For Philosophy of Religion, I have to write a final 2,000 word paper on a topic of my choice; I chose Theodicy, the defense of God in the face of evil. Below is what I wrote; please read & see what you think (it's too long for the short attention span many of us let the Internet train us into, but it's divided into headers if you just want to see 1 particular argument for a loving God in the face of evil):
________________________________
“How can a loving God allow so much evil in the world?”
Theodicy is the attempt to defend the existence of God in the face of evil. So many people, religious and non-religious alike, have asked this question: If God is loving, and God is all-powerful, how can there be so much evil? Why doesn’t God stop it? Why is it here in the first place?
This is the faith-shaking question that countless people have had to face. Throughout my college classes, I’ve gotten into a lot of criminology; Forensic Psychology has taken me deep into the worst of mankind, detailing all sorts of awful things people do to each other. Much of it hit close to home for me, because one of my closest friends here has spent a summer in Thailand, learning about & working against human trafficking. I’ve had 2 good friends who have nearly been raped, I grew up surrounded by meth labs & binge drinkers, my neighbors had alcoholic-abusive neighbors, and the news is filled with stories of shootings & sexual abuse.
“Why, Lord, do you stand afar, and provide no heed in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1)
My experiences in being surrounded by evil are by no means uncommon; in fact, it’s much lighter than what many other people have experienced. Think of the starving children in Syria, the physically & psychologically wounded women in domestic violence shelters, the men who were diseased & injured in the jungles of Southeast Asia throughout WWII.
Where is God?
There are many different directions to approach this question; I’ll try to break it down into headers to take it 1 direction at a time.
Evil doesn’t invalidate any other theistic argument
Yes, there is evil in the world, and it has confounded us throughout the ages. But that doesn’t change any other evidence of God’s existence! Somebody had to make something instead of nothing; somebody had to make conditions just right to support such an abundance of life; somebody still had to set everything in motion! The more fundamental arguments still hold strong; even if there are people who do awful things, they can only do so if God already created the universe, life, and so on.
The problem of evil is indirect evidence for God
Curiously, the problem of evil actually speaks for God’s existence!
For evil to be a problem, there has to be some objective standard for evil. Evil simply can’t be an opinion; otherwise, people’s opinions change, and crying out for an answer to why evil is permitted would be solved by relativism; “Well, I think that 9/11 was an evil act, but the hijackers didn’t think so, so it’s alright.” No! Right & wrong must be decided by something beyond personal opinions or societal norms; as history has shown, individuals & societies are really lousy at deciding what’s moral. Every “evil” tyrant had a certain amount of support, sometimes by nearly the entire nation! Militarism is widely regarded as a good idea, as is racism, slavery, selfishness of all kinds, and countless atrocities against any minority. For there to be evil beyond what societies decide on, beyond what humans can put together, there has to be a higher power with a set moral code; in other words, for evil to exist an objective wrong, there has to be an objective set of right & wrong. This objective right & wrong has to come from an objective source—God! And if God has objective right & wrong, and makes it available for us to know, that would point to his loving nature, as well!
Free will
“1730 God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. “God willed that man should be 'left in the hand of his own counsel,' so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him."26
Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.27” --Catechism of the Catholic Church
Free will is a widely held belief among religious people & philosophers alike; history has shown the sheer amount of force needed to restrain free will, a mission that never works in the long run. Cults can convince very small groups of people that they don’t have free will, with a certain amount of success; militaristic dictatorships can restrain free will with weapons & prisons, but even then people continue to rebel, and such dictators can rarely last beyond a few generations.
If man is “master over his acts”, as the Catechism says, it stands to reason that man can choose to do evil. God could’ve made man into mindless robots, only doing good; but again, that’s not compatible with a loving God! Skeptics question how a loving god can permit evil; how much less loving would be a good who denies us the chance to choose evil! The only way we can truly choose good is to have an alternative; evil happens when we don’t choose to do good!
Love
Theodicy, and the question of God allowing evil, are inherently rooted in the idea of a loving god. If god isn’t loving, then there would be no reason to question evil in the world; an unloving god would simply create evil out of his evil nature!
Love cannot be forced; any attempt to force love would be an evil act unto itself. This makes the argument “A loving God wouldn’t allow evil” self-defeating; a loving God would have to allow evil, or else he isn’t loving at all! If you truly love someone, you will desire to be with them; but if they turn away from you, you will try to call them back, but you won’t force them back. Likewise, a god that truly loves His children will call them back when they leave him, but will not force them to come back; thus, like a good but pained lover, a loving God will allow His children to do what isn’t good, but He will never force them to love.
God already intervenes
In my Ethics class, the professor briefly talked about God. An atheist, he mentioned a few arguments for & against God, and among those arguments was the problem of evil. The professor mentioned the idea of free will, of a parental god allowing His children to do wrong, but he brought up a further argument: “Couldn’t God step in to stop the worst atrocities? Couldn’t He have stopped WWII, or the atrocities in the Middle East, or the tyrants in North Korea?” His belief was that a parent will allow their children to do some bad things, but will step in to stop the really bad things the children would do. So why doesn’t God stop the worst things His children would do?
My argument is: Who says He hasn’t?
Think about how close the world has been to nuclear destruction in the past 80 years. Suppose Nazi Germany had developed the nuclear bomb before we did; would they have stopped after the enemy surrendered? Or the Cuban Missile Crisis; Global Superpower #2 has the ability to annihilate the US before we could send nuclear missiles to retaliate, and nothing happens? Or in current times, when a lunatic in a small country with nothing to lose has a nuclear arsenal and only sends missiles into the ocean? Humans have had such abundant opportunities to completely destroy each other, and yet, it never happens. The people most hell-bent on world domination can never get the nuke quite right, as the only country who successfully developed the nuke only used to it end the war.
Think of all the mass shooters whose guns locked up, all the bioweapons that can’t be made on a mass scale, the Columbine shooters whose bombs didn’t go off; could all of this be coincidences, or is this the divine intervention that my Ethics professor said didn’t happen?
It’s always difficult to look at what didn’t happen; alternative histories can be interesting, but little more than speculation. However, let’s suppose that my Ethics professor’s wishes were granted; God stopped His children from committing WWII, the atrocities in the Middle East, and the tyranny in North Korea. He would still say, “Couldn’t God step in & stop the worst atrocities? Couldn’t He have stopped WWI, all the starvation in Kazakhstan, and all the slavery in world history?”
But suppose God stopped all that, too. Then my Ethics professor could say, “Couldn’t God step in & stop the worst atrocities? Couldn’t He have stopped the Thirty Years’ War, all the sex trafficking, and all the drug violence in South America?”
No matter what God steps in to stop, there will still be people who point to what He allows as evidence that’s He’s malevolent, impotent, or simply doesn’t exist. While the problem of evil is laden with emotional confusion, there are legitimate reasons for why He would allow evil, even if we despair.
Temptations exist to strengthen us
Trials are nothing else but the forge that purifies the soul of all its imperfections. (St. Mary Magdalen de'Pazzi)
“Blessed is the man who perseveres in temptation, for when he has been proved he will receive the crown of life that he promised to those who love him.” (James 1:12)
Temptations are often seen as the weight room of the spiritual life. They provide us with something to work against, so that we may be made stronger & better, more ready for the next life, better able to defend against the dark spirits that prowl this world, seeking the ruin of souls. Fighting temptation can be glorified, elevated to a noble spiritual warfare, fulfilling St. Paul’s charge to “fight the good fight” (1 Timothy 6:12).
We humans are made for challenges; games are supposed to be hard, dumbbells are supposed to be heavy, and everything that gives us satisfaction involves overcoming something. So, to enjoy goodness in life, we must overcome the appeal of malevolence; to be able to choose good, we must have evil to resist!
Heroism:
Evil can lead us into some really, really dark places. But at the same time, virtue & goodness can lead us to great heights. What hero existed in a world where everything’s nice & everyone’s happy? Marvel would go bankrupt if they tried to make “Friendly Man”, the superhero who hangs out & says “Hi” to people because there’s no evil to fight!
What would police officers do? Where would the military go? What would disaster relief teams, paramedics, and firefighters do for satisfaction?
I was talking with my friend who spent a summer in Thailand with an anti-human trafficking organization about all the worst samples of mankind we were studying in Forensic Psychology. She said that you do see the worst of mankind in these situations, but you also see the very best of mankind. The people who go out there, trying to rescue people from the sex industry, going undercover to free slaves, tirelessly collecting evidence to free a child from an abusive home; where evil is the heaviest, heroism thrives. No evil, no heroes. While this may not explain why God allows evil to exist, it still shows some of the value of a world where evil is permitted; again, it comes back to love. We can’t be forced to do good, so we’re allowed to do evil; but when we really embrace goodness, we can do amazing things.
We don’t understand God
“He who lives forever created the whole universe;
the Lord alone is just.
To whom has he given power to describe his works,
and who can search out his mighty deeds?
Who can measure his majestic power,
or fully recount his mercies?
No one can lessen, increase,
or fathom the wonders of the Lord.
When mortals finish, they are only beginning,
and when they stop they are still bewildered.” (Sirach 18:1-7)
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9)
It stands to reason that a God who is infinitely greater & wiser than man (as any religion would say) would be a God who does things that we little mortals can’t understand. Can we really say why God made the universe? Can we really say why God created man? Can we really say why God allows evil? At the end of the day, we really can’t explain why God does anything; even if we go with the Christian idea of God being love & doing everything out of love, can we say why God is love?
Conclusion
Do we understand why God allows evil? God is all good & all powerful; but if God truly loves us, then he’s not going to force us to do anything. By His loving nature, he has to let us choose to do evil, because that frees us to choose love. Free will is something that logically follows from a loving God, because again, love can’t be forced. The evils that exist in the world do serve a purpose, as they provide a challenge for us to strengthen our spirituality and, like any other challenge, resisting evil impulses gives us a sense of satisfaction.
It’s hard to believe in a loving God while you’re being kidnapped & sold as a sex slave; but people have done it, and people will continue to do it. People will go crazy figuring out why God allows such an awful act to happen, but when God’s goodness & the world’s evils are viewed in a rational way, separate from the emotional anguish, it becomes much easier to understand why such acts are allowed to happen.
