I think we’ve all heard the statement of the problem before. The claim in its canonical form goes something like this: There is a logical contradiction between the three statements that (1) God is omnibenevolent, (2) God is omniscient, and (3) evil exists in the world.1 Christian philosophers and writers like Alvin Plantinga and C. S. Lewis have articulated defenses which posit that the existence of free will allows for the logical coherence of theistic belief in the face of the existence of things which we would consider evil.2 The success of such arguments have often led to a restatement of the problem from that of logical impossibility – the three statements cannot logically coexist – to that of evidential improbability – namely, that the existence of evil provides reasonable grounds from which to reject the existence of an all-powerful, all-good God.
The free will argument, however, is not without its doubters, especially as it neither directly confronts the existence of natural evil (Plantinga’s response is an appeal to the free will of spirits or the devil) nor deals with the actual lived experience of those who suffer evil.3 Philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams attempts to address the latter of the two problems – a problem she refers to as the problem of horrendous evil – by simultaneously making two moves which I find to be rather convincing and quite promising for discussions of the problem of evil.4 Let us quickly examine them here:
The first of Adams’ moves is a move away from the abstractness of discussions about capital-letter Good and Evil and the untouchable omni-adjectival God of the philosophers to a concrete discussion of moral horror in our lives and how they may relate to the Trinitarian Christian God who has revealed Himself to us through the person of Jesus Christ in the Scriptures. The problem of evil, if it is to be meaningful to any of us beyond the realm of philosophy departments across the world, is an all-too-real problem and, as such, ought to concern itself with the all-too-real God in whom Christians profess their faith. However we might attempt to explain why evil and suffering exist in our Father’s world, one thing that we cannot say is that it is completely meaningless, for we believe in a God who Himself stepped into the evil and suffering of the world so that we could be free of it.
The second move Adams makes is a shift away from attempts to look at good and evil in terms of isolated acts and events towards attempts to see how individual occurrences are parts of an individual’s entire life-span. Another way to frame this shift is to note that the conceptions of good and evil that come into our minds when we think of the problem of evil are often shaped by the debates between moral absolutism and consequentialism that used to dominate moral philosophy classes everywhere. The problem with the dichotomy presented by absolutism and consequentialism is that they both assume that moral good and evil can be evaluated independent of context and solely in terms of the acts or states of affairs involved in a particular episode of life. Absolutists would speak of certain intrinsically evil actions which one ought never to do while consequentialists would accept that such intrinsically evil actions may exist but contend that it is sometimes permissible to do them if doing so would forestall more evil actions (or bring about a sufficiently better state of affairs). The problem of evil, stated in these terms, certainly seems to be a real problem: if certain actions are just intrinsically evil, the fact that we see them committed implies that there is a sort of permanent stain on the goodness of our world which could only be compensated for by a sufficient amount of “goodness” generated by the existence, say, of free will. I sense that most of us are in some way repulsed by the conception that the evil of the world can be somehow made up for by some supposedly greater good; it seems as if one can accuse God of doing what the apostle Paul himself condemns in Romans – let us do (or allow) evil that good may come! Can states of affairs really be summed up in such a way so that, as long as enough “good” can be conjured up to tip the scales towards justice, any evil can be tolerated?
In the place of moral absolutism and consequentialism, there have been moves in moral philosophy to abandon analysis of our moral lives as if they were a series of unconnected episodes of moral dilemmas in favor of an emphasis on the narrative of a life. Actions are not so much intrinsically good or evil as they are unbefitting the pursuit of the good life. Here, more importantly, the evil and suffering of one stage of life can find its redemption in another. Even if someone may suffer unimaginable evil in her life, God may be able to turn that suffering into praise by overwhelming any pain that might have been felt by the comforting power of His Spirit. Any event that may happen in the course of a person’s life, then, cannot be analyzed and judged good and evil from some objective viewpoint looking at a momentary snapshot of happenings outside of the context of an individual’s life story.
I stop here in the interest of time, but I hope discussion will continue. In a way, however, any reanalysis of the problem of evil along these lines cannot simply limit itself to philosophy. We are not speaking of a god who is far off, but one who is intimately near and real. In speaking of the problem of evil, then, we must look not only to God as He reveals himself to us in Scripture, but also in our lives as a people in covenant with this self-same God. He is a God who has promised that He will not leave and forsake us, just as He did not ultimately leave nor forsake His Son in the judgment of Calvary. He is a God who has demonstrated to us that his final response to the sin, death, evil, and suffering in our lives is not ambivalence, but love, a love demonstrated in His raising of Jesus Christ from the grave. As we all know, the story of the gospel does not end on a cross on Golgotha, but continues to the surprising discovery of an empty tomb. As such, I sense that “He is risen!” must be part and parcel of any Christian response to the problem of evil.
- The classic statement of the problem can be found in J. L. Mackie’s 1955 paper “Evil and Omnipotence”. [↩]
- See, for example, Plantinga’s article “Free Will Defense” or Lewis’ The Problem of Pain. [↩]
- It also commits those who accept Plantinga’s argument to a particular position – incompatibilism – in the free will and determinism debate, which is not necessarily a bad thing. [↩]
- See, for instance, her article “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God” (1989) or her book of the same name, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999). [↩]
