The Problem of Evil

Why the Problem of Evil Is Difficult to Answer

The problem of evil is one of the classic concerns/arguments raised against the existence of God.  "If God is all-powerful and all-good, how could there be evil and suffering in the world?  If God is all-powerful, he can eliminate the evil.  If he is all-good, he would want to.  So there should be no evil."  Personally, I do not find it to be a terribly difficult objection to deal with on an intellectual level, but it is very tough to respond to overall.  I think perhaps that one of the reasons for this is because it strikes hard on the emotional level.  The sufferings caused by the evils in this world are felt very deeply, and evil, as the hymn says, seems "oft so strong."  It is difficult, when one is the midst of experiencing great evil or suffering, to imagine how the allowance of such evils could be justified, or to see how any good could possibly counterbalance them.  Consider a novel as an analogy.  The characters in the novel, while in the midst of the apparent victory of evil (it is typical in a story for the power of evil to reach its greatest height, its victory apparently assured, right before the climactic "eucatastrophe"--as Tolkien called it--where good finally defeats evil), cannot imagine how evil could be defeated and good could possibly win.  (I think of Sam's great speech to this effect in The Two Towers movie.)  The end of the story is very difficult to conceive of from the vantage point of the middle of the story.

Because pain and wickedness are felt deeply, and because of the difficulty of envisioning the end from the middle, it is difficult for people oftentimes to give an unbiased intellectual hearing to answers to the problem of evil.  It feels like a betrayal or a trivialization of the greatness of the pain to hear someone make an argument for how the allowance of such evils in the world could be justified, or how the allowance of evil leads to a greater good.  No matter how intellectually convincing such arguments are, on an intuitive and emotional level, they feel woefully inadequate to the reality.

That is all very understandable, and yet, if we wish to get reality right, we must try to approach even this topic with sound, objective reason.  We must distinguish between what our feelings tell us and the intellectual merits of the arguments.  This is one place where the virtue of faith comes in.  Faith is believing to be true what one has good reason to believe to be true even when the appearances are against it.  I once heard the concept of faith illustrated by means of the idea of an airplane pilot flying through thick clouds.  The pilot's intuition, judging from the appearances out his window, keeps telling him that he is about to crash into a mountain, but his instruments tell him he is nowhere near the mountains and there is no danger on his current trajectory.  The pilot has to suppress his instincts and intuitions and trust his instruments.  (I have no idea if pilots actually experience situations like this, not having any experience with flying anything, but the analogy is still useful either way.)  That is how the virtue of faith works.  Our reason leads us to certain conclusions, and yet our instincts make these conclusions seem false.  We have to trust our reason over our intuitions and over the appearances.  But this can be very difficult, and we must be careful to give ourselves and other people what we and they need at the time.  The existence of evil poses intellectual challenges to the idea of God.  These challenges must be met by rational arguments.  But when people are in the midst of evil, they often need comfort, encouragement, pastoral care, and other kinds of personal and emotional support as much as or more than they need intellectual answers.  We cannot respond to the legitimate intellectual challenges by expressions of emotion or platitudes, nor can we properly comfort and encourage people simply by giving them intellectual answers to arguments.  Both of these have an essential role, but they must recognize their proper place.

A Response to the Problem of Evil

So here is how I think the Christian worldview can provide an intellectually-satisfying answer to the problem of evil:

God is the Supreme Being, the Creator.  He is also the Supreme Good.  He embodies the fullness of being, goodness, knowledge, wisdom, life, happiness, etc.  To know God is to know the fullness of joy and to be completely satisfied.  God himself exists as a Trinity of persons who delight in knowing and loving each other eternally.

God created the world in order to display and share his glorious perfections, to fill up the emptiness of the world with the joy of who he is.  As God's creatures, our ultimate happiness can come only from finally achieving the Beatific Vision - the joy of fully knowing God in eternal life, of which we only have a foretaste in this life.

But to know God fully, and to reach the joy of knowing God fully, one has to understand the nature of what God is not as well as what God is.  God is the fullness of being, life, goodness, wisdom, happiness, etc., so the absence of God, the opposite of God, entails emptiness, death, evil, foolishness, misery, etc.  That is why the opposite of God is hell, and hell is the destiny of beings who intentionally, with full understanding of what they are doing, cut themselves off from God (what Catholics call "mortal sin").  Hell is the natural as well as the just consequence of rejecting and opposing God, of not giving him the love that is due to him or finding our happiness ultimately in him.

In order for God to display and share his supreme goodness in and with the world, he has seen fit to allow evil and suffering to exist in the world.  Only by experiencing and understanding evil and suffering can we truly come to know God fully.  Evil and suffering are hateful to God, and yet he allows them to happen in the world to bring about the greater good of sharing the joy of who he is.  God is all-knowing and all-wise, so he knows what is best, and he only allows evil and suffering in the way and to the degree necessary to bring about the greatest good.  His plan for history, both in terms of the good he brings about and the evils he allows, is best suited to accomplish that greatest good.  The Supreme Good of who God is infinitely outweighs the worst evils that can happen in the universe, for while the evils and sufferings of this world are very great, God is infinitely greater.  We can understand this idea in general and see the reason behind it, but, with our limited knowledge, we rarely understand why God does or allows the particular things he does.  In fact, our own ignorance of the full meaning of what is happening is one of the things God allows in the world as part of his overall good plan.

God is not unjust in allowing the evils and sufferings he does.  None of us deserve any good from God, for everything we have, every aspect of our existence and life, is a free gift from him.  We are nothing in comparison to God or without God.  God is the supreme source of all being and goodness.  These things belong to him and to no one else.  God does not owe it to any being to bring it into existence, or to keep it from falling into evil or suffering when it does exist.  (Once God has freely brought us into existence, it is true that he naturally and justly respects and loves the existing beings he creates.  We are his works, and he owes love to us as such - not as if we own our own existence ultimately, but he loves that which he has freely made.  He loves the happiness of all beings and hates their suffering.  And yet our value as created beings does not give us a right to receive the ultimate goodness and happiness of the divine life.  God does not owe it to us to keep us from falling into sin and suffering.)  And not only that, but we are sinners.  Left to ourselves without his grace (the help that comes to us when God shares with us his own life and power), we inevitably fall into foolishness, weakness, wickedness, and misery.  Our first parents fell into mortal sin against God, and all their descendants come into this world following in their footsteps.  Only God's grace can turn us from mortal sin to supreme love to God.  God sent his Son--the Second Person of the Trinity--into the world in order to share with us his divine life and give us the means of deliverance from evil.  God the Son became a sharer in our humanity, uniting himself to us, so that he could absorb into himself all our emptiness, foolishness, weakness, sinfulness, and misery, sharing with us the fullness of his divine life, wisdom, power, goodness, and joy.  He has thus provided deliverance from our fallen condition, though the process of that deliverance takes place over a lifetime (and sometimes longer) and is usually painful (much like healing from a serious disease in a hospital is often a painful experience, though it leads to the revival of life rather than to death).  Left to ourselves, we are rebels against God and on the path to hell, but God in his grace gives us another path--the path back to him and to happiness.  Regenerated by his grace, in the end we will be full of God's goodness, beauty, and joy, and God will delight in our goodness and beauty as we receive a value infinitely above that which we have as mere creatures.  Thus God is not unjust in allowing the evils to come upon us that he does, and we must remember that he only allows those evils that are best for the overall good.  If we trust him in these things and follow him, though our way may be very painful, in the end it will lead us to what is best.

It also helps to remember that God is not oblivious to or aloof from our suffering.  He sees the bigger picture, but he also sees with absolute clarity all the smaller parts of that bigger picture.  Since he is fully aware of the feelings and experiences of all sentient beings, he experiences infinite empathy.  He is fully blessed and happy because he experiences the overall product of all his works, which is perfectly good and beautiful, but, unlike with us, his awareness of the whole does not cloud his full awareness of all the parts, and so he is fully with us in all our suffering.  This awareness is complemented by the Incarnation.  God became human and so has an added human capacity to empathize with us in our weaknesses and sufferings.  Christ himself took upon himself the full weight of human sin and suffering - and also overcame it through the power of his divine life.

I think the picture of reality described above shows how the existence of evil is not incompatible with the existence of an all-powerful and all-good God, and so answers the problem of evil.  The various points of this picture derive from the existence of the classical theistic God, and so if that God is shown to exist, these points all logically follow, as I have shown here (briefly) and here (more fully).

A Response to a Follow-Up Question

In order to shed further light on the problem of evil, I would like to follow up the above summary with my answer to a specific question regarding biblical morality which was asked of me in a different context.  Below is that question and my response to it.

“What about the killing of infants and animals in the Bible as they are swept up in God’s punishments.  For example, in response to the Amalekites’ attack on Israel a few hundred years earlier, God tells King Saul to wipe out all the Amalekites.  1 Samuel 15:1-3:  ‘Samuel also said unto Saul, "The Lord sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, 'I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’ "' How can this be just?”

It is easier to see why God brings strong punishments on wilful sinners, particularly those who commit mortal sins (which involve a knowing and willing rejection of God as one’s supreme good and a turning away fundamentally from him).  If God is the Supreme Being, he is the Supreme Good, the source of all being and goodness, and so he is supremely valuable (as I argued in my case for the existence of God and my case for Christianity which I wrote up with Robert).  Therefore, rejection of him or opposition to him or contempt for him will be supremely bad and will naturally and justly reap supremely bad consequences (in other words, hell).  It is not surprising, in light of this, that God brings strong penalties on sinners in the Bible.  When God punishes sin, his punishments are not arbitrary.  With God, there is no ultimate distinction between a punishment or a reward and a natural consequence, for nature itself comes from God and his will.  God’s punishments are not arbitrary, but are logical and rational, in accordance with his divine nature and the very nature of reality itself.  He simply allows the sin to reap what it truly and naturally deserves and brings upon itself.  And his punishments are not unjustly harsh.  An Atheist or an Agnostic might see God’s punishments (whether in nature, in Christian theology, or in the Bible) as harsh, but that, I think, is partly owing to their assumption that God doesn’t exist.  If God doesn’t exist, he is of no importance, and so sin against him is no big deal, and so it doesn’t deserve or warrant any serious punishment or consequences.  But if God exists, as I said above, he is supremely important, and so sin against him is supremely serious, and the consequences of sin supremely dire.

But what about when God brings serious negative consequences on those who do not commit mortal sin or are incapable of mortal sin--like infants and animals?  Is this just?  We have to keep in mind that God is the Supreme Being and the Supreme Good.  He possesses all being, goodness, value, and happiness.  They belong to him.  They are a part of his divine life.  No one possesses these things other than him.  Apart from him, they do not exist.  Apart from God, there is only non-being, emptiness, death, evil, and misery, as I argued in my case for Christianity.  If any being who is not God experiences happiness, it is only as an unmerited gift from God.  We have nothing of our own that naturally attains or merits or warrants the happiness that is part of God’s own life.  Everything we have is a gift of God, and what we have as mere creatures is infinitely inferior to God.  Without the unmerited gift of God’s own life (which is what theologians call “grace”), we are doomed to evil and misery.  Although infants and animals are not capable of personal sin, they are part of the created and fallen world.  They do not naturally possess happiness or a right to happiness.  They are naturally prone to suffering.  (As created beings, they have value and we ought to love and respect them, as God does as well, and yet their created value does not give them a right to ultimate happiness or to be kept from falling into the suffering involved in a fallen world.)  When our first parents fell into sin, they brought the whole human race along with them, and, as St. Paul says (Romans 8), the creation itself is subject to the bondage to decay until it shares in the liberation of the children of God which comes through Christ.  Although infants do not commit personal sin, they are fallen creatures who do not deserve happiness, and, not being God, they are naturally subject to evil and misery.  God, for good and just reasons in his overall plan, has allowed the consequences of the Fall of our first parents to come to them and cause them to be born into the world without the grace of what Catholics call “original justice”--that condition in which grace kept our first parents holy and happy before they rejected it.  As a result of this, they share in the misery of their first parents to the extent they are capable of it, even as infants.  But they are also sinners in embryo.  When they grow up and develop the capacity for moral action, they will, without grace, grow up into mortal sinners themselves.  So, being part of fallen humanity, they share in their own way in the lot of fallen humanity.  Their suffering, however, cannot be the same or at the same level with the suffering of those who commit personal mortal sin, for God punishes no one for that which they do not deserve.

In the case of the adult Amalekites in the text, they had not lived at the time the Israelites came out of Egypt, so why are they punished for what their ancestors did?  As with the infants, I don’t think we should think of what happened to them as a “punishment” in the strict sense--as if God were blaming them personally for something they didn’t do.  Rather, he was simply bringing the consequences of their ancestors’ behavior upon them.  These Amalekites were fallen human sinners.  As such, they were already subject to death and the sufferings of this life.  If God, in his providential plan of history, chose to allow that to manifest itself by means of a link between generations--so that one generation reaped the failures of an earlier generation--there is nothing that can be shown to be unjust about that.  It is very similar to the case of the infants mentioned in the previous paragraph, but with the added element that these were adults who were personal sinners themselves.  And there is no evidence that they had repented of their ancestors’ actions or regretted them at all, or had changed in their basic approach to life (attacking innocent people and killing them, etc.).  For this reason as well it was not inappropriate for God to bring upon them the consequences of their ancestors’ sins.  In general, God often allows our actions to affect others and their actions to affect us.  Human beings are often the recipients of the consequences of other human beings’ good or bad actions.  The ultimate examples of this are all of us inheriting original sin from Adam and Eve, and those who are saved receiving the benefits of Christ’s atonement.  But in everyday, ordinary life, we often see less dramatic versions of the same basic principle, especially with parents and children (as children often receive great harm or great good from the actions of their parents).

What about animals?  They, too, are creatures and are part of this fallen world, though, unlike human infants, they are not sinners in embryo.  They will never be capable of moral action.  That capacity is contrary to their nature.  Still, they are not God, and so they do not deserve happiness, and they are justly subject to share in the consequences of being part of a fallen world, though they cannot suffer the same way that those guilty of personal mortal sin can suffer.  If God. for good and just reasons, has chosen to allow them to share in the calamities of being part of our fallen world, we have no basis to declare this to be wrong or unjust.

We can even think of adult humans who committed no personal mortal sin.  Of course, there are not many of those.  We can think of Jesus and Mary.  They could not suffer exactly the same way that those guilty of personal mortal sin can suffer, but they did suffer.  They could suffer because they were human and so were finite creatures, and also because they lived in the context of a fallen world.  (Jesus was, of course, God as well as human, but he was [and is] fully human.  He took upon himself the fullness of our humanity along with its weaknesses and frailties and sufferings, though in him that humanity was united to the divine nature.)  In the case of Jesus and Mary, and indeed any of us fallen sinners who, by grace, have repented and chosen to turn to God, our suffering can take on a voluntary and redemptive quality.  That is, we can willingly accept the suffering God providentially brings into our lives and choose to embrace the good that it leads to for ourselves, for others, and for the glory of God.  Christ voluntarily accepted suffering in order to overcome it and liberate others from sin and its consequences, and we who are in Christ are given the privilege likewise of offering up for the good of others our suffering and the virtues that are involved in suffering in pursuit of God.  God can use our suffering to help others in many ways, and we can be a willing part of that.

A closing note in general on this whole discussion of God’s punishments and negative consequences in Scripture.  When we discuss these things, we must be careful not to give an unbalanced emphasis to some things in the Bible over others.  This is especially something to watch out for when we do not really know the Bible very well.  There are lots of Atheists, I suspect, who know virtually nothing about the Bible except the “harsh” passages Atheists like to throw around.  But anyone who knows the Bible holistically is well aware that to think of the Bible as if it solely consisted of these “harsh” passages is to grossly misrepresent it.  In fact, the emphasis of the Bible, and of the Christian worldview grounded in it, is quite the opposite.  God is love (1 John 4:8).  Love is the chief characteristic of his life.  The members of the Trinity delight in their love for each other.  Love is what created the world, as God chose to let that Trinitarian love overflow into creation.  We are saved by love.  Our salvation from sin and misery has come about because God the Son died on the cross to save us.  He gave his life out of love for us and love for his Father.  God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy” (Psalm 103:8).  And when God allows evil and suffering to happen in the world, and when he allows and ordains in his providence that evil reap its just and natural consequences, he is not acting contrary to love, but according to it.  When we love someone or something, we hate that which would destroy or defame what we love and value.  God’s punishment of evil is simply the flip-side of the coin of his love.  (Again, Atheists and some others see God’s punishments as arbitrary and cruel because they do not interpret them in their proper context, taking seriously that God is the Supreme Good so that sin against him is the supreme evil and calamity.)  God only allows evil when he knows it will bring about a greater overall happiness in the ultimate view, as it allows his divine life to be experienced fully and so loved and delighted in to the happiness of all who choose to embrace it.  The Bible is full of beautiful exhortations to love our neighbors, to love our enemies, calls to social justice (think of Jesus and the Old Testament prophets), calls to fairness and equity among all, etc.  Some of the most beautiful passages advocating compassion are in the Law of Moses (Exodus 22:21-25; 23:1-12; Leviticus 19:9-18, for example), and many more in the prophets, in the New Testament, etc.  So let’s remember to keep a balanced view of the whole context of Scripture and the Christian worldview when discussing these matters.

For more general apologetics for Christianity, see here, here, and here.