Defeater Ethics: Evil & Suffering (Part 1)
"How could a good God allow so much suffering?"
The aim of this series is not to rehash apologetic answers to classic intellectual doubts, but rather to speak to modern ethical objections to the Christian faith. However, one intellectual objection is worth an answer, because it argues against the existence of God on ethical grounds.
Centuries before Jesus came into the world, the Greek Philosopher Epicurus reasoned against God’s existence with an argument that remains a dilemma, not just for Christians, but for people of every faith. Here is how Epicurus presents it:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he not benevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
This is commonly referred to as the problem of evil and suffering. And indeed, it is a problem. Belief in an all-powerful and all-good God is negated by the presence of evil and suffering. For if he is all-powerful and allows evil, then he is not good. If he is good but cannot prevent it evil, then he is not all-powerful. In this way, the undeniable presence of evil and suffering calls into question the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God.
As I’ve said, it is appropriate to begin my answer to each of these defeater ethics with an apology, and the problem of evil and suffering certainly deserves one. This objection tends to be more personal than philosophical, and the apology I need to offer has to do with the way Christians, particularly American Christians, have approached suffering in the lives of our neighbors. In some extreme forms we have offered the prosperity gospel, which promises that following Jesus will prosper your life. Thus, when suffering inevitably comes, the reason is attributed to your lack of faith and repentance. This only compounds your pain, because now you are not only the sufferer, but you are also the reason for your suffering. But beyond the extremes of prosperity Christianity, American Christianity as a whole tends to offer a very trite form of religiosity that has little room for suffering.
Suffering and sadness make us uncomfortable. We force smiles, suppress sorrow, grit through pain, and our churches are full of cliché gladness void of solemnity and lament. If life is good, then you will feel at home in our churches. If life is a mess, you may feel as a stranger in our churches. And when the pain is expressed, too often we respond with simple answers and trite platitudes that are not worthy of your profound struggles. I am sorry. That is the not fitting the followers of a Savior who is familiar with suffering and acquainted with grief.
I will do my best to answer this problem of evil and suffering with the holy reverence it deserves. Two answers are needed—a philosophical and a pastoral. In this post I will offer the philosophical response, and then next week the pastoral, which I believe is the more important answer.
Christian philosophers have made a lot of progress on this notoriously difficult question, most notably, Alvin Plantiga. In fact, Plantiga and other scholars have moved the conversation to the point that the new consensus among philosophers is that evil is not a logical a dilemma for the existence of God. Philosophers now argue that, given the presence of evil and suffering, it is improbable that an omnipotent and benevolent God exists, but they admit it is not impossible, as Epicurus once argued.
The reason Epicurus’ seemingly impossible logical dilemma fails is one would have to demonstrate that God has no morally justifiable reason to allow evil and suffering. To use the presence of suffering to negate the existence of God, we must prove that God has not justification for suffering, and this is impossible to prove. Just because we cannot conceive of any reason, does not mean that God cannot have a morally justifiable reason. And this is not a convenient copout.
God, by definition, is inscrutable. Meaning, we cannot scrutinize his ways. Were he even to try to explain himself to us, we could not comprehend. If God’s ways are fathomable to mere mortals, then this is the surest sign that mere mortals have contrived a god who is not God. Simply put, it only makes sense that God does not make sense. Therefore, not only could God have a reason to permit suffering, we should expect that reason to be inaccessible to our finite minds. This means Epicurus’ problem is no longer a logical problem. That is not to say we do not have a significant emotional problem, because we do. The problem of evil remains a problem in the pastor’s office (more on that in the next post), but in the philosophy department, the consensus is that the presence of evil and the existence of God are not contradictory.
That said, philosophically speaking, people of faith are not the only ones who must wrestle with the problem of evil. In fact, a worldview of unbelief has a much greater problem, and it is that evil isn’t a problem at all. C.S. Lewis famously turned to evil and suffering as his greatest argument for the existence of God. It seems counterintuitive, but during World War II, Lewis gave a series of public talks on BBC radio (later composed into his book Mere Christianity) where he had the audacity to argue that all the evil they were witnessing was a reason to believe, not disbelief, in God. He recounted an epiphany he had as a former atheist, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”
His point is that our visceral sadness and anger in response to evil is making a statement that evil is wrong. But Lewis asks where did this notion of right and wrong come from? We cannot know a line is crooked unless there is such a thing as a straight line, and we cannot declare something is ultimately wrong unless there is an ultimate right. We only know that 2+2=3 is wrong because we know 2+2=4 is right. And Lewis applies this to the arena of ethics. He said to a war weary nation, are you willing to say that what Hitler is doing is wrong? Of course. But, why? Why is this wrong is that haunting question we must wrestle with.
In this way, far from Hitler’s evil disproving God’s existences, it demands a God, because we have no grounds to declare Hitler is breaking a moral law if there is no moral Lawgiver. He may be breaking our own agreed upon social constructs, but those are just moral inventions of our own. Suppose Hitler won and conquered the world, as was his intent. And suppose his ideology took over the world, and several generations later we now have a new social construct with a new agreed upon morality, which is Aryan supremacy and the eradication of lesser races. In the same way we say it is just common sense that killing is wrong, we now have a new ‘common sense’ that genocide of inferior races is a morally good. Cursed be the thought! But without God, Lewis argues, we cannot curse the thought.
Without a God who has moral rules for our existence, there is no longer a fixed ultimate right, and therefore we are left without a fixed ultimate wrong. Evil is malleable based upon our cultural whims, and so when our nation agreed that slavery was not evil, it was not evil. But Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” would have none of that. He argued against the segregation laws of the United States by appealing to the higher moral law from God. Jim Crow laws were unjust, MLK declared, because they were not in accordance the justice of God. But without God, we lose this higher moral appeal.
Atheist Richard Dawkins admits this:
“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference”
His words are brutal, but at least he is being honest with his Nietzschean worldview. If there is no transcendent Creator who has created an existence governed by moral absolutes, then we are, quite literally, law-less. There is nothing wrong with meaningless matter inhabiting a meaningless existence harming other meaningless matter inhabiting a likewise meaningless existence. In fact, even the language of harm cannot be invoked, for how is it harm when meaningless does something to meaningless? It’s just all meaningless.
Taking us into further into absurdity, according to the meaningless and morally indifferent struggle we inhabit, Hitler has the high ground over us who prioritize the rights, freedom, and dignity of others. His movement was doing exactly what our evolutionary selfish genes demand—survival of the fittest, strong triumphing over the weak, my tribe over your tribe—the Third Reich was acting out like any good animal species we see in nature.
This is the dilemma a contemporary of C.S. Lewis faced. Bertrand Russell, a champion of modern atheism, had a terrifyingly different conclusion on World War II: “Dachau is wrong is not a fact. Gravity is a fact. But ‘Dachau is wrong’ is not a fact. I think it’s wrong, but I can’t prove it.” That’s what we are left with without a God. Unlike Lewis who said I know Hitler is crooked because I know there is a straight line, Russell, who denied an ultimate moral straight line, cannot say with certainty that anything, even a concentration camp, is crooked.
Is the presence of evil a problem for people of faith? Of course. And we will deal honestly with that in the next posting. But it is a much greater problem for those of unbelief. Without a God, the problem of evil and suffering is that evil and suffering are not a problem at all.