My friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has a new post up on what I consider the most difficult challenge to belief in God: the arbitrary suffering that is such a conspicuous feature of the world that He created and sustains. How could a God that combines the triple perfections of omniscience, omnipotence, and absolute benevolence permit this?
Bill’s post focuses on the suffering of animals in nature, and begins with a description of a baby elephant being torn to pieces by a pack of lions. But why, you might ask, address the problem of animal suffering, and not begin with all the horrors that humans have inflicted on each other? It is because we can see that God had no choice in permitting the evil that men do to one another: if men are not radically free to choose what they do, then they become mere slaves, or automatons — and God did not want to create slaves or machines, but free beings, made in God’s own image, with the capacity for voluntary self-perfection. If we are to be truly free, though, and therefore responsible for our own moral choices, then we must also, however distressingly, be free to choose evil. And we very often do.
But we do not suppose that any of this applies to animals, who act not from moral choice, but from natural instinct, and so do not have our chance at transcendent perfection. Why, then, must they be made to suffer so?
The question is even sharper when it comes to the suffering of innocent humans: the toddler who suffers the torments of cancer, or the multitudes who are sheared away each year in natural disasters. How can a God of the three perfections possibly allow this capricious evil? As I contemplate the possibility of belief, this seems by far the biggest obstacle.
Bill clarifies the discussion by bringing in the idea of “pointless evil”. For all we know, there may be evils apparent to us that are in fact necessary for the possibility of a greater good. (Any parent who has dealt with a frustrated two-year-old understands this in a way that the child cannot — and we stand in a position of far greater ignorance relative to God than a child does to his parent.) What should stymie belief in God, then, is only evil that in fact serves no higher purpose. Bill draws on a formulation taken from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Theological Premise: Necessarily, if there is a God, there are no pointless evils.
Empirical Premise: There are pointless evils.
Conclusion: There is no God.
But here’s the rub: how can we, in our finitude and ignorance, know what is or isn’t pointless? Bill continues:
Now the lions’ eating alive of the baby elephant would seem to be a pointless evil: why couldn’t an omnipotent God have created a world in which all animals are herbivores?
But — and here the skeptic inserts his blade — how do we know this? in general, how do we know that the empirical premise is true? Even if it is obvious that an event is evil, it is not obvious that it is pointlessly evil. One can also ask, more radically, whether it is empirically obvious that an event is evil. It is empirically obvious to me that the savagery of nature is not to my liking, nor to the liking of the animals being savaged, but it does not follow that said savagery is objectively evil. But if an event or state of affairs is not objectively evil, then it cannot be objectively pointlessly evil.
So how do we know that the so-called empirical premise above is true or even empirical? Do we just see or intuit that an instance of animal savagery is both evil and pointless? Suppose St. Paul tells us (Romans 1:18-20) that one can just see that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the the things that have been made, and that therefore atheism is morally culpable! I say: Sorry, sir, but you cannot read off the createdness-by-God of nature from its empirical attributes. Createdness is not an empirical attribute; it is an ontological status. But neither is being evil or being pointlessly evil.
So both the theist and the atheist make it too easy for themselves when they appeal to some supposed empirical fact. We ought to be skeptical both about Paul’s argument for God and the atheist’s argument against God. Paul begs the question when he assumes that the natural world is a divine artifact. The atheist too begs the question when he assumes that all or some evils are pointless evils.
Will you say that the pointlessness of some evils is not a direct deliverance but an inference? From which proposition or propositions? From the proposition that these evils are inscrutable in the sense that we can discern no sufficient reasons for God’s allowing them? But that is too flimsy a premise to allow such a weighty inference.
The dialectical lay of the land seems to be as follows. If there are pointless evils, then God does not exist, and if God exists, then there are no pointless evils. But we don’t know that there are pointless evils, and so we are within our epistemic rights in continuing to affirm the existence of God. After all, we have a couple dozen good, but not compelling, arguments for the existence of God. One cannot prove the existence of God. By the same token, one cannot prove the nonexistence of God. One can bluster, of course, and one can beg the question. And one can do this both as a theist and as an atheist. But if you are intellectually honest, you will agree with me that there are no proofs and no objective certainties in these sublunary precincts.
This is why I say that, in the end, one must decide what one will believe and how one will live.
“One must decide.” Well, yes — but how? Bill shows us that reason alone has insufficient grounds for a verdict; neither case is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Upon what do we fall back, then? C.S. Lewis argued that our awareness of natural moral law — laid down, to quote the Declaration of Independence, by “Nature and Nature’s God” — is proof of the existence of a transcendent and righteous Lawgiver. But if we are to accept this, then we may — nay, must — appeal to our moral intuitions to help us arrive at a verdict.
So, then, what does my own moral intuition have to say about a two-year-old writhing in pain from bone cancer? When I ask, the answer is this: that it is wrong, that it is evil, to make an innocent child suffer so. Try as I might, I cannot imagine what “greater good” could justify such an act of torture (or even how such a horror could serve any “good” at all). Either my conscience is a reliable proxy for God’s moral guidance, or it is, as the atheists say, merely a pragmatic social adaptation, an evolutionary by-product of a purposeless world. If the former, it seems to convict God — but how can I square that with belief in God’s triple perfections? If the latter, then the answer is simple: there is no God, and pointless evil exists.
So — if reason is helpless to acquit, and conscience votes to convict, then what is left for the believer? Only the persistence of his sense of the transcendent, and the yearning to believe. If we are to let God off the hook, the problem of “pointless evil” must simply be set aside as a mystery beyond our comprehension. Can we do it? Ought we do it?
12 Comments
I do not think reason is helpless to acquit, of course it’s horrible, it is absolutely horrible and that part of the point, it was never part of God’s plan.
Unless sin has real consequences, not just for oneself, but for others, the freedom just really isn’t there. God isn’t making the child suffer, the child isn’t suffering for their own sin obviously, the child is suffering because that is the natural consequence of a fallen world.
I don’t think it’s a mystery, or at least not entirely one. My intuition tells me that it kind of has to be that horrible or else what we’re playing in is more simulation than real. If our sins only affected ourselves, and it were obviously so, than that is not really “real”. It’s got to be that bad.
And finally, everything has to be weighed against the eternal bliss of heaven. Stretching out across eternity, whatever pain or trauma that can be felt becomes by definition infinitely small.
We have abundant evidence for God’s existence and benevolence. It’s also not just if we take the evil as evidence against Him and then refuse to take good as evidence for Him.
Greetings,
I had a conversation with someone who volunteers at a children’s ward in the hospital, and has lost his faith in God as a result, as he questions why a loving God allows this suffering to happen (“How can that be part of His plan?”).
I explained to him that God, by definition, is both omniscient and omnipotent. Therefore, He sees and plans things on a level that we, with our comparatively puny minds, are incapable of even comprehending. Or even imagining to comprehend.
“Imagine if the drug from Limitless were real, and I took it, and I suddenly had a 4-digit IQ, in the thousands.” I told him. “Then, imagine I told you that on the 22nd of next month, you have to sell everything you own and buy stock in Sears. I know that it’s going bankrupt, but I’ve done all of the math. Trust me…. Would you do it?”
I told him that if his answer was ‘yes’ that it’s faith.
Just as a normal person couldn’t fathom what someone with an IQ in the thousands is doing, so are we incapable of understanding God. God lets us understand only what He tells us about Himself. The rest is incomprehensible, and trying to comprehend it is, ultimately, both futile and arrogant.
We are ants trying to understand Tesla, DaVinci, or Goethe.
Laocoon,
Ah, but you see there is a competing explanation, namely that we live in a purposeless world in which the suffering of the innocent is simply a brute fact. The idea, however devastating its implications, is compelling in its consistency and simplicity.
On the one hand, then, we have God, but also the terrible conundrum of apparently pointless evil. Yes, we can cut short the deliberation by simply believing in God’s tri-perfection despite the visible and inexplicable horror, but that is no easy thing (for me, at least).
On the other hand, we have the world as an awful, brute fact — a profoundly isolating and unconsoling view that also comes with enigmas of its own, such as (see my previous post) the fine-tuning of the physical constants and the mystery of consciousness.
I find the argument from contingency quite compelling. If the pointless/not pointless evil conundrum is inconclusive (we are within our epistemic rights) then the other arguments tip the scales, so to speak. The “existence of evil” argument has always been an argument against God’s existence, rather than a positive argument for His existence. To refute it, all one needs is to show it to be inconclusive, and therefore loses all its purpose.
In other words, if the fingerprint evidence is inclusive, then the DNA, eye-witnesses, video surveillance, cell-phone data, etc. will have to do.
It’s hard for me to see how preventing genetic defects in young children wouldn’t be a massive violation of the natural world, something God by His nature should be reluctant to do. It would be too much of a “tell,” precluding the need on our part for virtue and faith. Would not such a statute of limitations be strange, that adolescents and adults are affected by mutations or poor genetic hands but never infants and toddlers?
This is a complicated problem and it has been studied a lot. I don’t think the best option is to reach conclusions starting from scratch. As with any complex topic, we should study a bit the arguments given by previous thinkers, instead of trying to “reinvent the wheel”. The same way, if we find that we don’t understand the functioning of the DNA, the first thing is to read a book about genetics, instead of reaching conclusions without taking into account the information that has been discovered by the people that came before us.
The size of a combox or a post cannot explain all the complexities of this subject, so, if you are really interested, I recommend you to watch the 5 or 6 videos that William Lane Craig has produced about this topic, where he analyzes all the different perspectives and versions of the problem of suffering. This is the first one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMOKakXm1Wc
(and then you can watch the next ones)
I will only say two quick things:
1) My dog thinks I am cruel when I vaccinate him. He can’t imagine that I have good reasons to inflict this suffering. Lack of imagination is not a proof, especially when thinking of someone infinitely more intelligent than ourselves. (And don’t forget that even the worse sufferings of this world pale against the eternal infinite bliss that is heaven)
2) I don’t think “omnipotent” means what you think that it means. In Christianity, “omnipotent” does not mean “God can do everything” (such as Allah in the Quran, see Surah 22:6 and Surah 46:33) but “God can do every thing that is not logically impossible” (this is the understanding of the Bible and all Christian thinkers from Christ to our days).
God cannot create a squared circle (a logical impossibility). God cannot lie (Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 6:18) because lying would be against God’s nature, which is truth (so God’s lying would be a logical impossibility, like a squared circle). God cannot deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13) and cannot be tempted by evil (James 1:13).
In a universe with billions of creatures with free will, lots of things cannot be done by God because they are logical impossibilities. Not only the obvious ones (such as preventing Hitler from killing people while giving him free will at the same time). But also lots of non-obvious ones, because billions of people practicing their free will can cause lots of chains of consequences. And this is only about material causes, without mentioning the logical impossibilities derived from spiritual causes (which we may know or may not know).
But these are only two small comments. For a more detailed analysis of the topic, you can see the William Lane Craig’s videos. And then, reach more informed conclusions.
Pointless evil is the entire reason I believe in God – pointlessness is at the very core of evil. If something is necessary there is no sense in calling it evil in the first place.
In a Godless universe ruled only by cause and effect the concept of evil seems incoherent. It is atheists, not theists, that have ” the problem of evil”.
imnobody,
Thank you for the Craig link. I read him a bit years ago, but have been meaning to consult him again (along with others such as Edward Feser).
A Catholic friend has also sent me an encyclical, which I had not read, by John Paul II on the subject of suffering. I look forward to reading it.
I am, not, however, a “babe in the woods” when it comes to this topic. I have engaged in conversation with believers about this for most of my life (albeit from an adversarial perspective until quite recently), and I am very well aware of the other points you make. If you scroll up you will see that I addressed, in passing, the limitations of both divine omnipotence, and of our comprehension of the greater good, in this post.
It is not that I am unfamiliar with these theistic arguments, but that I have so far had difficulty finding them sufficient to make belief possible for me.
As for omnipotence: imagine a two-year-old tortured by cancer. There are several answers on offer:
Which do you prefer?
Asher,
I know atheism from the inside. There is no problem of “evil” for the atheist; the only problem is for those who insist on trying, despite their atheism, to find some referent for the term. Most don’t.
@Malcolm
The answer is 2. We already conclusively know God is both there and good from other sources. Therefore 2 is the only explanation.
It isn’t pointless because we know if there was no such thing as meaning we wouldn’t be bothered by it or even have a concept of it.
I keep coming back to the unscientific, but unshakeable thought that things HAVE to be that horrible for free will to exist, for love to exist. If it doesn’t go that deep than it isn’t really real, it would be a nerf reality. The child’s suffering is not pointless, it’s horrible, but it isn’t meaningless. It’s horrible because it was preventable, because it wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. Which means there is a way things were supposed to be. Good must be very good for it’s privation to be so awful.
Hoyos,
I appreciate the depth of your faith, but the problem for someone like me is that I don’t “conclusively know that God is both there and good” (though I would certainly hope that if He is there, He is good!).
I don’t see why an innocent child must be tortured in order for love and free will to exist. The idea that a tri-perfect God would inflict, or permit, such torment on a wee innocent child because of the Fall in the Garden of Eden — for which the child cannot possibly bear any responsibility — feels grotesquely wrong, and the idea that it is simply a mystery above my pay-grade is just not good enough. If I am to believe, I need to understand — to find a way to square this circle — and so far I cannot.