In the most recent episode of their podcast “The Bible for Normal People,” Pete Enns and Jared Byas interviewed Thomas Jay Oord, a prolific theologian and philosopher, on the problem of evil. The problem of evil regularly shows up in my ethics courses in a unit called “Does God have anything to do with ethics?”; I found the podcast both entertaining and helpful in suggesting ways that everyone, including myself, might both frame and think about the problem of evil in ways that avoid the usual pitfalls, ruts, and arguments.
I’ve written about the problem of evil occasionally on this blog, including this post from three years ago,
Fortunately, the problem can be stated succinctly. It arises from the logical incompatibility of three claims:
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God is omnipotent (all powerful) - God is omnibenevolent (all good)
- Evil and suffering exist
The problem arises because all three of these claims, taken in their strongest and most obvious meanings, cannot be true at the same time. The truth of any two of them logically means the falsity of the third. The problem is most often expressed narratively along the following lines:
If the God who created the world is omnipotent (all powerful) and omnibenevolent (all good), why is there so much suffering and evil in the world? Notice, as an aside, that the problem only exists for those who are committed to the simultaneous truth of all three propositions.
The problem of evil has ancient roots; the Book of Job in the Jewish scriptures is a classic expression of many of its nuances. Early Christian writers such as Saint Augustine wrote books on the issue. But as I noted in a post last week, the problem of evil becomes more than an academic or classroom exercise, particularly for persons of traditional Christian faith, as thousands of innocent people die in the Israel/Hamas conflict and as eighteen innocent people were murdered by a shooter in Lewiston, Maine in recent weeks.
Anyone who has ever thought about the problem of evil undoubtedly knows the outlines of several possible ‘solutions” to the problem that have been suggested over the centuries. Here are a few of them.
**God’s ways are higher than our ways. To which one might say, no kidding! But this is not an response to the problem of evil. Rather, it is simply a religiously pious way of saying “I don’t know.” It hardly will be satisfactory to anyone who believes that God invites human beings to ask questions and use the investigative faculties that God created them with. It is certainly possible to conclude that God’s ways are mysterious after full investigative engagement with the world that we are part of and that God created, but as a starting point it is equivalent to refusing to do the work.
**Suffering and pain are character builders. This certainly has been the experience of most people over the centuries. Growth occurs because of struggle. In the podcast, Pete Enns notes that “suffering is the cost of doing evolutionary business.” Change through competition and struggle is embedded in the very fabric of the world we inhabit. This, however, is simply kicking the can down the road. If God is omnipotent, God could have created a world in which progress and growth were possible without suffering and conflict. And yet God didn’t create that world. Why not? The answer to the question will necessarily challenge the presumed omnibenevolence of God. Or if we say that God couldn’t have created a world in which growth was possible without struggle and suffering, then we are challenging God’s omnipotence.
**Goodness cannot be fully understood without its opposite. This is a favorite of my students (I’m sure some authority figure at some point has dropped it on them), but it’s a relatively weak response to the problem of evil. Claiming that God created human being as incapable of understanding goodness without evil and suffering to compare it to immediately raises a serious question mark over either God’s goodness or God’s omnipotence. Either God could have created us capable of fully engaging with goodness without accompanying suffering—and didn’t (lack of goodness) or God couldn’t create us that way (lack of power).
**Evil and suffering don’t truly exist. Believe it or not, this has been a favorite of some of the heavy-hitting Christian theologians over the centuries, including St. Augustine. The idea is that evil is a lack of goodness, but does not have substantial and existential reality in its own right. Tell that to the victims of the Holocaust. Enough said.
**Evil and suffering are due to the misuse of human free will. This is, in various versions, by far the most popular response to the problem of evil—with good reason. For our purposes, free will is the ability to choose between various available options without being forced or coerced to choose any one of them. In other words, one chooses between options and acts on that choice—but one could have chosen otherwise. Given that for many people (including myself), this ability is at the core of what we understand human nature to be, any solution to the problem of evil must take this fundamental human capacity seriously. And if human beings do truly have the capacity to choose between good and evil, then it is a given that they will on occasion, perhaps frequently, choose evil. Accordingly, the existence of evil can be explained by our misuse of free will.
But not so fast. As popular as the “free will solution” to the problem of evil is, several problems remain. First, it only addresses evil that can be traced back to human actions based on human free choice. This is often called “moral evil,” and there is more than enough of it to go around as anyone who has lived a human life knows. But there is an untouched category called “natural evil” that this solution does not address. What of the evil and suffering that cannot be traced to human actions, such as that which accompanies natural disasters? The normal operations of our physical world produce events (hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, flood, drought, and so on) that human activity cannot be held responsible for. Yet natural evil exists. Why did God create a world like that?
Furthermore, theologians and philosophers for centuries have simply pushed the problem of evil one step back and have asked, “if evil is due to the misuse of human free choice, why did God create humans with free will in the first place?” There are a number of good answers to this question, but every one of them directly indicates that God chooses not to be omnipotent. For instance, suppose that God, out of love, chooses to create humans with free choice so that we can freely respond to the divine invitation to relationship. That’s a more attractive God to believe in than one that randomly throws divine power around.
But as anyone who has ever been in a relationship energized by love knows, love and power are incompatible. To the extent that one chooses to love, one also choose to diminish power and control. Which means that if God created human beings with free will because God lovingly seeks relationship with us, then God is also deliberately choosing not to be omnipotent and controlling. After all, a free choice is one that could have been otherwise. Taken to its logical conclusion, the free will “solution” to the problem of evil undermines God’s omnipotence so much that God cannot know the result of my free choice until I choose. Otherwise the choice would not be free.
If you have stuck with me this far, congratulations! All of the above “solutions” are attempts to preserve God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence in the face of the reality of evil and suffering. Such attempts assume that we know God’s attributes and personality traits ahead of time, then seek to explain reality in terms of those assumptions—a “top down” approach, in other words. I propose that this strategy is doomed to fail. Next time I’ll suggest a “bottom up” strategy in which we begin with the world that we live in, then speculate from those details what a God who created such a world might be like. Stay tuned!
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