TOWARD
SOLVING THE problem: AN EPICUREAN riddle NO MORE
I. Introduction.................................................... 1
II. A Jet
Tour Of The Problem Of Evil.............. 3
III. The Earliest Christian Responses................. 5
IV. The Divine
Purpose...................................... 9
A.
The Origin Of Evil
B.
Purpose From Evil
V. Theology And The Problem Of Evil.............. 15
VI. Conclusion................................................... 19
Introduction
The
“Problem of Evil” is an old riddle, dating back to the post-Socratic philosophy
of ancient Greece, perhaps even farther back than that. In a famous quote, Greek
philosopher Epicurus presented his riddle of this problem. “Is God willing to
prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able but not willing? Then
He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence comes evil?” Epicurus
is not the only person to ponder this dilemma. Socrates asks a similar riddle
of Euthyphro; Rabbi Harold Kushner openly questions whether or not “God was out
to lunch”
during his crisis of faith, and even the biblical patriarch Job sarcastically reflects
on the question that he is, “a joke to my friends, the one who called on God
and He answered him; the just and blameless man is a joke.” (Job 12:4 NASB)
Amongst
all of these questions one thing is for certain: evil is real. Pain and suffering exist in the lives of
people. Yet another conviction that can be taken from scripture is that God is
good, just, and fair. The Psalmist wrote that God does not, “take pleasure in
wickedness; no evil dwells with (Him).” (Psalm 5:4) Nevertheless, the fact that
evil is present in this world seems self-evident. With this in mind, how evil is
viewed in the overall plan and purpose of God is something of extreme
importance. For either evil caught God
off-guard, or God allowed evil to enter the world all the while remaining
all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, for one grand purpose—his glory and
our good. It is this belief that can give
hope in the midst of human suffering. Despite the musings of Kushner that
certain bad things happen for “no reason,”
the Bible resonates with the control of God—and the control of God in all
things. Paul, writing to the Roman church, declared that “God causes all
things” and that He then “works (those things) together for (His) good.”
(Romans 8:28) Paul does not say all things will be good. Instead he proclaims that God will
synchronistically harmonize those “things” specifically into His purpose, and
for His glory.
Concerning
that line of thinking, John Piper has said that, “It is amazing that the most
common means used by people today to solve the mystery of suffering never
occurred to Job or to his three friends—namely, the limitation of God's
sovereign control over all things. Today we limit God at the drop of a hat (he
couldn't have willed that sickness, or that explosion, or the death of that
child!). So he must not be in control. He is a limited God.” However; in that sermon Piper further stated that “We see through a glass
darkly, even from our New Testament perspective (1 Corinthians 13:12). But faith always affirms that no matter how
chaotic and absurd things may seem to our limited view they are in fact the
tactics of infinite wisdom.”
A Jet Tour Of The
Problem Of Evil
As previously
mentioned, the problem of evil is an old dilemma. Socrates asked Euthyphro to
question how a pantheon of good gods could be good, and powerful, and there
still be problems. According to Plato, Socrates asks, ““Is the pious loved by
the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” The
primary interest in the Euthyphro Dilemma in the Judeo-Christian context;
however, has primarily concerned the relationship between God and morality in
the monotheistic religious tradition. In this, God is taken to be omnipotent,
omniscient, and omnibenevolent, having created the universe initially and still
actively involved in it today. The dilemma for the Christian then is best
summarized by D. Scott Henderson who wrote, “The first option says God creates
values by willing them, thus making morality arbitrary; the second option says
that God must align His will to a standard, thus making Him subordinate.”
In other words,
God is either all-powerful, but not very nice, or He is a benevolent deity that
lacks the sovereign power to control His creation. In either case the God of
the Bible is obfuscated by reason of the dilemma. It stands to reason that
neither option is of much value to the theist, for she does not give into the
assertion that there are only two horns in Plato’s dilemma. God is neither weak
and subordinate, nor is He cruel and incongruent. As William Lane Craig has
written, “God’s commands are not arbitrary, and so we need not trouble
ourselves about counterfactuals with impossible antecedents like, ‘If God were
to command child abuse…’”
The Euthyphro
Dilemma is the front door that opens this so-called problem of evil. The problem, masked and somewhat
veiled, also rears its ugly head in the Old Testament scriptures of the
Judeo-Christian faith. As an example, the problem played a major role in the
biblical writings of Job. God is shown as being in complete control, allowing
the adversary to torment Job despite his righteous character. While Job’s
friends attempt to find some flaw in his morality, Job consistently maintains
his innocence. It would then seem as though God was unjustly tormenting poor
old Job. The end of Job’s sufferings show the righteousness and justification
of God. As Job 28:12-13; 23 attest: “But where can wisdom be found? And where
is the place of understanding? ‘Man does not know its value, nor is it found in
the land of the living.’ God understands its way, And He knows its place.”
Still, this is not
the only place we see the dilemma in scripture. In Isaiah 45:6-7 for instance,
God declares His omnipotence and in plain language declares He is, “the One
forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity;
I am the Lord who does all these.” And in Amos 3:6 the prophet writes of God,
“If a calamity occurs in a city has not the Lord done it?” The word translated
for “calamity” in both texts is the Hebrew word Ra, defined as “bad, unpleasant, evil (giving pain, unhappiness,
misery) and displeasing.”
This would seem to indicate that the traditional thought of physical and moral
evil is in view in the biblical authors’ minds, not just the typical misery and
misfortune of natural disasters.
This problem has
also been the passion and consideration of many of the greatest Christian
philosophers. Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, and Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz have all added to the conversation on the subject. Augustine and Aquinas brought an early
foundation of philosophical thought as well as theological understanding to the
problem. Anselm is widely credited with the first look at the problem from the
ontological argument from being. Leibniz was the first to coin the phrase “theodicy”,
from the Greek words theos (God) and dikaios
(righteous); thereby meaning the justification of God.
The modern world
has also been beleaguered by the problem and modern theologians and Christian
philosophers such as Alan Plantinga, Bruce Ware, Albert Mohler, Alister McGrath,
C.S. Lewis, and Norman Geisler have contributed to the debate with the
so-called New Atheism proponents, who are especially adept at presenting the
problem as an argument against the existence of God. The problem of evil in
modern society would seem to focus less on the ontological realities of evil
and more on the nature of gratuitous evil, as seen in the everyday lives of
everyday people. The question is oft heard by some victim who is lamenting
their misfortune, “Where was God when this happened to me?” These calamities
highlight both moral evil and physical evil. Even the bystanders to trouble
sees the “absence of God” in major devastation. “Why,” asks these questioners,
“do tsunamis kill hundreds of thousands of people IF God is good and powerful?” Or perhaps one might hear, “Why was
my husband murderer for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
This line of thinking has become a rallying point for those opposed to theism.
New Atheism stalwarts like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Bertram
Russell and Christopher Hitchens have inculcated the problem of evil as a
militant call-to-arms for those opposed to theism. Consider David Lewis’
diatribe concerning the problem of evil and Christians who continue to worship
a God Who allows evil:
“Many Christians appear to be good
people, people worthy of the admiration of those of us who are non-Christians.
From now on let us suppose, for simplicity’s sake, that these Christians accept
a God who perpetrates divine evil, one who inflicts infinite torment on those
who do not accept him. Appearances notwithstanding, are those who accept the
perpetrator of divine evil themselves evil?”
In this it is possible to see how the
so-called new atheism, as a movement, is evangelical in its own right. Its
proponents seek to win converts by means of science, philosophy, and even the
problem of evil itself, decrying a vacillating, flippant god that either could
completely cease humanity’s suffering and is too unconcerned to be bothered, or
is a limp-wristed deity with a moral sense of obligation, but no power to
effect any real change.
New
atheism see no need for a Supreme Being, not realizing that they have simply
made science their own little god. As an example, Bertrand Russell commented in
his famous work Religion And Science,
that “science has stood for the diminution of suffering,” while it was religion
that “encouraged man’s natural savagery.” Sam
Harris viewed faith and belief as a question best left to the cold realities of
the scientific realm.
The late Christopher Hitchens saw religion as combining the “maximum in
severity and the maximum of solipsism.” This
is the same argument and gestations that have been considered since the days of
Socrates and Epicurus. Still, while the Christians of today may couch their
answers to the riddle in more scientific language; even in this post-modern era,
they are by and large the same answers the earliest Christian philosophers and
theologians espoused.
Christian Responses
Augustine of Hippo
is seen as one of the most influential Christina philosophers to ever live. His
influence ranges from the Roman Catholic Church to Protestantism, with the
Arminians and Reformed theologians as well as Baptists and most every other
theological stripe all claiming him as their own particular patron. Henderson
noted that Augustine saw several things in humanity that contributed to a
proper understanding of the problem. Henderson wrote, “Augustine recognizes
that there is an order of creation reflective of the goodness of God and that
all things that exist are inherently good. One of these goods is free will,
which carries with it the possibility of its use to bring about evil.” [16] In
Augustinian thought, evil is not a “thing.” In other words, evil has no
substance, and as such it has no ontological being. It is best, according to
Augustine, to see evil not as “something,” but as a “lack of something”—and a
lack or privation of some part of goodness in specific. So Augustine saw evil
as a parasite that must have goodness to corrupt, or it cannot exist.
Thomas Aquinas
followed up with this thought by postulating that despite the reality of evil,
evil has no positive attributes, making it essentially nothingness.
Despite God’s omnipotent character, there are some things He cannot do, such as
the oft quoted dilemma of making a square circle. So it is better to define
God’s omnipotence as the fact God can do anything that IS possible. God cannot make nothingness, ergo, God did not create
evil, because evil is nothingness.
While attention to
the problem itself lagged somewhat during the prevalence of evil during the
Dark Ages, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz rekindled the debate by creating what he
referred to as a “Theodicy.” As noted earlier, Sproul writes:
“The term theodicy involves the
combining of two Greek words: the word for God, theos, and the word for justification, dikaios. Hence, a theodicy is an attempt to justify God for the
existence of evil (as seen, for instance, in John Milton's Paradise Lost). Such theodicies have covered the gauntlet between a
simple explanation that evil comes as a direct result of human free will or to
more complex philosophical attempts such as that offered by the philosopher
Leibniz.”
Leibniz proffered a threefold view
of the nature of evil. He suggested that there are three types of evil;
metaphysical evil, physical evil, and moral evil. In a systematic flow, Leibniz,
relied heavily on his theory of monadology. (A staggeringly amazing view for
his time, Leibniz believed that the world consists of tiny little units he
referred to a monads.) In his Delicate
Theodicy view, he saw evil as flowing from one type of evil to the next. In
essence, because humanity possess metaphysical evil (that is, creation is evil
because it could not be created perfect, only that witch is infinite can be
metaphysically perfect) physical evil is present (tornadoes, earthquakes, etc.)
The presence of physical evil opens the door to moral evil, and thus people
have the propensity to commit moral evil. (This is sometimes referred to as
“The Best of All Possible Worlds” theodicy, and is mercilessly parodied in
Voltaire’s satire Candide. In the
play, Dr. Pangloss’s hapless character is modeled after Voltaire’s perception
of Leibniz.) The rationale and flow of Leibniz theodicy seems
correct on the surface. Nevertheless, if one then traced the flow backward, it
would seem as though Leibniz’s theodicy fails, due in large part because moral
evil would be the necessary result of metaphysical evil. If, for instance, Adam
and Eve were created metaphysically evil, necessarily; then they would have
been evil in the Garden prior to the serpents entrance; and in fact remain evil
even into eternity. Hence the so-called “Leibniz Lapse” fails his theodicy. This
would also lend itself to the proclamation that humans are innocent of moral
evil because they were not created good, but in fact they were created evil.
Since Leibniz
first introduced the theodicy, many Christian theologians and philosophers have
put their energy into solving the Epicurean Riddle and justifying God, some by
proving the need for God. In Pensees #148,
Blaise Pascal noted that the human soul has a hole that can only be filled with
that which is infinite and immutable. C.S.
Lewis sought for an answer to the suffering that humans feel, and decided that
it must be filled with some reasonable argument for a divine purpose behind
suffering and injustice. Before his conversion, Lewis was a devoted atheist. In
Mere Christianity he wrote, “My
argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust.” Later, he would write in The Problem With Pain, “If God were good, He would wish to make His
creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what
He wished. But the creatures are not
happy. Therefore, God lacks either
goodness, or power, or both.” He continues this thought with the theodicy that it is free will that leads to
pain, suffering, and evil, not God. To Lewis’ thinking, God could interfere with
our free decisions, but unless he removes the result of every sin, eventually
humanity would end up in the same predicament in which it currently finds
itself. Removing every sin, though,
leads to “a world in which nothing important ever depended on human choice, and
in which choice itself would soon cease from the certainty that one of the
apparent alternatives before you would lead to no results and was therefore not
really an alternative.” These thoughts are often called a teleological argument, or the argument from
design. One of the things that vexes the atheist as he or she attempts to
explain the universe is the fact of what is known as “The Law of Causality,”
which states that every effect must have an adequate antecedent cause. In
essence, the Law of Causality states that because a watch exists there,
necessarily, must be a watch maker. Taken to its ultimate end, one could see
that because there is a creation there, necessarily, must be a creator. Leibniz
also saw this teleological theory for God in his “Law of Pre-established
Harmony.” (It is
important to remember here that the law does not require everything to have a
cause, just every effect. i.e. God does not require a cause since He is a Being
and not an effect.) As this relates to the problem, the teleological argument is
best summarized by John Hick in his work Evil
And The God Of Love. Speaking of the problem for the design aspect, he
wrote that the “answer—adapted rather than adopted from Plotinus—is that evil
is not any kind of positive substance or force, but consist rather in the going wrong of God’s creation in some of
its parts. Evil is essentially the malfunctioning
of something that in itself is good” (emphasis mine.)
In other words, the design is good (Genesis 1:24), but malfunctions due to the
privation of the good. Yet this begs the question, “Is there some sense of
purpose from the Creator of all of this good gone bad?”
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