This Month We Will Advance the overall argument into new territory. Having used the last two articles to approach the subject from the “amount of evil” perspective, we will now look at arguments that address evil as an entity, where amount (that is, quantity and intensity) is not a major feature at all.
I must repeat a principle stated in earlier articles: I am only dealing with the academic or theoretical face of evil and suffering. We must have the resolve and clarity of mind to maintain this separation, but this means that the upcoming topics might disturb you, because they do make this necessary separation. Such is the turf of theodicy, a theological conflict waged on philosophical battlegrounds. We will again remind ourselves before we jump in that suffering is very real. Theoretical, academic arguments have no value to those who suffer; in fact, their inappropriate use increases the suffering as rubbing salt in a wound.1 Mistimed use of academic argument in the face of tragedy has led to attacks on attempts at theodicy in general. We must keep the two faces apart, no matter how painful the circumstances. Conflating the two faces of evil makes for embarrassingly poor attempts at theodicy, a fact all too apparent if you do much reading in this field. We will take up that issue in the next article.
Now we turn to two lines of reasoning, relevant only in an abstract way to resolving the issue of whether the presence of evil on earth argues against the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.
VIII. When suffering ends, did it ever exist?
We often say of a person who has just died after a long, painful illness, “His suffering is ended. He is at peace.” This opinion of a peaceful state obtains regardless of one’s beliefs about any form of life after death. In the case of those who assert that the person’s soul now inhabits some blissful state, we note that much misery remains behind in the survivors still living out their miserable lives, and God is not glorified. In the case of those who assert no possibility of life whatsoever after death, then the deceased has gone into oblivion, and suffering remains on the earth. In the case of those who hope for a future resurrection of the deceased and a renewal of the earth, we find both the individual and collective ills of the earth remedied. This solution glorifies God and makes supreme sense in many other dimensions.2
Our point here is that when a person dies, his or her suffering dies also. It is gone forever. It is, therefore, as if it had never been. This might seem cruel to tell someone who is in great agony, but its veracity remains. A person receiving palliative care can die in peace. A person dying in the throes of agony has the same peace upon expiration, and neither has any ability to recall their dying days. At the moment of death, neither peace nor pain abides further.
Let’s look at an illustration from real life (or real death, as is the case). A banker becomes ill with cancer and dies in great misery. All the pains of his final months are gone forever, just as are the pleasures of life he enjoyed from his wealth. According to his wishes, his body is cremated and the ashes dispersed over a favorite lake. We do not need to stipulate bodily annihilation to make the point, but this presentation enhances our understanding. There is nothing left of the person; he is non-existent in all respects, his situation is as it was before he was ever born.
We can’t ignore the stark reality of nothingness. We are temporally constrained entities, with a finite life span, no existence prior to our birth and no existence after our death, (save for the resurrection of certain individuals to eternal life).3 I have not seen this line of argument deployed in theodicies, probably because the realities and implications of it are too devastating, too close, too threatening in our lives. As in the case above, this reality arrives with more force when we consider the case of a person whose physical body also entirely perishes upon death. When there is nothing left, it is the same as if the person had never existed. Perhaps they left behind writings or inventions or good deeds that others remember, but those survivors will eventually die also, and thus their experiences are serially quenched.4
A person near death will have a different sense of what’s important in life. The color of the living room carpet and such issues that may have seemed important years earlier become irrelevant. Close to death, very little is important. Nothing really matters because very soon it will all vanish. We are in this near-death state all the time, but we live as if it weren’t true. The fact remains, though, that death ceases all pains and pleasures. It doesn’t make any difference at all if a person’s life was filled with one or the other, because at the moment of death, it is as if the person never existed. In the eternal sense, the evil and suffering that occasion so much striving against God are no different from pleasure and joy.
For the brief time of our vain mortal existence, we seek pleasure and avoid pain. But in the end, it just doesn’t make any difference. This is surely the main point of Ecclesiastes, with its stentorian “Vanity, vanity” calling us to our spiritual senses.5 Only the development of spiritual character has abiding value and therefore does make a difference, because it survives death when we reappear in the resurrection.
As regarding our point here, we can say that part of the reason God can allow pain, suffering, and evil is because they are temporary. Temporary means temporally bound both at the beginning and the end, and any condition that ends is the same as it was before it began, which is non-existent. When it’s over, it’s over. This is a stiff dose of reality, and of little comfort to those overcome by anguish or pain. It’s also a critical part of any real theodicy, but it must be used carefully and in harmony with other arguments. It does not mean God condones evil, and it does not mean God lacks compassion or mercy. It does mean that the necessary sufferings attendant to human mortality are limited by that same mortality.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
- Analyzing evil impairs the argument from evil
It is intellectually disingenuous to establish an entire logical array that purports to disprove the existence of God upon a single factor, and then leave that factor nebulous and undefined. How can you accuse someone of a crime when you can’t even state what the crime is? Evil is easy to assume, but hard to define. As I wrote earlier,
…The other face of evil and suffering is abstract and arbitraiy, highly relative, contextual, and subjective — that is to say, ultimately, without any true meaning. Whether or not “evil” and “suffering” have any ontological status at all is a fair issue in itself The anti-theist argument presented above almost collapses for want of workable definitions of “evil” and “suffering.”
The experience of evil is very real, but for purposes of ideological argument, it’s hard to characterize or exemplify. What one person calls egregious treachery, another calls divine duty. One person cries, “injustice,” another responds, “vindication.” What one person feels as intense pain, another doesn’t even notice. These are some of the challenges we have in putting “evil” in a tidy box.
In an attempt to clarify what evil includes, we will dissect it into three components: moral evil, physical pain, and mental pain. We will look at each of these individually to determine if the presence of any one of them has utility in the anti-theist argument.
Moral evil
Moral evil implies a moral standard. Saving the main discussion about moral standards for a later article, we will now assume that most humans agree that some kind of moral standard exists in the world; therefore, we can have violations of that standard resulting in moral evil. Let’s illustrate by using a commonly accepted moral tenet: we ought not to harm others. However, people do harm each other, so we will say that moral evil does exist. I’m only including the actual thought or practice of evil, not the results thereof. If one smites another, the moral evil is the sin against one’s neighbor. The pain incurred by the smiting and the psychological trauma are separate issues discussed below.7
If moral evil exists, does that mean God does not exist? Can God make a world in which humans have free will but never sin?8 If free will means anything at all, God cannot make a world that guarantees the absence of moral evil. God can make a world without humans, but He cannot make humans unless they have the entirely inner and free option to fully respond to God as creator. If humans don’t have this, then we are just like the other animals, and not human at all. If anything, moral evil demonstrates the existence of God, because a purely naturalistic world — a world without God — can have no moral system. To posit moral evil is to acknowledge a God.
Physical evil
This is the category of pure physiological pain. It would seem that pain is certainly an aspect of evil, whether it comes from disease, accident, or assault. If we didn’t have physical pain, then we would be much happier, despite what happened to us. However, the story of pain is much more complicated than unpleasant neural activity. Pain is far more subjective than it might seem, depending on a number of physical variables, as well as psychological and cultural factors. This is a fascinating subject to explore, but the only issue relevant to us is the question, “Does the presence of pain present an argument against the existence of God?”
Our first reply is, “No, indeed. Without pain, we would be in deep trouble, as we would have no way to monitor important interactions with our environment.” People who do not sense pain damage themselves severely, not knowing when they have burned themselves, or have appendicitis, or if their shoes are too tight, or if they have broken a bone, etc.9 People can die from infections and other problems if they lack the warning system of pain.
This response, however, only presses us to ask the next question, “Why did God make us so vulnerable? Why do we need to suffer to stay healthy?” Pain is a warning system because it is painful; if pain weren’t pain, it wouldn’t be doing its job. Pain by definition must hurt. It’s not a matter of vulnerability; it’s a matter of being human. If your fingers didn’t hurt when you picked up the hot pot handle, you’d burn your flesh. Should God have put red warning lights on our knuckles instead?
We sense pain in our peripheral nervous system, but the brain interprets those sensations in conjunction with other physiological and psychological factors and comes up with the level of pain we actually feel. The range of pain serves the social, mental, and physiological needs of the owner of the nervous system. There is no necessary correlation between physical insult to the nervous system and pain perception. Consider the following examples that illustrate the multi factorial nature of pain perception: a person in personal injury litigation with major pain from minor injuries; psychosomatic disorders in which people experience great pain with no physical cause whatsoever; surgery, including amputations, performed without anaesthesia until the late 19th century; persons in hypnotic states in modern times who undergo major surgery with no anaesthesia; chronic pain patients with social dependency; people with massive injuries from an accident feeling no pain until they reach safety; an athlete playing despite injury; a person undergoing acupuncture to relieve pain; the dentist distracting you before an injection; a person reporting significant pain relief after taking a placebo.
But what can we say about the absolutely overwhelming and excruciating pain that many people experience? What about when the nervous system itself goes awry and people suffer enormous pain without physical trauma? These are inevitable results of the multi-factorial experience of pain, and thus we have the inevitability of registering maximum sensation. But couldn’t “less pain” still do the job? Wouldn’t a loving God subject His creation to only the minimum necessary pain? At this point, the argument parallels many features of the “amount of suffering” discussion we investigated earlier. You can’t set a point of acceptable pain reduction, because whatever residual pain humans still experienced would probably register as just as painful as what we have now. Pain is largely subjective; it certainly has some absolute physiological thresholds on both ends, but in practical terms in any conceivable real world, pain, like gas in a closed container, will fill up the space available.
And what about the “no pain, no gain” crowd, those hard-core endorphin addicts who love pushing their bodies to the point of pain?
The point of all this is that it is unlikely that any “adjustment” of the nervous system would yield any change in pain experience. As long as we have a nervous system, we will experience the same range of pain, and the question must quickly transfer (again noting the parallel to the “amount of evil” argument) from “why must pain be so painful” to “why is there any pain or discomfort at all?” In other words, “Why are we mortal human beings?” That’s where the pain question ends. The question then becomes, “Does the presence of mortal humans indicate the non-existence of an omnipotent, fully beneficent God?” Why God didn’t make us immortal in the first place is a topic for the last installment on this subject.
Emotional/psychological pain
Any physical pain, moral transgression, injustice, or loss of any kind can lead to emotional pain. We can call it grief, sorrow, stress, anxiety, or whatever; in all cases what we have is a mental state of great distress, so much so that it too qualifies as a form of evil, and therefore also enters into the questioning. Thus we ask, “Does the presence of mental anguish of any sort present evidence against the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God? Would such a God allow such suffering to exist in a world He created?”
If physical pain is subjective, then mental pain is excessively more so. In fact, we could rightly say infinitely more so, for if someone stabs us in the heart with a knife it will certainly hurt to some extent, but if someone stabs us in the heart with a cruel remark, or if life stabs us in the heart with a great loss, it will not necessarily cause any emotional anguish at all. 10 The emotional anguish response, unlike most physical pain responses, does not ensue automatically. We have an internal filter, largely of our own making, that actually causes the emotional pain. The fact is this: nothing we encounter in life causes emotional pain except our own reactions to the circumstances of life. It is taught implicitly many places in Scripture, e.g., “We also rejoice in our sufferings” (Rom. 5:3, NIV), “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds” (James 1:2, NIV), and “A cheerful heart is a good medicine” (Prov.17:22).
Epictetus and the Stoic philosophers addressed this directly. They taught that we live in a world of unpredictable circumstances, that nature does not always go our way, that life inevitably has its hardships, but nobody and nothing can lay claim on the thinking of our mind. What happens “out there” is neither good nor evil. Peace or suffering result from how we construe these events. Happiness is an internal issue, entirely independent of what befalls in life.
If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.11
No man can rob us of our free wilL
Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will; say this to yourself with regard to everything that happens.
And Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and a Hell of Heaven.”
Conclusions
Moral evil, as sin alone, actually argues for the believer’s position, as it implies a universal moral standard and people being tested thereby. Physical pain is a necessary feature of mortal life. Emotional pain is within our own power to control. How is it that any of these aspects of evil can argue against the existence of God?
None of the above presents any substantial problem for the one who believes in the existence of God. To rid the world of all these forms of evil and still leave a real world with real humans being tested in their humanity creates an impossible world. If this is a fair parsing of the factors of evil, then the argument from evil is severely diminished. Short of the perfect, immortal world (discussed at the end of article 2b), we cannot assuage the atheist’s quest of a better world. Pain, loss, and injustice are inevitable consequences of mortality, but happiness and joy are ours if we want them.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One