The Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil

University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education, Undergraduate Philosophy Certificate, Assignment 7

Peter B. Lloyd

Is there any satisfactory way of reconciling the existence of an omnipotent and all-loving God with the existence of natural evil (i.e. evil not due to the misuse of human free will)? One of the central claims of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is the existence of an omnipotent and all-loving God. Against this is the observation that people and animals suffer evil. By common sense, we would infer from this observation that God, as conceived in this tradition, does not exist - for, if He did, He would prevent the evil. This inference is called the Problem of Evil by those who profess one of the religions in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and their attempts to 'solve' the problem have given rise to a labyrinth of sophistry.

Put briefly, the solution most commonly espoused to the Problem of Evil is

* Some suffering is caused by others' misuse of their own free-will (as in murder).

* God does not intervene to stop people freely choosing evil because:

o people can be virtuous only if they freely choose between good and evil;

o having virtuous people in the world is a greater good than eradicating evil;

o therefore God must allow people to be free;

o therefore evil inflicted by other people is the price that God demands that we pay to enable some people to be virtuous.

* Some suffering is caused by natural phenomena (as in earthquakes). Such occurrences enable people to be virtuous through:

o heroics, such as rescuing those in danger;

o strong faith in God, as it is harder to believe in God in the midst of grief;

o humility, as people realise they are powerless against the whim of God.

* Again, God does not intervene because he is using the natural disasters to engender virtue.

I shall examine a number of such arguments, but first it is useful to clarify the nature of such debate.

The nature of theological debate

One difficulty that arises in writing about this subject is that the traditional view of God is ridiculous - as Hume's Philo says, it is fixed only "by the utmost licence of fancy and hypothesis", and the arguments put forward for it are transparently fallacious. In order to proceed with the debate at all, one must feign a deficit in the application of one's powers of reason, for if one relied exclusively on reason for deciding what to believe, then one would dismiss religion out of hand. It is well known that people hold their religious beliefs because they are emotionally bound to them, primarily through their upbringing, and not because they have arrived at them by reasoning. As Hume's Demea admits, "each man feels, in a manner, the truth of religion within his own breast". Arguments in defence of religion arise retrospectively to support convictions that have already been secured by emotional persuasion. In this respect, Palinor's undermining of Beneditx's religious beliefs, in Paton Walsh's "Knowledge of Angels", is unrealistic. Since religious beliefs are held on emotional rather than rational grounds, Beneditx's beliefs would have been invulnerable to Palinor's reasoning.

Arguments for religion usually develop by the elaboration of hypotheses about what might be the case, in reaction to atheistic attacks. As Hume's Philo says, there is an inventiveness in religious arguments "entirely owing to the nature of the subject"; he contrasts it with other subjects, in which "there is commonly but one determination that carries probability or conviction with it", whereas in religion "a hundred contradictory views" flourish to defend one point; and he claims that "without any great effort of thought, I believe that I could, in an instant, propose other systems of cosmogony, which would have some faint appearance of truth". Likewise, at every step in this essay, one could in an instant formulate a hundred hypotheses to defend religion against my criticism, and for each hypothesis the refutation of it can be rebuffed by another hundred hypotheses, all equally baseless.

Part I. A non-omniscient God.

Grounds for supposing God is not omniscient

The assignment for this essay mentions only that God is omnipotent and all-loving, and omits the other traditional attribute, of omniscience. Therefore let us first consider how the debate goes if we allow God's ignorance of the suffering as His excuse for not stopping it. This approach gains some legitimacy thus:

There are passages in the Bible where God is ignorant, such as Genesis 3.ix, where Adam is hiding in the bushes, "And the Lord God called Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?". Of course, for every such passage in the Bible there is a theological theory that reconciles it with God's omniscience. In this instance, we could suppose that God is asking a rhetorical question, for the purpose of inviting Adam to give an account of himself. Nonetheless, for the purpose of this essay, the fact that there is biblical evidence of God's ignorance lends support to our taking the time to see how divine ignorance might solve the problem of evil.

St Thomas Aquinas, in his "Summa contra Gentiles", argues at length that God knows particular facts, not just universal truths. We may infer that God's omniscience was not universally acknowledged by medieval theologians.

Many theological theories arise in reaction to criticism of existing doctrines. Therefore it would be in keeping with the traditions of theology if one were to hold the belief that God is not omniscient just because it offers a solution to the problem of evil.

Having thus gained some legitimacy for considering a non-omniscient God, we could formulate a hundred hypotheses to explain God's ignorance. Here are just five:

God stands aloof from the world, and so cannot observe what happens in it. This might be