NOTE PAGES FOR

EVIL, AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL.

The arguments for the existence of God which we have so far considered have all at times been presented as ‘Proofs’ that God exists; that they yield knowledge of God’s existence. Knowledge in this context can be defined as a true, justified belief. If we were to have knowledge that God exists it would have to be true that God actually does exist. But our belief that God exists would have to be justified: it would have to be based on the right sort of evidence. It is possible to have beliefs that are true, but unjustified. I may believe that this is Thursday because I have looked at what is written in a newspaper that just happened to come out on Thursday, when in fact I have looked at Thursday’s newspaper of a week ago. I have not acquired my true belief, that it is in fact Thursday in a reliable way since I could just as easily have picked up an old newspaper which would have convinced me it was Monday. So I did not really have knowledge although I may mistakenly have thought I had.All the arguments for the existence of God we have so far examined have been open to a number of objections. Whether these objections are sound or not is for you to decide. The Teleological and the Cosmological Arguments suggest that there are features of the world which lead the mind to that which goes beyond experience. The Ontological Argument highlights the logical problems in speaking about God as ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ and makes the important distinction between logical and factual necessity.But could there be knowledge - true, justified belief – that God does not exist? There is one very strong argument against the existence of a benevolent God: The Problem of Evil.

NATURAL EVIL AND MORAL EVIL.

Suffering and Evil create for religions both a challenge to which they can respond and also a problem about their beliefs. The challenge is how to respond to suffering and evil in a way that expresses love and compassion towards all who suffer. Religions do this in two ways:

1 To counter Natural suffering they promote compassion towards those in need, creating in various ways organizations, structures and rules to help develop concern for those who suffer. Rules about giving to those in need and about relieving those who suffer aiming to reduce, the natural consequences of human frailty.

2 To counter Moral Evil and human cruelty they promote moral principles. This may take the form of rules to deter followers from doing those things that are likely to inflict pain on others or spiritual exercises like prayer and meditation seeking to promote a view of life in which deliberate cruelty has no part aiming to reduce the potential for human cruelty and to minimize it.

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3 Luke 6:31-38. Here is a simple rule of thumb for behaviour: Ask yourself what you want people to do for you, then grab the initiative and do it for them; if you only love the lovable, do you expect a pat on the back? …I tell you love your enemies. Help and give without expecting a return, you’ll never regret it. Live out this God-created identity the way our Father lives towards us, generously and graciously even when we’re at our worst. Our Father is kind, you be kind. Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults unless you want the same treatment. Don’t condemn those who are down, that hardness can boomerang. Be easy on people, you’ll find it a lot easier. Give away your life, you’ll find life given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting is the way. Generosity begets generosity.

WHEN DOES THE PROBLEM ARISE?

In the major theistic religions the task of overcoming evil is something in which God is seen to be active, using human beings as his agents, but occasionally acting directly through providence and miracles. The problem of Evil emerges when the degree of evil is such that it threatens to overwhelm the whole concept of a loving God.

Low-level suffering is universal, a feature of fragile human life; it is terrible suffering and extreme evil that tends to raise the problem of evil for religions. At this time comes a switch in the structure of thinking from seeing God aiding and inspiring the challenge of overcoming suffering and of not being the deliberate author of that suffering, but working to alleviate it to seeing God as not taking his fair share of the task and separating himself from his human agents when as a potentially victorious agent he seems content to allow suffering and evil to continue. At this point there would seem to be only two options:

1 To abandon the concept of God as a separate or external agent.2 To try to understand why an omnipotent God should choose not to use his power to

eliminate suffering and evil, and why he as creator should allow evil and suffering to exist in the first place.

3 If the first option is taken, ‘God’ simply becomes a word that describes a source of inspiration for those who seek to overcome suffering – valuable but not omnipotent. If the second option is taken it gives rise to the Problem of Evil.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL.

There is suffering and evil in the world; sunamis and wars, the practice of torture, natural evils and moral evils that cause suffering. We should understand moral evil as meaning human evil, evil resulting from beings that can think, feel and act. Matthew 24:4-8: When reports come in of wars and rumoured wars, keep your head and don’t panic. This is routine history; this is no sign of the end. Nation will fight nation and ruler fight ruler, over and over. Famines and earthquakes will occur in various places. This is nothing to what is coming.

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The problem of evil is generated by the believer’s acceptance of the following propositions. In order to spell out the nature of the problem two further premises are usually added to 1, God is omnipotent, 2, God is perfectly good and 3, evil exists, and by combining A: Any good being eliminates evil as far as it can, &B: There are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do, with 1&2 we would get 4: God eliminates evil completely.The question now becomes whether or not A&B are necessary truths. No-one would argue about the necessity of B as it unfolds the meaning of omnipotent. The theist needs to show that A is not a necessary truth. It might be argued that a doctor allows his alcoholic patient to suffer withdrawal symptoms in order to cure the patient’s alcoholism. This implies that the toleration of evil leads to attainment of good. However, it could be argued that such conditions do not hold for an infinitely good and powerful God who could bring about the occurrence of this good without bringing about the evil. In answer to this the theist must claim that there is good that logically entails the occurrence of some evil and that it is better for the evil and the good to occur than for neither to occur. This does not limit God’s power. In a world without gratuitous, undeserved, destructive evils there would be no opportunity for true compassion, sympathy, unselfish kindness, and goodwill and these are the highest moral values.

TRADITIONAL APPROACHES.

The Augustinian Approach: There are two aspects to this approach and the first reflects the influence of Plato on Augustine’s thought. Plato argued that the world we experience is made up of imperfect and limited copies of the ideal eternal forms. Augustine argued that evil is not a separate force opposing the good, but is a lack of goodness, and he saw the world as a limited, imperfect place and suffering and evil reflect this implying that evil is not a separate reality, but merely an indication that the world has fallen short of its intended perfection. This begs a key question: Evil may be a lack of goodness, but why is there a lack of goodness? If God is all powerful, could he not have organized the world differently? Augustine answered this in terms of the origin of evil and suffering saying that evil entered the world through the fall of the angels, who, although made perfect, some received less grace than others and were able to fall. The fall was repeated in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve who as a result of their disobedience were cast out to face a world of hard labour and suffering. Natural Evil was a consequence of the fall of humankind; the result of sin and a punishment for sin. In this way he can show that evil is merely a lack of goodness and God is not ultimately responsible for creating something that is inherently evil.The Irenaean Approach: Does not deny that suffering and evil exist, nor that they are permitted to exist by God. It argues that God chose to allow these things to exist in the world in order to bring about a greater good – human freedom, and the ability of human beings to have a relationship with God. Human life is imperfect but having been made in the image of God, people should have the opportunity to grow and develop into what God intended them to be. As they encounter the sufferings of life, people have an opportunity to grow and to learn. Irenaeus asked: ‘How if we had no knowledge of the contrary, could we have had instruction in that which is good?’ Evil is a necessary feature of any world

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in which people could make moral choices and strive to be good. The world is a vale of soul-making; evil is necessary without which there can be no spiritual growth.

COMMENT ON AUGUSTINE.

So, even if Augustine’s second line of argument is accepted – that humankind is to blame and is suffering the consequences of sin, we return to the original problem of why, if God is omnipotent and all loving did he create in humankind the possibility of disobedience and the ‘fall’? Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologiae presents the issue in another rather stark way and his argument starts with the fact that God and evil are incompatible.For Augustine and Aquinas the way out of this dilemma is to say that evil exists only as a limitation of good, but does the Augustinian approach solve the problem of evil? Can the torture of an innocent child really be regarded as merely a lack of goodness in the torturer? Is there not a very definite act of evil in such situations?If evil is defined as a lack of goodness, it is equally possible to define goodness as a lack of evil. In a world created by a psychopath where nature and human nature forced forward only by means of suffering and death, would there not be a ‘Problem of Goodness’?

COMMENT ON IRENAEUS.

For Irenaeus, a belief in a life after death is important – giving people an opportunity to grow, but why should they bother to do so. They will be motivated only if presents hardships can be justified in terms of something better for which this life is a preparationAnd is it not possible to reinterpret Irenaeus’ approach in secular terms without belief in a life after death? This takes a pragmatic approach to evil and suffering. Even if the physical world is impersonal and our existence is fragile and limited we still struggle to make some personal sense of our lives and dealing with suffering and evil is an important part of that process.John 17: 8-11: I spelled out your character in detail to the men and women you gave me. They were yours in the first place then you gave them to me. And they have now done what you said. They know now beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything you gave me is firsthand from you. For the message you gave me I gave them and they took it and were convinced that I came from you. They believed that you sent me. I pray for them, I’m not praying for the God-rejecting world but for those you gave me for they are yours by right. Everything mine is yours, and yours mine and my life is on display in them for I’m no longer going to be visible in the world. They’ll continue in the world while I return to you. Holy Father guard them as they pursue this life, that you conferred as a gift through me, so they can be one heart and mind.

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THE FREE WILL DEFENCE.

By far the most important attempt at a solution to the Problem of Evil is the Free-Will Defence. It runs like this. Swinburne points out that for a moral choice to be real depravity is needed; in other words you need to want what is wrong and then decide to reject it. Swinbourne makes a distinction between the possibility of evil and the fact of evil, arguing that as a condition of the greater good, there has to be the possibility of moral evil, but not the actual evil itself. If we are free then it is up to us whether we choose to do evil, but for us to be moral there has to be that possibility. A being has free will if, given all other causal factors in the universe (genetic and environmental, physical and chemical) it nevertheless possesses the ability to choose more than one thing.

COMMENTS ON THE FREE WILL DEFENCE.

Two Basic Assumptions: 1. A world with free-will and the possibility of evil is preferable to a world of robot-like people who never perform evil actions.. 2. This assumption is that we do actually have free-will and not just an illusion of it.Free Will but no Evil: If God is omnipotent, then it is within his power to have created a world in which there was both free-will and yet no evil.God could intervene: Theists believe that God does intervene in the world primarily by performing miracles. If God intervenes sometimes why does he not intervene at times when evil is rampant to prevent such things as Holocausts or World Wars?Does not explain Natural Evil: The Free-Will Defence at best can only justify the existence of moral evil brought about directly by human beings. There is no connection between having free will and the existence of earthquakes, disease, volcanic eruptions except by accepting the doctrine of the Fall of Man that made human beings responsible for every form of evil in the world.John 10:14-18: I am the good shepherd. I know my own sheep and my own sheep know me. In the same way the Father knows me, and I know the Father. I put the sheep before myself, sacrificing myself if necessary. You need to know that I have other sheep in addition to those in this pen, I need to gather them too. They’ll also recognize my voice. Then it will be one flock, one shepherd. This is why the Father loves me because I freely lay down my life. And so I am free to take it up again. No one takes it from me. I lay it down of my own free will. I have the right to lay it down; I also have the right to take it up again. I received this authority personally from my Father.

DIVINE KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN FREEDOM.

It has been argued that if God is omniscient then he must know what we are going to do in advance of our doing it. The problem comes about through an alleged contradiction between the belief that God is omniscient and the claim that people can act freely. God knows that I will conduct a one man band at a certain time. Yet I freely choose to conduct

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a one man band at that certain time. So if God knows this will occur then it makes the occurrence inevitable. How then can I say that I freely chose to conduct a one man band at that certain time? There appears to be a contradiction.Ephesians 1:11: We have obtained an inheritance being predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.Romans 1:16: I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation for anyone who believes; to the Jew first and also to the Greek.However, it might be a mistake to understand God’s omniscience in a temporal sense. He surely knows things in a timeless way and not in terms of past, present, and future. God is aware of the totality of events in the history of the universe in a stable and unchanging way. Also, it might be claimed that God limits his own infallible foreknowledge in order to allow us freedom of action, but there are problems with this as it might be said to change a Christian’s understanding of the problem of salvation for all people. If this plan has been fixed for all eternity then it seems that God must know infallibly that it is going to work out.This traditional philosophical problem has been mischaracterized. Solutions have been sought to the question: Free Will or Determinism? Whereas the truly philosophical question is: Free Will and Determinism or Free Will or Determinism. Is it either/or or both/and?

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