Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

[Michie]

In Book 10 of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Adam asks the question so many of his descendants have asked: why should the lives of billions be blighted because of a sin he, not they, committed? (“Ah, why should all mankind / For one man’s fault… be condemned?”) He answers himself immediately: “But from me what can proceed, / But all corrupt, both Mind and Will depraved?” Adam’s Original Sin is like an inherited virus. Although those who are born with it are technically innocent of the crime – they did not eat of the forbidden tree – its effects rage in their blood and disorder their actions.

Continued- http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/suffering-evil-and-the-existence-of-god/index.html?hp

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

The problem of evil is something I've worked on over the past few weeks in my spare time. In order to pose a solution, the problem should first be drawn out in detail.

The first thing to be clear on is that we're talking about the logical problem of evil (how can an omnibenevolent, omnipotent God cooexist alongside evil), not the religious problem of evil- the personal angush a person feels while sitting by the bedside of a dying child. What that person needs is pastoral care, not logical proofs.

So the logical problem of evil goes like this:

1. God exists. (premise)
2. God is omnipotent and omniscient. (premise — or true by definition of the word "God")
3. God is all-benevolent. (premise — or true by definition)
4. All-benevolent beings are opposed to all evil. (premise — or true by definition)
5. All-benevolent beings who can eliminate evil will do so immediately when they become aware of it. (premise)
6. God is opposed to all evil. (conclusion from 3 and 4)
7. God can eliminate evil completely and immediately. (conclusion from 2)
   1. Whatever the end result of suffering is, God can bring it about by ways that do not include suffering. (conclusion from 2)
   2. God has no reason not to eliminate evil. (conclusion from 7.1)
   3. God has no reason not to act immediately. (conclusion from 5)
8. God will eliminate evil completely and immediately. (conclusion from 6, 7.2 and 7.3)
9. Evil exists, has existed, and probably will always exist. (premise)
10. Items 8 and 9 are contradictory; therefore, one or more of the premises is false: either God does not exist, evil does not exist, or God is not simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent (i.e. God is omnipotent and omniscient but not all-benevolent, omnipotent and all-benevolent but not omniscient, or omniscient and all-benevolent but not omnipotent).

Hope that makes sense to everyone. God cannot be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent alongside evil.

One theodicy, or solution to the problem of evil, is the theodicy of privation:

This was proposed by St. Augustine. It says that evil is not a real thing, not a positive substance. Rather, it is a lack of being, or substance, or reality. The evil of premarital sex is the lack of marriage; the evil of murder is the taking of life.

This solution has God creating everything and declaring it 'good,' so that anything that deviates from that original creative plan is really some form of destruction. Evil is thus not created by God, because it the result of acts by Satan and humanity that take away from God's original design.

Personally, I think this is a crummy solution. It explains brilliantly how evil could come about in a universe created and declared 'good' without it being the work of God; however, it fails to explain how it could continue to exist in a universe ruled over by an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being.

The second theodicy, then, is the free will defense:

Augustine put forward, then, a second reconcilliation of evil with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. A recent defender of Christian orthodoxy, analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga, formulates the defense this way:

1. Creatures who are significantly free cannot be causally determined to do only what is right.
2. Thus, if God creates creatures who are significantly free, He cannot causally determine them to do only what is right. (from 1)
3. Thus, if God creates creatures who are significantly free, he must create creatures who are capable of moral evil. (from 2)
4. Thus, if God creates a world containing creatures who are significantly free, it will contain creatures who are capable of moral evil. (from 3)
5. If God creates a world containing creatures who are capable of moral evil, He cannot guarantee that there will not be evil in that world.
6. Thus, if God creates a world containing creatures who are significantly free, He cannot guarantee that there will not be evil in that world. (from 4 and 5)
7. A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more morally good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.
8. Thus, God has good reason to create a world containing creatures who are significantly free. (from 7)
9. Thus, God has good reason to create a world, which He cannot guarantee will not contain evil. (from 6 and 8)

What Plantinga is basically saying here is that in order to create a world where there are creatures with morally significant freedom (freedom such that they can make choices of right and wrong), he must run the risk of allowing the creatures to introduce moral evil into their universe

Far from an omnibenevolent, omnipotent God cooexisting with evil being a logical impossiblility, it is absolutely necessary that God, in creating a universe with any significant moral creatures (ie, beings in his own image), must run the risk of allowing those creatures to choose evil.

Note: I think one of the implications of this is that, in order to preserve the omnibenevolence and omnipotence of God in the face of evil, we need to continue to affirm that humans have free will. I'm not saying we need to say that we need to be Arminians, saying that humans choose to believe and are thus saved (not only do I believe in predestination, but no less figures than the aforementioned St. Augustine and Alvin Plantinga believed in it as well). But we do need to have free will to make this work- and so I challenge the strict determinist, hyper-Calvinist to reconcile their system with the problem of evil by some other defense.