His Month’s Installment Continues on the “amount of evil” theme raised in the previous article. The “unexpected participant” referred to in the tag line of last month’s article turns out to be a familiar figure in apologetics discussions: Charles Darwin. We will look at his involvement in the theodicy dispute before resuming the main stream of our discourse.
- Charles Darwin and the Problem of Evil
You might not think that the ubiquitous influences of evolutionary thought would extend as far as the theodicy argument, but a theodicy lies at the very core of Darwinism. The problem of evil and suffering shaped Darwin’s thinking in several ways, and his theological journey appears to be complex and
consternating. We will confine ourselves here to a few brief relevant quotes and comments to demonstrate the connection between Darwinian thinking and the problem of evil in general, and the abundance of evil in particular.
Charles Darwin spent much mental energy trying to account for a world which sported unmitigated violence in the animal realm: predators, parasites, mating and territorial supremacy determined by violent combat, wanton waste of millions of seeds, and a very high percentage of young killed in each generation in the violent struggle for survival. It was, literally and figuratively, a jungle out there. This pattern of life didn’t square with his notion of God.’
We can’t say that he offered his theory of natural selection simply to assuage his conscience about a God who set all this horrible cycle in motion, for he had ample field work to support his conjectures. However, he did need
to propose a purely naturalistic explanation for the arrangements of the biological world—not only to explain the varieties and distribution of species for which, of course, he became famous, but for the struggle of life that seemed to him so unlike a scheme that a kind and loving God would produce. He needed to remove God from the natural world. Inasmuch as natural theology was already on the wane in Western Europe, this move, though bold, was perhaps not unexpected.
It is neither pejorative nor assumptive to postulate a theological underpinning for Darwin’s work, as he himself put this aspect on the table. The carnage of nature and the presence of so much pain and suffering in the world, he once declared to be a strong argument against belief in a beneficent Deity, but it accorded well with the theory of natural selection.
. . . A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient. It revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of lower animals throughout almost endless time? The very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent First Cause seems to me a strong one; and the abundant presence of suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.”5
In 1860, one year after the first edition of The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote to American botanist, Asa Gray, who championed his theory of natural selection:
There seems to me to be too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself to believe that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the ichneumons [a parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or the cat should play with mice. 6, The emphasis in the above quotes is on the amount of evil, suffering, waste, carnage, predation, violence, and plunder in the animal domain, which Darwin knew very well. His observations of nature, coupled with his sensitive nature, circumstances of life, and incomplete theology all contributed to his conclusions about origins. One writer stated Darwin belonged “to a class of God-deniers who were yearning after a better God than God.”
While this is a fascinating topic in its own right, this section is really an aside to our topic of resolving the theodicy enigma, but it shows how far-reaching are the effects when one dismisses God from the picture. Darwin is certainly not alone in looking at the world and thinking, “This is not the work of a beneficent God.” The arena of his observations, however, and the world-changing impact of his conclusions demand our attention.
What then can we say about the theological influence of Darwin’s approach to natural history?
- People can use the presence of evil even in non-human arenas as an argument against theism.
- In the absence of a comprehensive and intellectually satisfying theodicy, people will develop alternative explanations for the presence of evil.
- People need an accurate theology before they can develop a viable theodicy.
- The interconnection between science and theology has its strongest links at the issue of origins, but there’s also a considerable link at the issue of how to explain evil.
- The presence of apparently consistent data from natural history, coupled with any reason whatsoever to dismiss God from the arena of creation, will yield an atheistic worldview.
Before we leave Darwin for the time being, a word of caution: the merit of Darwin’s theories is a separate issue, and they must be judged on their scientific basis alone, not on what may have driven Darwin to pursue those conclusions. Our purpose here is to bring to light some of the motivation behind his natural history, not the natural history itself, which we will critique much later in this series.
We will now return to the mainstream of our discourse.
- God’s Apparent Inaction
“Where is God?” is a common cry when someone is overwhelmed with apparently unremitting distress or when disaster overwhelms a community. “Why isn’t God doing something? Why doesn’t God act?” We can take these pleas at face value and attempt to explain God’s inaction, or we can interpret them as saying, “There is no God. No God would let this much disaster and suffering reign unchecked. If God doesn’t move to save, that means we have good evidence that either He doesn’t exist, or He is much less than omnipotent and infinitely benevolent.”
Let’s look at the face-value response first. Even if God seems to allow certain misfortunes, we have no way of knowing how much God does intervene, or how many disasters God does prevent, or how much suffering God does dispel. We have no way of knowing how many accidents are averted (we’ve all had more than our share of “close calls”), how many hurricanes never get started, how many tornadoes turn the other way, how many potential birth defects are corrected, etc. Clearly, many people are alive today and living in good fortune. Has God acted directly on their behalf? We simply cannot say with any certainty whatsoever how much evil has never happened that could have, and how much good fortune is the result of God’s direct healing, intervention, and other acts of grace. In sum, we cannot accuse God of inaction because we don’t know the extent of potential evil that God might have circumvented. We only know evil when it does happen, and even then we don’t know how God might be working.
The Holocaust
Let’s look at a real life situation that commonly arises in theodicy discussions, an event of extreme evil that has fueled much atheism: the Holocaust. Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews perished, including most of my grandparents’ families (here is an example of what I wrote in the first article about appearing to be insensitive when we look at evil from purely a philosophical perspective). The fact must remain that if one is to assert something like, “God stood idly by while the Nazis brutally destroyed two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population,” then one is linking God’s activity to human welfare. This linking represents a principle that accommodates other equally valid statements, such as, “God saved a third of Europe’s Jews from brutal destruction.” Or, “God saved Europe from Hitler’s designs of total domination.”
This is more than a half-empty/half-full perspective. What is at issue is how we must be careful when we use “activity” or “inactivity” language, for to cite one is to invoke a principle that perforce includes other statements.
We don’t know just what God does and does not do
The paradigm works in the other direction, also. People often cite God’s intervention when spared from a disaster, such as the survivors of a mass transportation accident. “God was looking out for me” is also stating, “God didn’t care about the rest of the busload who perished.” Again, we must use caution when linking the activity or inactivity of God to human welfare, for we cannot make any such statement without inviting other statements that would leave us in a socially and theologically compromised position.
No one has any sure way of knowing exactly how much and when God does intervene in daily human affairs, including permitting or preventing disasters. However, it is certainly dangerous, from the anti-theist perspective, to directly link the existence of God with the presence of a disaster: to state that God does not exist because He didn’t prevent a disaster is to invite the corollary: God does exist because other disasters were prevented.
In other words, we could say, “Life on earth has never been evaporated by a cosmic event; Florida has never been entirely destroyed by a hurricane; no earthquake has ever cloven California from north to south, etc. If God is in control of such events, then all these potential evils that have not occurred could be due to divine intervention. Therefore, they argue for the existence of God.”
The anti-theist will obviously counter that these events might not have happened anyway; we cannot argue from the absence of an event even if, in fact, the daily presence of life on earth does testify to a Creator. It seems that presence or absence of disaster is an unreliable way to ascertain the existence of God, and we need to be aware of the implications when connecting God to any specific event.
Let’s return to the implied meaning of “Why did God allow this to happen?” Critics use this to mean, “God doesn’t exist.” It’s not a theological inquiry, but an anti-theist statement. Adherents to the “God didn’t do anything to stop this” argument really want to say, “God didn’t do everything.” For instance, skeptics have often cited Adolph Hitler’s brush with death in the First World War. “God could have just as easily had the bullet move a few inches and had him killed. Why didn’t He? Looks like good evidence against the existence of an all-good and powerful God.” However, we don’t know how many potential Hitlers did die in World War I, either among the soldiers or the great many civilian casualties in Germany. But to the skeptic, that’s not the point. Even if God did dispatch fifty potential Hitlers to an early doom, He still let one survive, and that’s one too many. God may have done something, but not everything.
You can see the parallel to the “amount of evil” form of argument. This particular slant is that when one complains that God didn’t do anything, the real issue is God didn’t do everything, because we don’t know what God might have done of which we are not aware. If a train derails, and, by some “miracle,” everyone is safe but one, and that one is your loved one, then God didn’t do enough, and someone is left crying, “Where was God?” If one Hitler arises from post-WWI Germany, that’s one too many.
So we’re back to the amount of evil argument, coming from another direction. The argument is redirected to, “Why does God allow any evil?” This is where the argument needs to be, anyway, and that takes us to the next section.
- How Much Evil Does it Take to Disprove the Existence of God?
We aren’t done yet, however, with the “amount of evil” argument, as we have yet two more ways to defuse it. In this section, we will show from a numerical perspective the absurdity of trying to quantify what constitutes massive and overwhelming evil.
We can ask the question this way: if someone is appalled that God permits, or even “causes,” (as is the perception with some forms of natural evils) a mass casualty event, what would be the threshold number that would cease to elicit such a response? Even if we concur that people bring most evil upon themselves, and even if direct “acts of God” are relatively rare, how many earthquakes and hurricanes does it take to show that God simply cannot be the all-loving, all-powerful God that people make Him out to be? We don’t need big numbers here at all, do we? What is the difference if 10 people die a year from hurricanes or 10,000? Is there some “acceptable” number of earthquake and tornado fatalities that lies within acceptable limits?
Let us borrow the Abrahamic approach, and wonder just how few casualties it would take to allow belief in God. If a person disbelieves in God because, say, 5,000,000 people perish in disasters every year, what number does it take to restore belief? Is God reinstalled as the omnipotent, all-loving Supreme Being if that figure drops to only 2,000,000? 200,000? 20,000? 2,000? When is God exonerated?
We can see that this is a ridiculous pursuit. Belief in the existence of God cannot depend on any given number of casualties, as if one had an epistemological criterion that held “5,000,000 dead—God cannot exist; 50,000—I can live with that figure; 5,000-now that’s a reasonable number of people to die and still let me believe in God.” Could anyone find satisfaction on the “amount of evil” issue following this protocol?
The argument must come down to the presence of evil, period—not any given amount of evil. If even one hurricane destroys one house and one person suffers, God is still called into question. Although popularly conceived as a quantitative issue, we must remove the explanation of evil from that perspective if we are to make any progress at all in its resolution.
- Further Thoughts on the “Amount of Evil” Consideration
It seems that we have beaten the “amount of evil” issue to a pulp, but we have yet one further perspective that can help us. We will adopt a hypothetical position similar to that adopted in the previous article wherein we supposed a world incrementally free of evil. Let’s suppose, using reductio ad absurdum, that we did live in a world free of accidents and natural disasters. Everyone lived to be 100 and died with a smile on their face. In this world of relative peace and calm, any evil that did exist would be all the more noticeable. An outbreak of toenail fungus in Bolivia would set off a furor of doubt that would fill national television with clergy trying to explain how this could happen. The same cries would emanate from those inclined to disbelief—”Why did God allow it?” I speak facetiously, of course, but in any conceivable world the point holds: our perception of pain and suffering is relative to our experience of it, not to its absolute quantity. Perhaps a larger issue is the awareness of living in an imperfect world. “What else could happen?” would be the constant gnawing fear of all who lived in any close-to-ideal world. The concept of some paradisiacal world wherein everyone would feel safe and secure is simply impossibility, as we showed in last month’s article.
If tidal waves swept away 65,000 people every day, and that was the norm, then that would be the world of our expectations, and the arguments against the existence of God would be no greater and no less. The Black Death in the 14th century took out about a third of Europe’s population, and the remainder lived in conditions that would make us shudder. Up until the mid-nineteenth century doctors operated sans anesthetic or antiseptic. Ten percent of children died in their first year in the most advanced societies. We have a pretty good time with life lately, but the outcry against God will not cease.
It’s not a matter of quantity at all. People’s perception will call God’s existence into question regardless of the amount of evil and suffering they experience, because in any context it will seem overmuch. We cannot say that God is “heavy-handed.” We all get along quite fine, but when any disaster, personal or public, strikes, it appears to us as overmuch.
The media factor
We must also note that in our day media access greatly amplifies the sense that we live in a world overrun with disaster and suffering. We have a 24/7 placarding of global misery and despair. Media is both continual and ubiquitous. It takes almost eremitic intent to avoid the constant barrage of woe. Our brains thus saturated, we easily wonder, “How can a good and omnipotent God allow this to happen?” The subsequent slide into agnosticism and atheism easily follows for those who don’t have an answer.
I don’t suppose that in a world of over six billion people we should expect anything different. Most of us lead pretty ordinary lives from day-to-day; we work, harvest, take care of children, laugh, read, eat, and sleep, in lives filled with joy and pain, birth and death. We all have vastly different living conditions, but, as a whole, our quotidian affairs do not make the news. News is the plagues, accidents, wars, earthquakes, famines, and the like that affect a small number, percentage wise, of us daily. The perception is that these disasters are the way of life for most of the world. There’s never any lack of misery for the media.
I’m not saying we live in a “good enough” world, or that we can dispense with compassion and aid to those who do suffer. I’m saying that our estimation of evil is already distorted by our biased perceptions and further distorted by media overdose. If we had an imaginary world of much less evil, the evil that we did have would engender precisely the same response, “we live in a world overrun by evil.” If we lived in a world of constant wars, miserable living conditions, and continual plagues that swept away large chunks of the population (in other words, Europe for many centuries), our complaints would be none the greater. The “amount of evil” issue is therefore also dispatched on this account; it is relative to our daily expectations, and no amount of amelioration will suffice to obviate what truly amounts to no more than cavils against God.
The real tragedy is, of course, the fact that all six billion of us are quite mortal and will die of something or other. Whether we are taken by plague, war, accident, or cancer really doesn’t make much difference. What is it about the form of death that causes so many people to disbelieve in God? Are we supposed to be mollified by dying in some approved manner?
Once again, we find that the argument from evil tells us about people, and how they think, not about the existence of God.
Now we must turn our attention to a different set of arguments, those that address the presence of any evil whatsoever, and how God can coexist with a world of His creation and supervision that indeed does display evil.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One