Obsolete Philosophy: The Senior Thesis on Theodicy

As I mentioned in the kickoff post, I wrote a lot of papers in college.

This is the last major paper I wrote. The Senior Thesis. You had to write the best paper of your life and then go through some Socratic Questioning from the various professors sitting around the table. It tackled the problem of Theodicy. You know the drill: God is All Good, God is Omniscient, Evil exists. Pick two. (Spoiler: I solved the problem by reading the text and seeing which of the three had the least (or, at least, the most contradictory) support.)

I remember having butterflies beforehand but sitting down and doing it was actually pretty fun. Hey, it was something I had spent the previous 15 years or so arguing about (with various degrees of sophistication) and it was nice to have an exhibition game with pros from the American League instead of the National League (if you know what I mean).

Re-reading it, I wince… but not as bad as I thought I was going to. I’m mostly struck by the whole “I read a book. Then I read another book. Then I read another book. Then I read another book” thing that it’s got going on. Would I write this paper differently today? Well, the answer for pretty much every single other paper I looked at was somewhere between “Yes” and “Hell, Yes” and this one is no different but… I think it’s closer to “Yes” than “Hell, Yes”.

No pun intended.

Here it is.

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University of Redacted

The Problem of Resolving Evil with the Notion of a Christian God

A Thesis Submitted to
The Faculty of the Department of Philosophy
In Candidacy for the Degree of
Bachelor of the Arts

By
Jaybird

Fall 1996

Why do bad things happen to people who don’t deserve them? This question, at first glance, seems to have no answer. Indeed, it seems to have the basic assumption behind it that the question should never have come up. The bad weather, or bad health, or bad whatever should never have existed. When the above question is posed, it seems most appropriate to respond by asking “Why shouldn’t these bad things have happened?”

Most every religion in the world do not have a problem with the existence of evil. Buddhism and Hinduism both see evil as part of the natural order that should serve as impetus for the enlightened to leave the wheel of suffering. Islam sees evil as coming from Allah as punishment for going against his will; when bad things happen to good people it is evidence that the people themselves aren’t good. Judaism sees evil as just part of the broken order, it is something to be saddened by, but not questioned, as it, like everything else in the world, comes from God. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the world religions apart from Christianity do have a problem with evil, but they have no problems with any attempt to reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of their own particular Gods.

Christianity does have an answer to the question “Why should these things have not happened?”: God. God should want these things not to happen. And, since He is God, he has the ability to prevent them. God should keep these bad things from happening. Bad things should not happen to us if we do not deserve them. The problem comes up when these statements regarding the nature of God are faced with the fact that all of these things that should not happen are. Christianity is the only world religion that seems unwilling to cease affirming God’s omnipotence and all-goodness in the face of the evil that it encounters.

The problem of theodicy is certainly not a new problem. Epicurus discussed the problem of trying to resolve an all-good, all-powerful deity with the evil that exists in the world, as have Leibnitz, Aquinas, Luther, Augustine and others. Indeed, hundreds of theologians have struggled with the existence of evil since the beginning of the concept of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. Several of these theologians have even offered answers to the problem. However, the answers given by these great thinkers ring hollow when faced with yet another instance of something not being the way it should be.

It can be argued that an existential sense of wrongness is hardly sufficient for the assertion that an all-powerful, all-good deity is incompatible with the state of the world. However, no amount of counter-argument is sufficient for the pangs felt when one sees something like a four-year-old wearing leg braces. We look to the sky and ask, like Tevye in the play Fiddler on the Roof, “God? Was that really necessary?”

But the existential nature of the problem can be misleading. The problem is that Christianity commits itself to an incompatible triad. God is, by definition, all-powerful. God is, by definition, all-good. An all-powerful being has the wherewithal to prevent, minimize, or eradicate evil. An all-good being has the desire to prevent, minimize, or eradicate evil. Evil does not seem to be prevented, minimized, or eradicated in the world. The conclusion seems to be that God is not both all-powerful and all-good. It seems that the truth of any two statements in the triad precludes the truth of the third, resulting in an inconsistent triad. This paper will look at not only the arguments of many theologians saying why we should not jump to the above conclusion that there is inconsistency, but also posit an independent answer.

What is God?

The problem that results in an inconsistent triad is the attempt to balance the traits of God with the traits of the world. What are these traits? As said before, they are the traits of being both all-powerful and all-good. There are, of course, problems trying to break down either one of these traits. The first is the problem contained in all-powerful. Thomas Aquinas dealt with this problem in the form of “Can an all-powerful God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift?” The question leads to two problematic answers: On the one hand, if He can, then he can’t lift it, and so therefore isn’t all-powerful. On the other hand, if he can’t, he just isn’t all-powerful. Aquinas resolved this problem by saying that it is absurd to demand of omnipotence that it be able to do self-contradictory things, that is, an omnipotent being cannot do things that result in a loss of omnipotence. But, Aquinas said, an all-powerful God can do anything that is not self-contradictory.

To be perfectly honest, to claim that the resolution of the inconsistent triad of theodicy lies within claiming that the trait of all-powerful cannot exist because of silly examples such as “Can God make a hot dog so big that He can’t eat the whole thing?” seems to miss the point of the real nature of the part of the triad that asserts God’s omnipotence. For example, if one made the argument that presupposed a definition of omnipotence that is capable of absurdity, and (by hypothesis) God can’t do absurd things, it results in God’s not being omnipotent. Claiming that the conditions of solving the problem have been met by removing one of the three members of the problem seems like cheap wordplay because there is still the problem of having to resolve the fact that there is a God that, even though not powerful enough to do self-contradictory things, is still powerful enough to create the entire universe from scratch (or from a big bang), but who does not have enough power to do things such as cure cancer, or prevent war atrocities, or any other number of things easily put into the category of “evil”. There is still very much a problem with resolving a God with omnipotence who is also claimed to be omnibenevolent, but there is, nevertheless, evil in the world. So, with this problem in mind, this paper will say that the definition of omnipotent, or all-powerful, is “The ability to do anything that is not logically or self-referentially impossible.” This definition is adequate, as it is close to the definition used by the church fathers, and is also in common usage today. And, there is no potential problem with any self-referential paradox by using this definition of omnipotence.

There are fewer problems with paradox when dealing with the trait of omnibenevolence, or all-goodness. The main problems deal with the meta-question “What is good?” Goodness might entail any number of things, from all of the traits taught us in kindergarten, to the traits given in the Sermon on the Mount. The definition of omnibenevolence that this paper will use will be “The trait of being an entity that would prevent, reduce, or eradicate evil had it the wherewithal to do so.”
This leaves us with only one last problematic definition: Evil.

What is Evil?

It seems all to easy to define evil in terms of good, and all to difficult to avoid talking about goodness when dealing with the definition of evil. We can begin by defining evil as “something without which the world would have been better.” But this is unsatisfactory because then such things as influenza and carbon monoxide could be classified as evil, along with things like war and child abuse. But, there are precious few of us who would put viruses and poisons into the category of “good things.” It seems that a distinction must be made between two kinds of evil. “The evil that men do” is generally termed “Moral Evil” while the evil of hurricanes or of the AIDS virus is called “Natural Evil”.

It does seem extreme to assign a moral value to weather or DNA strands, but if one man cut down another in the prime of life it would be deemed evil. The argument behind “Natural Evil” lies in the intuition that cutting down a (for all intents and purposes “good”) man in the prime of life is an evil thing, whether it be done by another man with a knife, AIDS, a hurricane, or any cause at all. Whatever the distinction made between evils, they are both members of the set “Things the world would be better off without”.

David Ray Griffin points out a further distinction in types of evil. He claims that there is apparent evil and genuine evil. Apparent evil is anything that someone could come to the conclusion that it was evil, even though it was a necessary evil that contributed to a greater good. So stubbing one’s toe is apparent evil, as is the AIDS virus, as is more or less anything if the thing in question results in a better world, and the world would not have been better off without it. Genuine evil is something that makes the world the worse off for having. The difference lies in the difference between our perspective and what actually is. A bad thing that happens to us may seem to be evil, but in actuality make us into a better person (what parents call “character builders”). Since they make us better people, such phenomena make the world a better place, and so the instances of apparent evil really cannot be termed genuine evil. However, since we have no real facility to distinguish between genuine and apparent evil, it seems that one could “cop out” and claim that all evil is merely apparent evil and resolve the problem of the inconsistent triad by just denying evil. It should be noted, however, that it seems improbable that any one person would be able to say in 1996 that there has been nothing in the world to this point that the world has been better off without.

What is the problem?

Saying that the three phrases “God is all-good”, “God is all-powerful”, and “Evil exists” do not seem to form a contradiction immediately. There are some missing premises that need to be formalized if the argument is to carry full analytic weight. David Ray Griffin, in his book God, Power, and Evil puts forth the argument like this:

P1: God is a perfect reality.
P2: A perfect reality is an omnipotent being.
P3: An omnipotent being could unilaterally bring about an actual world without any genuine evil.
P4: A perfect reality is a morally perfect being.
P5: A morally perfect being would want to bring about an actual world without any genuine evil.
P6: If there is genuine evil in the world, then there is no God.
P7: There is genuine evil in the world.
C: Therefore, there is no God.

I must say, however, that I do not understand this concept of “a perfect reality” or even see how it is necessary addition to the argument. Also, his definition of genuine evil vs. apparent evil seems unnecessary to me. When a situation produces good, it does not necessarily justify the original “evil”. For instance, even if the holocaust of the Jews during the 1940’s produced scientific breakthroughs in medicine, psychology, and philosophy that eventually lead to the world’s betterment, or even perfection, it still does not justify the original evil. While an appeal to the atrocities committed by the Nazis borders on an appeal to emotion, it can be argued that a theologian, committed to keeping his God with all of his traits intact, must then make an appeal to all evil in the world being apparent and not genuine. It certainly seems difficult to imagine a person who could call such things as the concentration camps merely apparent evil (“after all, there were some wonderful books and movies that sprung from the holocaust!”) and not difficult at all to imagine a world that would be better if the camps never came into existence in the first place. And that is why that I feel that a much more concise argument is the following:

P1: God is an All-powerful, All-good entity.
P2: An All-good entity would reduce, prevent, or minimize the existence of evil in the world had it the wherewithal to do so.
P3: An All-powerful entity has the wherewithal to reduce, prevent, or minimize the evil in the world.
P4: The evil in the world seems neither reduced, prevented, nor minimized.
C: God either does not exist, or does not have the trait of being All-powerful, or does not have the trait of being All-good, or is neither All-good nor All- powerful.

This is a valid argument, insofar as all of the premises lead to the conclusion. But the soundness of the argument has been questioned by hundreds of theologians. David Hume put the problem very concisely when he asked about God “Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” It seems that one must remove one of the three of the triad if one is to resolve the problem.
The philosophers Augustine, Luther, Leibnitz, and Hick all choose to remove evil from the triad. David Griffin decides to absolve God of his power. Roth and I choose a different route and decide that omnibeneficence is the trait that does not apply to God. This paper will first examine Augustine, as he is among the earliest philosophers to tackle this problem.

Augustine’s Free Will Defense

Saint Augustine, hailed as the Father of systematic theology, takes an approach that does not seem terribly novel today, but when it came out, it was quite groundbreaking. The argument can be summed up by saying that when something bad happens, it happens because people cause it, not because God wills it. God wants us to have the ability to go against his will, and, since he is all-powerful, he has the wherewithal to create things that can go against his will. Since he is all-good, his will is something that should be followed, but, since we, in the garden of eden, railed against God’s perfect plan, we must sleep in the bed that we have made, namely, a fallen world that contains evil. At first look, this seems a good defense. However, when one looks at the implications of God’s omnipotence, namely his power of foreknowledge, one runs into problems with free will.

If God knows that a created being will turn against him and directly allow evil into the world and indirectly cause pain in billions and billions of people, does not God have a responsibility to rectify that situation? Or, at least, does God not have a responsibility to the multitudes of entities that will reap the consequences of the two entities making the choice? Augustine has an answer to this: even though there is a multitude of pain, God’s omnipotence still keeps anything from going against His will. So all that happens is still within God’s will, and, as such, cannot qualify as genuine evil but only as apparent evil. How any one action could not go against God’s will is due to the fact of God’s foreknowledge of all things. God’s power of omniscience results in all things happening necessarily. That is to say, everything that we may seem to will to do is in fact known by God ahead of time and God created a world where, although it seems that we experience evil or even occasionally choose to commit evil, God planned on every single thing happening the way that it would, and made sure that the outcomes of our actions resulted in, at the worst, apparent evil but not genuine evil.

There is a problem with this defense: If God has the power of knowing all that will happen then all that happens, happens necessarily. Even if our actions feel like free will, are they really? The statement that our actions follow from our wills brings on the question of whether or not we could have willed other than we did. If God does know exactly what will happen, it implies that all that happens, happens necessarily. Our will is not free will, but merely another causally determined factor in a long string of causally determined factors. Augustine’s notion of free will is fairly reminiscent of the Stoic notion of fatalism. This fatalism not only seems to contradict Augustine’s theory of free will, but it does not seem to let God off of the hook. His omniscience results in negating our free will at the same time that his omnipotence is the cause of all that happens.

So it would seem that Augustine, in light of this, is really only giving us free will with his right hand in order to take it away with his left. When given the choice of giving up one of the attributes of God, or the attribute of evil in the world. Augustine chose to give up evil as he was willing to give up neither God’s power, nor his moral perfection. This is not a satisfactory defense, for it does not really eliminate the problem of evil, but merely shuffles the parts around. Those things that our intuitions say could not contribute to God’s glory or the betterment of the world in general are no less odious after seeing the world through the perspective of Augustine.

Luther’s Denial of Free Will

Martin Luther takes a different tack than Augustine when it comes to free will. While Augustine gave free will with the right hand and took it away with the left, Luther comes right out from the beginning to say that the doctrine of free will is incompatible with the doctrine of God’s omnipotence and thus denies even the possibility of free will. How then does he deal with the problem of evil? With the assertion of God’s omnipotence, there is only his omnibenevolence and the existence of evil to dispute.

Luther seems to vacillate upon which of these two he would like to dispose of. He concedes that God has created a world in which the existence of evil seems undeniable leaving us with the unpleasant conclusion that we may have to deny God his omnipotence or his omnibenevolence. To make matters worse, his theory of predestination leads to the conclusion that God alone chooses the elect who will go to be with him for all eternity in glory and those who will spend an eternity in hell. This leads not to a denial of evil in the world, but to a denial of God’s moral perfection, as it is our sinful nature that sends us to hell for eternity and we do not choose our nature. It is only through the grace of God that any of us escape hell, but, since our natures, actions, attitudes, and all else about us exist only because God so wills it, it seems arbitrary for anyone to be chosen for eternal bliss or eternal torment. All of these factors lead to the conclusion that the evil we see on this world is in fact genuine evil, which leads us to the conclusion that it is the moral perfection of God that is suspect. Luther anticipated this conclusion and constructed a counter-argument to deal with it.

While on this earth we have the earthly perspective that the wicked seem to prosper and the good seem to suffer, in the afterlife, we will see that the wicked will be punished and the good rewarded for their deeds in the life on earth. This new perspective is deemed “the perspective of Grace.” Of course, even within this new perspective, we may question the rightness of eternal torment for those who did not choose their natures, actions, or beliefs. There is another perspective beyond this meta-perspective of grace, called “the perspective of glory” that will make all things clear to us regarding the meta-question of cosmic justice, just as the meta-perspective of grace cleared up the problem regarding the question of worldly justice.

When given the choice of giving up God’s goodness or the existence of evil, chose to give up evil. Even in the face of circumstances that looked like there would be no choice but to give up omnibenevolence, Luther constructed an argument that saved him from giving up one of the traits of God. However, his argument leaves something to be desired. The strength of his argument relies not only on having a meta-perspective after this worldly existence with the perspecive of Grace, but upon having a meta-meta-perspective after that with his perspective of glory. Without these perspectives to come Luther must conceed that God is not omnibenevolent, and he fought violently against reaching this conclusion. However, the main criticism of his viewpoint is that an argument that claims that all evil in the world is only apparent evil needs support that is stronger than a premise that says that all of our worldly ideas of right and wrong and eternal justice are wrong, and founds that premise upon two perspectives that we might gain, after we die.

Leibnitz’s Possible Worlds

Perhaps the most eloquent of all the theologians who attempt to defend God by denying evil was Leibnitz. Leibnitz begins with the theory that there are many possible worlds, each with differing degrees of good and evil, but our world, the actual world, is the “best of all possible worlds.”

His argument is simple and elegant: There is an infinite number of possibilities for the way the world could be. God, in his infinite power and knowledge, knows which of the infinite possibilities is the best one. It may seem that there is a great deal of genuine evil in this world, but all of that evil exists to facilitate the greatest good. In his masterpiece, aptly titled Theodicy, Leibnitz says that God uses evil only as a ladder to get us higher than we would have been otherwise.
One may ask of Leibnitz, “Well, what about the possible world that is better than this one?” Leibnitz has a handy response in his essay Freedom of Man in the Origin of Evil: “a lesser good is a kind of evil if it stands in the way of a greater good”. Leibnitz allows that there may be possible worlds where there is no pain or suffering, but these worlds would not be the best of all possible worlds, just the least painful. The best of all possible worlds requires pain, suffering, and apparent evil in order to maximize the good within it.

There are problems with this view, however. We could ask him again “Well, what about the possible world where the total amount of good is greater than in our own, and the amount of pain and suffering and apparent evil is less?” Leibnitz may say that there is no such world. But that is one of the problems when dealing with possible worlds: it is fairly easy to imagine a possible world having any amount of qualities, as long as none are necessarily contradictory with any other. It is not obvious that the possible world where people were genetically programmed to be nicer to each other is necessarily worse than this one. On the other hand, it is difficult to claim that this is the best of all possible worlds when one sees a small child in a wheelchair or a cancer ward. One can easily imagine a world that would have been better without the suffering of children.

There is another way around the possible worlds by questioning the possibility of all of the other worlds. There are theories that there is one, and only one, possible world and we all live in that possible world, called the actual world. If the theories that there is one, and only one, possible world are correct, the statement that this is the best of all possible worlds is true, but trivially true as one could also call this the worst of all possible worlds. Or the most mediocre. Or the furriest. One could call it the pinnacle or nadir of any trait, as there are no other possible worlds to vie for the title.

How then can Leibnitz justify all of the evil in the world? Leibnitz will give up neither omnipotence nor omnibenevolence. He denies the existence of genuine evil with his assertion that this is the best of all possible worlds. While we may smile at the assertion, there certainly seems to be a preponderance of evidence that it is in fact not the best, and we are still left trying to reconcile the evil in the world to our idea of God.

John Hick’s Happy Ending

Contemporary theologians have also tried to resolve the problem of theodicy by denying the existence of genuine evil. John Hick is a 20th century philosopher who has tackled the problem by saying that our perspective in this world of good and evil is lacking. He has constructed a rather convoluted argument that dismisses much of the dogma plaguing such theodicies as Augustine’s and Luther’s. Hick comes at the problem of evil from the point of view that humankind is progressing toward a greater good. He leaves the traditional starting point of Christian theology of humans being created perfect but then falling from grace. Instead, he starts from the viewpoint that the world was created with evil in it, and humans were created as fallen creatures.
As his starting point, Hick dismisses the traditional free will defense used as a foundation (either for or against) by Augustine and Luther (as well as Calvin, Aquinas, and countless other church fathers). Hick instead decides to make an argument against the existence of genuine evil. He argues that all instances of evil are part of a process that leads to the greater good of the human spirit. By making people better and better, God is hoping to eventually have entities with which he might have a “filial” relationship.

As Hick does not really question God’s omnipotence nor omnibenevolence, he must then deal with the problem of evil. He makes the distinction between moral evil (evil that men do) and natural evil (bad stuff that just happens). His view on natural evil is a persuasive one. Imagine the most vile natural evil in the world (Cancer, AIDS, old age) and then imagine the world without that particular evil. Inevitably, there is a new worst natural evil. Remove that one, and then repeat. Eventually, we get to a world where the worst of the natural evils is indigestion or toenail fungus. Even beyond those worlds is a world without any natural evil at all. A world that is “morally frictionless”. A world like that one would not be one conducive to the growth of its participants, and, as such, would not lead to an entity capable of as full and rich of a relationship with God as a creature in a world with cancer, AIDS, and old age.

Hence, all of the evil in this world is apparent evil for it is providing the friction necessary for us to gain the strength needed in the next world, much like a caterpillar when hatching from a cocoon needs to fight its way to the outside alone (lest it die from being too weak). The fact that such evil is abundant is so that humanity will have cause to doubt the existence of God, and so that those who do love him will love him all the more, and all the more honestly. In a world where good is always rewarded and evil is always punished, Hick says, morality is meaningless. People do what they do for their own best self-interest. In our, imperfect world, when we go to God, we do so out of faith (which God wants) and not out of self-interest. Eventually, this world will reach the point where the payoff will be reached, and those who did fight against evil, those who did overcome the friction it provided, will be in a perfect relationship with the creator. God is good, God is powerful, and evil is only a thing to be overcome so that we may become more like God.

This view, although novel, has quite a few problems with it. It is not readily apparent that the evil in the world is justified by God’s desire for peers. Nor is it apparent that the world will be made a better place through God having friends at the cost of all of the pain the universe experienced up to that point. Hick himself gives the example from Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov when Ivan says:

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.

Hick seems to take the tack that God would say “yes” to this question. He and I have differing intuitions on this point. I would say “no” and that any such utopia would not be worth the cost of that one tiny baby beating its breast with its fist. Even if every human being ever born became close personal friends with God, and peers worthy of Him, all of the evil in the world would not be worth the cost if the conclusion of all human existence would be nothing more than just having a filial relationship with the creator. John Hick’s happy ending leaves much to be desired.

Griffin’s Process Theodicy

When faced with the problem of trying to reconcile the problem posed by theodicy, David Griffin sees that so many have tried (and failed) to deny the existence of evil. Indeed, Griffin claims that, in this post- holocaust world, it makes most of us “uncomfortable” to say that there is no genuine evil in the world. Griffin attempts a new tack: He starts questioning God’s omnipotence. He claims that we were created not ex nihilo, but formed from chaos. As such, we are not made of perfect stuff, but chaotic raw matter that may predate God.

Griffin makes the argument that God created a plan and the closer that this stuff follows this plan, the closer to perfect that it becomes. He has four variables of the created beings that, when one rises, the others rise accordingly:

(1) The capacity to enjoy intrinsic goodness (or value)
(2) The capacity to suffer intrinsic evil (or dis-value)
(3) The power of self-determination.
(4) The power to influence others (for good or evil)

He makes the claim that the evolutionary process toward greater and greater complexity is a reflection of the creative purpose of a loving, omnibeneficent God. He created us so that we make have richer and more-good experiences that lead, eventually, to an experience of Him as creator. He claims that the capacity to experience good is necessarily correlated to the capacity to experience evil. It can be safely posited that atomic particles can experience neither pleasure nor pain, let alone good or evil. There is then a jump to cells. Cells give the first signals of experiencing satisfaction or dis-satisfaction. Animals with central nervous systems make another leap to the point where pleasure and pain can be experienced. Perhaps humans are the next leap up, able not only to experience pleasure and pain, but also to deal with such things as good, evil, aesthetics, ethics, and so on. So, when we ask the question “Why do we experience suffering and evil?” Griffin gives the answer “God could not do otherwise. To give us the ability to experience pleasure and goodness, he necessarily gave us the ability to experience suffering and evil.”

Griffin resolves the problem of evil by denying God His omnipotence. When one asks Griffin “Why didn’t God create us so that we would be able to experience goodness but incapable of sinning?” Griffin answers that God could not do this. That is to say, God could not create humans that could experience goodness to the level that we are capable of doing while reducing our self-determinacy to the point where we are incapable of experiencing and causing evil. God wants us to follow his path, but his ability to influence us is directly correlated to how close we are to his path. So a moral man is much easier influenced by God than an immoral man. He has limitations on the abilities of God that lead to these three conclusions:

(1) Those things which cannot deviate much from the divine will also cannot be influenced by God very quickly.
(2) Those things which can be influenced by God very quickly can deviate drastically from the divine will.
(3) Those things which do nothing on their own cannot be directly influenced by God at all.

Evil exists because God has created us with the capacity to have a richness of experience and causality that we are not only capable of good, but also of evil. He is not capable of creating a creature capable of experience of one but not the other.

This position poses two problems. The first comes from a critique of this position by John Roth. John Roth claims that Griffin’s God is too small and pathetic to merit the title of “God”. Roth says, “with one hand Griffin offers the hypothesis that God lures us to realize the greatest good that is possible in our particular situations. With a leash of necessity in the other, Griffin removes virtually every good reason for religious faith in God’s power to redeem and save.”

The other argument against Griffin is slightly more rooted in the tradition of Christianity. The Bible makes many claims regarding both God’s goodness and omnipotence, but while it may equivocate on God’s goodness, it never equivocates on his power.

Roth’s Theodicy of Protest

John Roth in Encountering Evil proposes a theodicy of protest. In it, he gives many quotations from writers who tackled the atrocities of the holocaust, such as Elie Weisel, William Styron, and Irving Greenberg. He gives a passionate argument from his own experience, and the experience of others, that the existence of evil, even genuine evil, cannot be denied. He is then left to deal with God’s power, or his goodness. It is interesting to see that Roth does not question God’s power at all. It is assumed that the creator of the universe is all powerful, and even if He gave humanity some amount of his power in the guise of free will, it does not result in a lack of God’s power, but, Roth claims, the fact that the cost-benefit of free will versus evil is so unbalanced calls into question God’s goodness, and not his power. Surely God, when armed with the power of the knowledge of the consequences of giving humanity free will, cannot be called good when he decides to go ahead and give it to them anyway.

It is called a theodicy of protest, because it has taken into account all of the theodicies that have claimed that all the apparent evil in the world will be rectified in the world to come, all of the wrongs will be made right, and all of the tears wiped away. Roth’s theodicy says that even if that is the case, the cost is too high. No amount of glory can make up for atrocity. Moreover, he makes the statement regarding the claims that glory in heaven and adequate displays of human virtue require atrocity: “That proposition mocks the victims far more than it honors them.”

He goes on to claim that there are 5 basic tenets to his theodicy of protest: (1) Affirmation of God’s omnipotence, (2) affirmation that suffering is part of life, (3) affirmation of trust in God, (4) affirmation of hope in God and something better, and (5) the affirmation that genuine evil does in fact exist. (1), (2), and (5) are either self explanatory or have been covered ad nauseam in this paper already, but (3) and (4) are interesting and deserve unpacking.

Trust in God is unpacked by appeal to the story of Job in the Bible. When Job lost all of his worldly possessions, his children, and his health, he remained certain that, given the chance, God would vindicate him if He heard Job’s story. Job suffered terribly and unjustly at the hands of an agent of God, but still he was certain and remained unswayed in his belief that God would make things right.

Hope in something better is not a hope for a paradise beyond this life, but that human beings can turn this world into a better place by challenging the obstacles that God has put up for us. Roth quotes Elie Wiesel “…we know that it is given to man to transform divine injustice into human justice and compassion.”

However, Roth’s argument leaves something to be desired. His is a theodicy that has decided to be honest, brutally honest, about the existence of evil. Roth is not afraid to bring up quotations such as Irving Greenberg when he said “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.” Roth does not let people like Leibnitz, Augustine, Luther, and Hick off of the hook. The appeal to the ignorance of the status of evil (whether it be genuine or merely apparent) is not enough for Roth, and rightly so, but his argument is still insufficient. Roth does not give much reason to care about this new God. He focuses on the evil that God does, and offers no consolation at all regarding the fact that God is responsible for more than his fair share of evil in the world. Roth’s assertion that hope is possible seems spurious when compared to the omnipotence of God. How can we little humans hope to turn anything divine into something else? (Let alone turn divine injustice into justice!) And why bother trusting in a God who does not care enough to stop such things as holocausts? It seems terribly evident that one cannot trust such a God. There needs to be something more.

A New Proposal

The problem of evil is grounded solely in Christianity. This is because that the Christian notions of God are grounded more in wishful thinking than in the canon. The problem of evil comes when one tries to reconcile one’s own “clear and distinct” ideas of God with experience. My solution to the problem involves reconciling the God of the Christian canon with reality, and not the attempt to reconcile the concept of a God that we gain through philosophical ruminations with the outside world.

In both the Old and New Testaments in the Bible, the omnipotence of God is always affirmed without hesitation. Genesis claims that God managed to create the heavens and the earth. The Book of Job (with may be the oldest story extant) again makes the point that God is the one who was there at the beginning and who set the foundations of the earth. Job 41:11b makes the point explicitly: “Whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine.” The New Testament also makes the point of God’s omnipotence. In Mark 10:27 Jesus affirms that “With men it is impossible, but not with God: For with God all things are possible.”

The existence of evil is another thing affirmed by the Bible. The fall, as explained in Genesis 3, makes plain that it is the knowing of good and evil that makes men to be like God. The Deluge, as told in Genesis chapters 6-8, happened in response to the amount of evil in the world. The books of the prophets, both major and minor, harp constantly about evil. The New Testament as well is filled with references to Satan as a metaphysical entity who could well be the instanciation of evil. Hell is introduced in the New Testament as a place of punishing evil. The existence of genuine evil is very much affirmed in the Christian Canon.

We are left with the discussion of God’s all-goodness. Here the Bible equivocates, and within this equivocation the solution can be found. There are a number of Psalms praising the goodness of God. There are also affirmations by the prophets that God is good, and even Jesus, in Matthew 5:48, tells his disciples “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” But, there are also verses like Exodus 32:14 “And the Lord repented of the evil he thought to do his people.” In the book of Job, Job questions God’s justice, but never his power. The truly tragic thing about the book of Job is the insight given in the opening chapters: We know that Job is right. God allowed what happened to Job for the sake of a cosmic wager. In Exodus, when Moses is trying to get Pharaoh to allow his people to leave Egypt, it is God who is hardening the heart of Pharaoh so that more plagues would be brought down. Pharaoh concedes to Moses two separate times, but God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” and made Pharaoh renege on his promise to Moses. Instances of God’s apparent lack of all-goodness are not confined to the Hebrew portion of the Christian canon. In The Revelation of John there are many instances of evil that would be easily prevented by God, but are not: they are allowed to happen so that God can make a point.

This is not to say that the Bible is not filled with verses espousing God’s goodness: it is. However, we must look at the Bible as a whole, and not allow only the verses we like to define God for us. The distasteful verses that paint an unflattering portrait of God are just as essential to the Christian conception of God as the flattering ones. If we look at the descriptions of God’s goodness in the Bible, we come up with an amazing mix of verses saying that God does all the good that is in the world, as well as is responsible for all the evil. This is not to say that the God of the Christian canon is not good: He is. But, he does not have the trait of being omnibeneficent, and thus is the problem of theodicy a manufactured one. The Christian church has created a God from wishful thinking (calling it “revelation”) and as such have created a God incompatible not only with the existence of evil in the world, but also with the God of the canon.

This explanation is not without its own problems, which are not that different from the problems with Roth’s. Roth’s assertions are grounded in deep religious faith, and with a struggle to resolve the problem of evil with the attributes of God, my explanation makes no assumptions about faith, but only looks at the canon of the religion in question and holds it up to the doctrines regarding God. The question “Why should we follow your omnipotent, but not all-good God?” strikes home with the theodicy of Roth, but it is truly outside of the scope of my theodicy. Faith has nothing to do with this problem, since it is not the problem of reconciling our Descartian “clear and distinct” idea of God with the existence of evil. Rather, we must reconcile our ideas of God with the canon that discusses a very different God than the one professed to be followed. That is the problem with every theodicy discussed in this paper but mine: the most important thing is to come up with an idea of God that one can live with. Hick wanted his God to be both all-powerful and all-good and so denied the existence of any genuine evil. Griffin couldn’t deny the existence of genuine evil, but still wanted a God who was all-good, so he decided that he could live without God’s power. Roth came to the flip side of Griffin’s conclusion, he could live with God not being all-good, but not with him being without omnipotence. The problem is that we cannot project our desires for the best possible God into the problem of theodicy and still claim to be Christian. We must look at the descriptions of God that are provided in the canon and see the opinions of ourselves and the theologians as nothing more than commentary upon said canon. To do more than that is certainly possible, but not if one wants one’s God to be the one from the realm of orthodox Christianity.

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Bibliography

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