Direct continuation of: The Great Problem of Evil, Part I

Author’s Note: As a result of feedback with others who have read this, I now recognize this essay as misleadingly incomplete and partially inaccurate. I keep it up as a record of how I have previously thought, but do not stand by all of it.

The Problem of Evil is an argument against the existence of God that asks two questions: Why did God create a world with all this suffering? Why does God do so little to remove this suffering, when this is clearly within his power?

Properly formatted, the objection goes like this:

1. God, as described by the major religions, is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good.
2. Any all-knowing entity would know of all the needless suffering that takes place, if there is any.
3. Any all-powerful entity would be capable of ameliorating needless suffering greatly, if not outright eliminating it.
4. Any all-good entity would desire to eliminate needless suffering to the best of its ability.
5. Any all-good entity would not create creatures, diseases, and/or defects which cause needless suffering.
6. Our world contains needless suffering.
7. Therefore from 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, God is either not all-good, not all-powerful, or not all-knowing.
8. Therefore from 1 and 7, the God as described by the major religions does not exist.

With an additional argument establishing the truth of premise 6:

10. If an instance of suffering that is necessary (because of a higher good) were prevented, then that higher good would also be prevented.
11. Therefore from 10, preventing necessary suffering makes us worse off.
12. There are some instances of suffering that were prevented where we did not become worse off.
13. Therefore from 11 and 12, needless suffering exists (and 6 is true).

In the previous post, I analyzed several objections: suffering can’t be identified without God, no suffering is needless because all suffering exists for some sort of higher purpose, and that suffering is necessary for free will to exist. Now I will look at several more objections.

Is the Suffering Inconsequential?

One might concede that needless suffering exists and that God is doing little to prevent it, but attack premises 4 and 5 suggest that this is not actually a big deal because Heaven awaits all those who deserve it, where the suffering will be repaid millions of times over. Yet, if the needless suffering is indeed inconsequential, why is it considered moral to eliminate or reduce it? Furthermore, why doesn’t it feel inconsequential?

The suffering in this life, regardless of the existence of an unproven next life, is indeed very real. As it is said, justice delayed is justice denied. An all-good being wouldn’t just say “Eh, Heaven’s great so you’ll get over it” — he would be deeply involved with eliminating suffering. It’s not like an infinite being has to spend any resources making the world just a little bit better and making us just a bit more comfortable.

Lastly, it must be pointed out that we’re not just asking for a blanket and a pillow. We’re asking for our eyeballs to not get eaten out by infectious worms, not to watch all of our friends and family die in an earthquake, not to contract paralyzing diseases, and not to come in contact with even more unspeakable horrors. They may not look as bad once we arrive in a Heaven, assuming such a place exists, but they sure look bad now to those who are deeply suffering, and that’s where it currently matters. Telling someone who is dying of loa loa that their suffering is inconsequential makes you look really callous and out of touch.

Is the Suffering Necessary for Spiritual Growth?

Another common suggestion is to attack premise 6 and state that no suffering is needless, because we need it for spiritual growth. The suggestion is that suffering turns us to God, or that suffering is needed for us to choose God, because we need to know what evil looks like.

However, this objection appears so ludicrous I fear I don’t understand it and I only mention it because it is provided so commonly. First, it smacks right into the implication that (1) we shouldn’t attempt to reduce suffering because it is lowering opportunities for spiritual growth and that (2) we are excused in causing suffering, since we are increasing opportunities for spiritual growth.

But the real reason this theodicy is so incoherent is that it is difficult for suffering to improve your spiritual growth if you die in the process. Consider a baby who is alive for about a year, but then contracts pneumonia and dies. This was quite common just a few hundred years ago, and still happens occasionally today. This baby is only one year old and has suffered and died. How is it supposed to have spiritual growth? How does God judge the baby and determine if it goes to Heaven? Why did the baby die before getting knowledge of God?

If suffering truly was only to serve for the purpose of spiritual growth, then suffering would not result in birth defects or infant death. The only people who would die would be those who had fully heard the testimony of God, fully contemplated it, and made a choice to accept or reject God. Yet many people die without either hearing the testimony of God (such as those who the missionaries never reached), being capable of understanding it (such as babies and mentally handicapped people), or making a choice to accept or reject God (those who are still thoroughly and diligently researching). The reason for this is completely unclear.

It must be pointed out that suffering does not occur equally either — some people have lives with an awfully large amount of “spiritual growth” as apologists would call it, afflicted by many of the horrors I’ve described earlier, while others live lives of great personal comfort. Suffering is by no means distributed equally. If suffering was intended to grow people spiritually, we would expect a lot more equitable distribution of suffering, or more suffering distributed to those who disbelieve in God the most. Yet, this is not the case.

But that’s not all. Fourthly and finally, while suffering does lead some to belief in God, it leads many away from God. The Problem of Evil isn’t called the “atheist’s killer argument” for nothing. Many people have seen all the needless suffering in the world and walked away from their faith, or at least came to doubt it further. If God has intended suffering to lead to greater spiritual growth, he has failed horrendously. We can also see this plainly to be true that the areas where people suffer the most are not the areas that are most religious. People often come to disbelieve God when they feel forsaken by him.

Lastly, if God really does want people to come to know him, he’s going about it entirely the wrong way. As “Where is God?” argues, God would cause a lot more people to come to know him if he revealed himself conclusively and actually proved that he was all-good. We only know if someone is all-good from evidence of their character, which comes from actions.

For example, imagine if God actually regularly intervened in the world and did unquestionably good things, like having prevented the Holocaust or stopped genocide. Imagine if God worked within our justice system to capture and educate criminals and villans, as I’ve mentioned earlier. These actions would definitively prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to all reasonable people that God not only exists but is all-good and worthy of worship.

Is Suffering Necessary for Heroes?

Another objection attacks premises 4 and 5 and suggests that God created and does not stop needless suffering because he wants us humans to have an opportunity to be heroes and ameliorate the needless suffering by ourselves. However, this completely derails the idea of a moral obligation for everyone — if God was justified in not ameliorating all of the suffering in his power because other people would do it, then every bystander is justified. We could simply ignore the plight of someone suffering because someone else will do it, and it would be mean to deprive them of the opportunity.

This also suggests that there is something moral not about reducing suffering, but in being a hero. For example, one could continually capture and trap a family in a burning building and then heroically save them, and this would be considered a good thing, for you would continually be a hero. What would we say of the doctor who creates a disease and then shows off his heroic ability to cure it?

Lastly, this theodicy fails along with every other “higher good” theodicy for implying that (1) we shouldn’t reduce suffering because that would lead to less opportunities for others to be a hero and (2) we are excused in creating suffering since it leads to more opportunities for others to be a hero.

Is Suffering Caused by Sin?

This theodicy attacks premise 3 and argues that needless suffering is direct result of sin, and God is both powerless to prevent the suffering caused by sin and powerless to prevent humanity’s sinful nature. But why would we expect an omnipotent God to have both of these limitations?

Stories from Christianity always invoke the concept of “The Fall”, a story of where Adam and Eve chose to forsake God, and as a result introduced a whole host of evil into the world, including things like polio and birth defects. However, this theodicy also leaves a lot to be explained.

First, why would we expect God to be unable to prevent or ameliorate humanity’s sinful nature? This essentially boils down to the Free Will Defense which has been rebutted earlier, because God would possess the ability to influence the events of humans through education; the same ability all of us have.

And while the God as described in the Bible has been totally incompetent at stopping humanity’s sin (even using a flood to kill absolutely everyone wicked — a flood for which there is no evidence — didn’t work), this doesn’t imply that doing so is impossible. Surely there are a lot of good people in the world, and God could use his infinite wisdom to know why these people act good, and figure out how to educate the remaining evil people.

Second, why would we expect God to be unable to prevent or ameliorate the suffering caused by sin? As mentioned earlier, God at minimum could work within our justice system to allow those who are righteous to perfectly identify and convict the unrighteous for what they’ve done. This would reduce the suffering of innocents being wrongly convicted and the suffering of the victims of criminals that evade imprisonment. Why is God unable or unwilling to do so?

Third, why would we expect sin to affect natural suffering? There is no indication that hurricanes, tuberculosis, birth defects, and lola loa are caused specifically by sinfulness, as if sin somehow manifests itself as infectious parasites or hurricanes. Especially since moral progress one way or another in the world has no affect on this natural suffering — hurricanes did not go away when we abolished slavery.

Even if this were somehow the case, there is no indication that God can’t omnipotently will away these things regardless of their sinful origin. And even if natural suffering was somehow both somehow caused by sin and God couldn’t just will them away for God could still ameliorate the suffering through giving us the technological knowledge to cure these diseases, build stronger levees, and predict disasters more accurately and earlier. God, being all-knowing, has knowledge to this technology. Therefore, he could ameliorate a lot of suffering by divinely revealing this technology to us. Yet, he does not.

Is Suffering Necessary for Consistent Physics?

Yet another theodicy attacks premise 3 and suggests that, contrary to what is argued in the Free Will Defense and the Sinful Nature Defense, natural evil is indeed caused by the laws of physics. The argument is that “the rock that holds you up must also be hard enough to stub your toe.” Furthermore, it is either logically impossible or something God does not want for there to exist a world without such consistent physics.

First, this has the opposite problems of the Free Will Defense and the Sinful Nature Defense — while these two theodicies have problems explaining natural evil, the consistent physics theodicy has problems explaining human-caused suffering. Why is human caused suffering necessary for consistent physics?

Second, this theodicy suggests that the current set of physics is the only one the all-powerful God could have created. It is said that God could realize any world that is logically possible. A world in which physics does not cause suffering — a world where there is survival-of-the-kindest rather than survival-of-the-fittest, a world where a bullets fired at other people turn to flowers, and/or a world where hurricanes never form or only strike the sinful — is logically possible. Therefore, God could have realized this world — a world with a lot less suffering.

Third, as I will harp on again and again, God could work within consistent physics to ameliorate suffering. We know that certain knowledge can greatly reduce suffering, such as knowledge of how to cure disease, build levees, do surgery properly — even knowledge of the germ theory of disease contained in the Bible rather than left to be discovered by fallible scientists would have saved billions of lives. Why he didn’t do so, given that it would prove his glory and goodness beyond a shadow of a doubt, is unknown. It’s far more likely that such a being doesn’t exist.

Next Up

Despite responding to eight theodicies so far, many still remain. But in covering about two centuries of philosophy on the Problem of Evil, it’s no wonder that there are more than a dozen of theodicies to consider. In the next, third, and final part of my series on the Problem of Evil, I will look at and respond to six more theodicies, specifically:

• suffering is just a means for God to test our faith
• suffering is just a means for God to show his goodness
• suffering is not bad because sinful humans deserve it
• this is God’s world and he can do what he wants
• that God works in mysterious ways
• atheists have no basis to judge God

Stay tuned.

Continued in: The Great Problem of Evil, Part III

Be Sociable, Share!

•