The Problem of Evil

The Challenge to Essential Christian Beliefs

Jeremy A. Evans

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781433671807
• eBook ISBN: 9781433674020
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Problem of Evil offers a comprehensive examination of the problem of evil from both technical and ministerial perspectives. Author and acclaimed philosophy professor Jeremy A. Evans treats the history of the problem with fairness, looking at it through contemporary philosophical literature and offering responses to the most substantive arguments from evil. His purpose is to provide holistic responses to the problem of evil that are philosophically and theologically maintainable.

Among the chapters are “Introduction to the Problem of Evil,” “The Logical Problem of Evil,” “The Evidential Problem of Evil,” “The Problem of Hell,” “The Problem of Divine Hiddenness,” “The Defeat of Evil,” “Moral Evil: Comparing Theism and Naturalism,” and “Evil and the Worship Worthiness of God.”

Chapter One

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The Problem of Evil:
Introductory Issues

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What Do We Mean by Evil?

Christians have generally agreed that evil is not a substance or a thing but instead is a privation of a good thing that God made. A privation of a good is the corruption or twisting of a created thing’s essence or substance.1 Evil, since it is not a thing in itself, is parasitic on the good. There can be good without evil, but there cannot be evil without there being a good upon which it preys. The concept of evil as a privation of the good has been essential in undermining at least one argument against the existence of God from evil, namely that God caused evil. The thought is as follows:

• God created only actual things (or substances).
• Evil is not an actual thing (or substance).
• Therefore, God did not create evil.

As a corruption or twisting of what is good, evil is the absence of something that ought to be; it is the absence of what fulfills a thing’s nature or essence. Evil, as such, is not a mere lacking of some quality or characteristic. A snake, for example, lacks arms, but we would not say a snake is deprived of arms. Aquinas explains:

As the term good signifies “perfect being,” so the term evil signifies nothing else than “privation of perfect being.” In its proper acceptance, privation is still predicated of that which is fitted by its nature to be possessed, and to be possessed at a certain time and in a certain manner. Evidently, therefore, a thing is called evil if it lacks the perfection it ought to have. Thus, if a man lacks the sense of sight, this is an evil for him. But the same lack is not an evil for a stone, for the stone is not equipped by nature to have the faculty of sight.2

The potentiality for sight is present in a human but not in a stone; accordingly, since humans have the potentiality for sight, the inability to see is expressed as a privation of sight—it is a perfection that should be in accord with the nature of a particular thing.

While the inability to see is a physical privation, moral failures such as gossiping and slander are expressions of an evil relationship—the privation of rightly relating to one another. Perversion is a state of being due to persistence in moral wrongdoing, which reveals that evil can be in a nature.

A more thorough treatment of the nature of causation and free will are forthcoming in this work. Suffice it to say at this point that the metaphysical view of evil that is expressed here is derivative of the privative view of evil found in Augustine and Aquinas, among others.

Categories of the Discussion: Moral and Natural Evil

Moral Evil

The first type of evil, and the one most discussed in the relevant literature, is moral evil. Moral evil occurs when free persons misuse their freedom in such a way that the content of their will and/or actions violates a moral standard. The first component of moral evil is the intention formed in the agent to perform an immoral action. An intention is different than a desire. A person can desire something and never intend for the contents of their desires to be a course of life for themselves. For example, having a sexual temptation is not the same thing as having formed an intention to commit an immoral sexual action. The type of desire being described is akin to what Scripture calls a temptation, and being tempted should not be considered the same thing as committing a sin; Jesus was tempted in the same way that we are, and this was not reckoned unto him as sin (Heb 4:15). Forming an intention to commit immoral actions is a hardened concept from a mere desire. A person can, for example, have a desire to act virtuously and never decide to act on the desire. When the agent forms an intention, she is moving from having reasons to perform an action to deciding for herself that this is the action she will take.3 Moral evil is then to be understood as having occurred when an agent intends to perform an action of moral disvalue.

Simply intending to commit an action does not mean that the action necessarily occurs, for there may be an intervening factor that prohibits the action from ever obtaining. For example, when Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford in September of 1975, she never worked the action of her pistol to ensure that a bullet was in the chamber of the gun. When she pulled the trigger nothing happened, as all of the bullets were still in the magazine of the gun. No doubt Fromme had a settled objective to murder President Ford but failed in the endeavor of murdering President Ford. The failure in the act does not mean that her intentions were any less immoral, as the old adage “no harm no foul” might indicate. The moral failure consisted in the forming of the intention to murder. The tactical failure consisted in her not working a gun properly. The same could be said of Sarah Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate Ford a mere two weeks later and failed to accomplish the attempt because the sights on her gun were off by several inches.

Even though moral evil is first to be categorized as when a person forms the intention to commit an action of moral disvalue, moral evil also involves the content of the action itself when the content of the intention is not mitigated by an intervention of some kind. Suppose, for example, that Squeaky Fromme had chambered a bullet or that Sarah Jane Moore had corrected the sights on her .38. Even though a moral wrong occurred in forming the intention to murder, suffering is what occurs when the actions resultant from intended evil are brought about. Suffering has many manifestations. If Ford had been assassinated, his family would have experienced emotional suffering; he would have, perhaps, experienced emotional and physical suffering.

The distinction between evil and suffering is an important one, for these terms are not coextensive. There can be evil without suffering, as when the objectives of evil intentions are thwarted. There can be suffering that is not evil, as when a person is imprisoned for committing a serious enough crime to warrant the imprisonment. So a distinction is in order. While the imprisonment of a criminal is a not a happy state of affairs, neither is it a wrong state of affairs. When a person suffers for a morally sufficient reason, we can agree that the suffering is bad but are not entitled to conclude that it is wrong. Arguments to the extent that the problem of evil is one that reduces to the experience of pain or suffering are not entirely on point, for such reductionist views fail to capture this important distinction. Likewise, there are goods in states of affairs that are not necessarily right. For example, persons that commit adultery usually do so for emotional and physical satisfaction, among other things. Emotional and physical satisfactions are good things, but when they are satisfied through adultery they are wrong. Genesis describes the forbidden fruit as “good” for food and desirable for gaining wisdom (Genesis 3). Partaking of the forbidden fruit, though providing these goods, was wrong because it violated a divine command. Moral evil, as such, occurs when an objective moral requirement is vitiated through the intentions (free will) of a person, the usual result of which is the suffering of others.

Natural Evil

The second category of evil typified in the relevant literature is natural evil. Natural evil is generally accepted as evil resultant from nonhuman causes such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornados. Arguments from natural evil against the existence of God usually emphasize the nonhuman element in the definition, as it removes free will in the explanation of these events occurring. Such arguments then center the discussion on God’s bringing about these states of affairs rather than humans, the intention of which is to indict God for authoring evil.

This understanding of natural evil is admittedly unsatisfying. A hurricane that moves from the African coastline into the Atlantic without ever making landfall or affecting human life in any discernible way is not usually considered to be evil. It might be considered bad weather but not evil. So these events are not in themselves evil but take on the label of being evil when they cause human or animal suffering. It is the suffering of sentient beings resulting from these events that might be understood as evil; hurricanes or earthquake are not evil. Perhaps a better understanding of natural evil is to redefine the categories of its expression to include the following:

• There are violent, natural states of affairs that produce human suffering, and human suffering that is not connected to one’s personal misconduct is wrong.
• There are violent, natural states of affairs that produce human suffering, and human suffering that is derived from these states of affairs that are also connected to human misconduct is bad but not necessarily wrong.
• There are violent, natural states of affairs that never affect any human in any negative way that are caused by the misuse of human free will.
• There are violent, natural states of affairs that never affect any human in any negative way that are not caused by the misuse of human free will.

A larger taxonomy is, no doubt, available. These distinctions, however, help clear up some issues attendant to the problem of natural evil, at least as far as how natural evil is to be conceived. Nature, as an impersonal force, does not commit evil. One question concerns how nature responds to human evil, including humans abusing the earth and the effects that yields. Another question concerns other agents that might be a factor in nature’s behavior that produce human suffering. For example, in Job 1 Satan causes a great wind that destroys the house Job’s children are in, effectually causing their deaths. In the same chapter a lightning strike kills sheep and their attendants (v. 16). Free will must be factored in as a possible explanation of natural evil at least some of the time. When free will is at issue, then nature becomes a means by which moral evil is brought about; a hurricane in the hands of an evil agent such as Satan is as efficient for destruction as a gas chamber in the hands of Hitler.

We will return to the topics of moral evil and natural evil in later chapters. Suffice it to say at this point that the words “natural evil” are unsatisfying, for they fail to take a range of issues into consideration. The chapter on natural evil will address this problem.

Distinguishing between a Defense and a Theodicy

Scholars traditionally distinguish a defense from a theodicy.4 A theodicy is an attempt to justify the ways of God in light of the vast amounts of evil we find in the world. A theodicy, as it were, attempts to answer the question “why.” Theodicies are thus offensive rather than defensive in approach. It is generally true that when people are suffering they want an answer to the question why. Taking the approach of a theodicy implies accepting the burden of proof concomitant with the intention of the project. The theodicist is not so much claiming “it might be the case that” as she is claiming “it is the case that.” The strength of this claim reveals how high the bar is raised, for it is purporting to express God’s own thoughts about the matter and not just what the theodicist supposes are God’s thoughts about the matter. This is not to say that only one line of thought is permissible in developing a theodicy, such that, for example, the free will theodicy is the only legitimate theodicy. As will be noted in a moment, there are inferential relationships among several theodicies. The point here is simply to express the scope of the project in theodicy and why some are suspicious that such a case will never be offered on this side of heaven.

A defense, as one might guess, is not an attempt to explain what God is up to in permitting evil, but instead tries to provide rationally compelling reasons to question the soundness of the argument from evil against the existence of God. Rather than make suggestions about God’s reasons for permitting evil, a defensive strategy generally arrives at the conclusion that the atheist’s objection from evil is either inconclusive or logically fallacious. Accordingly, the primary strategy for defenses is to undermine an argument, and only secondarily is a defense interested in offering answers to the “why” question.

In the following sections I will develop the rationale behind several theodicies. It is not my intention to argue for any one of these theodicies but to provide a descriptive survey as a resource for some of the most...

Table of contents

• The Problem of Evil
• Copyright
• Contents
• B&H Studies in Christian Apologetics
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Concluding Thoughts