The Puzzle of Evil

Peter Vardy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317455059
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Politics

First Published in 2015. The first half of this book concludes that, if human reason is master, there seems to be no way of equating a good and powerful God with evil in the world. In the second half, searching for a solution, the author takes as his starting point St Augustine's credo, I believe in order that I may understand. He builds up a series of statements which express the central Christian convictions in relation to the problem of evil, a viewpoint which the reader may accept or not.

PART I

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Is God 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?

EPICURUS

ONE

The Problem Stated

Why is there any misery in the world? Not by chance, surely. From some cause then. Is it then from the intention of the deity? But he is perfectly benevolent. Is it contrary to his intention? But he is almighty. Nothing can shake the solidity of this reasoning. So short, so clear, so decisive …

DAVID HUME, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Penguin, pp.111–12

Try to think of someone who is really evil. Many people would immediately pick on Hitler yet even Hitler had many good points. Hitler’s leadership and his party transformed a war-torn and ravaged Germany, which had been bled dry by the Allied powers after the First World War, into a modern and prosperous nation. Hitler loved children and was faithful to his friends. Of course, the slaughter of the Jews, gypsies, Poles and others as well as the expansionist policies which led to the Second World War were malevolently evil, but the issue is more complicated than may at first appear. The Spanish dictator Franco was vilified by most of the Western and Eastern world, but his officials saved more Jews in the Second World War than did the French government under Pétain and he brought constitutional democracy and stability back to Spain. England celebrates the killing of Guy Fawkes, yet he was trying to get rid of a perverted king and a parliament that was hopelessly intolerant. Does that make him a terrorist fiend or simply part of the leadership of a strong opposition driven to take extreme measures to defend liberty? Oliver Cromwell, who brought democracy to England, was in many ways an ill-mannered murderer, and General Sherman’s treatment of the State of Georgia in the Civil War was unforgiveable in its ferocity. Almost always black is mixed with white, or at the least grey.

What is evil? It is too easy to think that suffering and evil are the same, but are they? An inoculation may be painful, but it is good for you. An operation may cure a disease or a defect in one’s body, even though pain and inconvenience may be the short-term result. Some human suffering can ennoble the individual, although it must be recognized that it can destroy as well. One needs to relate the eventual good to the assumed evil.

If the problem of evil is to be considered fully then it must necessarily be discussed in relation to God. The existence of God and the reality of evil have always been closely interrelated issues. As a first step the assumptions on which the whole debate about evil rests need to be examined. The presence of evil is unquestioned, but if there is a good God how can it be explained?

Many attempts have been made to solve this problem. Classically, there have been two different approaches:

1. The Irenean Tradition develops a theodicy which accepts God’s partial responsibility for evil. Ireneus (a.d. 130–202) attempts to show the good reasons which made the existence of evil inevitable. He claims that human beings were created as imperfect creatures who had to be brought to perfection by development and growth. Evil was a means to this end. The world with its mingled good and evil is, for Ireneus, part of God’s plan and purpose. Ireneus gives little place to any idea of a fall from perfection and explains evil by looking forward to what is achieved as a result of its presence in the universe. Humans, therefore, have responsibility for evil but are not solely responsible. Clement of Alexandria (who died in a.d. 220, soon after Ireneus), largely shared his view by holding that human beings were created immature and had to grow to goodness.

2. The Augustinian Tradition sought to entirely remove responsibility for the existence of evil from God by blaming it on dependent beings who have, by their own free decision, misused the gift of freedom that God has given them. God is not to blame for evil as all blame can be laid at the door of human beings and fallen angels. For Augustine, the world was originally created perfect and fell from this state through the exercise of free will and contrary to God’s intention. Augustine was strongly influenced by Plato and, in his approach, the personality and love of God are not central.

These two approaches are different but, in spite of their differences, they share a number of assumptions which appear so obvious that they are sometimes not recognized.

Opening assumptions

Either this world was created by God or it was not. If it was not, then the universe must have always existed. Demonstrating this is straightforward:

Assume that at one time there was nothing. It is clear that nothing can come from nothing. If, therefore, there was once nothing, even now there would be nothing. The universe cannot, therefore, have come into existence from nothing unless something brought it into existence.

However, we know that the universe now exists. If God, or something equivalent in terms of power, does not exist then the universe must always have existed since, if it was not created, it could not have come into existence of its own accord from nothing. (This is a paraphrase of part of an argument from St Thomas Aquinas’ Third Way of proving the existence of God.)

The standard theory of the creation of the universe is that there was an original explosion, the Big Bang, which took place about 15 billion years ago. Since this initial explosion the universe has been expanding outwards. The explosive force of the expansion is, however, counteracted by the force of gravitation which strives to contract the universe. There is a very fine balance between these two forces. If the strength of the Big Bang had been just a little bit larger (1/10 to the power of 60 — an incredibly tiny amount), then matter would have been thrown out at such a speed that there would have been no chance for galaxies to be formed. If, however, the strength of the Big Bang had been the same amount less, then the force of gravity would have caused the universe to collapse in on itself.

Scientists are fairly clear about how the universe developed from the first hundred thousandth of a second onwards — what happened in this first infinitesimal period is, however, still unknown. We do know that galaxies and their stars are getting further and further apart all the time. There are two basic possibilities in the future. Either this expansion process will continue or, at some stage, the rate of expansion will slow and the galaxies will start to fall in on themselves again.

The Big Bang theory need not necessarily point to God. Possibly there was a continual series of universes that have existed, each starting from its own Big Bang, each expanding over unimaginable distance and time and each collapsing once more — before another Big Bang started the whole process again.

The claim that the universe is everlasting, that in some form or other it has always and will always exist is, therefore, not impossible. It cannot be proved to be false and the atheist or humanist will maintain this position.

The theist is the person who believes in a single God who is an incorporeal agent — i.e. who can act in the universe that he has created. Theists are generally Christians, Jews or Muslims and will claim that the universe was created by God. This God, they will hold, necessarily exists — he could not fail to exist. The universe was not only created by this God but is sustained or kept in existence by this same God. This is a perfectly reasonable theory which is held by hundreds of millions of people around the world but there is a difference of opinion as to whether it can be proved to be true. Aquinas and modern supporters such as Brian Davies think that such a proof is possible, others maintain that all the proofs rest on assumptions which cannot be justified.

In this book we shall be concerned with the second of these two views, with the claim that the universe was created by God. The alternative view is credible, however, and we must recognize that our discussion starts with an unproved assumption — the existence of a single creator God.

If someone believes in two Gods, one of whom is good and the other of whom is evil, then this entails a Cosmic Dualism — the belief that there are two equal and opposed forces existing in the universe. On this basis, the evil that exists is to be expected as it is due to the action of an evil power which the good power is battling to overcome. Theism, however, maintains that there is a single God and rejects cosmic dualism — although we shall have to return to examine its persuasiveness later.

The assumption that there is a single God is not the only one made when discussing the problem of evil. The theist does not just hold that a single God created the universe. He or she also maintains that this God continues to be interested in the universe. This view may be rejected. The deist holds that God did, indeed, create the universe but has left it and is not interested in its progress or development. The theist rejects this view.

When starting to consider the reality of evil in the world, we have, therefore, two initial assumptions:

1. A single God exists who created the universe from nothing,

2. This God continues to be interested in his creation.

These are major premises and many will not accept them. However, unless these two assumptions are accepted, there is no problem of evil to worry about. The philosophic problem arises because of the difficulty of reconciling God’s creation, his care for his creation and the evil we find in the world.

God’s care for his creation must, however, be a benevolent care. God must be good if the problem of evil is to arise. If God was in some sense evil, if he enjoyed the sufferings of Auschwitz or the pain that many humans inflict on others, then it is not surprising that we have a world in which this type of suffering so often occurs. The theist maintains, however, that God is wholly, perfectly good and, indeed, the source of all goodness and that he is Omnipotent — God can do anything. God’s goodness is not, therefore, limited by his inability to act.

We cannot, of course, fully understand what it means for God to be good, but it must mean at least as much and a great deal more than it does for humans to be good — God is, after all, meant to be the source of all goodness. In particular, theists maintain that God does not wish human suffering on earth to take place (in the case of animal suffering, theists tend to be more divided as we shall see later).

We have, therefore, five basic assumptions to start with:

1. A single God exists who created the universe from nothing,

2. This God continues to be interested in his creation,

3. God is good,

4. God is omnipotent,

5. God does not wish suffering to take place.

If we are willing to give up one of these assumptions, then evil is no longer a problem.

— If the universe is simply a brute fact that has always existed then the nature of the universe is not due to any agent or God. The world is as it is and we must live in it, we must make the best of it. We have no alternative!

— If God is no longer interested in his creation, then evil can be explained as being due to divine neglect.

— If God is not good then evil may be directly due to God’s will.

— If God is not omnipotent, then God may not have had the power to prevent evil, for instance if there is a cosmic power for good and an equal cosmic power for evil, then evil may be simply explained by the action of the evil power.

— If evil is held not to exist or to exist only in the minds of human beings, then there is no problem that needs to be resolved.

If we reason simply from the facts in the world as we perceive them, David Hume and John Stuart Mill argue that there is no way that we can arrive at the existence of an all-powerful and wholly good God. (See Mill’s Three Essays on Religion and Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.) Both these philosophers looked at the traditional forms of the design argument for the existence of God and took seriously the evil to be found in the world. To both of them, this evil seemed to be unnecessary and avoidable if God really created the world from nothing. They therefore argued that either God must not be wholly good so that he was not concerned with human suffering or that he was lacking in power and therefore not omnipotent (their arguments are outlined in my book The Puzzle of God, HarperCollinsFlame, 1990).

At the outset, therefore, we need to recognize that evil is only a problem if we make some fairly major assumptions. For the Christian, the Jew or the Muslim, evil and suffering are, indeed, a very real problem — for those who reject belief in God there may well be puzzlement as to what the problem is, although they may still be bewildered by the depths to which human beings can sink and the agony they can and do inflict on each other.

In this book, we will be examining the nature of the problem of evil, trying to understand how it has been dealt with and seeking to determine whether the criticisms of them are so strong that belief in the traditional understanding of God should be rejected. Many today take this view and, as we shall see, they have good arguments on their side. The question we must discuss is whether the arguments are compelling. One of the aims of this book is to set out the argument to help you, the reader, to make your own decision and to think through just what the presence of evil means for you.

TWO

A God’s Eye View

I repeat the question. Is the world, considered in general, and as it appears to us in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Letter to the Reader
• Part I – The Problem of Evil
• Part II – The Mystery of Evil