Reading: The Problem of Evil

We have now finished our section on religious experience. There is, of course, a great deal more that could be said about that. And you can certainly read more. The books on the subject are legion. But I think that we've established enough here in the way of principles to guide your reading, by giving you the definition of what a religious belief is, and defining religious experience.

A religious experience is any experience that generates, deepens, or confirms a religious belief. I made the point last time that experiences of self-evidence are almost never just standalone experiences. Let's see if I can explain more clearly what I mean by that. Experiences of self-evidence are generally confirmed to us by further experiences. These further experiences may or may not be self-evident themselves.

For instance, when we experience something as just true, then other experiences tend to confirm that. If I look up the street and see nothing coming and then check again and still see nothing, that's the confirming experience of the first one. That's a simple example. But considering the experience of the biblical message to be the truth about God from God: if I experience the gospel to be true, then when I try to put it into practice in my life, do I find that life is as expected if I were living faithfully before the Lord? Further experiences confirm the initial self-evident experience.

Whether or not a belief can be confirmed by further experiences is important. I mention this because I want to contrast this with a materialist divinity belief. We can't conceive of matter as self-existent, and when we try, we get nothing. Thus, the materialist belief is incapable of confirming experiences. Nobody in science does science as though pure materialism is true. In science, we test hypotheses and observe experiments, which exhibit properties and laws. Pure materialism provides zero confirming instances.

There was a bit of leftover information that I thought should have been in the last session, so I'm including it here. But now, we're shifting to a new subject, which is the best argument against belief in God. Known in the history of philosophy as the problem of evil, this argument stems from a book written around 250 AD by a writer named Porphyry.

So, if we want to deny the conclusion, at least one of the premises has to be shown to be false.

Of course, I think you know what I'm going to say about this. I'm going to start with premise one and say that's the wrong conception of God. God is not presented in Scripture as the being with all perfections and only perfections. For example, this means that if God were perfectly good, then he would be as good as possible to as many people as possible. That right there would prevent people from unjust suffering, wouldn't it? But that's absurd.

The picture of God presented in Scripture is not of a being who is so perfect that if one little child ever falls off his or her bicycle and skins her knee, there can't be a god. No Old Testament believer in Israel would have taken a view of God like that. So, God is good to us in that he offers us a covenant of love, forgiveness, and everlasting life. He guides us through life. That's how God's good to us—it doesn't mean he's as good as possible to as many people as possible. Nothing in Scripture ever comes anywhere near that.

So, my first and biggest objection is right away with premise one. That's the wrong conception. Is God good? Yes. Is God just? Yes. He promises to be strictly just in his dealings with us. But he does not promise that he will see to it that no one else is ever unjust to you in their dealings with you. That's just not it.

Besides, the other thing about premise one is that it makes God's justice and his power things over which he is totally helpless. He has no control whatsoever. Because he just is the unity of all the perfections, then he is compelled to do what he does. On this view, you and I may have free will, but it appears God doesn't. He always has to do whatever is the best thing. And since he knows everything, he knows what's the best thing. But that makes it look even worse for what goes on in creation. Because what goes on in creation is often pretty horrible. And we know God's got the power to stop it. So this argument expresses outrage, then why does he do it? Well, it must be because he ain't there. There is no such being.

So, the premises two and three just go on to explain what we would expect if a being were perfectly just and perfectly powerful. And then it asserts unjust suffering exists. Now in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition, that's what they deny. They deny that there's any such thing as undeserved suffering. First, because everything we experience about this world is a kind of hallucination anyway. It's mere appearance, it's Maya. It's not reality. Brahman Atman, or the Dharmakaya, or the suchness behind everything is the divine reality. The second reason is because they teach reincarnation—they teach that whatever suffering you have in this life is due to wrongdoing you did in a past life. So there is no unjust suffering—it only appears to be.

But for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, that's not a proper answer. There is only one lifetime that we get to live. And as the scripture says, it's appointed for a person once to die. And after that the judgment—not you get 100,000 more lives, especially if they're lives of suffering, which is what the Hindu-Buddhist tradition has to say. So we think there's one life and then everyone comes before the judgment seat of God. And everyone then ultimately, whether they receive the punishment or not, but ultimately, everyone is taken into the kingdom of God.

So this objection—this is an argument that I find highly objectionable with respect to the truth of the premises. I think premise two, as it stands, would be true. God, if God is perfectly just, then he would not want unjust suffering to exist. I think that's right, given the only perfections view of God. They define that so that God is maximally just and that would be a proper inference. And so with three—if God is all powerful, he could prevent all unjust suffering. That looks true too. And so does premise four. In my opinion, premise one is a false idea of God.

God is greatly loving, overwhelmingly kind and merciful. He offers us His fellowship and love and forgiveness. He offers us everlasting life, in His covenants of salvation—the Covenant, the last one of which was fulfilled by Christ on behalf of the whole human race. So all the benefits of the promises of the Covenant are given as free gifts to everyone. But it doesn't work with an idea of maximal perfection or the infinite mode or degree of a property. And I've said to you, it's a theory that there are such things. And it's a theory I don't find convincing.

When we try to think of any of these perfections as self-existent, that fails. But then, what grounds do we have for saying at all that there is a maximal degree of goodness or justice? Why can't those just be like the natural numbers? There's no highest to be had among these perfections. All of that I raised before, so you can see how I would object to this argument again.

Let's go through some of my preliminary objections this way:

Number one: no reason to believe there are perfections. Especially not self-existent ones. Our experiment in thought took care of that. So keep in mind that the perfections, as God has them, are supposed to be both self-existent and maximal. We've shown that they're certainly not self-existent. And we've not seen a good reason to think that there is a maximal degree of them.

The second preliminary objection: think of how inconsistent this depiction of God is with scripture.

What we're told in the Bible about God is that if God is all and only perfections, He can't alter or change in any way, shape, or form. If the only thing that's true of God are perfections, he can't really relate to you and me. We read that before, remember? Thomas Aquinas said, "Since God is outside the whole scheme of creation, it's clear that while creatures are really related to God, in God, there is no real relation to creatures, but only a logical one." God's logically distinct from us. That's the only relation he has to us.

That cancels the entire Gospel. The Gospel says the primary relation of God toward the world is "God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son to be the Redeemer of the world." Thomas says there are no relations but the logical one. That's outrageously inconsistent with what Scripture tells us. The scriptural picture of God is that God deals with humans as they are. He often argues with them, sometimes he approves of them, and sometimes he reprimands them. This picture of God as a pristine perfection in another realm, that never in any way, shape, or form, changes or even relates to anything or anyone in any less than perfect way means that he doesn't really relate to us. It's not an ongoing experiential give and take; we don't have a real relation.

This view of God that the argument assumes is inconsistent with the way God's depicted in the Scripture. There he is clearly on the ground floor, right in your face, dealing with you as you are. An example that comes to mind is when God says to Abraham, "I'm going to destroy this wicked city." And Abraham prays, "Lord, if there are any righteous people in the city, will you spare it, please?" Abraham comes back again and again, asking God to spare the city. God says, "Even if there's a few, Yes, I'll do that," and then God rescues some of the people from the city and destroys the rest. But Abraham bargains; he argues. It's a real ongoing relationship. Does God not change in that relationship? Is there no give and take, no real alteration? Sure, there is.

Now, I'm not suggesting that because God doesn't have some kind of self-existent perfection, that God is unjust. No, he promises to be just to us in all his dealings. He offers us goodness and his love. Those are real relations he has with creatures. But Scripture doesn't have the technical philosophical idea of perfection in the sense that Plato and Aristotle developed. So, God is bound in what he does, bound in his relationships to us, not by the rules that bind us. The norms of justice and love that bind creatures are not binding on God. We can't turn around and say, "God, you have to do this or that, or it wouldn't be fair." What binds God are his promises. We have to take those promises, understand them, and see exactly what God promises.

Does God promise to be just to us in all his dealings? Yes, definitely. But does he promise to prevent anyone else from being unjust to us? No. There's no such promise in Scripture.

Now, having examined the argument and my preliminary views on it, let's delve deeper. Evil acts of other people are one source of undeserved suffering. Natural disasters like tornadoes, tidal waves, earthquakes, and pandemics also produce significant undeserved suffering. Historically, these have been distinguished when discussing the problem of evil.

This is the AAA view of God. They're dealing with the problem of evil, which means undeserved suffering. There are three main arguments they've proposed.

The first is the "soul-making response." The argument here is that when people suffer, even unjustly, it teaches them patience, kindness, and sympathy. The purpose of undeserved suffering is to make our souls better fit for their eventual entrance into God's eternal kingdom. While this may explain some undeserved suffering, it doesn't explain all.

The second argument has to do with goods being produced in the world that couldn't exist without undeserved suffering. Again, while this may be true for some instances of suffering, it doesn't account for all.

The third argument is called the "freewill argument."

The Free Will defense is an argument that St. Augustine himself put forth. Here's a summarized version of it:

God had the choice to create human beings in any manner he desired. He could have created us without free will. However, possessing free will makes us full agents, acting out of our own volition and being responsible for our actions. This is a richer and more fulfilling reality. In giving us free will, God knew he was taking the risk that we might choose evil over good. This risk is inherent in granting free will: either individuals are not truly free, or there's the risk they will commit evil acts. By giving us free will, God accepted the risk that we might act wickedly. Rather than label this as "evil," let's define such acts as those that violate the norms of justice and love. Unfortunately, many, if not all of us, commit such acts at times.

The second premise in this defense is that undeserved suffering stems from wicked acts committed by those with free will. As Augustine and others have suggested, when someone commits a wicked act, it can lead to suffering for others. The root of the world's undeserved suffering lies here. The only way God could prevent this suffering would be by not granting free will. Yet, granting us free will is preferable, as the alternative would make us mere puppets without any real responsibility toward others or God.

This Free Will defense has been refined in modern times by various Christians. Notably, Alvin Plantinga revisited it in his book, "God, Freedom, and Evil." While Plantinga has effectively addressed several criticisms of the Free Will defense, one objection remains unaddressed, and I'd like to raise it now.

The crux of this objection is that God could permit wicked actions while simultaneously preventing undeserved suffering. It's not crucial for me that people possess free will. Even if individuals with free will commit wicked acts leading to suffering, an omnipotent God could still prevent the resultant suffering. For instance, if a person intends to harm others with a gun, God could cause the gun to malfunction, without impeding the person's free will. Thus, I find it unconvincing to simply state that free-willed individuals cause undeserved suffering.

Furthermore, some arguments posit that natural disasters and pandemics are also a result of wicked free-will acts, claiming Satan is the instigator. Two things about this perspective: Firstly, God could still bestow us with free will, allowing us to act wickedly without intervening to prevent such actions, yet still intervene to halt the resultant suffering. Secondly, attributing natural disasters solely to Satan seems to contradict scripture. In Isaiah, God says, "I am the Lord; there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I cause well-being, and I create calamity. I the LORD do all these things." God claims responsibility. If He is in control of His creation, couldn't He prevent natural disasters? From the perspective that God is all-powerful, the answer seems to be a resounding "yes."

In conclusion, I believe none of these three defenses fully addresses the issue. Does that mean Christianity is completely refuted? Not necessarily. There may be other responses that are more compelling, and the problem of evil alone might not be enough to challenge belief in God.