with undeserved suffering. Let's restate the argument accordingly. "If God were all-powerful, He could keep undeserved suffering from happening; if He were good, He would keep undeserved suffering from happening. But people suffer undeservedly. Therefore God is either impotent or evil." Isn't that what you're really saying?

But this variant of Crappy World (call it Painful World, "Suffering Exists, etc.") is hopeless, too. Let's see why.

The first thing to do when we look at suffering is to distinguish between temporal and eternal suffering. Most people are able to see pretty easily that an infinite God could take any amount of finite suffering and make up for it by greater blessing (since He could bless infinitely). Eternal suffering poses a greater problem, since it will by definition never be "made up for" by subsequent blessing. So we have to treat the two separately. We'll take eternal suffering first.