Lecture 20: The Problem of Evil

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Lecture 20 The Problem of Evil

1. The Nature of Evil.
2. The Existence of Evil in a World created by God.
3. A Possible Solution Regarding the Problem of
   Evil.
4. Problem of Evil and the Moral Law Argument.
5. Meaning in Suffering and Evil?

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II. How can evil exist in a world created by God?

• Consider
• If there is an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly
  good God, how can it be that the world is full of
  evil?

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II. How can evil exist in a world created by God?

• Consider
• An all-good God would destroy evil.
• An all-powerful God could destroy evil.
• But evil is not destroyed.
• Therefore, as such God does not exist.

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Examples of suffering from a typical local paper

• Somalis are stealing food from starving
  neighborspeople are dying by the thousands
• Muslim women and girls are being raped by Serb
  soldiers,
• In India, Hindus went on a rampage that razed as
  mosque and killed over 1,000 people.
• In Afghanistan gunmen fired into a crowded bazaar
  and shot ten people including 2 children.
• Cigarette company is having to defend itself
  against charges that it is engaged in a campaign
  to entice adolescents to smoke.
• High school principle is indicted on charges of
  molesting elementary and middle school boys over
  a period of 20 years
• A man is being tried for murder in the death of a
  9 year old boy he grabbed the boy to use as a
  shield in a gunfight
• racismrapeassaultmurdergreedexploitationwar
  genocide.

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Examples of suffering from a typical local paper

• Typical Responses to Suffering
• 1. Look away approach We may take note, shake
  our heads sadly, and go about our business. We
  work, we worry about our children, help our
  friends and neighbors, and look forward to
  Christmas dinner.
• 2. Cant ignore approach We sit in our cool
  homes with dinner on our table and our children
  around us, and we know that not far from us the
  homeless huddle, children go hungryyou ask
  yourself Is it human, is it decent, to enjoy
  our own good fortune and forget the misery that
  is near us? But we may even say it is morbid to
  keep thinking about the evils its depressive
  its sick. Nevertheless, how can we close our
  minds to what is going on around us?!!!

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Examples of suffering from a typical local paper

• Typical Responses to Suffering
• 3. Labor at Obliviousness approach We drown
  our minds in our work or in pleasure or in both.
• 4. Good Samaritan approach Evil can be
  eliminatedEden on earth is possible. Whatever
  it is in human behavior or human society that is
  responsible for misery around us can be swept
  away. Reform our world. Remove the human
  defects that produced the evil in the first place
  (e.g., apply utopian communism).
• 5. It has led some people to the following
  conclusion by examining evil
• bitterness, resentment against God, etc

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Examples of suffering from a typical local paper

• Philip Hallie, who studied cruelty for years
  made an interesting statement in his study of
  Nazi medical experiments on Jewish children in
  the death camps. He states that Nazi doctors
  broke and re-broke the bones of six-or seven-or
  eight year old Jewish children in order, the
  Nazis said, to study the processes of natural
  healing in young bodies. Across all his studies
  on cruelty Hallie writes
• the pattern of the strong crushing the weak
  kept repeating itself, so that when I was not
  bitterly angry, I was bored at the repetition of
  the patterns of persecutionMy study of evil
  incarnate had become a prison whose bars were my
  bitterness toward the violent, and whose walls
  were my horrified indifference to slow murder.
  Between the bars and walls I revolved like a
  madman.over the years I had dug myself into
  Hell in
• Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (Philadelphia
  Harper Row, 1979), 2.

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II. How can evil exist in a world created by God?

• Consider
• God is the Author of everything.
• Evil is something.
• Therefore, God is the Author of evil.

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II. How can evil exist in a world created by God?

• Consider
• God is the Author of everything.
• Evil is something.
• Therefore, God is the Author of evil.

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I. What is Evil?

• Atheism affirms evil but denies the reality of
  God
• Finite godism can claim that God desires to
  destroy evil but is unable to because he is
  limited in power
• Deism can distance God from evil by stressing
  that God is not in the world, but beyond it.
• Panentheism insists that evil is a necessary part
  of the ongoing progress of the interaction of God
  and the world.
• Pantheism affirms the reality of God but denies
  the reality of evil.
• Theism affirms both the reality of both God and
  evil.

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II. How can evil exist in a world created by God?

• The problem of evil may be viewed in simple form
  as a conflict involving three concepts
• 1. Gods power,
• 2. Gods goodness, and
• 3. the presence of evil in the world.
• Common sense tells us that all three cannot be
  true at the same time.

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II. How can evil exist in a world created by God?

• Solutions to the problem of evil typically
  involve modifying one or more of these three
  concepts
• 1. limit Gods power,
• 2. limit Gods goodness,
• 3. modify the existence of evil (e.g., call
  evil an illusion).

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II. How can evil exist in a world created by God?

• Consider
• If God made no claims to being good, then the
  existence of evil would be easier to explain but
  God does claim to be good
• If God were limited in power so that he was not
  strong enough to withstand evil, the existence of
  evil would be easier to explain but God does
  claim to be all-powerful
• If evil were just an illusion that had no
  reality, the problem wouldnt really exist in the
  first place but evil is not an illusion. Evil
  is real.

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II. How can evil exist in a world created by God?

• We face the reality of two types of evil
• a. Moral Evil (evil committed by free moral
  agents, involving such things as war, crime,
  cruelty, class struggles, discrimination,
  slavery, ethnic cleansing, suicide bombings,
  social injustice)
• b. Natural Evil (involving such things as
  hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc).
• God is good, God is all-powerful, yet evil
  exists.

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1 Evil is the absence or privation of
something good.

• Rot can exist only as long as the tree exists.
• Truth decay can exist only as long as the tooth
  exists.
• Rust on a car can exist only as there is a metal.
• Decayed carcass can exist only as there is a
  body.
• Therefore, evil exists only in another but not in
  itself.

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2 To say evil is not a thing in itself is not
the same as saying that evil is unreal.

• A. Evil may not be an actual substance, but it
  involves an actual privation in good substances.
• B. It is not an actual entity but a real
  corruption in an actual entity, e.g., rotting
  trees, rusting cars, tooth decay, brain cancer,
  etc.- all these are examples of how evil is a
  corruption of something good.

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II. How Can evil exist in a world created by God?

• The problem of evil can be summarized
• God is absolutely perfect.
• God cannot create anything imperfect.
• But perfect creatures cannot do evil.
• Therefore, neither God not his perfect creatures
  can produce evil.
• In a theistic universe there are only two sources
  for moral evil.

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II. How can evil exist in a world created by God?

• Christian response
• God created every substance.
• Evil is not a substance (but the corruption in a
  substance).
• Therefore, God did not create evil.
• Evil exists only in another but not itself.

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The Problem of Evil A Possible Solution

• God is absolutely perfect.
• God created only perfect creatures.
• One of the perfections God gave some of his
  creatures angels, lucifer, Adam, Eve was the
  power of free choice.
• Some of these creatures freely chose to do evil.
• Therefore, a perfect creature caused evil.

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The Problem of Evil A Possible Solution

• 1. Evil arose in the abuse of a good power called
  freedom.
• Freedom in itself is not evil. It is good to be
  free. But with freedom comes the possibility of
  evil.
• God is responsible for making evil possible, but
  free creatures are responsible for making it
  actual.

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IV. The Problem of Evil the Moral Law Argument

• THE MORAL LAW ARGUMENT
• 1. Moral Law imply a Moral Law Giver.
• 2. There is an objective moral law.
• 3. Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver.
• Moral laws dont describe what is, they prescribe
  what ought to be.
• They cant be known by observing what people do.
  They are what all persons should do, whether or
  not they actually do.

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IV. The Problem of Evil the Moral Law Argument

• How do unsaved people know that the torture of
  Jewish children by Nazi doctors are evil?
• By reason? While it is true that moral
  principles and ethical theories do rely on reason
  (otherwise there is no coherence, logic, or
  intelligibility). we build those principles and
  theories, at least in part, by beginning with
  strong intuitions about individual cases that
  exemplify wrongdoings, and we construct our
  ethical theories around those intuitions.
  Typically ethicists look for what the individual
  cases have in common, then they try to codify
  their common characteristics into principles.
  Once the principles have been organized into a
  theory, they may revise their original intuitions
  until their intuitions and theories are in
  harmony.

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IV. The Problem of Evil the Moral Law Argument

• Nonetheless, original intuitions retain an
  essential primacy. If we found that our ethical
  theory affirmed those Nazi experiments, we would
  throw away the theory as something evil itself.
• But what exactly are these original intuitions?
  What cognitive faculty produces them? Not
  reason, apparently, since reason takes them as
  given and reflects on them.
• How about memory? No because we arent
  remembering that it is evil to torture children.
• How about sense perception? No because when we
  say that we just see the wrongness of certain
  actions, we certainly dont mean that its
  visible.

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IV. The Problem of Evil the Moral Law Argument

• Can we even identify the cognitive faculty that
  recognizes evil intuitively? It would be a
  mistake to infer that there is no such faculty.
• Its clear that we have many other cognitive
  faculties that similarly cant be accounted for
  by the triad of reason, memory, and perception.
  For example We have the abilities to tell mood
  from facial expression, to discern affect from
  melody of speech.
• While we dont understand much about the faculty
  that produces moral intuitions in us, we all
  regularly rely on it anywaywe have some
  cognitive faculty for discerning evil in things,
  and that people in general treat it as they treat
  their other cognitive faculties as basically
  reliable, even if fallible, and subject to
  revision.

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IV. The Problem of Evil the Moral Law Argument

• It is also clear that this cognitive faculty can
  discern differences in kind and degree of evil.
• For example A young Muslim mother in Bosnia
  was repeatedly raped in front of her husband
  father, with her baby screaming on the floor
  beside her. When her tormenters seemed finally
  tired of her, she begged permission to nurse the
  child. In response, one of the rapists swiftly
  decapitated the baby and threw the baby in the
  mothers lap.
• This evil is different, and we feel it
  immediately. We dont have to reason about it or
  think it over. When we read this account, we are
  filled with grief and distress, shaken with
  revulsion and incomprehension. The taste of real
  wickedness is sharply different from the taste of
  garden-variety moral evil, and we discern it
  directly, with pain.

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IV. The Problem of Evil the Moral Law Argument

• This moral faculty also discerns goodness. We
  recognize acts of generosity, compassion, and
  kindness.
• When we weep when we are surprised by true
  goodness.

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IV. The Problem of Evil the Moral Law Argument

• Consider the attitude which you and I respond
  to the evil around us will be different if we see
  through it to the goodness of God.
• Someone asked Mother Theresa if she wasnt often
  frustrated because all the people she helped in
  Calcutta died. Frustrated? she said, no-God
  has called me to be faithful, not successful.
• Evil our own evils-our moral evils, our decay
  and death-lose their power to crush us if we see
  the goodness of God.

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IV. The Problem of Evil the Moral Law Argument

• Can evil lead us to God? A loathing focus on
  the evils of our world and ourselves prepares us
  to be the more startled by the taste of true
  goodness when we find it and the more determined
  to follow that taste until we see where it leads.
  And where it leads is to the truest goodness of
  all-evil becomes translucent, and we can see
  through it to the goodness of God.
• If we taste and see the goodness of God, then
  the vision of our world that we see in the mirror
  of evil looks different, too. Start with the
  fact of evil in the world, and the problem of
  evil presents itself forcefully to you. But
  start with a view of evil and a deep taste of the
  goodness of God, and you will know that there
  must be morally sufficient reason for God to
  allow evil-all of them work together for good for
  those who love God-for those who are finding
  their way to the love of God.

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V. Is there Meaning in Suffering and Evil

• 1. Every worldview has to handle this
  problem There is no Exit.
• A. Assumed in every answer or explanation is
  the purpose of human existence.
• B. There is no exit Moral Law Argument
• How can an objective moral law be develop from a
  materialistic, naturalistic source? It cant be
  grounded!
• 2. Can we be good without God?
• A. There is no explanation even for noble
  deeds if self-preservation is sine qua non.
• B. God is the Author of Life
• 1. Life is SacredIam made in the image of
  God.
• 2. Is God is the Author, there is a story
  line.
• 3. If there is a story, then worship is the
  first responsethen love follows.

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V. Is there Meaning in Suffering and Evil

• 3. Heinous evil cannot be explained apart
  from a Christian world.
• 4. Evil is a problem withinstart there!
• 5. Meaninglessness does not become weary of
  pain, but from pleasure.