| The Problem of Evil | |
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Recommended Reading |
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Cornman/Lehrer/Pappas (1992) Philosophical Problems and Arguments, Indianapolis:Hackett Hume, D. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in Cohen (ed.) (1965) Essential Works of David Hume, New York:Bantam; pp. 303-389.
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Introduction |
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It has always been a problem for religion that a god is supposed to be in ultimate control of the world and yet the world is a self-evidently imperfect place. Some religions are able to get away with this without too much difficulty, and we shall see why that is in a moment, but all the most important religions of the Modern West are seriously challenged by the problem of the existence of Evil in the world. Why is this?
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The Argument |
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There is an argument that goes that if God is supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, then there could not be evil in the world, because God would desire to make a world without evil (benevolence); He would know how to make a world without evil (omniscience); and he would have the ability to make a world without evil (omnipotence). And yet the world does have evil, so there can’t be a God who has those properties.
Here’s how the argument goes:
P1. God is benevolent P2. A benevolent being wants the world to be without evil ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C1. God wants the world to be without evil
P3. God is omniscient. (=God knows everything.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C2. God knows how to make the world to be without evil
P4. God is omnipotent. P5. An omnipotent being can do whatever it knows how to do C2. God knows how to make the world to be without evil ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C.3 God can make the world to be without evil
C1. God wants the world to be without evil C3. God can make the world to be without evil P6. If a being wants to do something, and it can do that thing, then it will do it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C4. God will make the world to be without evil
C4. God will make the world to be without evil ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C5. If there is a God then the world is without evil
Which brings us finally to: C5. If there is a God then the world is without evil P7. There is evil in the world ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C6. There is no God.
If this argument is valid then if the premisses are true the conclusion must be true. The arguments against this will try to show that some of the premisses are not true, and that therefore the conclusion is not supported by the argument. (Notice that that method could not show that the conclusion was false.)
What premisses are safe from criticism?
P1, P3, and P4 are safe, because they are just what we take the nature of God to be. If God was not benevolent then of course we wouldn’t think that He wanted the world to be without evil; if he was not omniscient he might not know how to make the world to be without evil; and if He was not omnipotent he might not be able to make the world to be without evil even if he wanted to do so and knew what had to be done. You can see that some religions would be able to adopt one of those responses – but we can’t with our version of what God has to be.
P5 is safe because it is merely a clarification of what we mean by ‘omnipotence’.
P6 is probably safe. It is just the sort of practical syllogism that we use to explain the actions of beings that have beliefs and desires, and we are saying that God is one of them. If God did not do what he ‘wanted’ when he was able to, then he would be the sort of being who had a desire that he didn’t act to fulfil, and therefore it is doubtful whether one could actually say that He had a desire at all. The very definition of a desire is that it is some thing that you will achieve if you can.
P7 is probably safe. We think we know this from experience. It is unlikely to be falsified, but it’s possible that the evil in the world and the evil that God would prevent are not the same thing, so we have to be on the lookout for a possible fallacy of equivocation.
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Objections |
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1. Wanting The World Without Evil
P2 claimed that a benevolent God would want the world to be without evil. But this might not be the case. The benevolent God wants to bring about the best world for humans. It might be that the best world is a world with some evil in it. For example the world with no evil in it might have no people in it; or, to be less extreme, the best world might be quite without art and philosophy and love, and to have these in the world we would have to suffer some slight evil – say, hay fever. Isn’t it clear that a truly benevolent God would prefer the world containing the slight evil if it could contain so much more good? If that were the case then we could not claim that God wanted the world to be without evil, and the argument fails.
A response to this would be to say that the amount of evil in the world is so great that there can hardly be conceived a good that would counterbalance that weight of woe. But others have thought that they can suggest such a good: free will; and the salvation of man that it makes possible. (Also the fall that makes the salvation necessary.)
This forms a natural part of a second objection.
2. Free Will the Source of Evil
Some have complained that much of what counts as evil in the world, and much that we find most alarming, is due to people. People do evil things. But if God were to attempt to stop all evil he would have to stop people from choosing to do evil things. This would mean that God would have to deny Man his free will. And if he did this he would have greatly reduced the amount of good in the world.
In response to this, consider what it means for the evil to be blamed on free will. And let us suppose, for the sake of the argument, that all the evil that is relevant is caused by the exercise of free will. But what does it mean for a will to be free? It means that it could have acted otherwise. And in fact, to say that one could have acted otherwise is to say that in some possible world one does act otherwise. So for every choice freely made there is a possible world in which the choice went in the other direction. In particular, for every actual choice that led to evil there is a possibl;e world in which the choice went the other way and led to good. Since this is the case for every choice, there is a possible world in which every choice is made so that it leads to good. Now, when God he sets out to create a world, he has the choice of all possible worlds before him, so he could have chosen the world in which all the choices were good choices just as easily as choosing this world where so many of the choices go astray. There is no question here of God forcing us to do anything against our will, it just so happens that in this possible world, which God chooses to make actual, all choices are good. The fact that God did not choose that perfect world indicates that He is not benevolent, and therefore He is not Him.
3. The World the Source of Evil
The fact is that although people are indeed at the base of much evil, there is much also that is not the effect of people. We can distinguish moral evil for which people are responsible, and natural evil for which they are not. Natural evils are such things as droughts and hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and fire. None of these have much to do with people, and all of them should be within the power of God to prevent. The insurance companies certainly think so, because they are all labelled as acts of God for purposes of insurance law. Surely a benevolent God could prevent these natural evils without destroying the value of the world?
A reply to this complaint might be that these natural evils are not themselves due to God’s creation – or to God’s creative power – but are the result of the evil deeds of Satan. In that case there are two categories of evil the human evil and the satanic evil, and both of them can be attributed to God’s insistence that his creatures should possess free will, for the devil is only allowed to continue to wreak havoc in the world at God’s sufferance. God, it is admitted could stop Beelzebub at any point but does not do so – and this is presumably for the very same reason that he allows mankind to go on its merry way.
In return it is open to the critic to point out that; first, there really doesn’t seem to be any good evidence to suppose that the devil is responsible for natural evils. As far as we can make out, these floods and fires are the result of the acting out of normal chains of cause and effect and there is no reason to believe that a supernatural cause needs to be invoked. If that’s the case then Satan can’t be used as an excuse for the natural evils. And second, that the very same considerations that were urged against God’s choosing a world where human choices went wrong could be put against his choosing a world where Lucifer’s choices – beginning with his rebellion – went wrong.
A more interesting reply to the original complaint is that the natural evils are not logically avoidable. If man is to guide his life by his intelligent free will, which seems to be the requirement for salvation, then the world will have to be ordered in such a way that the application of reason as a guide is possible. This means, it is usually argued, that the world has to follow rules. Moreover it has to follow rules of a certain kind: they have to be integrated into a logical scheme of the universe. This means that there are very serious restrictions on the types of worlds that can be admitted. For example, a world in which a baby pulls a jug of boiling water over her head, which happily does not scald her but turns into a teddy bear, is probably not one of the admissible worlds. It does not follow the appropriate rules. We can still maintain that this is the best of all possible worlds if we are prepared to argue that any alternative world, any world running under different or nonexistent rules would be much worse. If that’s right then God could retain his characteristic of benevolence and thus remain God.
In response to this we can refer again to Philo in Hume’s dialogue. He thinks that there are just too many evils that are not necessary for this story to be plausible. He thinks in particular that Pain to the degree that humans are able to experience it is quite beyond any necessity, and that the requirement of an orderly world could be met without demanding a purely causally driven world. On the first point he says:
The first circumstance which introduces evil, is that contrivance or economy of the animal creation, by which pains, as well as pleasures, are employed to excite all creatures to action, and make them vigilant in the great work of self-preservation. Now pleasure alone, in its varioius degrees, seems to human understanding sufficient for this purpose. All animals might be constantly in a state of enjoyment; but when urged by any of the necessities of nature, such as thirst, hunger, weariness; instead of pain, they might feel a diminution of pleasure, by which they might be prompted to seek that object, which is necessary to their subsistence. Men pursue pleasure as eagerly as they avoid pain; at least, they might have been so constituted. It seems, therefore, plainly possible to carry on the business of life without any pain. Why then is any animal ever rendered susceptible of such a sensation?
And on the second point:
But a capacity of pain would not alone produce pain, were it not for the second circumstance, viz., the conducting of the world by general laws; and this seems nowise necessary to a perfect Being. It is true; if everything were conducted by particular volitions, the course of nature would be perpetually broken, and no man could employ his reason in the conduct of life. But might not other particular volitions remedy this inconvenience? In short, might not the Deity exterminate all ill, wherever it were to be found; and produce all good, without any preparation or long process of cause s and effects?
4. Evil the Source of Goods
There is a general category of replies to the argument from evil that suppose that something good comes from the evil. Not just that the evil is a necessary effect of something good but that it is a necessary cause for something good. The first of these possible goods is knowledge. It could be supposed that in order for us to understand the world there needs to be a motivation for the effort that is required in understanding. And the most effective motivation that there is the desire to avoid evils that we know to be consequent upon our failure to understand and control the world. Moreover, it could be argued that in order to achieve mastery of some knowledge we have to be prepared to make mistakes and that some of these mistakes will be marked as mistakes by the fact that they area cause of some evil. If we consider, for example, the way that we learn to build bridges, it is largely by the method of trial and error, and some of those errors are going to result in evils. A case in point is the construction of manned spacecraft. The original American spacecraft used an atmosphere containing a very high percentage of oxygen. Much greater than in natural air. There were advantages to this, but when an accident occurred on the launch pad oxygen’s property of flammability resulted in a great evil. Similarly, in the construction of the pyramids, the builders experimented with the proper angle at which dry masonry could be piled. It turned out to be about 27o. A pyramid that was being constructed at a greater angle collapsed halfway through its construction, doubtless with the loss of many slaves. Another pyramid under construction at the same time had its angle sharply decreased and survives to this day as the ‘Bent Pyramid’.
There are other possible goods that require evil in order for them to be produced. How can we demonstrate courage without there being anything to be courageous about. There has to be some evil for us to overcome if we are to be stalwart or determined or brave or … Moreover, if we are to be tolerant we have to have something to tolerate. There has to be some evil that we accept. Forgiveness can’t be forgiveness unless there is something to forgive. Compassion is not compassion unless there is an evil that has befallen someone else whom we can subject to our compassion.
To all of these forms of reply to the argument from evil there is the natural response that the amount of evil in the world far exceeds anything that is required for the existence of these second order goods.
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