The Problem of Evil

The Basic Problem

The world we live in contains no small amount of "evil". Bad things happen. People are cruel, sometimes extremely so. And there are a variety of natural disasters that ruin and end people’s lives. True enough, lots of good things happen in this world as well. People can be very nice, and the weather can be beautiful. But the fact are that evil, bad things do happen.

All this evil in the world naturally prompts a question for theists: Why would God let these things happen?

This question is at the heart of the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil attempts to show that there is a tension between God (at least on a certain conception) and the presence of evil in the world.

Many religions hold that god is a symbol of perfection. God is not just a powerful force that set the world spinning, God is a source of moral authority and greatness. The Problem of Evil focuses specifically on this idea about God. More precisely, the Problem of Evil takes issue with the following conception of God.

God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-caring.

The basic argument against such a god’s existence is that it seems to be in tension with the fact that:

Evil exists.

“Evil”

It's worth pausing for a second on the claim that "evil exists". When the PoE calls our attention to the large amount of “evil” in the world, they seem to have in mind those events which cause needless sufferring. Such examples include:

• "Human Evil". Here, the proponent of the PoE has in mind the large number of bad things people do to each other. Some people inflict pain, sufferring and torture on others. (In class, I described the really bad "human evils" of Stalin's regime, but we can also think of other examples like the Holocaust.)

• "Natural Evil". Here, the proponent of the PoE has in mind things like natural disasters (e.g. the Lisbon earthquake). Now, it may seem odd to label these things "evil". (After all, we don't scold an earthquake or hold a hurricane morally responsible for its actions.) But as I described in class, I don't think the issue of how to label such events is crucial to the PoE. The proponent of the PoE claims that these examples of natural disasters (whether we call them "evil" or not) seem to be in tension with the idea that an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-caring God is in charge.

Two Forms of the PoE

As I've described, the basic PoE is that there seems to be some kind of tension between the claim that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-caring and the claim that evil exists. At this point it is worth distinguishing between two different forms that the PoE can take. These forms are distinguished by how strong they take the tension between the conception of God and the fact that evil exists to be.

The Logical Problem of Evil.
The Logical PoE claims that the "tension" involved between a perfect God and the presence of evil in the world actually amounts to a logical contradiction. Thus, given the evil we find in the world, this shows that the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-caring God is logically impossible.

The Evidential Problem of Evil.
The Evidential PoE makes a much weaker claim than the Logical PoE. The Evidential PoE does not claim that there is any contradiction between a perfect God and the presence of evil in the world. Instead the claim is that the existence of evil provides good evidence for rejecting the claim that God is all-powerful (and all-knowing) and all-caring.
(As we saw, Plantinga describes this version of the PoE as the "probabilistic problem of evil". As he puts this version, the existence of evil is supposed to show that it is very unlikely that any all-powerful, all-knowing, all-caring God exists.)

The Logical PoE: Mackie

Again, the Logical PoE claims that there is a logical contradiction between the claim that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-caring and the claim that evil exists. In our reading, we saw Mackie push his own formulation of the Logical PoE. (We also saw James Coley, in his guest lecture, give a version of the Logical PoE.) As Mackie describes it, he thinks that there is a contradiction between the following two claims:

God is omnipotent and wholly good.

Evil exists.

Strictly speaking, Mackie admits that the above claims aren't in contradiction as they stand. Depending on how we conceive of "omnipotent", "good" and "evil" we might be able to avoid contradiction. So, to generate the contradiction he has in mind, Mackie has to define those terms. He does so by giving what he refers to as two "quasi-logical" claims:

"Good" is opposed to "evil", in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can.

There is no limit to what an "omnipotent" thing can do.

Mackie's official claim is that once these quasi-logical claims have been accepted, we can no longer hold, without contradiction, that God is omnipotent and wholly good, and that evil exists.

Responding to the Logical PoE

Mackie thinks there are legitimate responses to the PoE. Basically, he claims that to respond to the PoE you need to alleviate the contradiction by giving up one of the claims that generates it. According to Mackie, a legitimate response would have to do one of the following:

Reject the claim that God is omnipotent and wholly good.

Reject the claim that evil exists.

Reject one of the "quasi-logical" claims. (Reinterpret “good”, “evil” or “omnipotent”.)

Mackie's own response, of course, is to deny that an omnipotent and wholly good God exists. (He takes the logical PoE as an argument for atheism.) He thinks that either of the other options would lead to other philosophical problems.

However, for the purposes of his paper, he is willing to admit that those other options are honest, legitimate responses to the logical PoE. The main purpose of his paper is to argue against what he calls "fallacious solutions".

For Mackie, a "fallacious solution" is one that pretends to be rejecting none of the claims. (It pretends to be doing something other than the three options listed above.) In his assessment of each such solution, Mackie argues that, without admitting as much, they really are rejecting one of the claims (usually one of his "quasi-logical" claims).

In class, we discussed a number of these "fallacious solutions". In what follows, I will briefly describe each response, and list the objections we discussed in class. (Remember, some of these objections were made by Mackie, but some were provided by Coley or myself).

The “Necessary Counterpart” Response

The Response:

The first response is that  “Good cannot exist without Evil” or “Evil is necessary as a counterpart to Good.” The basic idea here is that if there were no evil, there would be no good either. As I described in class, this basic idea can be taken in a couple of different ways:

Evil is logically required for Good.

Evil is required for us to recognize Good.

Objections:

Limits God's Omnipotence. There is something he can't do, namely, he can't create good without evil. (On the first way of taking the point, it doesn't seem to much of a limit to take omnipotence to exclude the ability to do what is logically impossible. However, some views of God have denied this, seeing God as above logic, or perhaps even responsible for it.)

Re-interprets Mackie's relation between good and evil.

Why so much evil? (If all we need is some evil in order to generate the required contrast, why would he fill the world with so much of it?)

The Means and Ends Approach

The Response:

“Evil is necessary for Good, not as a counterpart, but as a means.”

Evil will cause some greater Good (either in kind or extent).

Objections:

Limits God's Omnipotence. Again, it looks like there's something God can't do, namely, he can't create good without evil. (Notice that this seems worse than in the previous case. It seems that God is limited by some causal, rather than logical, laws.)

Why so much indiscriminant evil? (Even if sufferring causes some greater good, why have some people, e.g. the Jews in the Holocaust, had to suffer so much, while others, e.g. philosophy graduate students from Minnesota, haven't?)

The “Free Will” Defense

The Response:

God endowed humans with Free Will.

This basic idea has been intended to solve the PoE in one of two different ways:

Evil is no longer ascribed to God, but rather to humans.

Endowing humans with Free Will results in a greater Good, even though it will also result in some Evil. (This makes it a variant of Means and Ends Approach.)

Objections:

General problems with the notion of “Free Will”.

What about Natural Evils?

What about really bad Human Evils?

Mackie: Why couldn’t God grant humans Free Will, but make them such that they always freely choose the Good?

The "Appeal to Ignorance" and/or "Mysterious Ways" Response

The Response:

One response we disn't have time to cover in class is what we might call the "Appeal to Ignorance" or "Mysterious Ways" response. The idea here is to claim that there we ignorantly perceive a contradiction between the presence of evil in the world and an omnipotent and wholly good God, but that, in fact, there is no such contradiction. One way the point is sometimes pressed is that God works in "mysterious ways" and that we are ignorant of God's "big picture".

I think that the most straightforward way of taking this response links it to the Means and Ends approach. (It is either a version of that approach, or it is added on as a supplementary detail.) God allows sufferring to produce some greater good of which we are ignorant.

Objections:

If this response is a version of the Means and Ends Approach, then I think it suffers from the same objections listed when discussing that response. (For example, God's omnipotence is limited. If God were really all-powerful, couldn't he find a less mysterious way to achieve a greater good?)

Regardless of whether we take this to be a version of the Means and Ends approach, I think it's especially vulnerable to Flew's "Death by a Thousand Qualifications". This kind of appeal to ignorance seems exactly like the kind of qualification that Flew objects to.

Responding to the Evidential PoE

All of the above responses are attempts to solve the Logical problem of evil. But remember, the Logical PoE was only one version of the problem. In fact, it was a version that made an especially strong claim. The Logical PoE claimed that there is a logical contradiction between an all-perfect God and the evil we find in the world. To respond to the Logical PoE, one would need to argue that there is no contradiction. To do this, it would be sufficient to describe some possibility where God is all perfect and yet he allows evil to exist. (And notice, this is what each of the solutions above attempts to do.)

I claimed in class that the Evidential problem of evil is much tougher to respond to. The Evidential PoE makes no claims about logical contradiction. Instead, the Evidential PoE claims that the evil we find in the world provides good evidence to reject the existence of an all-perfect God. (Evil shows that it is highly unlikely that any all-perfect God exists.) To respond to the Evidentialist PoE, then, it would not be sufficient to merely describe a possibility on which an all-perfect God allows evil to exist.

For this reason, all of the above responses to the Logical PoE provide no response to the Evidential PoE. (Or at least, they provide no response as they stand. We might try to strengthen them or add to them in a way that makes them more responsive to the Evidential PoE.)

And due to time constraints, we never explored any attempts to respond to the Evidential PoE in class. However, Plantinga does attempt to respond to the Evidential problem of evil:

Plantinga's response to the Evidential Problem of Evil.