The Hard Question (Part 3 of 0)

The Theodicy Enigma (2b) – Part 3

Last Month we stated the general form of the question regarding God and suffering and cautioned that, what looked like purely academic arguments, were in no way dismissing the painful human side of evil and suffering. This month we will continue the discussion, focusing primarily on the amount of evil and suffering. At the end we will find an unusual twist and the appearance of a basic Biblical teaching in a new light.

We will, therefore, address the concept of a world so filled with horrible evils that it calls God’s existence into question.1 The “amount” aspect suggests two related questions:

  1. It gives teeth to the question of whether or not God even exists; that is, so much evil — certainly doesn’t look like the work of an all-powerful, loving God. (the atheist’s question)
  2. If God does exist, it demands a convincing explanation of why He doesn’t intervene. Where is God? Why does He permit such massive suffering? (the disquieted believer’s question)

To address the “amount” questions we must necessarily discuss the etiology (cause or origin) of evil, and that, in turn, requires that we raise the issues of human free will and perspective. To cover these adequately in the space of one month’s installment is not possible; I hope that the outline presented here will suffice to at least show the form of argument one would marshal.

I will develop a three-pronged resolution for the theodicy enigma. (1) It will show that “so much evil” is a red herring; the real question we should ask is, “Why does God allow any evil at all?” (2) It will show how an omnipotent, beneficent God can and must allow evil. (3) It will show how God will ultimately correct the situation (presence of evil) that propagates the questioning of His existence. In other words, we must first ask the right question, give a good answer, and then eliminate the need to ask the question.

Continuing our section numbering from last month, we will start with III.

III. How etiology affects the theodicy issue

The first step is to classify the sources of evil by etiology (cause). Defining classes helps us appreciate what sort of world we live in and clarifies our thinking. If we aver that the presence of evil proves God cannot exist, then we ought to know just what this “evil” is that has the power to remove God from our concept of the universe. Lastly, using the tool of classification will establish the basis for the resolution.

The categories below are general, somewhat subjective, and not mutually exclusive — hardly a clinically precise taxonomy, but an adequate first step.

  1. Social evils are entirely of human origin. Injustice, prejudice, oppression, greed, war, fraud, hatred, abuse, persecution, and such like. A detestable catalog of the nefarious exercise of human free will.
  2. Accidents are also of human origin, but they result from carelessness, recklessness, lack of prescience, and disregard for safety, not from purposeful ill will. This category includes vehicle crashes, falls, fires, water mishaps, accidents with machines, etc., that spell loss of life, health, and property.
  3. Natural Disasters, often known as “acts of God,”2 are distinguished by their tremendous, rapid devastation and their origin in nature, with no known human causality.3 This category includes severe weather and geophysical events such as earthquakes, storms, avalanches, and floods. These are but the forces of nature in their ongoing process of shaping and reshaping the earth — until humans get in their path. When they occur in populated areas, the damage, in human terms, is stunning.4
  4. Disease includes every sort of debility, infection, pain, cancer, bodily dysfunction, etc. These have multifactorial causation: genetics, personal health habits, environment, and “chance.” Preventing one disease only means living long enough to die of another. This category is distinguished by its unremitting and relentless attack on humanity. Seldom does it raise large numbers in a very short time, even during plagues and epidemics, but its pervasiveness leads to overall leadership in morbidity and mortality.5 This category will play an unexpectedly significant role in our discussion below.
  5. Emotional and Psychological Problems obviously correlate with any of the physical evils in the above categories. We also have the stress of normal life, and mental illnesses unrelated to any external sources.

Useful observations

Several observations ensue from considering the implications of the above classifications. These observations, five of which I list below, are neither answers nor new issues in the argument, but they further refine the discussion. From the five observations (which have no one-to-one correspondence to the five categories above), I have expanded on two, A and E, at the end of this essay. These expanded remarks will finally yield some substantive answers to the theodicy enigma.

Human vs. natural causation

Distinguishing between evils emanating from human activity and those deemed attributable to natural causes absolves the Almighty, at least prima facie, from culpability for war, crime, and other human-caused evils. It injects into the theodicy discussion the issue of human free will, and to what extent, if any, God will limit human free will for the sake of protecting us from ourselves and from others. The buck still stops at the gate of heaven, even if God bears only indirect responsibility.

Dividing between human and natural evils, although useful, comes with its own set of limitations. The two most obvious are:

It’s often impossible, in practical application, to clearly separate these two. A person who fails to take shelter and therefore dies in a tornado has one foot in both graves. Human vs. natural causality is often academic or one of perspective.

It could be said that a good, powerful God surely would prevent the evil, regardless of etiology. It makes no difference if someone dies by murder or tornado; the person is just as dead, and God did not prevent either case.

  • Relative amounts of evil presented by each category

The above discrimination vastly deflates the “amount” argument; from an actuarial perspective, human-caused death from evil or careless action, injury, and destruction far exceed whatever we might attribute to an uncaring or impotent Deity. The casualty and destruction data for wars are staggering multiples of even a bad earthquake year.6 Moreover, humans have a 100% market share of evils such as injustice, oppression, hatred, and fraud. We are the cause of things for which God is blamed. The vast majority of human suffering is attributable to our own actions. If the “amount” of evil is an issue with you, then you must discount it heavily after you factor out what comes from the inevitable and necessary exercise of human free will.

  • Distorted perception

Although human-caused evils, primarily wars, cause much more death and destruction (over time) than natural disasters, the impact on our psyche is the opposite. Mass casualty events occur rarely but they are almost always in the “acts of God” category.7 Not only do they carry the pejorative “act of God” label and seem utterly pointless, they inevitably blot out the “just and the unjust” together.8 Therefore, these events have far greater psychological impact than the daily toll of primarily human evils,9 and they increase the perception that God condones, if not causes, tremendous acts of evil. The psychological and emotional impact of the sudden, massive, and seemingly unwarranted suffering caused by natural events distorts our perception, increasing the likelihood of calling God’s goodness, power, and even existence into question.

  • Where is the reality of evil?

Many theologians and philosophers have proposed variations of this theme: that the entire external world is irrelevant; only what goes on in the mind is of any real importance. They argue that only in the intangible realm of the mind do we encounter the reality of evil, and that people can rise above the circumstances that surround them. I plan to expand on this point in a future article.

  • Is death an evil?

This question arises from the “Disease” category, the only one that allows people to die “naturally” at an advanced age (but not always, for sure). Oddly, it’s this category — not the violence and tragedy of the others — that has the key to resolving the theodicy argument. Would the skeptic be satisfied that mortality itself is really okay, it’s what happens during life that’s the problem? Is the skeptic’s ideal an evil-free, but still mortal existence?

A further look at free will

Now we will return to the issues raised above in A and E.

First, the free-will issue. One result of the classification by cause is that we get the category of human-caused evils, which places the free-will issue on the table. If we acknowledge that at least some expression of human free will results in evil, that changes the question from, “Does the amount of evil negate the existence of God,” to “Does the manifestation of human free will in any form negate the existence of God?” Now, this is quite another question, isn’t it? Instead of holding God culpable (or rendering Him non-existent) because He causes or allows evil, we now ask, “Should God prevent people from being independent moral agents?”

If God prevents people from harming others, directly or indirectly, we wonder if morality would have any value at all. If God makes you “good,” what good is that “good?” It keeps the world, perhaps, in general order, but God could have accomplished that by restricting creation to just plants and animals, and bypassing the human element.

How much evil, if any, can we reasonably expect God to obviate? At first, it seems like the answer should be, “A whole lot more than we see now.” A careful look into that premise, planned for next month’s article, will yield a surprising result.

People who long for a better world often cannot accept the present necessity of unrestrained human free will. That so many have suffered at the hands of others seems an injustice that no just God could allow. That said, we still need to free our minds from the emotional grip of evil, suffering, and injustice so that we can look rationally and critically at the various facets of the problem, including God’s restraint. The abundance of human-caused evil tells us nothing about the existence of God, because it is a fundamental necessity that God allow humans to exercise their autonomous and independent moral agency. If God doesn’t exist, then violence and selfishness are just adaptive behaviors of an amoral creature. Given the existence of a God, they become moral issues.

Death and evil

We will close, finally arriving at a genuine impact point, with a few more words on the question, “Is death qua death (just death itself stripped of all attendant sufferings) an aspect of evil?” In other words, if we could eliminate all evils, but we were still mortal humans, could God be admitted back into our personal model of the universe? To determine this, let’s propose a series of (admittedly absurd) hypothetical conditions. We will systematically remove all sources of evil and suffering until the atheist can no longer play the “amount of evil” card.

We will first propose a world void of all natural disasters. Would the atheist now say, “All is well and good, we only have ourselves to blame for any evil?” No, the complaints about “God allowing it” would scarce be reduced. So we will further propose the idealistic goal of eliminating all wars. Will this yield a good enough world in which theodicy becomes unnecessary? Of course not, for we would still have plenty of other evils such as accidents, diseases, selfish human behavior that would incite the same question.

Suppose further that great strides in medicine and technology allowed almost everyone to attain a good old age in good health. Still, some tragedies would occur, and everyone would still die. As long we have mortality in the picture, we’ll never have a good enough world to still the argument from evil against the existence of God.

We can filter out all the evils in a mortal world, but we still have to deal with death. In this impossible world, we would either decline at some age (which we would perceive as a great evil), or we would die suddenly in good health for absolutely no reason (which we would perceive as a great evil). “Tragically unfair,” the skeptics would complain. “If there was a God, He surely wouldn’t have made an absurd world like this.” No set of conditions could produce a world in which we could be both mortal and free from any form of evil and suffering.

That is why I asked whether or not death itself belongs on the list of evils, for even if we live to be 120 and die happy, we’ll all die of something. No matter what ridiculous hypothetical conditions we propose, we cannot create a set of conditions in which people will not raise exactly the same complaint of “Why does God allow this?” Atheists give away the right to argue on this point, for they must acknowledge that no possible mortal world could be good enough. We would need to advance to an immortal world, a feature utterly impossible without a God, in which case they could no longer maintain atheism.

Concluding remarks (so far)

We cannot make any world, no matter how free from evil, in which the skeptic will not still raise the same cavil against God. If the same objection to God arises from any set of conditions in a mortal world, the question, “Why does God allow this?,” means absolutely nothing, because the “this” could be anything at all. It has no value whatsoever, at least insofar as establishing the existence or non-existence of God. As stated in the first article, it tells about human nature, not about God. The “so much evil” idea, as previously stated, is a red herring that distracts us from the real question: “Why does God allow any evil?”

If we are to be human and mortal, we cannot propose a world good enough to put the question to rest, so either our humanity goes, or our mortality. We can solve the theodicy enigma in two ways, but only one of them preserves our humanity.

The “solution” that allows us to live in a mortal world is to remove our humanity, which entails removing our awareness of death and evil. That is, we propose a world in which humans become like other animals. Zebras don’t say, “The abundance of evil — drought, predation, habitat loss, hunting, competition for grazing areas — indicate that we cannot be the product of an infinitely powerful and loving God.” Zebras lack the moral awareness to think this; so this is one resolution, to create a world in which humans have no moral or aesthetic capability above the brutes. We can sacrifice our humanity and live out our mortality without the psychic distress of doubting the existence of God.

If we would keep our humanity, then the other option requires a perfect world free of all evil, including mortality. Here we can have fully human people who once experienced, and therefore fully apprehend, the nature and consequences of mortality and its attendant evils. This is the only possible world that can supply the necessary conditions to solve the theodicy enigma. In this world, the skeptic cannot bring down God because of the presence of suffering. However, this is a theistic, moral world, so the skeptic will not be present.

Now, this notion ought to ring familiar, as it is a logical basis for the doctrine of the Kingdom of God on Earth. This “first principle” provides the only resolution to the theodicy problem and also to evil itself. It features a world inhabited by beings who have the moral awareness so that they could ask the “Why?” question, but, being in a perfect world, have no need to. Other hypothetical options fail to offer any satisfactory resolution:

  • In a world where humans are like other animals and have no moral awareness, they cannot even ask the question. But there is still death and no humanity.
  • In a world that has always been perfect (that is the proposed world of the skeptic which, incidentally, requires God to make it) humans would have no sense of evil, and likewise could not ask the question.10
  • In a world where evil and mortality still abide, people can and do ask the “Why?” question, but without resolution. (This is our present world).
  • A world of no evil, true humanity, and “normal death” is an impossible world, and also fails to satisfy the theodicy problem.

Only the conditions of the Kingdom of God resolve the theodicy enigma.

We will have more to say next month on what we have presented here briefly; meanwhile, I invite all readers to apply their analytical abilities to demonstrate to themselves why this is so.