Notes on the Problem of Evil

Qualified omnipotence is the more common view among theologians than unlimited omnipotence. This is because the God of Christianity is a logos-type God, unlike the Old Testament God or the gods of the ancient Greek and Roman pantheon. Those gods were unpredictable, irrational, unjust, and vindictive. If you were unlucky enough to incur the wrath of one of those gods, you were doomed to eternal suffering, even if you were a virtuous person. The logos God of the New Testament, by contrast, follows the rules of logic, and is thereby constrained. The universe is consistent (i.e., it follows rules, enabling it to be known by science) and the universe is ultimately morally fair: good is rewarded and evil is punished.

You’ve probably heard of the problem of evil (also known as the problem of suffering): if God loves us, as Christians say, and he is just and fair and all-knowing and omnipotent, then why is human life often so full of suffering? The suffering of innocent people, e.g., children, seems especially cruel. The God of Christianity knows that innocent children suffer. He's omnipotent, which means he could make the suffering go away. And he's supposedly a loving God (a loving father, according to popular imagery); what kind of loving father would allow his child to starve to death or die from some horrible disease? Some people, like J. L. Mackie, view the problem of evil as the most powerful argument for atheism. A famous literary statement of the problem of evil can be found in Feodor Dostoevsky's famous novel The Brothers Karamazov.

In Confessions, Chapter 5, Augustine states the problem: “Whence is evil? Or was there some evil matter of which He made and formed and ordered it, but left something in it which He did not convert into good? But why was this? Was He powerless to change the whole lump, so that no evil should remain in it, seeing that He is omnipotent? Lastly, why would He make anything at all of it, and not rather by the same omnipotency cause it not to be at all?”

Mackie puts it this way: the following three statements comprise an inconsistent set: they cannot all be simultaneously true:

Another common way to state the atheist argument that arises from the problem of evil and omnipotence is a reductio ad absurdum (indirect) proof. This version claims that absurd (i.e., contradictory) consequences follow from the supposition that there is an omnipotent and totally good God. Hence, that supposition cannot be true. If the supposition cannot be true, no such God can exist. Here's the indirect proof:

To prove: There is no God (“God” meaning a being who is both omnipotent and totally good).

As I have presented the argument, it may sound dry. But it carries a lot of emotional weight. Many people struggle with suffering – health problems, war, famine, losses of all kinds. Religious people often tell sufferers to have faith that God will take their suffering away. But I think sufferers want to know why they’re suffering to begin with. If God could have eliminated suffering, and he didn’t, then why didn’t he? And if he didn’t eliminate suffering, how can he be called good at all (let alone totally good); he seems to be just a sadist. This is a hard problem for believers as well as unbelievers; religious bookstores frequently have titles such as “Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen to Good People?” or “Why Did You Do This to Me, God?”.

Some people say the cause of evil is Satan, or the devil. Philosophers don’t usually consider this explanation as separate from the classic problem of evil because it seems to be the same problem in another form:

"Why doesn’t God just get rid of Satan once and for all? If he’s omnipotent, he can. If he’s omnibenevolent, he wants to. So why doesn’t he?"

Philosophical and theological responses to this are the same as for the classic problem of evil.

Now, you can make the problem of evil go away, but you have to deny key elements of Christian doctrine. In other words, the genuine solutions are unorthodox. “Orthodox” is an interesting words. Many of you know the word “orthodontia” because you’ve had your teeth straightened. The “ortho” in “orthodontia” means “straight” or “going the right way.” The “ortho” in “orthodox” also means “straight” or “going the right way.” If your opinions (doxa) are orthodox, they are along the right lines; they are on the straight path and will not lead you astray. Many Christian sects enforce doctrinal orthodoxy; that is, in order to be a member in good standing, you must profess belief in certain articles of faith, and if you don’t profess belief, you can’t be a member of the church in good standing (you become a heretic or an apostate). Among these articles of faith – or presupposed by them – are the claims that God is totally good, God is omnipotent, and evil is real. There’s no problem of evil if you’re willing to deny any of these claims.

Now we need to recall the two notions of omnipotence described above, because the definition of "omnipotence" makes a difference in the degree of unorthodoxy this solution carries. There were two notions of omnipotence: unlimited omnipotence and qualified omnipotence. So denying omnipotence, then, (saying “God is not omnipotent”) might mean either

If unlimited omnipotence is false, God just tells the sufferer, “I'd sure like to relieve your suffering because you are my child and I love you, but I can’t do anything about it, sorry, never could.”

Denying qualified omnipotence is more complicated, though. The view that God's omnipotence is qualified is commonly-held, and orthodox, even if not entirely intelligible.²

If “God is not omnipotent” means only option (2) -- that divine omnipotence is qualified -- then we are still arguably orthodox. If “God is not omnipotent” means “God chose to limit his powers,” then when the sufferer asks, "Why don't you do something about my suffering, God?", God’s answer isn’t simply “Sorry, I can’t.” It’s something like “Sorry about that. I’m can't make your suffering go away, because I choose (or chose) not to interfere in the universe.”

God's answer now leads the sufferer to ask: “OK, why do you choose not to interfere?” and God might have perfectly good reasons for his choice.

We may have made some progress. Qualified omnipotence might be half of a solution to the problem of evil. The other half would have to be a reasonable answer to the sufferer’s question “Why don’t you help?” Possible answers from God include:

These are the four so-called orthodox solutions to the problem of evil. If any of these responses makes sense, the Christian can say "God chose not to intervene, and I totally understand why." Mackie, however, says all four of these orthodox solutions fail (more on this below).

Note that Mackie defines "totally good" as "actively opposed to evil", so that a totally good being eliminates evil as far as it can. If we limit omnipotence in the way just described -- if we say, for example, that God chooses to allow natural evils (floods, earthquakes, disease, etc.) as part of the ordinary course of nature and also chooses not to interfere in the exercise of human free will -- then God is not totally good according to Mackie's definition. And remember, limited omnipotence is orthodox. Thus if we could demonstrate that God's choice to limit his own powers was reasonable (intelligible and logically consistent), then we might be able to live with the notion that God isn't totally good in the way Mackie describes; i.e., God has his reasons for choosing not to eliminate evil as much as he can.

Two common versions of "Evil doesn't exist" include evil as privation (absence) of goodness, and evil as an illusion of unenlightened mind.

According to Augustine’s “evil as privation” view, evil is essentially non-being. Augustine says “For God, evil does not exist at all.” Evil is the absence of good; it isn’t anything that is. According to “evil as privation of good” since evil doesn’t exist, we can’t experience evil. We experience not pain, but “absence of comfort”. We experience not sadness but “absence of happiness”. We experience not disease but “absence of health”.

Augustine’s view is often said to “preserve omnipotence” in the following way: if evil doesn’t exist, as Augustine argues, the question of whether God is powerful enough to eliminate it simply doesn’t arise, since there’s nothing to eliminate.

Augustine is a Church Father. As far as I can determine, the “evil as privation” view is orthodox.

Aquinas calls natural evils “evils of penalty” and moral evils “evils of fault”.

In creating the universe with hierarchies of goodness, God is clearly responsible for natural evils, but he can’t be said to have created them. He allows them because all humans are sinful and deserve to suffer (Augustine); or he allows them as consequences of the laws of nature operating normally (Aquinas) because the universe is more perfect that way (more on this later).

Moral evils, on the other hand, are never caused by God and God is never responsible for them.

Non-Western religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism view evil as an illusion that results from an unenlightened mind. According to “evil as illusion,” suffering is caused by our thoughts. “I suffer” is just a story I tell myself, but what I actually experience are just some sensations. I wouldn’t experience them as suffering if I were fully enlightened. According to non-Western religions, if you think something is bad, that’s your ego projecting itself pridefully out at the universe. But if you are enlightened, you realize that there’s nothing especially alarming about the cancer; it just is, like everything else, and everything is always changing. The divine nature is in the cancer as much as it’s in you, and besides, there’s really no “you” anyway.

It seems to me that orthodox solution 3 – “Evil doesn’t exist” -- in either form is simply not helpful to ordinary people as a solution to the problem of evil. You say “Why did you do this to me, God?” God says “Sorry you feel that way, but your cancer is just the absence of healthy cells. Your pain is just the absence of comfort.”

It’s reasonable for the sufferer to feel frustrated by God’s answer, no? The sufferer says to God “Well, maybe that works for you, but I can’t seem to define away the cancer or the pain! I’m still suffering here.”

To sum up so far, Mackie says "God is not omnipotent", "God is not totally good", and "Evil does not exist" are genuine but unorthodox solutions to the problem of evil. That is, a person who believes one or more of these views would not be welcome in most Christian faith communities. But the situation is more complicated, I think. "God is not omnipotent" might just mean God has chosen to limit his powers, and that view is orthodox. If we accept "God is not omnipotent" in that sense, God is of course not "totally good" in Mackie's sense; i.e., God chooses not to eliminate evil as much as he can. So we might have an orthodox solution to the problem of evil if we can devise some intelligible and logically consistent rationale for God's choice to limit his powers. Mackie says there is no such rationale. Let's see if Mackie is right.

According to Mackie, the usual “orthodox” solutions you hear in churches are actually not orthodox at all. They actually presuppose one or more of the unorthodox solutions described in the previous section. Thus, according to Mackie, there are no orthodox solutions to the problem of evil.

You see this “solution” in the movie Oh, God. A child asks God (George Burns) why he created the world with evil and suffering. God answers, “Can you tell me another way I could have done it?” Sometimes believers use the analogy of a mountain and a valley: they say, “You can’t make a mountain without simultaneously making a valley. And in the same way, God can’t create good things without simultaneously bringing bad things into existence as a necessary consequence.”

Mackie replies: But most Christians believe God is not subject to the ordinary causal laws of nature. For example, God as Creator can create things out of nothing. Why can’t an omnipotent God create a mountain without creating a valley? According to Mackie, orthodox solution 1 masks unorthodox solution 1. You can’t really say “God couldn’t have done it any other way” without denying omnipotence.

As we saw above, believers often say, “God chose not to be omnipotent. So God’s supposed inability to create a mountain without a valley is just the result of a constraint he put on himself.” Believers who say this have now qualified the notion of omnipotence.

But qualified omnipotence is less convincing here because God as Creator is supposedly the author of causal laws. God made the law requiring valleys with mountains. That was his idea, and he presumably he could have done things a different way.

Maybe we can’t think of a way to make a mountain without a valley, but we’re not omnipotent.

Mackie says, this so-called “solution” really presupposes unorthodox solution #1: it presupposes that God is not really omnipotent after all – an unorthodox view. “Orthodox” solution #1 is really unorthodox solution #1.

Unsatisfactory “orthodox” solution 2: “Evil is necessary as a counterpart”

First we need to understand what this “solution” means. According to Mackie, this means evil must necessarily exist if good exists, since God is bound by the laws of logic, and “good” and “evil” are logical opposites. Since “non-good” means evil, evil must exist if good exists.

Finally, believers often give solution #2 to explain how we learn the difference between good and evil. And solution #2 probably is a good description of how we often learn. We learn what’s good by contrast with the bad. If everything seemed to be good all the time, maybe we’d never be able to tell the difference between good and evil. But even if that’s true, that doesn’t explain why evil and suffering must exist. If God’s purpose in creating or allowing evil is simply pedagogical (to teach us the difference), then surely he could think of a way to give us the lesson without tormenting us in the process. If he can’t, he’s not omnipotent (unorthodox solution #1). Furthermore, even if evil did have to exist for us to learn about it – and it’s not clear why this should be so if God is omnipotent – then why so much evil? It seems we could learn what’s bad without suffering quite so much. However, God allows some people to suffer quite horribly and protractedly – much more than enough for them to learn the lesson. This seems to show God’s just not very nice (unorthodox solution #2).

The aesthetic version is summed up in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733): “All nature is but art, unknown to thee; / All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; / All discord, harmony not understood; / All partial evil, universal good.” What seems like chance to us is really God’s intentionally-created work of the highest art; what seems like discord or evil to us is really part of God’s bigger plan. The universe really is as good as it can be from God’s point of view. Just as sometimes discord adds to the beauty of a piece of music, so does “evil” (from the human point of view) add to the greater awesomeness of God’s creation.

The moral version (often called “soul-making theodicy” and associated with the 2nd-century bishop Irenaeus) says the universe is actually better with some evil in it than it would be if there were none, because evil gives us the opportunity to grow and develop morally and spiritually as a result of our confronting it in faith. For example, if you get an opportunity to give charity to a suffering person, then someone must be suffering in order to be the recipient of your charity. If you yourself suffer, your suffering provides an opportunity for you or someone else to grow morally and spiritually. Human suffering simply must exist for people to grow morally and spiritually.

In either case, it’s just a matter of understanding God’s priorities, a believer would say. In either case, God is not primarily concerned with decreasing human suffering; God’s benevolence extends only so far. His ways are not our ways. It is more important to God that the universe be as beautiful or awesome as possible than that people suffer. It is more important to God that we be as good as possible than that we be happy in this life, and in fact he’s set things up so that we can reach our full spiritual potential only if we (or others) suffer in this life. If you point out to a religious person that this scenario makes God seem less than totally good (not to say sadistic), the religious person might answer that we are happiest when we are most fully developed morally and spiritually. (And this may be true, for those who reach the apex of spiritual development.) But if you ask the religious person why God set things up that way and not another – for surely, as Mackie points out, an omnipotent God could have made human spiritual development possible without suffering – the religious person says “I don’t know; His ways are not our ways.” A “muscular Christian” might say “Suck it up.”

But it often rings hollow to suffering people when believers tell them “God is good” or “God loves you.” For sufferers, God often seems like the guard in a concentration camp; he doesn’t have to torture you, but he does anyway, and then tells you, absurdly, that he’s torturing you because he loves you. For Mackie, this so-called orthodox “solution” masks unorthodox solution #2.

Orthodox solution #4 is often found in combination with orthodox solution #3, as follows: God wants humans to develop morally and spiritually, and free agency is necessary for that. From God’s point of view, the value of human freedom (including the freedom to cause terrible suffering to other humans) outweighs any suffering that this freedom causes. Some theologians, e.g., John Hick, say that if humans didn’t suffer, humans would never be tested and become better, so human goodness would be childlike or robotic. Suffering must exist, then, to enable people to use their free will to “grow up” morally and spiritually. This reduces to “His ways are not our ways”.

Mackie responds that God could have created humans whose goodness was immutable; they freely choose only the good, and become better and better, happier and happier. This is what happens to residents of heaven, no? So why couldn’t God have made residents of earth the same way? The response can only be “His ways are not our ways”. And while that might be true, it is a solution that simply doesn’t address the issues raised by the problem of evil.

Also, to many people, the free will response in this form (“Grow up; suck it up; life is hard, etc.”) seems not to take seriously the actual amount of suffering that many humans experience. Even if some people develop morally from some suffering, it doesn’t follow that anyone can develop morally from any amount of suffering. It seems obvious that some people’s suffering is simply too much -- too great to bear at all, let alone to develop morally as a result of it. Suffering seems to kill some people before they have a chance to grow from it; for example, a soldier with an excruciatingly painful bullet wound, or person with terminal cancer, may die in agony, and as the infection or disease progresses, the sufferers, as a matter of physiological fact, become less and less capable of sustained thought. An observer who says “Look, God is giving them a splendid opportunity for moral and spiritual growth, and they’re just refusing to take it!” seems both cruel and ignorant of the facts of biology.

Think of what Voldemort does to Longbottom’s parents in the Harry Potter books. They don’t die, but they are destroyed nonetheless; as a result of their torture by Voldemort, they become so incapacitated they are unable to raise their son. Many people say the Nazi Holocaust is another good example of sustained almost-unimaginable suffering; rather than calling forth virtue in the victims, the Holocaust appeared to destroy many people both psychologically and morally. Believers sometimes respond that no suffering is unbearable, because God never gives people more suffering than they can handle successfully. But that response again seems contrary to the facts of biology: an injury capable of producing intense suffering, even if it does not kill a person, can deprive a person of the capacity for sustained sober reflection, e.g., cardiovascular accidents (strokes), or some forms of encephalitis.

It is often hard to see how the preservation of free will can possibly be more worthwhile than the prevention of human suffering. Try this thought experiment: Suppose you have the chance to prevent a gruesome murder from happening, without incurring any harm to you, but you choose to let the murder happen anyway. You could not use the free-will defense to justify your inaction, could you? Seriously? Could you argue that you were right not to prevent the murder, even if you were able to, simply because you wanted to preserve the free-will of the murderer? Yet this is supposedly God's reasoning. A God who values freedom more than human suffering seems just nasty (unorthodox solution 2). It’s no comfort to hear “His ways are not our ways” when he seems to act like a monster.

Orthodox view #4 takes a grim turn in Augustine. I learned his views on free will and sin as a child in Catholic grammar school. Augustine is particularly concerned with original sin. Augustine argues that God created a perfect world without any evil or suffering. Genesis 1:31: “God saw all that he had made and saw that it was very good.” Augustine defined evil as the privation of goodness, just as blindness is a privation of sight. Since evil is not an entity in itself, just like blindness is not an entity in itself, God could not have created it. Instead, evil (i.e., failure to attain the maximum good) originates from free will possessed by angels and humans, who turned their back on God and settled for a lesser form of goodness. As a result of Adam and Eve’s original sin, the state of perfection was ruined by sin. Thus, all humans are worthy of God’s punishment for Adam’s original sin because all humans are “seminally present in the loins of Adam”. (This is why Jesus had to be born of a virgin (no sperm involved) and also why Mary the mother of Jesus also had to be “immaculately conceived” (no sperm involved in making her either)). In Augustine's day, descendants of criminals were usually expected to continue to suffer and pay for the crimes of their ancestors, so this idea that blame for Adam's sin extends to all Adam's descendants would not have been considered strange. In other words, because all humans inherit Adam's blame, God permits Adam's descendants to suffer, because he is a just God and we are worthy of punishment. (This is why it’s important to be baptized; Baptism removes the original sin.) God chooses to offer salvation to some people, but only he can choose who. There’s nothing we can do to gain God’s grace if we’re not baptized. It follows from Augustine's views that if Baptism is necessary for salvation, unbaptized babies and all non-Catholics automatically go to hell. So in the Catholic Church anyone can perform a Baptism. As a child raised in Catholic schools, I was also taught that in an emergency, you don’t necessarily help save people or ease the victims’ suffering: the first thing you do is baptize everyone in sight, just in case.

Mackie says the main reason to reject solution #4 is the “incoherence” of the notion of free will. You may have learned about this in your introductory philosophy classes. Most philosophers don’t agree with Mackie that free will is incoherent, but most accept some form of determinism also. It seems impossible to avoid determinism if God made an orderly universe in which everything happens according to laws of nature, and God knows the future.

One common view among philosophers and theologians is “soft determinism”: freedom consists in being able to do what you want to do in the circumstances in which you find yourself. A prisoner is not free to leave the prison, but is free to write to his mother. However, according to soft determinism, we are not really free with respect to our wants: we want what we want, according to our brain chemistry, our conditioning, our nutritional state, and all the rest of the laws of the universe. The universe is still determined. We are free in the sense that we can do what we want; but the future is fixed nonetheless.

The indeterminist position on free will – the view that we are free only if we can change the future by some non-physical power of our minds alone – means even God can’t know what we’ll choose, and he can’t prevent any of our free acts, i.e., the indeterminist position seems at odds with both divine omniscience and omnipotence.

A lot of people say you are free to change your wants. For example, if you find yourself wanting to crawl into a hole after a bad breakup, you can, by an effort of will, force yourself to go out and party, or talk to a counselor, etc., and thereby cheer yourself up, so you no longer want to crawl into a hole. According to William James and others, if you want to have faith in God, you can “will to believe”. If these transformations are possible, though, according to soft determinism, they are possible because of a physical substrate of preexisting brain conditions. ³ And you're likely not free with respect to those; you don't control which genes you inherit, or your nutrition as a baby, nor the socio-economic position of your parents, and a whole host of other factors that affect your ability to change your mind and thereby change your brain. So free will can't be the answer.

^{1. Some liberal Protestant theologians – pushing the
envelope of orthodoxy – actually favor unorthodox solution #1 (God is not
omnipotent). Omnipotence is not an essential attribute of God, they say. Unlimited omnipotence is incoherent anyway:
can God create a stone he can’t lift?
(If he can, he’s not omnipotent because he can’t lift it; if he can’t,
he’s not omnipotent, because he can’t create it.) Can God violate the laws of logic? Not a logos-type God,
they say. So don’t worry about God not
being omnipotent, they say; he’s still way more powerful than anything else.}

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^{2. One logical problem with qualified omnipotence is that God is also supposed to be immutable, i.e., unchanging, and it looks as though qualified omnipotence and immutability are contradictory attributes. Remember that God is supposed to be absolutely perfect (as Anselm says, the greatest conceivable being). If God could change, he would get better or maybe worse, but the point is, if he's absolutely perfect, he's already as good as he can be. There's no "better" where God is concerned. Now, think about qualified omnipotence. The key notion is that God chose to limit himself at some point; he chose not to interfere with the laws of nature or with human free will. But wouldn't that mean God thought about things, and decided it would be better if he changed his own attributes and behavior? Now, you could avoid the contradiction between qualified omnipotence and immutability if you're willing to deny immutability. Some theologians (e.g., process theologians) go this route, but process theologians' views are embraced primarily by educated, liberal Christians, and would be unthinkable for most. Another problem with qualified omnipotence is that the whole qualified-omnipotence story makes it sound like God is in time, which can't be quite right either. As Kant points out, we cannot possibly
understand what it would mean for a being in time not to change; but neither do we understand what it would
mean for a being to be "outside of time". In short, "qualified omnipotence" is tough to understand.}

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^{3. Unless you believe in violations of the laws of nature, i.e., miracles. But the logos God made an orderly universe (and, if qualified omnipotence is correct, he stays out of it).
Hence, philosophers and theologians generally doubt that miracles (in the sense of
violations of the laws of nature) are really possible – one big difference
between the views of theologians and ordinary believers.}