(Author’s note: This begins a series answering objections to the Christian worldview. A week or two ago I made a call for folks to send me their “best shot.” For the other posts in the series, simply follow the pingbacks in the comments section.)
In the middle of Bible study tonight, the leader received a text message: the wife of his friend died in a tragic car accident on the freeway. In addition to her husband (Bible study leader’s friend), she left behind two kids. In my Bible study leader’s words, his friend was the most “energetic, joyous person you’d ever meet. He always had a big smile on his face, and he was sooo proud of his wife and kids.”
His wife was 38.
Also as I write this, a good friend of mine is in the hospital battling for his life. After five brain surgeries, he is mostly paralyzed, can barely speak, and has a feeding tube. He has been in the ICU for well over a month.
He is the most loving guy you’d ever meet. He is 33.
Columbine. September 11. The Tsunami in India.
Something has gone dreadfully awry.
Events like these hit us straight in the gut, don’t they? The question “why God?” or “where was God?” pop up quite naturally.
This brings up perhaps the most common objection to the existence of God generally and, specifically, the Christian worldview. A few of the objections I received in my call to skeptics are variations on this problem. The objection generally comes in two forms: the logical and the evidential problem of evil. There is also a pastoral element to the problem. I will eventually get to all three aspects, but let me tackle the logical aspect first.
Be forewarned: if you are currently personally going through some suffering, this post will do you little good. Pontificating about possible worlds and free will isn’t much help to someone who just lost a friend to cancer, for example. The pastoral element will come later.
The logical problem of evil argues that the existence of God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil. A common version of the argument, perhaps best summarized by David Hume, goes like this:
1) If God were all loving, He would want to prevent all evil.
2) If God were all powerful, He would be able to prevent all evil.
3) Evil exists.
4) Therefore, God is either not all powerful or not all loving.
5) Hence, God (defined as a maximally perfect being worthy of worship) does not exist.
The crux of the argument is that 1-4 cannot all be true at the same time. One of them has got to go, and 3 seems like it is immovable. (For brevity’s sake, I’m skipping some of the fill in. For a full statement of the problem, go here.)
Before anything else, it’s crucial to get a handle on the definitions of the terms. Vagueness in the terms has been one of the things that’s made this problem a stumbling block to many.
First, underlying this discussion is what we mean by a “free creature.” There are a few definitions of freedom out there, but one that I’m assuming for this discussion is libertarian:
A person is free with respect to a given action if and only if that person is both free to perform that action and free to refrain from performing that action; in other words, that person is not determined to perform or refrain from that action by any prior causal forces. (citation)
This is the average person’s view of freedom. This is a morally thick view of freedom.
Think of a world in which God created beings that were only able to choose good options. If someone in this world were faced with three good options and one bad one, he would be incapable of choosing the bad option. This would be a limited, and thus, morally thin kind of freedom. People in this world would always choose good options, but we wouldn’t praise them for it; they’d deserve no credit, just like a computer that did what it was programmed to do wouldn’t deserve credit for its actions. (Citation)
People in the real world (including Adam and Eve) are free in that sense. This conflicts with a key assumption that backs the logical problem of evil….more on that in a bit.
Next, what is meant by “all-powerful”? Many people assume that the classical theistic meaning is that God can do absolutely anything, but this is not so. Biblically, at least, there are things that God cannot do. He cannot make a square circle, for instance. In other words, He cannot do the logically impossible.
This is not a limitation on His power, however. Some concepts are meaningless, vacuous, and non-existent, and no matter how powerful God or anyone else is, that’s not gonna change. To paraphrase C.S Lewis, a sentence doesn’t suddenly become imbibed with meaning when you put the words “God can” in front of it. There are some possible worlds that God cannot create, but this doesn’t mean He’s not all-powerful.
This all relates to the problem of evil in that if one accepts the common view of freedom above, then no, God could not make robustly free creatures that would only be capable of choosing good, as is commonly assumed. God, in creating the world with morally robust freedom, had to give us the option of choosing rebellion, and with that, all the consequences derived from that choice.
Someone could respond by going with another, less robust, view of freedom, but I doubt it would be a freedom we’d want.
The question is, “could God have kept the possibility of evil out of the equation without thereby eliminating the existence of love and genuine relationship?” No. If there is no possibility of rejection, love is coerced, and that is not genuine relationship. Think back to my computer illustration; no one would say our computer ‘loves’ us and ‘relates’ to us, at least not on a meaningful level.
Now the question becomes, “is free will a ‘greater good’?” Is the possibility of genuine relationship with the ability to genuinely love God and others such a great good that allowing the possibility of evil (the possibility of rebellion and rejection of relationship) is morally permissable?
That’s a key issue, isn’t it? All that is needed to for there to be no contradiction between God being all-powerful, all-loving, and evil existing is the possibility of God having a morally permissable reason to permit it. We don’t even need to *know* what the exact reason is. All that is required, logically, is possibility.
An illustration: say you overhear a co-worker claim that six months ago someone cut him to the bone with a knife. At first glance, this sounds pretty cruel, because most of us hold that no one should inflict unwanted pain upon another.
But, as he continues, you find out that the knife-wielder was a surgeon, and he was performing surgery on your friend to remove a cancerous tumor. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it? The surgeon was going for the greater good, and thus had a morally sufficient reason to cut with the knife.
It is possible that God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting evil in the world; this reason is freedom, relationship, and love (mentioned above). To solve the logical problem of evil, possibility, not plausibility, is all that is needed.
Before you scoff at the value of all that, think hard. What would you be giving up? C.S Lewis put it nicely:
Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other…. And for that they must be free. Of course, God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. (Mere Christianity)
Alving Plantinga agrees:
A world containing creatures who are sometimes significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but he cannot cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if he does so, then they are not significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, he must create creatures capable of moral evil; and he cannot leave these creatures free to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so…. The fact that these free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against his goodness; for he could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by excising the possibility of moral good. (The Nature of Necessity)
For me, when I think back to all the things that make life worth living, most of them have to do with love in relationship. In addition, if I think back to all the accomplishments I’m proud of and wouldn’t sell for anything, most of them would be completely ruined if I was automated to accomplish them….saying I’d be “automated” to “accomplish” them even sounds weird.
To sum up thus far: many classical theists deny premises 1 and 2, but that does not mean God is not both all-powerful and all-loving. The combination of 1, 2, and 3 does not necessitate 4 and 5.
There are objections to this (for a full description, see the article I’ve cited several times above). While cataloguing all of them would require a book, let me mention one that does make me think: apparently, in heaven, we will not have the ability to sin. Our freedom, then, will be limited in a sense, and most think this is a good thing. If it will be a good thing in heaven, why think it wouldn’t be a good thing now?
My response is that the state of sinlessness will not come in a vacuum. That is, it comes only after a period on earth where we each “prove” the genuineness of our relationship to God and others by freely choosing love. Only after this will our free choice of obedience be “habituated” and confirmed into a state of sinlessness.
The objection still makes me question libertarian freedom, though. I guess the jury is still out.
So far, I have left lots unanswered: what is meant by evil? Also, what about the evidential and pastoral elements of the problem? There is still much left to discuss. Stay tuned for part II.
In addition, yet to come are many, many posts on the many, many other objections I received: is there evidence for God/the supernatural? What about the claims of science? Isn’t Christianity unnecessarily exclusive? Hey, what’s the deal with you all taking the Bible so literally? Isn’t Jesus just a copy cat of other ancient mythic figures? Why hell? And if there is a hell, why doesn’t God just send somebody back from the dead to tell us?
I will tackle all these and other objections in the next few weeks!
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