The most popular Christian response to the ‘problem of evil’ is the ‘free-will defence’. This argument goes that we can reconcile the propositions that evil exists and proposition that God is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good; because free will is such a very good thing. And so God elects to create the world contains creatures with free will, since he wills the best, even if it introduces the possibility that free decision results in decisions to do evil, causing suffering. Now, we are so used to this kind of argument that it is hard for us to see anything wrong with it. And while I'm not wanting to suggest that the free will defence is flat out wrong or useless, in this lecture I'd like us to consider some objections to it.
THE CASE AGAINST THEODICY
A theodicy is a demonstration that the existence of evil can be reconciled with the existence of God. It attempts to show that there is no logical contradiction in believing at the same time that evil exists and that God exists; or, from a slightly different perspective, that the existence of evil doesn't count as evidence against the existence of God as he is traditionally understood.
To put it formally, theodicy is an attempt to resolve the apparent incompatibility of the two propositions:
I. God exists, and is essentially omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good;
II. Evil exists
2. Examples of theodicy:
There are several theodicies. Let me very briefly sketch out three.
(1) Best of all possible worlds (Leibniz): God would create the best of all possible worlds. And Leibniz aims to show that such a world contains evil as an indispensable element. So, what he argues is that there are reasons availably to an omniscient and omnipotent God to allow evil; namely, because these give rise to greater goods, and hence a better world on the whole, e.g. courage through danger, forgiveness through injury.
(2) Soul-making theodicy (Hick): Evil is a part of the divine plan to ensure that all souls attain perfection. Life in a world like this is "good for the soul'; it helps us grow into an ultimately perfect relationship with our Creator. This is the purpose of God for creation. Environmental evils are permitted because they create an environment favourable to soul-making.
(3) Free Will Defense (Plantinga): one has achieved popularity in Christian circles far beyond all the others: the so-called "free will defence'. The "free will defence' says that free will is a very good thing, even if it introduces the possibility that free decision results in decisions to do evil, causing suffering. In fact, free will is such a great good that a world in which humans are free to make real decisions is better than a world without free will. And so God elects to create a world that contains creatures with free will, since he wills the best. Thus, the possibility of evil is a necessary correlate of the best (or at least a better) kind of world.
In each theodicy, a reason why God allows evil is provided which is consistent with his "essential attributes': each theodicy asserts that, in one way or another, evil is "factored in' and is thus reconcilable with the belief that God is in control of the world, he is aware of everything that goes on in his world, and is perfectly good.
Now, we are so used to this kind of argument"”especially the free will defence"”that it is hard for us to see anything wrong with it. It certainly seems a neat and broadly biblical way of defending the Christian belief in God from a widespread knock-down argument that's used against it. But, while I'm not wanting to suggest that the free will defence is flat out wrong or useless, in this lecture I'd like us to consider some objections to it, and to the project of theodicy in general, which I think require some serious reflection.
Overview: We'll start by placing the project of theodicy in its historical context; then we'll go on to consider the way in which theodicy typically portrays God, evil, humanity.
OBJECTIONS TO THEODICY
1. Theodicy and enlightenment
Evil, sin and suffering are phenomena that Christians have struggled against (practically) and struggled with (intellectually) continually over the centuries. But it's important to see that modern debates in the philosophy of religion concerning "the problem of evil', the theodicies that have emerged from these debates, have a very particular shape which is a product of a particular intellectual context: namely, the Enlightenment.
Kenneth Surin, in his excellent book Theology and the Problem of Evil, argues that the existence of evil presented no obstacle to belief in pre-modern times. This is because the concept of God was indispensable in the intellectual and social context of pre-modern times. Belief in God remained so fundamental to the worldview of the age that it would never have occurred to a suffering individual or to a philosopher that the existence of evil in the world might count as a reason not to believe in God, or that there may be a logical contradiction between belief in the existence of God and belief in the existence of evil. Surin writes: "Pre-seventeenth century Christian thinkers were certainly not unaware of the conceptual difficulties that these antinomies [between divine omnipotence and worldly evils] generated; but, unlike their post-seventeenth century counterparts, they did not regard these problems as constituting any sort of ground for jettisoning their faith' (Surin 1986: 9).
What changed then in the seventeenth century? It wasn't until the seventeenth century that the belief in God shifted from the category of the irrefutable to the category of the hypothetical"”at least for certain sections of European society; the idea of God came to be seen as a hypothesis that could be tested like any other. The idea of God entered into the domain of scientific reason. And it was precisely when this shift occurred in the intellectual climate of the seventeenth century, that the modern problem of evil emerged. In this new world, where theism had become refutable, belief in God reappeared in new garb fit for a scientific era: in a form of belief we call "deism'. Deism is the belief in God as a unitary personality or mind, as the first cause of the material world, non-interventionist; in short, the divine watch-maker. Here was an idea of God that could sit comfortably with the new mechanistic worldviews of Galileo, Descartes and Newton; here was an idea of God that would allow the intelligentsia to distance itself from sectarian squabbles and the perceived superstitions and corruptions of the institutional Church; here was an idea of God crafted specifically in order to reassert God's irrefutability.
But this is also where the modern problem of evil emerges. If God is understood as the divine watch-maker who has designed and constructed the world, wound it up and set it in motion, then we might well ask whether the world he has set in motion reflects the perfect of its creator. And if we see embarrassing defects and tragic events all around us, then might we not be justified in concluding that God is a shoddy watch-maker? Or even that the very hypothesis that there is a designer behind this great big mess of joy and pain, creation and destruction, peace and violence is ultimately untenable? Perhaps the irrefutable God of deism is not so irrefutable after all"
And it is at this point that the theodicist steps in to defend God in the face of evil and suffering in the world"
Having looked at the historical context of what gets called the problem of evil in the modern era, we're now in a position to go through some of the reservations that have been expressed towards the project of theodicy.
2. God: The Christian God vs the deist idea of God (the god of the philosophers)
The first reservation follows fairly obviously from the historical sketch that I've just constructed: namely this, that the God presupposed by participants in modern philosophical debates over the so-called problem of evil is sub-Christian. This is all-important, for reasons I'll explain in a moment. But first let's see some of the ways the God of the philosophers might be sub-Christian.
The God of philosophical theism is defined as a being who is omni-potent, omni-scient, and omni-benevolent. Those who argue using this definition of God suggest that it is a neat summary of the essential features of God, and has the added advantage of being acceptable to all the major monotheistic religions. It is recognised that all the monotheistic religions will want to say more about God, but it is assumed that they wouldn't want to say less. So, for instance, philosopher William Rowe (1984: 95) distinguishes between a "restricted (standard) theism', which is this minimal or essential definition of God used by philosophical theism, and "expanded theism', which is the more complex set of beliefs about God found in the existing religions.
There are a number of theological strands of thought that seem to bring the philosopher's seemingly straightforward restriction into question. Let me just describe two.
2.1. Ontological: thinking of god as object (Thomist objection);
Why would we think we could provide a precise conceptual definition of God in the first place? The most rigorous form of this objection, perhaps, is given to us by Thomas Aquinas and those theologians who have been influenced by him. The Thomist point is that we must be careful when we speak of God as though he were an entity or an object. God is not just another entity or object. And when we speak of him as such, we must recognise that we are using language analogically, not literally. We can speak meaningfully about God using language which is drawn from the mundane sphere, but we must always recognise that these concepts will never grasp God, they will always be inadequate to the being of God because his being is of a radically different order to the being of things with their properties, etc. In one classic formulation of the point it is said that "any similarity [that is posited] between the creator and the creature is characterised by an even greater dissimilarity' (Fourth Lateran Council, 1215). (This statement is from 1215, but similar things are said much earlier; for instance, by Augustine who, echoing the Greek Fathers, wrote: Si comprehendis non est Deus, "If you think you have conceived something, then it is not God'.)
According to this line of argument, the restricted definition of the philosophical theist is bound to lead into logical and theoretical confusions and dead ends because it fails to reckon with the ontological difference between the infinite God and finite beings. It assumes we can comprehend God like any other entity and draw rational inferences from this definition about what he would or wouldn't do. But this is to treat God as though he were just another object"”perhaps bigger and with unusual properties (like invisibility), but an object nonetheless, one that causes the world to be the way it is"”like a cosmic pool cue, lining up the shot and cracking the billiard balls of creation into motion.
2.2. Methodological: not Christocentric (Barthian objection);
Another, perhaps more familiar objection to the restricted theism of the philosophy is this: is it really possible to abstract an idea of God from the fabric of narratives that ground the Christian faith?
The tri-omni God of the philosophers may initially seem a perfectly uncontroversial and acceptable base-definition of God. But there is something about this definition that ought to puzzle any orthodox Christian:
The God of the philosophers is defined without any reference to the particular narratives that are foundational for Christianity, especially to the narratives concerning Christ. And yet, in various ways, Christ is described in the New Testament as the climactic revelation of God's very being: he is the image of God; anyone who has seen him has seen the Father; he is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being. The philosophical theists, however, presume to define the very essence of God without any reference to Christ.
What's more, no reference is made to the trinitarian character of God. From very early on the Christian Church identified the God whom it worshipped as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This God is one, but not one as the deist's solitary divine mind is one.
And we must wonder whether this distancing of the philosophical definition of God from the fundamentals of the revelation of God in Christ does not cut that philosophical debate off from the possibility of offering a properly Christian response to the problem of evil. More on this in a little bit.
For the moment, let me just make the point that from the perspective of the Christian faith, the tri-omni definition of God is at best an unexpected and novel way of thinking about God, and at worst substitutes something other than God for the God made known in Christ.
Why then does the tri-omni definition of God seem so familiar and plausible to us in the modern age (if indeed it does seem plausible)? Why do we feel we must define God that way and defend this definition? It's here where Surin's work of placing theodicy in its historical context is particularly instructive, because it helps us see that, to put it crudely, the idea of God presupposed by the philosophers is an idea that is specially designed to seem plausible in the modern context: it is simply the idea of God as necessitated by the new cosmology of the Enlightenment. That is, it is simply the name for that first cause which needs to be posited in order to make the scientific picture of the universe rationally coherent. So this conception of God represents instinctively to us, I would suggest, an idea that gives us a firm toe-hold in the worldview of our modern age. But this is just to remind us once more that the God of the philosophers is strictly correlated to the project of scientific rationality. It is not a product of Christian revelation but of modern philosophical invention.
To summarise then, the God presupposed by the theodicists of modern times is curiously disconnected from the traditional Christian God. Indeed, we might even suggest that the problem of evil as a philosophical conundrum is a bug in the software of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theism. It may be possible to fix the bug and restore the respectability of this kind of theism; but of course atheists will have no interest in doing so, and it is unclear whether Christians should have any interest in doing so either. It may even be that Christians ought to abandon the whole project of theodicy as a confusion and to rediscover more properly biblical ways of speaking about God and about evil in the world. And maybe this, ultimately, will prove to be the more faithful and effective way of commending the God of the Christian gospel in the present era. And indeed this is what I want to commend.
One clarification before I go on. When I say that the problem of evil is a bug in the software of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theism, I don't mean that there is no problem of evil"”or even many problems of evil"”apart from this kind of theism. On the contrary, evil remains a very real problem on a number of levels. But, as I shall argue next, the philosophical debates concerning the problem of evil as it manifests itself within their specific deistic framework actually obscure the real problem of evil, and in so doing they misrepresent what life is like, what God is like, and ultimately make the Christian gospel unintelligible and unnecessary.
So we'll now turn from God to evil"
3. Evil
There are a series of interlocking objections that have been made with regard to the way theodicies have understood evil. I'll go through these in a little less detail"
3.1. Abstracting evil; the global problem of evil is not the individual problem of evil (M.M. Adams)
Theologian Karen Kilby (2003) writes: "most theodicies invoke, though sometimes with a degree of tentativeness, the notion of a greater good"”God permits evil because it is somehow necessary to a larger whole which is very good, whether conceived of as a world in which free will and therefore love, relationships, moral development and the growth of character and so on are possible, or simply as a world which is in fact the best of all possible worlds. The theodicist's central task is to show that the greater good really is not conceivable, not in any sense possible if the evil were removed, so that God's omnipotence is not impugned. All this may well seem reasonable so long as one is able to confine one's thoughts to evil considered as an abstraction. It begins to fall apart, however, when one confronts particular kinds of evils.'
No one has been more attentive to this problem than Marilyn McCord Adams. Her first move is to distinguish God's global goodness and his goodness towards individuals. All the major theodicies, she argues, defend God's goodness on the whole towards the world, but this says nothing to defend the goodness of God towards this or that individual person. Indeed, she ramps up the problem by highlighting certain cases of what she calls "horrendous evils'. As she defines the term, "horrendous evils' are evils that, if they are part of one's life, give one prima facie reason to doubt whether one's life could be a good gift at all (Adams 1999: 26). Here are some examples she gives: "the rape of a woman and axing off of her arms, psycho-physical torture whose ultimate goal is the disintegration of personality, betrayal of one's deepest loyalties," parental incest" participation in the Nazi death-camps, the explosion of nuclear bombs over populated areas' (1990: 211"12). Such evils "devour" in one swift gulp,' she says, "the possibility of positive personal meaning' (1999: 27). It is not just that such evils outweigh other good or meaningful things there might be in a life, so that you would need a whole lot of nice things to make up for them: rather, such evils defeat, engulf, destroy any positive value to the participant's life"”or at least they seem to do so on the face of it (gloss by Kilby 2003). Adams argues that a successful theodicy must not only defend God's goodness at a global level but also at an individual level, to demonstrate that God is good to each person.
This is a damaging criticism. But it could be taken"”and indeed Adams does take it"”as simply demanding a more thoroughgoing attempt at theodicy; back to the drawing board. In other words, it highlights deeper dimensions of the problem of evil within and for the philosophical tradition itself; it doesn't break with that tradition in any way.
3.2. Neglecting certain types of evil (Tilley)
A second kind of complaint about the way evil is dealt with by theodicists is provided by Terrence Tilley in his book The Evils of Theodicy (1991). Tilley argues that the theodicists try to tell us what counts as evil. He writes: "Each theodicist mimics (with individual variations) the key declaration that evil " is the acts individuals commit and the sufferings each undergoes (a declaration, for instance, that Aquinas did not make)' (1991: 236; cf. King 1731: 72; Griffin 1976: 22"23; Hick 1978: 12"14; Swinburne 1977: 84). They count only passive and active evils. But what about social practices such as oppression, injustice, contempt, violence, war, fraud, sexism, racism? Evil social practices and social structures are never brought into account by the discourse of theodicy. But, there is a social and contextual story to tell about many evils, e.g. the holocaust, which cannot be reduced into individualistic and atomistic acts and experiences.
Now on the surface this may appear to be a criticism at the same level as Adams': it may appear that it just widens the field of evidence that is to be included into the proposition "evil exists' and thus makes the theodicist's job harder without radically questioning the project of theodicy as such. But this is not the case, because Tilley's object has a further dimension to it.
3.3. Theodicy effaces the demand to practically respond to evil (Surin, Tilley)
On Tilley's account (and here he is following Surin and others), the very theoretical undertaking of theodicy is an example of a social practice that is itself evil, or at least contributes to evil. How so?
Theodicies, he suggests, try to reconcile us to evils, that is, in a way which we should not be reconciled. They say that if one takes the long enough view, if one really gets the right perspective everything is not so bad. But this puts both the author of the theodicy and the reader into the wrong kind of relationship with evil, or, more to the point, with particular evils.
There is nothing pious is arguing on God's behalf that things are really as good as they can be. Really? Things are as good as they can be? Then I suppose we need not struggle against injustice, because God is working through it in some mysterious way for our good; we ought not prevent abuse, because that would be to challenge God's wisdom; and so forth. This is what Marx called ideology, pure and simple: i.e. a set of ideas serving to legitimate or mask the real state of social relations.
Therefore, Tilley claims in fact that theodicy itself is an evil that must be resisted, interrupted, counteracted, and abandoned. On the other hand, we ought to be working to uncover evils in their multiple forms, to find their causes and to get rid of them (Tilley 1991: 250). And, although Tilley does not make this point, contrary to the impression one might get from reading Christian theodicies, this message of resistance is absolutely at the heart of the Christian faith, since this "no' to evil is precisely what is played out in the person and work of Jesus Christ. More on this in a moment.
To summarise then, theodicy both misrepresents the reality of evil, and places us in the wrong kind of relationship to evil. It misrepresents evil by saying that evil is not really evil, since it is God's instrument for some higher good; God is weaving a tapestry and he uses the light and the dark to produce a beautiful picture. It misrepresents evil by saying that evil is necessary for the good; God is weaving a tapestry and he needs the light and the dark thread to make the picture beautiful. But the analogy won't wash: while the weaver may need the light and dark threads, the creator of heaven and earth made a world that was good, very good without a drop of blood being spilt. And theodicy puts us in the wrong relationship to evil since it asks us to put our pain, outrage and opposition to one side and to see the bigger picture, the harmonious and rational whole of the universe in which evil has its place. But this does not do justice to victims of pain, loss and injustice. And even more importantly, it doesn't do justice to the good news of the gospel; and it's to this good news that I want to turn briefly before I conclude.
3.4. Theodicy effaces God's opposition to evil in the gospel (Hart)
A couple of weeks ago you may have read the following quotations from a book called The Doors of the Sea, by David Bentley Hart. They capture well where the New Testament stands in contrast to the theology of the theodicist:
"[I]f it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God' (86"87).
In other words, if we are to look to the gospel for our understanding of how to think about the relationship between God and evil, what we find is not harmony but raging opposition. God is relentlessly and fiercely opposed to evil and will not be reconciled to it. Indeed, apart from this opposition, the message of the gospel is unintelligible. For the gospel is the message that God, the great warrior and champion, has saddled up and is waging the decisive battle to judge sin, overthrow evil and defeat death out of his loving faithfulness to the world he has made. And he achieves the victory, in a breathtaking reversal, through the humiliating passion of the Christ, through his own suffering and death at the hands of evil men. If we do not look evil square in the face and recognise it for what it is, then we simply won't understand the joy and the hope that this gospel brings to a world saddled with sin and plagued by suffering and death.
What then are we to say when evil and death taunts us still? Among other things: Evil, your days are numbered;
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?"
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
(1 Cor 15.55"57)
God is redeeming and restoring his world, and what he began in the death and resurrection of Christ he will complete when Christ returns. In spite of the reality of sin and death, then, we have hope:
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
"See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away." (Rev 21.3"4)
4. A comment on "divine sovereignty'
There is much more to say on the gospel perspective on the problem of evil"”and I encourage you to come along to the short course if you are able to think further about these things with us"”but I'd just like to make one final comment on the idea of sovereignty.
We who have grown up in Christian evangelical circles have inherited a particular way of understanding and talking about God's relationship to events in the world which we call the doctrine of "divine sovereignty'. By this we usually mean God's control over events; the idea that nothing happens that is beyond God's control. I want to suggest that this is actually a parody of two traditional Christian ideas that we need to recover.
The first is the idea of God's Kingship, which in a fairly straightforward way could be called God's sovereignty. But again the narrative of the New Testament assumes at every turn that the sovereignty of God is contested, and that the good news is precisely that God is acting to once again have his rightful sovereignty universally recognised. But this implies that in the meantime God's intentions, plans and purposes are not universally adhered to; or, in other words, things happen that God doesn't want to happen. That is why there are things he is wrathful about and condemns. Hart again:
"[T]here are those who suffer from a palpably acute anxiety regarding the honour due the divine sovereignty. Certainly many Christians over the centuries have hastened to resituate the New Testament imagery of spiritual warfare securely within the one all-determining will of God, fearing that to deny that evil and death are the "left hand" of God's goodness in creation or the necessary "shadow" of his righteousness would be to deny divine omnipotence as well. Nevertheless, and disturbing as it may be, it is clearly the case that there is a kind of "provisional" cosmic dualism within the New Testament: not an ultimate dualism, of course, between two equal principles; but certainly a conflict between a sphere of created autonomy that strives against God on the one hand and the saving love of God in time on the other.' (Hart 2005: 62"63)
Having said that, the other idea that we need to reclaim, I think, and which is parodied in our received notion of "divine sovereignty' is the idea of providence: the idea that God has a loving and active involvement with his world God and that he is able to bring good out of tragic and lamentable circumstances. This is a genuine and comforting biblical teaching. But it does not say that everything that happens is itself the will of God. Rather, it says that when damage is done, when God's world is vandalised by pointless, destructive and despicable acts carried out in defiance of God's express will, it doesn't matter how extreme the damage is, it does not exceed the extremity of God's love and power to redeem.
So, I suggest that, rather than the confused notion of "divine sovereignty', we speak of God's kingship, asserted and reclaimed in Christ, and we speak of God's providence, in which he graciously works for the good of those who love him.
5. Conclusion
So where does this leave the project of theodicy. It leaves the modern philosophical discourse, at least, in my view, in an irretrievably compromised position. Irrespective of whether it succeeds or fails on its own terms, we have seen that, from a Christian perspective, modern theodicy is a questionable project from the ground up. This does not relieve us of the responsibility to think through the problem of evil from a theological and even philosophical perspective, but it should give us pause to consider whether the theoretical perspective we buy into or construct is truly biblical. There is no apologetic benefit in defending foreign Gods. And, ultimately, is not the God who hates evil, who stirs to rescue this compromised world and suffers with us a more appealing and praiseworthy deity than the divine watchmaker who calculates the optimal proportion of good and evil and leaves the world to grin and bear it?
