Is God Responsible for Evil?

Johannes Siedersleben, Oxford, June 2023

The evidential problem of evil is the view that the existence of evil is evidence against the existence of a perfect God: omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good. Theodicy is the branch of philosophy-theology that seeks answers to this contradiction. The purpose of this paper is to outline some of its main lines of thought. I will present and comment on them in five sections: (1) God as bystander, (2) God as educator, and (3) God as enigma. I challenge divine perfection in section (4) and turn to the imperfect God in section (5). The famous free-will argument appears in sections (2) and (4).

1 God as Bystander

Evil is the absence of good, just as darkness is the absence of light. Our sins hide the good, just as clouds hide the sun. Good is God’s, evil is man’s. None other than Joseph Ratzinger, Pope from 2005 to 2013, promotes this idea. He writes ([5], p. 107): God created only the good, evil is not an independent entity, but can only ever be conceived as the negation of an actually good being. And ([5], p. 103): Human beings, with their abilities, can unfold ways of destruction that no other living creature carries within itself. A torturer would thus be responsible for the absence of well-being of the tortured, with a passive, innocent God on the sidelines. In short, evil is not God’s business, he doesn’t get his hands dirty.

Is this convincing? Many would argue that shifting responsibility from God to man gives Him too easy a pass. After all, He has created the whole world, including the evil that is not man-made: natural disasters, disease, accidents. To reduce evil to the negation of good seems to be nothing more than a sleight of hand. You can certainly define death as the negation of life, but is that what you would say to a mourning mother?

The idea of defining something as the absence of its opposite goes back to Plato, whose ideals include goodness, love and freedom, but famously lack evil, hatred and oppression. But the absence of good is not the same as evil, the absence of love is not the same as hatred, the absence of freedom is not the same as oppression, and the inverse is even less true. On the other hand, rest is indeed the absence of movement, cold is the absence of heat (very similar to the previous example), and darkness is the absence of light. So, the absence argument seems to be either misleading or, at best, a loose description of physics. I fail to see the insight it provides.

2 God as Educator

Proponents of this view attribute to God the intention to educate us, to challenge us, to give us opportunities to develop, to grow, to excel, but also to err, to sin, to commit atrocities. This shaping of souls, as it is sometimes called, requires free will, as did the previous argument – you cannot train a puppet. And it comes at a price: the risk of failure, of things going horribly wrong if people misuse their abilities. So it presupposes a judgement on the part of God: It only makes sense if He values a self-determined life full of opportunity, challenge and risk over the pain and suffering inflicted. But whatever His judgement, couldn’t He have made us better in the first place, instead of training us: less greedy, more empathic, less intelligent to prevent us from doing harm, or more intelligent to enable us to anticipate the consequences of our misdeeds? But we are as selfish, stubborn, and short-sighted as we are. The educator argument is of little help when it comes to natural disasters. Avalanches, floods, and fires have buried, drowned and burned millions – that’s really the hard way to learn how to deal with these threats. Imagine you wanted to teach your kids about the dangers of fire. You’d let them approach a fire cautiously so that they could feel the heat, but you wouldn’t burn one of them to make the experience more convincing.

It is worth noting that the educator argument also contributes to the divine hiddenness problem: Why doesn’t God provide irrefutable evidence of his own existence? The answer is clear: If His existence were obvious, there would be no non-believers, and no opportunity to distinguish oneself as a devout believer. Is God playing hide and seek with us? Going further, one might ask why mathematical theorems, physical laws, or medicines are so hard to find. Did God hide them on purpose, like parents hiding Easter eggs, to train our mental capabilities? This would be a disputable reason, given the pain that could have been avoided if, for example, penicillin had been available 100 or better 100,000 years ago. The educator argument can be taken to the point of absurdity by seeing the existence of the poor as an opportunity for the rich to do good: without poverty, there is no charity, no way to distinguish oneself as a pious benefactor. But the main criticism is this: Proponents of this view put themselves in God’s shoes (if He wears any) and argue as if they knew what God thinks. Who do they think they are?

3 God as Enigma

The enigma argument is based precisely on the fact that we don’t know what God thinks. It is gentle and modest unlike the previous one, and comes in two flavours, weak and strong.

The weak variant: We humans don’t see the whole picture. God maximizes the total good in the vast universe of which Earth is but a tiny part. We don’t know His preferences, His priorities, the algorithm He uses. But at least we can safely assume that He is familiar with Bentham and Mill, and we can trust that the pain and suffering inflicted on us will be more than compensated for by some other benefit, hidden from us, at least for the time being. This view is also known as the “God is not a deceiver”-argument. Aye, there’s the rub: The beneficiaries of our suffering may well be ourselves, like children punished by their parents (“It’s for your own benefit”), but also others: our ancestors in heaven or hell, our descendants in the future, wild and domestic animals (let’s face it!), and perhaps unknown species on other worlds with whom we compete for more happiness and less pain. Unfortunately, we are completely ignorant of our role in the global optimization process. It may be tiny. And for all the evil in the world, we may have had our share of good and worse is yet to come.

The strong variant: God is inscrutable, we humans have no idea what his aims are (Romans 11:33), there is no point in trying to understand. This argument, which is perfectly sound, finds unexpected support in modern logic, which teaches us about the disappointingly narrow limits of our minds: Alfred Tarski [6] tells us that the concept of truth in any given axiomatic system is indefinable unless one uses means of expression that this system does not provide. Kurt Gödel [4] tells us that most propositions in non-trivial axiomatic systems cannot be proved or disproved – they are neither true nor false. And there are a number of other impossibility theorems of this kind (Alan Turing [7], Stephen Cook [2]). It could be argued that God set these limits for the human mind, but certainly not for His own, so that His mind would operate in a realm far greater than ours. Aye, there’s the rub again: If this is true, the believer has nothing left to rely on; the rug has been pulled out from under him. Whatever he does, whatever rules he chooses to follow, there is no way of knowing how his behaviour fits with God’s expectations, if He cares at all. “What about the Bible?” you might ask. Of course, but the Bible is so heterogeneous, so self-contradictory, so enigmatic that it can itself be used as evidence for the strong enigma argument. The Bible has a bit of everything: it is obscene (Genesis 19:31-38), mad (Revelation), cruel (Job, crucifixion), incongruous (Song of Songs), amusing (Ecclesiastes), sublime (some Psalms, the Good Samaritan), and much more. This is why the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. And the believer seeking guidance is left with countless translations and thousands of interpretations from competing denominations.

4 Perfection Challenged

The Bible does contain references to God’s omnipotence (Genesis 18:14, Job 42:2), omniscience (Psalm 147:5, Psalm 139:1-4) and perfect goodness (Exodus 34:6, Psalm 25:8), but these are few and far between. Instead, the God of the Old Testament comes across as an old man, often angry with His people, sometimes punishing them for minor transgressions (Eve eating the forbidden fruit, Lot’s wife looking back), sometimes on the basis of vague accusations (the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah), and sometimes for no reason at all (Job). The New Testament establishes the sequence “creation → sin → redemption through the crucifixion” as the backbone of Christian doctrine, which is hardly evidence of God’s omnipotence and, it must be said, stretches logic to its limits and beyond.

The postulate of a perfect God can be traced back to the Councils of Nicaea (325 CE) and Constantinople (381 CE), and was further developed by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and many others. Since then, it has been a cornerstone of Christian thought, proclaimed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church ([1], §§ 268, 385). This is strange because it raises awkward questions: If God knows today what I will do tomorrow, then I have no free will. God’s own free will is hindered by the fact that He must be perfect – His choice is limited to the one or very few optimal options. He can hardly evolve, because any change could jeopardise His perfection. Redefining perfection as whatever God does is possible, but brings us back to the enigma arguments. If, on the other hand, we admit imperfection, the evidential problem of evil simply vanishes and the contrived arguments we have seen in the previous sections become unnecessary. After all, perfection has unpleasant connotations: it is cold, awe-inspiring, unattainable, unlovable. So why hold on to it?

5 The Imperfect God

We are going to gradually relax the requirement for perfection. As a first step, let’s assume that God is limited by the laws of logic and cannot make a triangle with four corners. This weakens the strong enigma argument, but leaves everything else in place. As a second step, let us assume that He is limited by the laws of nature, which are what they are and which explain natural disasters, accidents, and disease: The law of gravity is responsible for a falling stone killing a man, for a falling man being killed when he hits the ground, cancer is caused by biochemical processes, all without divine intervention. This lets God off the hook as far as avalanches, floods, and fires are concerned, but man-made evils such as wars remain to be explained. So what could be the third step?

In Paradise Lost, John Milton tells of the faithful angels fighting Satan’s forces, in Spanish Train, Chris de Burgh sings the song of God playing poker with the Devil. The idea of an imperfect God struggling with the Devil goes back to Manichaeism, the religion with which Augustine grew up. There the evidential problem of evil finds a plausible, if heretical, answer: The competition between good and evil on earth is an image of the wrestling between God and the Devil. Catastrophes such as a World War are due to a defeat of God.

If you don’t like the devil you can do without. Some dilute the concept of God beyond recognition and renounce any responsibility on God’s part. In pantheism, God is little more than another name for nature. In process theology, the relationship between God and the world is an ongoing dynamic process. Coming from the opposite direction, many atheists accept the idea of anonymous forces out there that we humans will never directly perceive, let alone understand, forces that might as well be called God: There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Whatever the details, all these views leave little of the loving God of the Bible, who protects, comforts, and saves us. But they solve the evidential problem of evil. You cannot have your cake and eat it.

References

[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 268, 385, https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM

[2] Stephen A. Cook: The Complexity of Theorem-Proving Procedures, 1971 https://dblp.org/rec/conf/stoc/Cook71.html

[3] Brian Davis: Philosophy of Religion; Oxford University Press, 2000

[4] Kurt Gödel: On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems; Dover Publications, 1992

[5] Joseph Ratzinger, Peter Seewald: Gott und die Welt; DVA, 2000

[6] Alfred Tarski: The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics. In: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. IV,3 (1944), S. 341–375.

[7] Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, 1936 https://www.wolframscience.com/prizes/tm23/images/Turing.pdf