The Problem Of Evil (and the problem of suffering)

[mitchellmckain 0]

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?”

-Epicurus (“De Rerum Natura” Lucretius)

 

Some common solutions:

 

-A God which is benevolent and all powerful does not exist.

 

-Evil is the the consequence of human free will. Free will is more important than the existence of evil.

 

-Evil is not real but a product of our inadequate understanding of things.

 

-Evil is real, but human logic itself is inadequate to explain the reality of both God and evil with the information that is available to us.

 

There is actually 2 versions of this paradox - one in regards to the existence of evil and one in regards to the existence of suffering. The philosophical problem is not difficult to answer, but something does have to give way in the solution and this does contribute to the variety of Christian beliefs about God. In addition to the philosophical problem there is also the visceral experience of evil and suffering to which philosophical solutions are somewhat lame.

 

 

The problem of Evil.

 

In the problem of evil, I go with the free will solution and I think this means that God is capable of sacrifice and risk. In order to create something interesting God risked disaster by sacrificing His absolute control over everything to give all living things a measure of free will. In fact He gave an increasing amount of free will in higher life forms until Adam and Eve had such a measure that they embodied the idea of children, whose essential free will has been experienced by every human parent. Human parents have also experienced the same sort of disaster as God did in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve turned from the guidance of God to learn about good and evil for themselves.

 

This is hardly the universal Christian solution to the problem of evil. For even when free will is upheld as a solution, many Christians will insist that God sacrifices none of his omniscience, omipotence or sovereignty as illogical as that seems to me. For me, a God that must preserve his own power and control at all costs and is incapable of risk or sacrifice does not inspire any love or admiration in me.

 

 

How is free will compatable with the omniscience and omnipotence of God?

 

Omniscience and omnipotence and especially total sovereignty are not three separate things as is often imagined. They are inextricably bound together. Power is impossible without knowledge and knowledge is impossible without power. Furthermore, abosolute knowledge can only mean absolute sovereignty. It is a lesson of quantum mechanics that you cannot know without interfering in what is known. To put it simply knowledge has a hand in creating reality. Therefore absolute knowledge is absolute control. For us who are limited in power and knowledge we do not see the ultimate connection between the two. It is possible for us to know something without having any control over it, and it is possible for us to have power over something without knowing what will happen. But when we are talking about complete power and knowledge the difference between the two vanishes. If you trully know everything, then you know all the consequences of your actions, which means you have control over all of those consequences. And when you are all powerful then your actions also have no limits which means the consequences of those actions are without limit as well.

 

The lesson of quantum mechanics is that things can exist in a natural state of uncertainty. Absolute knowledge must annihilate these states of uncertainty, changing the natural state of reality to what your knowledge dictates. The future choices of human beings are quite comparable. Free will means that our choices are ours to make and therefore are in a similar state of uncertainty until we make our choices ourselves. For God to have the future knowledge of our choices would annihilate this state of uncertainty and destroy our free will. We would be no more than automatons to Him and it would be irrational for Him to hold us responsible for anything.

 

 

God is capable of sacrificing His own power and knowledge.

 

There is this idea that omnipotence and omniscience defines God and so it is impossible for God to sacrifice knowledge or power. It is almost as if rather than knowledge and power being available to the service of God, it is He/She who is bound and enslaved by knowledge and power. This is why I make the point about risk and sacrifice. All power is available to God, but God is not ruled by this. What kind of person is ruled by power? Surely God is ruled by His own will not by His power. Likewise, I say that knowledge is available to God but God is not defined or ruled by knowledge. God can know or not as He chooses, but God is motivated by love rather than power. God cherishes life and the free will of His creatures, and their ability to surprise Him. Otherwise how boring it would be. God prefers a greater challenge.

 

God can still plan the general course of event on an historical scale without controlling the individual. People really have very little control over the general course of events on the historical scale, for these depend on so many things quite beyond their control. Furthermore even though human beings have free will, they rarely exercise it. They really are rather predictable most of the time.

 

But is it moral for God to limit his own power in order to make free will possible? This is the question of the morality of creating life and it is indeed a real paradox of logic. By pure logic it would seem that the creation of life is inherently immoral. For to create life is to make evil possible and to make suffering inevitable. There is only one thing that can defy this logic and make it moral and that is love. The creation of life without love indeed is a great evil. But God's perfect and infinite love for all that He has created makes His act of creation a moral one.

 

When we have a child, it is inevitable that the child will suffer (from the birth itself, falling when learning to walk, required vaccinations, etc...), but loving parents are ready to provide comfort to help the child endure throught these moments of suffering and in the end to believe that this necessary suffering is worthwhile. But a parent who brings a child into the world without this love for selfish reasons (such as to put the child up for sale), does great evil.

 

I am not saying that doing something out of love justifies it no matter how much pain and suffering it causes. The creation of life is a special case, because pain and suffering is not a direct and automatic result. Sure the creation of life makes suffering possible but it also makes joy and happiness possible as well. The creation of life out of love is moral, because when love is offered there is every hope that what is gained will be worth the price of suffering. It is what is called in the courtroom, doing it in "good faith".

 

Love includes empathy, so the when the one who is loved suffers then the one who loves also suffers. Your free will means you are free to be perverse in choosing death and hate over life and love. But that is your choice and thus it is only your fault. God and a lot of other people will suffer because of this choice. And so in this sensless manner you can respond to the suffering in the world by creating more suffering, making life senseless and meaningless by your own choice. The world has seen so much of this that it is terrifyingly boring and not worth our attention. It is the creators in life who deserve and get our attention with what they pour their hard work and love into: their ideas, stories, art, music, films, inventions, games, communities, and other accomplishments.

 

 

Being outside time and space does not mean knowledge of the future.

 

There is the idea that God sees the future because He exists outside of time and space, for He created it. But Just because God exists outside of time and space does not mean that the universe exist as a four (or ten) dimensional object with past and future complete. I do not think that God even created a single living thing this world with a snap of His fingers, but only in a interactive process of being involved in the life of living things moment to moment, side by side. I think that this idea of being oustide time and space simply means that God is free to move His consiousness to any point in time for He is not bound within it. Some people deny this, saying that the future does not exist to be known. But I think God is sufficiently bound by both ethics and aesthetics to participate in our world in its proper order of time. Otherwise violates aesthetics in the sense of reading the end of a story ahead of time, and violates ethics in the sense of telling the end to someone before he reads it. Furthermore I think it is an issue of privacy. He may be everywhere in our world and life knowing our every thought and action, but the future is a privacy that he allows us and therein lies our free will. So I think that as God participates in this world He does not know its future (even though He may plan some of it).

 

 

Free will implies that it is human-kind which are responsible for evil, but how is this reasonable considering our limited knowledge and power?

 

Life innately has an infinite potentiality, for the essense of what it means to be alive, is to have the ability to become more than it is. It has the ability to learn and become what it learns. This potentiality may never be realized without the aid of God, but it is there. In any case, there came a point in God's effort of cultivating life to realize its greater potentialites when God decided that a certain lifeform was ready for a more direct form of education by means of what we call communication. If this was ever just an experiment you could say that this is where he contaminated it, for in raising young humans with speech and communicating to them the essential ideas of being a person, God truly created human beings in His/Her own image in the same way that every human parent raises their own children, inheriting much of their parents' personalities. But at a key point human beings refused the guidance of God and the world we know of is the result.

 

God created far superior beings called angels, but their free will is a poor imitation, much like the decision making capabilities of our computers (but obviously much more sophisticated), because the fact of the matter is that they (just like our computers) are still no more or less than exactly what they were designed to be. And so the angelic world has no pain, suffering, death, evil, hate or sin. But it is also boring and rather limited in the ability to love or to be loved, and that is why God tried something quite different involving the sacrifice of his abolute control and the risk of things like pain, suffering, death, evil, hate, and sin. For in creating life, God created something which would always have a hand in its own creation, and therefore unlike the angels would not simply "be no more or less than exactly what they were created to be", but would, in fact, themselves be responsible for who and what they are. THAT is what it means to be alive (in truth rather than in the poor angelic immitation).

 

 

If God is such an advocate for free will, then why tell us how to behave and punish those who disobey?

 

Free will is the power to choose, but choice is meaningless without alternatives. Free will is life and life is the infinite poteniality of being creative, able to learn new things and become more than we are. But creativity and learning do not exist in a vacuum. The whole point of creating this infinite potentiality of life was that this was something to which God could give without limit. The creation of something without free will is instantaneous. It has what you have given it already. But living things are created continuously in a partnership with the creator, just as a farmer raises crops and a teacher teaches students. We are created with nothing but with the potential for everything. So God can lead us towards our greater potentialities eternally.

 

When you tell your children not to play with fire that does not mean that you don't want your children to have any free will. When you insist that your children eat their vegitables that doesn't mean that you don't want them to make choices in their life. The younger the child, the more you need to control their life for their own protection, but a good parent will give their children an increasing amount of freedom to make their own choices as they grow older. I can see this progression in the Bible going from the Old Testament to the New.

 

A mother may say to her child, "If you break your neck doing that, I will kill you." Of course the threat is an empty one, but the danger is real. The truth is that no punishment is required. Real punishment when possible and offered by the parent is a blessing for it substitutes the excessive harsh consequences of reality with milder ones, so that the child may learn the lessons of life more gradually. The idea of an eternal hell for punishment is nonsense of course. The purpose of punishment is to modify behavior so it makes no sense for it to be eternal. It is only the natural consequences of our action that can be so permanent and harsh.

 

 

Suffering

 

In the version of the problem, which we can call the problem of "suffering", I believe that the solution lies largely in perspective and the perception of suffering. I compare us to the child in the grocery store acting like it is on the verge of dying because his or her parent will not buy the candy he or she wants. The child does not know what is good for it and barely understands the meaning of desire. As we grow older we learn that if we really want something then we are willing to work long and hard for it (even suffer for it). Thus in the context of eternal life our "sufferings" in this life may be just as trivial and our complaints as childish as the child in the grocery store.

 

Some people might argue that parents do their best to prevent thier child from suffering, and so it might seem that if a parent created the world they might create a world without suffering. But it is not really true that a parent would really do anything to keep their child from suffering. Would a parent sever their child's spinal cord or keep them on a morphine drip so that they would never feel any pain? Would a parent keep a child in complete isolation so that the child would never catch any disease or experience heartache from the rejection or mistreatment by others? I read an interesting youth novel recently entitled "The Giver" by Lois Lowry, where people tried to make a world without pain. It was a rather good horror story. The only way to eliminate the possibility of suffering is to eliminate the possibility of joy and happiness as well. Life includes the possibily of both.

 

Now the sad thing is that there are bad parents who do not give their children the freedom they should as they grow, just as there are religious people who make their religion just as controlling and without freedom. The first does not mean that all parents are bad any more than the second means that all religion is controlling and without freedom.

 

 

Experience of evil and suffering

 

But that brings us to the experience of evil and suffering as opposed to the intellectual exercise. Albert Camus' novel The Plague comes to mind in regards to this. The ultimate suffering, it seems to me, is the loss of loved one such as a child. In the face of such an experience I would not be to surpised to be rewarded by a punch in the face for the innane philosophical arguments presented above. The renunciation of faith as a result of such an experience is not an uncommon occurence. So this is a much more real and potent example of the problem of evil and suffering to my mind than any intellectual discussion. All I can say to this is that the renunciation of faith does not seem to bring any great comfort or solution to this experience of suffering and evil. People have many different ways of expressing their grief and many are far from rational and even self-destructive. In the end, after all is said, we all have to get through this experience of being human the best that we can.

 

Even a Christian whose child dies might turn away from God, become a drug addict, and die of an overdose. It is difficult to imagine how this suffering could have been "for their own good." Such realities are where it stops being a rational exercise and is just a matter of coping. Christians have to cope with this reality as best they can, just as do we all. As a personal pragmatic philosophy I believe that the events of my life are a gift from God to help me grow in spirit. But I am well aware that this does not work as an objective rational philosophy. I do not believe that the deeds of evil men are God's gift to their victims. The personal philosophy is my choice and determination to affect my attitutde and responses to events. It is a common personal philosophy among Christians but not all have the sensitivity and discernment to realize that you cannot paint this across everyone elses life. I do not even try to imagine that such events as described above are for anyones good. In fact, I feel quite sure that they do real harm to everyone. But I am also confident that such wounds can heal under the care of a loving caretaker. The real question (putting aside all inane questions of religion and philosophy), for everyone (all the time) is whether they want to be part of the harming or the healing.

[Mafamba Team 0]

I personally think it is a challenge set by God to see how we help others.And we are all failing miserably.There is plenty of supports available to help every poor person in the world, but we just don't do enough.Oh - and I don't think that God can control these kind of things fully - in other words I believe he is powerful but he is not all powerful.

[mitchellmckain 0]

I personally think it is a challenge set by God to see how we help others.

 

And we are all failing miserably.

 

There is plenty of supports available to help every poor person in the world, but we just don't do enough.

 

Oh - and I don't think that God can control these kind of things fully - in other words I believe he is powerful but he is not all powerful.

 

Now I have heard this before from adherents of Islam, but when I questioned further it became clear that they believed that God is only responsible for the possibility of evil and suffering, but that evil itself is something only attributable to humans and the Djinn. Even your last statement implies the same belief in human free will as what is truly responsible for evil. Am I understanding correctly?
Edited October 30, 2006 by mitchellmckain (see edit history)

[JeroenB 0]

Maybe evil is a necesarry thing to life. When God created us, he quickly found out that we also have some bad properties of which getting quickly bored is one of them. So He invented evil! Evil can be good, as well as good can be evil sometimes, if you understand what I mean. For example, what food do you like most? Take that delicious pizza pepperoni for example. When I would eat one tonight, I'd like the taste more then anything (well anything...) else, if you'd gave me one also tomorrow it would still be nice, however if you keep doing this for more then a week the taste is getting slightly less and after another week or two you'll notice that it just doesn't taste that great anymore. What I mean to say is; you need evil to appreciate the good things in life. You have to realize you will die sometime, to appreciate life and thank God that you were able to do so much good things (if you did so, that is ).

 

- JeroenB

[mitchellmckain 0]

Maybe evil is a necesarry thing to life. When God created us, he quickly found out that we also have some bad properties of which getting quickly bored is one of them. So He invented evil! Evil can be good, as well as good can be evil sometimes, if you understand what I mean. For example, what food do you like most? Take that delicious pizza pepperoni for example. When I would eat one tonight, I'd like the taste more then anything (well anything...) else, if you'd gave me one also tomorrow it would still be nice, however if you keep doing this for more then a week the taste is getting slightly less and after another week or two you'll notice that it just doesn't taste that great anymore. What I mean to say is; you need evil to appreciate the good things in life. You have to realize you will die sometime, to appreciate life and thank God that you were able to do so much good things (if you did so, that is ).

 

I on the other hand, find evil to be the most boring thing of all. Sure it gets the adrenalin of outrage and fear pumping, and perhaps this is a kind of drug addition. But evil practices meaningless destruction tearing life down into a monotonous nothingness. It is the opposite of the creativity of life, which is truly what makes life interesting. With a little creativity we can sit down and invent facinating universes like Harry Potter and Star Trek which revitalizes our whole culture and industry and in general increases our zest for life. Evil on the other hand for the sake of a cheap thrill would go out and murder the potential creators of such universes. So make no mistake, storybook evil to make the Harry Potter books more exciting has nothing to do with real evil which is really the epitome of boring. Our passion to stop evil is only a defensive reaction to the more immediate feeling that all life has been degraded.

[yeh 0]

Hehe... I know that this is a topic on religion and philosophy but I just wanna share a few lines of my thought...Well, if we negate the existence of God, then the problem of evil and suffering becomes very clear. People commit evil stuff to satisfy themselves. It could be greed, power, sex, etc. Most people choose good becoz society is created as such, with punishment meted out to evil deeds. And how do society come about with such a rule? This is becoz to progress, humans must co-operate and do good to each other.

[mitchellmckain 0]

Hehe... I know that this is a topic on religion and philosophy but I just wanna share a few lines of my thought...
Well, if we negate the existence of God, then the problem of evil and suffering becomes very clear. People commit evil stuff to satisfy themselves. It could be greed, power, sex, etc. Most people choose good becoz society is created as such, with punishment meted out to evil deeds. And how do society come about with such a rule? This is becoz to progress, humans must co-operate and do good to each other.

Yes indeed, but the question is why should the existence of God change any of this? The whole problem of evil and suffering is a proposed contradiction between this state of affairs you describe and the existence of a good and loving God. But it is my argument that it is the same as a fundamental question of parenthood on a larger scale. Sure parents do not have the power and knowledge to absolutely prevent evil and suffering among their children, but if they did have such power and knowledge, should they try? Can parents take away the possibility of evil and suffering from their children without taking away all the freedom and meaning of their lives? There are cases of parents with a great deal of money and power who try and in all such stories that I have heard the result is not good. These children quite often rebel and/or self-destruct. These are clearly examples of bad parenting. I believe that this reveals the flaw in the argument represented by this problem of evil and suffering.

[vbritton 0]

When I read this post I was immediately reminded of the following quote by Dostoyevsky:"Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to animals. For they are without sin and you in your greatness defile the earth by your appearance on it and leave traces of you foulness after you."It is man's very power to choose between good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, that gives him the propensity to act out in wicked ways. So there seems to me a link between man's "greatness," his very power to choose that endears him to evil. Perhaps that's why many pet owners prefer their dogs and cats over their friends. At any rate, unless you're a mental invalid, you are born with this evil, this orignial sin, if you will. Yes, we have free will, but as the original poster states, man is generally predictable. I believe this is due in part to astrological forces at play when the soul descends to matter, but that's a topic for another discussion.

[iGuest 3]

Problem of EvilThe Problem Of Evil

Can anyone, please define Evil without the aid of Good? or Can anyone define Good without the aid of Evil? How can evil ever exist without good?

Good and Evil are the two ends of the same stick. One cannot exist without the other. It is the same with anyother thing that exists in this universe. Small and Big, Thick and thin, beautiful and ugly...All of them without any exception exists as pairs of opposite.

Why should it be so?

When beautiful and ugly are the two poles of the same thing, there is a space between the two and this space is what is time.

ASHOK