As a christian I do find what you said to be very important and must be taken seriously. I am personally a christian universalist and found Origen's and DBH perspectives on it as helpful along with several other early church fathers and theologians. I also believe that animals will be in heaven as Origen talks about. I do often wonder sometimes a lot about this issue and its heartbreaking. I even question if god is real why doesn't he do something about it. I myself have had terrible experiences in my life for example, I lost my father when I was 14. I was not a christian at the time but, afterwards I had several tremendous events where I had felt a sense of overwhelming love. I also had thankfully many friends of mine who happened to be christians be their for me and understand me in a way that they had never had before. I believe strongly and hope strongly that their is an afterlife from both what I and others I know have experienced and from reading Dale Allisons book encountering mystery. I became a christian about 3 years ago for both personal and intellectual reasons. I wonder every day why if god exists why he allowed my father to pass away so early in my life and I don't believe I will ever have an answer. I do try my hardest to make the world a better place such as helping the homeless and rescuing injured birds in my neighborhood because I believe that it at least some difference. I also hope that I and everyone that has lost a parent will be reunited with them in heaven or something like it. I know this comment is long I just wanted to let you know emerson I take what you say seriously and even though we disagree I believe your position is very understandable and many christians have much to learn from you.
I got a similar impression about God's obvious absence after our stillbirth a few years ago (and later seeing some birds attack each other). I might be tempted to add the notes you added, but you already added them. The point about not betraying those who suffer strikes me as very important, and I will continue to ponder it.
Thank you for this. That was mind expanding. You gave such a lucid description of a very important yet underrepresented issue.
Christians often critique atheism for its implied nihilism, but the problem of evil (as you have so aptly explained) demonstrates that traditional theism does not escape nihilism either. Affirming the goodness of God’s will in these absurd scenarios diminishes our understanding of good, evil, and all of our values in general.
Atheism or agnosticism without its moral demand allows us to discover values with more fidelity, but theism demands that we eventually betray our values with absurdities.
However, theism defined by a non-omnipotent God does hold some potential for a morally and metaphysically consistent world imo.
A non-omnipotent God does not solve the Problem of Evil. IF the universe has only one actor in it that can influence it THEN the universe will be influenced to approach the ideal state desired by that actor. Over 15 billion years, even an exceedingly weak God would be able to do a lot of improving ....
It solves the problem of God’s Evil, which is the central problem for Christians.
For the soul-searching atheist, God can pose as a solution to the hopelessness of the status quo ONLY if they fail to recognize that God (if defined as both omnipotent and creator in the traditional sense) is actually part of the reason why things are the way they are (instead of being exclusively a part of the redemptive events). Yes, evil remain to be grappled with, but Omni-God ADDS to the problem of evil.
Are you postulating that the universe was a "found object" for God?
Once more, an agent is responsible for what they then DO with a found object, and no, this would not make such a God anything other than a moral monster.
But ofc, people entrenched in institution would rather people fall into the more easily critiqued rejection of all religion than establish a heterodox alternative. Pearls for me to clutch but not for thee.
The orthodox tend to hold onto omnipotence because without it, God is not the Pandokrator, and the origin of the universe is not explained by the God Hypothesis. It is not just dogmatism, there is a more fundamental reason to resist a weak God model.
Rejecting omnipotence does not mean endorsing a weak God. Most powerful, or as powerful as one can be, is still on the table. “Maxipotence” I guess.
I see no reason why an originating force that starts the universe necessitates its nature be boundless. In fact, the more boundless it is the less personal it is, and drifts ever further away from what can be understood as a coherent “will.”
Dano -- I agree, a God who is strong enough to do almost anything is all that is needed to make Abrahamic monotheisms work -- it need not be the absolutist God of Neo-Platonism. And such a "strong enough" God could be in time, and capable of an interactive relationship. And therefore be much more recognizable as a Biblical God than NeoPlatonist theorizing.
However, such a God is still responsible for evil. Losing absolutism does not solve the problem of Evil.
I don't think you need to take the moral stance described here to be a theist. Most traditional forms of theism didn't regard God as a moral agent, so endorsing (for many of them cosmological) arguments for God's existence didn't mean approving of everything in creation. This paper summarizes some of the arguments contemporary philosophers of religion (most notably Marilyn McCord Adams and Mark Murphy) have given for that conclusion.
Exchanging the moral stance required by the cataphatic theist for the one required by the apophatic theist isn’t obviously morally preferable and may make things worse.
God’s perfect love is either challenged by her moral responsibility for the permission of evil or the inability of our language to appropriately describe her as such.
And this is more or less why I stick to Deism. As much as I would rather be a polytheist because it'd make for more interesting stories woven into the fabric of life.
Argued perfectly. In terms of both reason and emotion. However why is theism identified with Christianity? To really universalise this argument you will have to use it against the solutions to the problem of evil in eastern philosophical systems. They start with reincarnation and karma but the structure of their proposed solutions become apparent only in relation to their psychology, ontology and metaphysics. In the first place in none of the Indian philosophical systems is God a creator. Creation ex nihilo, being arising from nothingness is considered righly incoherent. God is considered both the material and efficient cause of the universe. All sentient beings have a soul and the soul is considered uncreated and to have no beginning or end within time. The soul shares its Being with God, in varying ways according to different schools. For Advaita, the school of non-duality, the cosmic personal God is limited, and the ultimate reality is an infinite unconditioned undifferentiated reality with which the true Self of all creatures are identical. In other words the real nature of the sentient Self is a reality that transcends even the visible cosmic God. I am not saying your argument has no purchase against these philosophies, but it will have to be deployed in relationship to the complexity of such metaphysics to really see what its implications are for these theistic systems.
The problem of Evil remains as much of a problem for Eastern metaphysics as for western. The difference is the Eastern traditions more quickly admit to their deities not being omnibenevolent -- that is the reason this problem has not plagued them nearly as much.
As far as I know this is not true. The deity is considered omnibenovelent. As far as I can see, the problem of evil doesn't exist for the two classes of theistic philosophies, a) the sub- schools of Dvaita, Vishistadvaita, Advaita, etc of Hindu Vedanta philosophical system-- for which God is both the material and efficient cause of the universe or b) the Hindu Yoga and Buddhist Mahayana and Vajrayana, where the deity is limited in power and is not the cause of the universe. In the case of b) the problem of evil does not arise because the deity is not a creator deity. But such a God is not what we are interested in. In the case of a) the Vedanta denies the existence of evil. The dyad of good and evil as well as the appearance of the world is traced to the soul having fallen into metaphysical ignorance. However, the question of evil is then transferred to whether the category of ignorance can be coherently handled by the metaphysical architecture of these various philosophical systems. And the nature of that philosophical problem varies with each school. In Advaita (the only system I have read on systematically), the issue is termed the problem of the locus of ignorance and the school further splits into two or three depending on their strategies to neutralise it. The overall point is that these are highly technical philosophical debates (since all these schools debated with each other and the Buddhists for over a millenium) and if one is to intervene it can be done only by either a) Using the terms of the Indian philosophical tradition b) Philosophically reconstructing these systems using the terms of western philosophy and conducting a critique within a hybrid system. a) is not feasible for a number of reasons b) has not been attempted except at a very rudimentary level for Advaita (Eliot Deutsch) and a relatively more expansive way for Madhyamika Buddhism (Jan Westerhoff in particular). I have serious reservations about the discipline of philosophy of religion and have followed little of it. But from what I have seen, as long as it remains confined to the Judeo-Christian tradition, it really cannot make any universal claims about God, soul and so on. It will be worthwhile for the discipline to suffix its discussions with the disclaimer that it operates in relation to a particular religious tradition. Or else it will have to engage eastern philosophy. But to reconstruct these systems within the western philosophical discourse is a mammoth task requiring not only efforts from several disciplines of philosophy, but also Sanskrit and Pali scholars, historians and so on. There seem to be some movement happening in the field of comparative philosophy, but to even say that it is in its infancy might be an overestimation.
James -- I am not Emerson, just another commenter on this blog.
Your b) option does not solve the problem of evil. A deity does not need to be a creator in order to be able to modify or change the world, and a deity working over billions of years would be able to radically change a world for the better. The problem of evil is just as relevant for a God in a found world, as it is for a creator God.
Your a) likewise only addresses the problem of evil by denying evil. If there is no good or evil, then a deity could not be omnibenevolent, as the lack of a moral reference would make the term meaningless. hence a) is "solving" the problem of evil by denying omnibenevolence.
The POE was first clearly articulated by a pre-Christian pagan philosopher. Claiming it is intrinsically a Christian question and problem is factually in correct.
I did not claim that b) (Yoga Philosophy) solves the problem of evil. It doesn't arise for b because in b, the deity is nothing more than the most evolved soul who governs the universe. He/she is merely an administrator of karmic laws. But this will not be a deity in any sense. One doesn't pray to it for example for salvation. And in the next cosmological cycle this ruler of the universe gets liberated. So it is not even permanent. But yoga suffers from a different problem, it offers no explanation why there should be a moral law in the universe, what exactly happens to a liberated soul, what kind of relationship exists between the universe and whatever reality one is liberated into (the reality is a bit like Kant's noumena, a reality beyond space, time and causality, all of which are the soul's way of structuring experience), it doesn't explain how the universe came into being. It uses the term God, but it is not really theistic in the sense in which we usually use.
James -- The Yogic Philosophy is not something I have any prior knowledge of. This divine administrator -- presumably an administrator is needed to run the system as it is said to function. So could the administrator run it -- differently? If so, then the moral laws of the universe ARE subject to revision/improvement by the God administering them.
The problem of evil can be meaningfully raised against the full fledged theistic systems. In eastern philosophy. They consist of three schools of Vedanta. I have only looked deeply into one of the them: Advaita or non-dual philosophy which starts with Shankara (8th C AD). Firstly it claims that reality is one and the world of plurality is an illusion (or at best is relative and conditioned. This non-dual Absolute (the closest in western philosophy would be F.H Bradley) and the true Self of sentient beings are identical. God is a penultimate reality coexistent with our empirical selves which have fallen into the ignorance of plurality. So evil is not denied. But evil is not created by God. Good and evil, which are dyadic concepts, come about because of the soul's falling into error, into ignorance and bringing forth the illusory world of multipe existences. God is a creator in the sense that God manifests the relative world of the universe from the Absolute. All this is made extremely complex by the fact that all these statements are spoken from within the relative plane of space time causality, name and form and are only true within the relative. Of the Absolute all that can be said is that it is infinite Being, infinite consciousnes and infinite bliss. Since any predicate would limit the entity which it is predicated of, qualities like bad and good cannot apply to it. It is completely ineffable and can only described negatively as 'not this, not this.' There is a close resemblance to the German mystic Mesiter Eckhart's theology, but Eckhart did not create a philosophical system. For Advaita the problem of ignorance is basically: IF the Absolute is perfect where does ignorance exist? If it is not in the absolute, non-duality is broken, and if it is in the Absolute, the Absolute cannot be the Absolute. Over the centuries, philosophers of Advaita have developed extremely sophisticated responses. To what extent they succeed depends on who you ask.
James -- thanks for the summary. In general, I have a very poor opinion of religious apologetics, and I fear that extends to the non-duality apologetics.
This summary makes clear that non-duality solves the problem of evil by abandoning not just omnibenevolence, but morality entirely. Sure a world without a Good God will not have a problem of evil. But then another moral question arises -- why play this deities' silly self-contradiction games at all? Why not walk out, and look for a better deity?
Your summary also notes that non-duality also still suffers from a related empirical test case -- the problem of imperfection. Why would a perfect deity let imperfection and ignorance creep into its creation? the straightforward answer is "it would not, so this postulated deity does not exist in our world". The problem of evil's cousin strikes.
>>Ultimately, the suffering on earth must come with a kind of endorsement and imprimatur of believers.
I think this is a bit hasty. A police officer who witnesses a crime may have a specific duty to intervene, while an equally capable civilian who could interrupt the crime might not have the same responsibility in the same situation (especially if their intervention could lead to a worse state of affairs).
By that notion, if God's regular intervention would lead to more suffering, then it seems His general disposition toward nonintervention would be morally permissible. This is not an endorsement of or indifference toward suffering but an active means of harm reduction. If God were to constantly intervene to prevent evil, people might come to expect divine intervention for any problem. They might refrain from building the social frameworks and norms necessary to curb our worst behaviors. By my lights, history supports the idea that the most grievous sources of suffering are not the intentional harm caused by private individuals but the banal neglect, indifference, and systemic failures of institutions. Additionally, they could develop the mindset that God wanted them to commit some evil simply because He didn't prevent it.
To the fawn in the forest, I would explain that God's regular intervention into the animal kingdom would likewise lead to more suffering. If God intervenes for animals but not for humans in equally painful situations, it might raise questions about why humans must endure suffering or lead people to think that God approved of animal abuse whenever He didn't intervene. Furthermore, if the natural laws acted inconsistently or changed on a whim, it would lead to moral confusion for people. Understanding the consequences of actions is critical for people making morally significant decisions.
This is a very difficult subject, and I agree theodicies often fall short of providing a satisfactory explanation for suffering. I'm also not intending to address every question about suffering, such as why God couldn't allow our bodies to endure physical trauma without the conscious experience of pain or why a tangible, material world was necessary to existence.
Your reply presumes a God who has no power to restructure the world, only to apply band-aids to it. Human character could be such that a kindly world would not make us careless or indifferent. An omnipotent God could make us so we were BETTER.
And you presume that there is no other option than the eternal overproduction of life leading to perpetual scarcity and a continual struggle to steal resources from other life. An omnipotent God could have made the UNIVERSE better too.
I don't think my original reply denies God’s omnipotence but argues that nonintervention might serve a purpose a morally sufficient purpose as the only or best means to avoid worse harms.
It seems you think my concern about ways we would promote more harm if God regularly intervened could be averted if God made our character such that we wouldn't be careless or indifferent to the people and world around us. I agree God could do this.
The issue with this view is that it would undermine a true, mutual relationship between God and humans. Love in a relationship requires both sides to choose it freely. In classical theism, God embodies perfect goodness, as goodness and being are ultimately the same. God, as the ultimate reality, is also the ultimate good. If God made humans unable to choose anything but good, they’d be compelled to connect with Him, not freely choosing to do so. For a relationship with God to be genuine, humans must have the freedom to make that choice themselves.
Imagine a world where every person was biologically programmed to love and obey someone without the possibility of doing otherwise. The bond with that other person would not be one of mutual recognition and love but of necessity. No matter how good or fulfilling the relationship appeared, it would not be one of voluntary devotion.
If the greatest possible harm would be to never experience the Beatific Vision, then God programming our character to always choose goodness (God) would mean the fulfillment in the Beatific Vision would be impossible. If God forced the Beatific Vision on us, it would negate the free choice essential to love, turning it into a one-sided imposition.
Justin -- I was responding to your speculative example of how a God intervening might be detrimental to how we humans respond to our world: "people might come to expect divine intervention for any problem. They might refrain from building the social frameworks and norms necessary to curb our worst behaviors." This example presume several things which I think are indefensible:
1) an omniscient God could not be able to think of any way to improve our world without having any worse negative consequences, and 2) the character of humans and the principles by which our world works are not within the scope of what an omnipotent God can change.
IF a situation is imperfect, THEN an omniscient being WILL be able to figure out how to make the situation better.
If you agree with that, you will then have to defend that this is the best of all possible worlds. Specifically, that Ebola, the Black death, genetic diseases, the growth of all living things populations to the point of starvation -- none of these can be improved upon. The argument is -- simply not credible.
Your follow on, that if people had better character, they would have no freedom, and this would be morally worse than any evil they might do, involves several flawed assumptions.
a) God is posited to have a perfect character, yet be free, so good character does not actually remove free will.
b) If you think flawed character boosts the moral value of our world, HOW MUCH flaws would be morally ideal? I think it is easy to argue that LESS flawed would be far better for the world.
c) Your premise that freedom trumps all evils, that it is an absolutely greater value, leaves you once more in contradiction to the flaws of this world. We humans are severely constrained in our free will. We can be wrong about facts, poorly calculate outcomes, not be able to recognize all our choices, we are physically very limited, and we are highly influenced by and sometimes actually constrained by other people. We are FAR from maximally free. So if freedom is an absolute virtue, once more, this world is far from morally ideal.
I actually agree with much of what you said, but we seem to be at cross purposes because I haven't said or presumed some of what you said I have.
My argument doesn't presume either (1) God could not be able to think of any way to improve our world without having any worse negative consequences or (2) the character of humans and the principles by which our world works could not be changed. I agree He could design a world where genuine freedom exists without the possibility of any evil or suffering. In fact, according to my faith tradition, God has revealed that such a world will exist.
So I agree that God could think of logically possible ways to improve our world, but to be a viable option it must be consistent (i) with His purposes of creation, (ii) with His rational and orderly nature, and/or (iii) with how He relates to creation. (By how He relates to creation, I mean the ways God interacts with creation to reveal different aspects of His nature or character. God deals with people in two similar but distinct ways: through retributive reversal (live by the sword, die by the sword) and redemptive reversal (the last shall be first, and the first shall be last). Both reversals show who God is and who He wants us to become. Both reversals are how God turns permitted harm into warnings or invitations, so people can avoid a greater harm: indefinite separation from Him.)
In practice, a world designed to prevent unsanctified people from committing especially cruel or large-scale harms would need to be designed inconsistently with either God’s purposes, rational nature and relational approach in multiple ways. (By sanctification, I mean the consensual process by which the indwelling of the Holy Spirit aligns a person's will with God's sinless will. Sanctification is cooperative, so believers retain their own will, but it is through the power of the Holy Spirit that they are made free from sin in the new creation.)
The other claims that I have said or presume (3) that this is the best of all possible worlds (I don't agree a best of all possible worlds can be instantiated), (4) that people have no freedom at all if they had a better character, (5) that moral failings or flawed character add to the value of our world, (6) that freedom trumps all evils, (7) or that freedom is an absolute virtue are all just inaccurate. I don't have those views, and by my lights you explained why those views are not likely.
By my count, that is at least seven inaccurate statements about my views, so I don't think we're going to be able to make much progress. I don't have any hard feelings, and I'll try to reassess how I can present these views without permitting these misunderstandings in the future.
I’ve felt typical Christian theists have had it all wrong. I don’t think Christianity is about marginalizing people’s suffering and saying it doesn’t matter.
We see in John 11, Jesus weeps when he gets to Lazarus’s tomb and he sees his dead body.
When Jesus feeds the 5000, his apostles are wanting to send the people away, but Jesus tells them they must be fed… I’ve wondered if the reason people followed Jesus, was because he was so aware to the suffering people felt, and he actually did things about it. He healed people, fed them, forgave them of their shame, he dignified them.
I don’t think the argument of theism is about acknowledging a “good God” allowing bad things. Because all evidence of Jesus is about getting rid of the bad things. I think the argument if theism is understanding “why the bad things happened in the first place.”
My best suggestion is looking back to Genesis. Adam & Eve. God telling Adam and Eve to “rule over the earth.”
I believe the earth was meant to be humans domaine, in partnership with God.
But with man eating the apple and partnering with the serpent, it became the devils domaine as well.
A good God didn’t intend for that to happen, but God also gave us control over our choices, because we were meant to rule.
So suffering on this earth is meant to anger us, because of the DNA God built into us & We’re actually meant to do things about it - with the partnership of Jesus.
Jesus uses this language of the Kingdom of heaven forcefully advancing - through our prayers and actions.
I don’t know if this explains cancer, death, greed. But I do think it offers a perspective that our actions matter, we can be righteously angry at death, and believe in a good God who is trying to correct that…
Why does he wait so long, I don’t know. Maybe he is doing more about it than we realize.
So God TRIED to make a perfect world, but was a poor planner, and made people so badly that they always misbehave, and made the world so badly that it broke in morally irredeemable ways when an imperfect creature was placed in it?
You story makes God unwise, and then incapable of fixing His mistakes. Nether omnipotent nor omniscient. And then basically unresponsive in the face of the moral catastrophe of a failed creation on trillions of living things -- so not omnibenevolent either.
I have my own hypothesis on the matter on my substack, but I can think of a few other ways this can be tackled, although they raise their own issues:
1. Simply say there is more to ethics than preventing suffering. This is rather straightforward and intercepts the initial assumptions of suffering as paramount, and can accommodate many religions and philosophies. However, classical theism tends to use suffering as a tool to enforce divine law. Think of punishments meted out in the Jewish scriptures to transgressors, and the ultimate suffering of Hell for those who don't believe in the New Testament. So obviously, suffering is considered a bad thing in these systems, and if we posit the suffering is great enough, it still demands attention even if you think it's not the bees knees of moral norms. Does it have to be THIS bad?
2. Posit a Big Bad Guy who makes or represents evil. This can be Satan or Ahriman or Apophis, etc. and its not hard to find one in various theologies. But the theist is then presented with another dilemma: either he allows Big Bad, and we're back to square one, or he accepts that his deity is not quite powerful enough to do away with Big Bad completely. Classical theism cannot countenance this, although I have to ask: is a "God who is really powerful but just a little short of infinite power so that Bad Guy From The Game still causes trouble" really so awful? It can still be that ones deity is far more powerful than humanity, yet still not powerful enough to prevent evil. After all, if evil is as large in scope as you imply, that's a tall order for anyone. Would theism be more palpable if God was "A little less than omnipotent?"
3. If nothing is as great as the creator deity, then it stands to reason that this world is less perfect than he is. Perhaps the complexity of life, and this imperfection, means that suffering will always occur through probability, the equivalent of bugs in the system, and the fact that a complex world cannot satisfy everyone with their nuanced, complex values and needs. This may or may not require #2 to work.
3. Accept that evil is indeed under the control of one's god and deal with it. I've actually had a Jew tell me that Hitler was an instrument of his God's wrath! But again the amount of suffering makes one ask "Did it have to be this much?" and the arbitrariness of it also demands how productive it is. Could not more nazis have suffered than Jews under Hitler and still make it count? This just handwaves away omnibenevolence, or redefines it so as to be unrecognizable as we use it.
4. On the acceptance of suffering as good, I have seen some Orthodox and traditionalist Catholics say that yes, the more you suffer, the better. This seems masochistic, and requires acceptance of point #1, but still ends up appearing to make suffering the point, against the promises of happiness and blessings in this life. Even the most stoic philosopher would not want people to actively enjoy suffering. I should also note other religions and philosophies that have a warrior ethos (Norse, Bushido, etc.) can also fall under the umbrella, approaching suffering in the world as part of the battle. Of course the Norse religion also has point #2 in its belief, and Bushido incorporates Buddhism which rejects classical theism.
We may also ask whether or not omnibenevolence really is a required trait. A deity can be more loving than people, but perhaps not in an infinite sense.
Ultimately, religion is less valuable to me in explaining evil than reacting to it.
I'm more understanding of a God who says "Hey in order to make this universe diverse and complex enough to express all of my potentiality and give you enough to do, it also came with a lot of bad stuff as a byproduct. I can't make a rock to heavy to lift and I can't give you paradise and variety. But we can make it work together" than one who says "I'm the best and most loving and the evil in the world is just part of my loving perfection."
That description seems more like a non-omnipotent God rather than a non-omnibenevolent one. Omnipotence really does seem to be the most disposable, especially when we can compromise with “most-powerful” instead of all powerful.
Prescribing people to an illusion of creation’s perfection, then forcing people to swallow the “This evil is a part of My living perfection” pill when their illusion of the world’s perfection is inevitably shattered, is such a bone-headed & ham-fisted non-solution that has caused so much additional unnecessary suffering.
Why not just say creation, and therefor perfection, is still in progress? Perhaps God’s incarnation into, solidarity with, and sacrifice for the world is part of its redemption and its final perfection and most full state of creation? The beginning, the cross, the end, all part of the same process?
Absolute omnipotence does seem the weakest link, at least if one insists that an omnipotent deity would be able to make a universe free of suffering, no matter how complex and diverse that universe is. This may stray into the "can God make a rock too heavy to lift" if we think such a universe is logically impossible once set in motion, but the obstinate classical theist can always insist it could have been otherwise especially if God is the author of logic.
That creation is still in progress, and that humans must participate in it, seems reasonable to assume given our observations of change and the necessity of acting in the world. Religion in general seems to emphasize a relationship with the divine to maintain some sort of order and lessening of harms within society, so it meshes well the idea of divine-human solidarity. I think your proposal promotes feelings of intimacy and closeness to the divine as well; always a good thing.
According to Hinduism, this awareness that the suffering in this world is wrong is the cause of liberation (moksha). The suffering in this world isn’t something the animals or barbarians are worried about. If we don’t think there’s a problem, we won’t search for a solution.
I don’t see that every theist is committed to condoning the suffering in this world or think that any instance of suffering is justified or ok. You say “theism”, but you seem to mean “Christianity”.
My point wasn’t there is no problem of evil, it’s that theism doesn’t demand we endorse or affirm that the evil and suffering in the world is morally acceptable.
But my point is that God’s *power*, when we talk about God as an agent with his/her own will, is unavoidably connected to the problem of evil that plagues the world. God seems to endorse the suffering by refusing to use their omnipotence to end the suffering. Worse still, such omnipotence is often suspect to be involved in the creation of the initial conditions for suffering.
Given that theism demands that we endorse and affirm God, the problem lies in the fact that we must now endorse the suffering God leaves unsolved or even potentially caused.
Of course, this all depends on how you define God.
I understand the logic involved and I agree with the sentiment that the evil and suffering in this world are unacceptable.
But blaming God is a reaction that falls short of a solution. The author may refuse to believe in God as some kind of protest, because it “seems like” God must endorse the suffering.
Ok, now what? The suffering we’ve declared unacceptable is still there. Withholding belief in God as an ethical protest is a sentimental reaction that achieves nothing.
This is the point where Hinduism considers our real human life to begin, at this realisation of the ethical unacceptability of our existence here. Now we’re ready to seriously inquire into not only the cause, but more importantly, the solution for evil and suffering.
To quote from my former days as an apologist: most all emotions have an underlying rationale, and rationality does not function without a values that are inherently emotional in nature. The goal isn’t to blame God as much as it is to blame and highlight an inconsistency with *belief in such* as good. (And only a good God can be real right?)
The whole point of Emerson’s original article is to demonstrate that withholding belief does accomplish something: the first being the acknowledgement of the lack of logical consistency of an all good and an all knowing/powerful God, and the second addressing some of the suffering itself. Belief or disbelief in God may not solve the problem of suffering, but a tri-omni type God understood with its full implications ADDS to it by introducing more absurdities, such as his benevolent all-encompassing divine will endorsing all that comes to pass, including all the evil. This demand perverts and undermines our understanding of goodness and is ultimately nihilistic.
Those who are relieved of suffering by believing in (such type of) God are either in denial or ignorance of its dark side, or are worshiping a fundamentally different type of God that happens to have the same name. Holding on to a belief of this view of God as an ethical protest or a sentimental reaction achieves nothing.
Emerson’s purpose here isn’t to propose an exhaustive solution to suffering, but Hinduism (or any religion’s) call to heroic action function perfectly fine without a foreknowing and omnipotent God. Perhaps it would function even better, since we do not have to question our loyalty and love to the deity we devote ourselves too
Hinduism’s solution to suffering doesn’t function at all without God. Without God there is no solution to evil and suffering, we can only endure it. For Hindu metaphysics, the idea God has a dark side, or that he creates (or endorses) suffering is logically incoherent. It’s like saying darkness can exist in the presence of light, or that light creates and endorses darkness.
If someone is as concerned about suffering as Emerson says he is - “That suffering bird is a thing of cosmic significance...” you’d expect him to be desperate to find a solution. But he concludes non-belief in God is the best moral stance. His solution reduces us to impotent bystanders who can do nothing but helplessly weep at our existential predicament. There are far better answers available.
Excellent article. The ultimate POE is that our world is structured such that life will ALWAYS experience scarcity, starvation, and the need to destroy other life to survive, in large quantity. And these destructions are and will continue to be horrific. There is NO WAY to rationalize that this world is the best of all possible worlds, which monotheists need to do.
You do not seem to realize there are several solutions to the POE, though, that do not sacrifice a God's benevolence.
Solution 1: massively polytheistic universe, with limited Gods. Every God's will is therefore being overruled all the time, and no God own's any outcome. One of these Gods can be omnibenevolent.
Solution 2: This universe is a quickly constructed training ground created by a benevolent God, to further strengthen itself by building allies/additions through a harsh training environment. This universe would be just an annex on a larger one, in which our postulated God is besieged/at-risk by enemies. The poor construction/planning would be due to our God's attention mostly being elsewhere.
Solution 3: This universe has both an omnibenevolent, and an omni harmful God in it, and they mostly counter what the other does. Hence once more the structure of the universe is not a free variable available for an omnibenevolent entity to rework as desired.
My experience of mysticism reveals that there really is a loving deity in it, and option 3 as what our world seems to consist of.
Great post and you are right in that any theist, and in particular Christians (as I commit to), have to take the problem of suffering and evil very seriously in every respect. Pat Flynn has a great Substack (tongue-in-cheekily called “Journal of Absolute Truth”) where he approaches a lot of these challenges in a few solid ways. I would have linked to it, but I’m apparently not smart enough to figure out how to do so in an iPhone..🤷♂️
If I have the correct article in mind, it’s one that’s saying the problem of evil for the physicalist is also problematic. Yet I would argue that the traditional tri-omni-max conception of theism adds and compounds the problem of suffering in a way no other worldview can. Every theodicy that refuses to undermine God’s power ends up undermining or redefining omni-benevolence beyond recognition.
I think this argument accidentally makes a case for Theism while placing the responsibility on each individual. If the question is about a belief in God being immoral because a theist would have to, at least implicitly, endorse the suffering of another, while the sufferer themselves would not agree, I would question why the question about whether the theist believes that they would agree to the same, or any type of suffering for that matter, is not being raised. If their belief in God meant that they felt that any suffering they endured in view of a greater good would be justified, you would basically be saying that their belief in God is immoral even though it would be consistent and not hypocritical in terms of permissible suffering. Either their belief is not immoral because it is consistent, or they can only account for the permissible suffering justification for their own life. In which case the responsibility would be placed on each individual.
The immorality would then lie in the level of authority the belief demands from others who are not convinced of the legitimacy of this definition of the greater good.
What someone’s suffering means to them is up for them to determine and they should not be forced into a lesser solution.
I think there might be another demand of theism that you don't consider above. You're right that theism has normative implications, but not just for what we already believe about the moral state of the world. If theism is true, there are more values than you would otherwise think, and more final values than you would otherwise think. For example, union with God is a final value that's not possibly realized on atheism. So a particular state of affairs that has weighty final disvalue on atheism might have an instrumental value or irrelevant disvalue on theism.
Think of Cain and Abel, following Eleonore Stump. Cain's brutal, needless, unjustified murder of Abel is surely horrific and disvaluable in its own right. Theists can say this. But given Abel's right-standing with God, his union with God is protected. He is in a morally significant sense (according to theism) safe. Cain, on the other hand, is in poor standing with God given his sin. Cain is in danger, despite the security of his earthly well-being.
I don't raise this example as any kind of theodicy, or even that you would find the example persuasive, but only to illustrate some normative aspects of theism that I think are commonly neglected, especially by those with consequentialist tendencies. If you are really to entertain the moral state of the world on theism, you have to also thereby consider what theism predicts is valuable, and most importantly what it says is of final value. This might require going beyond bare theism.
Regarding some of the other points, I truly lament that you have found some Christians or otherwise theists dismissive of suffering. That surely is not warranted. With respect to animal suffering, I find Swinburne's line persuasive, or at least plausible, that animals are not cognitively sophisticated enough to appreciate the badness of pain. This way, they don't suffer as much as we think they do.
So what do we make of events that draw people away from God that isn’t of their own doing? The same problem remains.
What suffering means to someone is a process they must work through on their own, and whatever prescribed and perhaps preordained meaning assigned to their suffering or violation is insulting. Religions should focus on using their tools for redeeming suffering instead of committing themselves to views that say suffering was never that terrible to begin with, bc they are a part of some higher values they were yet to be convinced of. Why else can’t I just abduct people for scientific experimentation for the greater good?
Union with God is far from an orthodox value in the western Church, though it brings some interesting perspective of “perhaps the suffering was really of my own doing,” because the individual becomes closer to being the divine and its will.
The western churches have pretty explicitly put the exaltation of Godself as the ultimate moral goal. The elevation of Godself and his will over the suffering creature comes off as dismissive and contemptible, which perhaps wouldn’t be so problematic if the expectation of God was set to be exhaustively caring and the value of a human life to be so solemnly important.
As a christian I do find what you said to be very important and must be taken seriously. I am personally a christian universalist and found Origen's and DBH perspectives on it as helpful along with several other early church fathers and theologians. I also believe that animals will be in heaven as Origen talks about. I do often wonder sometimes a lot about this issue and its heartbreaking. I even question if god is real why doesn't he do something about it. I myself have had terrible experiences in my life for example, I lost my father when I was 14. I was not a christian at the time but, afterwards I had several tremendous events where I had felt a sense of overwhelming love. I also had thankfully many friends of mine who happened to be christians be their for me and understand me in a way that they had never had before. I believe strongly and hope strongly that their is an afterlife from both what I and others I know have experienced and from reading Dale Allisons book encountering mystery. I became a christian about 3 years ago for both personal and intellectual reasons. I wonder every day why if god exists why he allowed my father to pass away so early in my life and I don't believe I will ever have an answer. I do try my hardest to make the world a better place such as helping the homeless and rescuing injured birds in my neighborhood because I believe that it at least some difference. I also hope that I and everyone that has lost a parent will be reunited with them in heaven or something like it. I know this comment is long I just wanted to let you know emerson I take what you say seriously and even though we disagree I believe your position is very understandable and many christians have much to learn from you.
I really appreciate this post.
I got a similar impression about God's obvious absence after our stillbirth a few years ago (and later seeing some birds attack each other). I might be tempted to add the notes you added, but you already added them. The point about not betraying those who suffer strikes me as very important, and I will continue to ponder it.
I can’t even imagine how painful that was. I’m sorry that happened, truly.
I hope this argument gets more exploration. Excellent stuff.
Thank you for this. That was mind expanding. You gave such a lucid description of a very important yet underrepresented issue.
Christians often critique atheism for its implied nihilism, but the problem of evil (as you have so aptly explained) demonstrates that traditional theism does not escape nihilism either. Affirming the goodness of God’s will in these absurd scenarios diminishes our understanding of good, evil, and all of our values in general.
Atheism or agnosticism without its moral demand allows us to discover values with more fidelity, but theism demands that we eventually betray our values with absurdities.
However, theism defined by a non-omnipotent God does hold some potential for a morally and metaphysically consistent world imo.
A non-omnipotent God does not solve the Problem of Evil. IF the universe has only one actor in it that can influence it THEN the universe will be influenced to approach the ideal state desired by that actor. Over 15 billion years, even an exceedingly weak God would be able to do a lot of improving ....
It solves the problem of God’s Evil, which is the central problem for Christians.
For the soul-searching atheist, God can pose as a solution to the hopelessness of the status quo ONLY if they fail to recognize that God (if defined as both omnipotent and creator in the traditional sense) is actually part of the reason why things are the way they are (instead of being exclusively a part of the redemptive events). Yes, evil remain to be grappled with, but Omni-God ADDS to the problem of evil.
Are you postulating that the universe was a "found object" for God?
Once more, an agent is responsible for what they then DO with a found object, and no, this would not make such a God anything other than a moral monster.
But ofc, people entrenched in institution would rather people fall into the more easily critiqued rejection of all religion than establish a heterodox alternative. Pearls for me to clutch but not for thee.
The orthodox tend to hold onto omnipotence because without it, God is not the Pandokrator, and the origin of the universe is not explained by the God Hypothesis. It is not just dogmatism, there is a more fundamental reason to resist a weak God model.
Rejecting omnipotence does not mean endorsing a weak God. Most powerful, or as powerful as one can be, is still on the table. “Maxipotence” I guess.
I see no reason why an originating force that starts the universe necessitates its nature be boundless. In fact, the more boundless it is the less personal it is, and drifts ever further away from what can be understood as a coherent “will.”
Dano -- I agree, a God who is strong enough to do almost anything is all that is needed to make Abrahamic monotheisms work -- it need not be the absolutist God of Neo-Platonism. And such a "strong enough" God could be in time, and capable of an interactive relationship. And therefore be much more recognizable as a Biblical God than NeoPlatonist theorizing.
However, such a God is still responsible for evil. Losing absolutism does not solve the problem of Evil.
Well put. Thanks for putting this together.
I don't think you need to take the moral stance described here to be a theist. Most traditional forms of theism didn't regard God as a moral agent, so endorsing (for many of them cosmological) arguments for God's existence didn't mean approving of everything in creation. This paper summarizes some of the arguments contemporary philosophers of religion (most notably Marilyn McCord Adams and Mark Murphy) have given for that conclusion.
https://philpapers.org/rec/RUBATN
Daniel,
Exchanging the moral stance required by the cataphatic theist for the one required by the apophatic theist isn’t obviously morally preferable and may make things worse.
God’s perfect love is either challenged by her moral responsibility for the permission of evil or the inability of our language to appropriately describe her as such.
None of the arguments cited above rely on aphophaticism.
Daniel -- Abandoning a moral God has always been a way out of the Problem of Evil. Sure, a God who is not a moral agent is not refuted by it.
And this is more or less why I stick to Deism. As much as I would rather be a polytheist because it'd make for more interesting stories woven into the fabric of life.
Argued perfectly. In terms of both reason and emotion. However why is theism identified with Christianity? To really universalise this argument you will have to use it against the solutions to the problem of evil in eastern philosophical systems. They start with reincarnation and karma but the structure of their proposed solutions become apparent only in relation to their psychology, ontology and metaphysics. In the first place in none of the Indian philosophical systems is God a creator. Creation ex nihilo, being arising from nothingness is considered righly incoherent. God is considered both the material and efficient cause of the universe. All sentient beings have a soul and the soul is considered uncreated and to have no beginning or end within time. The soul shares its Being with God, in varying ways according to different schools. For Advaita, the school of non-duality, the cosmic personal God is limited, and the ultimate reality is an infinite unconditioned undifferentiated reality with which the true Self of all creatures are identical. In other words the real nature of the sentient Self is a reality that transcends even the visible cosmic God. I am not saying your argument has no purchase against these philosophies, but it will have to be deployed in relationship to the complexity of such metaphysics to really see what its implications are for these theistic systems.
James,
The problem of Evil remains as much of a problem for Eastern metaphysics as for western. The difference is the Eastern traditions more quickly admit to their deities not being omnibenevolent -- that is the reason this problem has not plagued them nearly as much.
Emerson,
As far as I know this is not true. The deity is considered omnibenovelent. As far as I can see, the problem of evil doesn't exist for the two classes of theistic philosophies, a) the sub- schools of Dvaita, Vishistadvaita, Advaita, etc of Hindu Vedanta philosophical system-- for which God is both the material and efficient cause of the universe or b) the Hindu Yoga and Buddhist Mahayana and Vajrayana, where the deity is limited in power and is not the cause of the universe. In the case of b) the problem of evil does not arise because the deity is not a creator deity. But such a God is not what we are interested in. In the case of a) the Vedanta denies the existence of evil. The dyad of good and evil as well as the appearance of the world is traced to the soul having fallen into metaphysical ignorance. However, the question of evil is then transferred to whether the category of ignorance can be coherently handled by the metaphysical architecture of these various philosophical systems. And the nature of that philosophical problem varies with each school. In Advaita (the only system I have read on systematically), the issue is termed the problem of the locus of ignorance and the school further splits into two or three depending on their strategies to neutralise it. The overall point is that these are highly technical philosophical debates (since all these schools debated with each other and the Buddhists for over a millenium) and if one is to intervene it can be done only by either a) Using the terms of the Indian philosophical tradition b) Philosophically reconstructing these systems using the terms of western philosophy and conducting a critique within a hybrid system. a) is not feasible for a number of reasons b) has not been attempted except at a very rudimentary level for Advaita (Eliot Deutsch) and a relatively more expansive way for Madhyamika Buddhism (Jan Westerhoff in particular). I have serious reservations about the discipline of philosophy of religion and have followed little of it. But from what I have seen, as long as it remains confined to the Judeo-Christian tradition, it really cannot make any universal claims about God, soul and so on. It will be worthwhile for the discipline to suffix its discussions with the disclaimer that it operates in relation to a particular religious tradition. Or else it will have to engage eastern philosophy. But to reconstruct these systems within the western philosophical discourse is a mammoth task requiring not only efforts from several disciplines of philosophy, but also Sanskrit and Pali scholars, historians and so on. There seem to be some movement happening in the field of comparative philosophy, but to even say that it is in its infancy might be an overestimation.
James -- I am not Emerson, just another commenter on this blog.
Your b) option does not solve the problem of evil. A deity does not need to be a creator in order to be able to modify or change the world, and a deity working over billions of years would be able to radically change a world for the better. The problem of evil is just as relevant for a God in a found world, as it is for a creator God.
Your a) likewise only addresses the problem of evil by denying evil. If there is no good or evil, then a deity could not be omnibenevolent, as the lack of a moral reference would make the term meaningless. hence a) is "solving" the problem of evil by denying omnibenevolence.
The POE was first clearly articulated by a pre-Christian pagan philosopher. Claiming it is intrinsically a Christian question and problem is factually in correct.
I did not claim that b) (Yoga Philosophy) solves the problem of evil. It doesn't arise for b because in b, the deity is nothing more than the most evolved soul who governs the universe. He/she is merely an administrator of karmic laws. But this will not be a deity in any sense. One doesn't pray to it for example for salvation. And in the next cosmological cycle this ruler of the universe gets liberated. So it is not even permanent. But yoga suffers from a different problem, it offers no explanation why there should be a moral law in the universe, what exactly happens to a liberated soul, what kind of relationship exists between the universe and whatever reality one is liberated into (the reality is a bit like Kant's noumena, a reality beyond space, time and causality, all of which are the soul's way of structuring experience), it doesn't explain how the universe came into being. It uses the term God, but it is not really theistic in the sense in which we usually use.
James -- The Yogic Philosophy is not something I have any prior knowledge of. This divine administrator -- presumably an administrator is needed to run the system as it is said to function. So could the administrator run it -- differently? If so, then the moral laws of the universe ARE subject to revision/improvement by the God administering them.
The problem of evil can be meaningfully raised against the full fledged theistic systems. In eastern philosophy. They consist of three schools of Vedanta. I have only looked deeply into one of the them: Advaita or non-dual philosophy which starts with Shankara (8th C AD). Firstly it claims that reality is one and the world of plurality is an illusion (or at best is relative and conditioned. This non-dual Absolute (the closest in western philosophy would be F.H Bradley) and the true Self of sentient beings are identical. God is a penultimate reality coexistent with our empirical selves which have fallen into the ignorance of plurality. So evil is not denied. But evil is not created by God. Good and evil, which are dyadic concepts, come about because of the soul's falling into error, into ignorance and bringing forth the illusory world of multipe existences. God is a creator in the sense that God manifests the relative world of the universe from the Absolute. All this is made extremely complex by the fact that all these statements are spoken from within the relative plane of space time causality, name and form and are only true within the relative. Of the Absolute all that can be said is that it is infinite Being, infinite consciousnes and infinite bliss. Since any predicate would limit the entity which it is predicated of, qualities like bad and good cannot apply to it. It is completely ineffable and can only described negatively as 'not this, not this.' There is a close resemblance to the German mystic Mesiter Eckhart's theology, but Eckhart did not create a philosophical system. For Advaita the problem of ignorance is basically: IF the Absolute is perfect where does ignorance exist? If it is not in the absolute, non-duality is broken, and if it is in the Absolute, the Absolute cannot be the Absolute. Over the centuries, philosophers of Advaita have developed extremely sophisticated responses. To what extent they succeed depends on who you ask.
James -- thanks for the summary. In general, I have a very poor opinion of religious apologetics, and I fear that extends to the non-duality apologetics.
This summary makes clear that non-duality solves the problem of evil by abandoning not just omnibenevolence, but morality entirely. Sure a world without a Good God will not have a problem of evil. But then another moral question arises -- why play this deities' silly self-contradiction games at all? Why not walk out, and look for a better deity?
Your summary also notes that non-duality also still suffers from a related empirical test case -- the problem of imperfection. Why would a perfect deity let imperfection and ignorance creep into its creation? the straightforward answer is "it would not, so this postulated deity does not exist in our world". The problem of evil's cousin strikes.
>>Ultimately, the suffering on earth must come with a kind of endorsement and imprimatur of believers.
I think this is a bit hasty. A police officer who witnesses a crime may have a specific duty to intervene, while an equally capable civilian who could interrupt the crime might not have the same responsibility in the same situation (especially if their intervention could lead to a worse state of affairs).
By that notion, if God's regular intervention would lead to more suffering, then it seems His general disposition toward nonintervention would be morally permissible. This is not an endorsement of or indifference toward suffering but an active means of harm reduction. If God were to constantly intervene to prevent evil, people might come to expect divine intervention for any problem. They might refrain from building the social frameworks and norms necessary to curb our worst behaviors. By my lights, history supports the idea that the most grievous sources of suffering are not the intentional harm caused by private individuals but the banal neglect, indifference, and systemic failures of institutions. Additionally, they could develop the mindset that God wanted them to commit some evil simply because He didn't prevent it.
To the fawn in the forest, I would explain that God's regular intervention into the animal kingdom would likewise lead to more suffering. If God intervenes for animals but not for humans in equally painful situations, it might raise questions about why humans must endure suffering or lead people to think that God approved of animal abuse whenever He didn't intervene. Furthermore, if the natural laws acted inconsistently or changed on a whim, it would lead to moral confusion for people. Understanding the consequences of actions is critical for people making morally significant decisions.
This is a very difficult subject, and I agree theodicies often fall short of providing a satisfactory explanation for suffering. I'm also not intending to address every question about suffering, such as why God couldn't allow our bodies to endure physical trauma without the conscious experience of pain or why a tangible, material world was necessary to existence.
Justin --
Your reply presumes a God who has no power to restructure the world, only to apply band-aids to it. Human character could be such that a kindly world would not make us careless or indifferent. An omnipotent God could make us so we were BETTER.
And you presume that there is no other option than the eternal overproduction of life leading to perpetual scarcity and a continual struggle to steal resources from other life. An omnipotent God could have made the UNIVERSE better too.
I don't think my original reply denies God’s omnipotence but argues that nonintervention might serve a purpose a morally sufficient purpose as the only or best means to avoid worse harms.
It seems you think my concern about ways we would promote more harm if God regularly intervened could be averted if God made our character such that we wouldn't be careless or indifferent to the people and world around us. I agree God could do this.
The issue with this view is that it would undermine a true, mutual relationship between God and humans. Love in a relationship requires both sides to choose it freely. In classical theism, God embodies perfect goodness, as goodness and being are ultimately the same. God, as the ultimate reality, is also the ultimate good. If God made humans unable to choose anything but good, they’d be compelled to connect with Him, not freely choosing to do so. For a relationship with God to be genuine, humans must have the freedom to make that choice themselves.
Imagine a world where every person was biologically programmed to love and obey someone without the possibility of doing otherwise. The bond with that other person would not be one of mutual recognition and love but of necessity. No matter how good or fulfilling the relationship appeared, it would not be one of voluntary devotion.
If the greatest possible harm would be to never experience the Beatific Vision, then God programming our character to always choose goodness (God) would mean the fulfillment in the Beatific Vision would be impossible. If God forced the Beatific Vision on us, it would negate the free choice essential to love, turning it into a one-sided imposition.
Justin -- I was responding to your speculative example of how a God intervening might be detrimental to how we humans respond to our world: "people might come to expect divine intervention for any problem. They might refrain from building the social frameworks and norms necessary to curb our worst behaviors." This example presume several things which I think are indefensible:
1) an omniscient God could not be able to think of any way to improve our world without having any worse negative consequences, and 2) the character of humans and the principles by which our world works are not within the scope of what an omnipotent God can change.
IF a situation is imperfect, THEN an omniscient being WILL be able to figure out how to make the situation better.
If you agree with that, you will then have to defend that this is the best of all possible worlds. Specifically, that Ebola, the Black death, genetic diseases, the growth of all living things populations to the point of starvation -- none of these can be improved upon. The argument is -- simply not credible.
Your follow on, that if people had better character, they would have no freedom, and this would be morally worse than any evil they might do, involves several flawed assumptions.
a) God is posited to have a perfect character, yet be free, so good character does not actually remove free will.
b) If you think flawed character boosts the moral value of our world, HOW MUCH flaws would be morally ideal? I think it is easy to argue that LESS flawed would be far better for the world.
c) Your premise that freedom trumps all evils, that it is an absolutely greater value, leaves you once more in contradiction to the flaws of this world. We humans are severely constrained in our free will. We can be wrong about facts, poorly calculate outcomes, not be able to recognize all our choices, we are physically very limited, and we are highly influenced by and sometimes actually constrained by other people. We are FAR from maximally free. So if freedom is an absolute virtue, once more, this world is far from morally ideal.
I actually agree with much of what you said, but we seem to be at cross purposes because I haven't said or presumed some of what you said I have.
My argument doesn't presume either (1) God could not be able to think of any way to improve our world without having any worse negative consequences or (2) the character of humans and the principles by which our world works could not be changed. I agree He could design a world where genuine freedom exists without the possibility of any evil or suffering. In fact, according to my faith tradition, God has revealed that such a world will exist.
So I agree that God could think of logically possible ways to improve our world, but to be a viable option it must be consistent (i) with His purposes of creation, (ii) with His rational and orderly nature, and/or (iii) with how He relates to creation. (By how He relates to creation, I mean the ways God interacts with creation to reveal different aspects of His nature or character. God deals with people in two similar but distinct ways: through retributive reversal (live by the sword, die by the sword) and redemptive reversal (the last shall be first, and the first shall be last). Both reversals show who God is and who He wants us to become. Both reversals are how God turns permitted harm into warnings or invitations, so people can avoid a greater harm: indefinite separation from Him.)
In practice, a world designed to prevent unsanctified people from committing especially cruel or large-scale harms would need to be designed inconsistently with either God’s purposes, rational nature and relational approach in multiple ways. (By sanctification, I mean the consensual process by which the indwelling of the Holy Spirit aligns a person's will with God's sinless will. Sanctification is cooperative, so believers retain their own will, but it is through the power of the Holy Spirit that they are made free from sin in the new creation.)
The other claims that I have said or presume (3) that this is the best of all possible worlds (I don't agree a best of all possible worlds can be instantiated), (4) that people have no freedom at all if they had a better character, (5) that moral failings or flawed character add to the value of our world, (6) that freedom trumps all evils, (7) or that freedom is an absolute virtue are all just inaccurate. I don't have those views, and by my lights you explained why those views are not likely.
By my count, that is at least seven inaccurate statements about my views, so I don't think we're going to be able to make much progress. I don't have any hard feelings, and I'll try to reassess how I can present these views without permitting these misunderstandings in the future.
I’ve felt typical Christian theists have had it all wrong. I don’t think Christianity is about marginalizing people’s suffering and saying it doesn’t matter.
We see in John 11, Jesus weeps when he gets to Lazarus’s tomb and he sees his dead body.
When Jesus feeds the 5000, his apostles are wanting to send the people away, but Jesus tells them they must be fed… I’ve wondered if the reason people followed Jesus, was because he was so aware to the suffering people felt, and he actually did things about it. He healed people, fed them, forgave them of their shame, he dignified them.
I don’t think the argument of theism is about acknowledging a “good God” allowing bad things. Because all evidence of Jesus is about getting rid of the bad things. I think the argument if theism is understanding “why the bad things happened in the first place.”
My best suggestion is looking back to Genesis. Adam & Eve. God telling Adam and Eve to “rule over the earth.”
I believe the earth was meant to be humans domaine, in partnership with God.
But with man eating the apple and partnering with the serpent, it became the devils domaine as well.
A good God didn’t intend for that to happen, but God also gave us control over our choices, because we were meant to rule.
So suffering on this earth is meant to anger us, because of the DNA God built into us & We’re actually meant to do things about it - with the partnership of Jesus.
Jesus uses this language of the Kingdom of heaven forcefully advancing - through our prayers and actions.
I don’t know if this explains cancer, death, greed. But I do think it offers a perspective that our actions matter, we can be righteously angry at death, and believe in a good God who is trying to correct that…
Why does he wait so long, I don’t know. Maybe he is doing more about it than we realize.
What do you think?
So God TRIED to make a perfect world, but was a poor planner, and made people so badly that they always misbehave, and made the world so badly that it broke in morally irredeemable ways when an imperfect creature was placed in it?
You story makes God unwise, and then incapable of fixing His mistakes. Nether omnipotent nor omniscient. And then basically unresponsive in the face of the moral catastrophe of a failed creation on trillions of living things -- so not omnibenevolent either.
I have my own hypothesis on the matter on my substack, but I can think of a few other ways this can be tackled, although they raise their own issues:
1. Simply say there is more to ethics than preventing suffering. This is rather straightforward and intercepts the initial assumptions of suffering as paramount, and can accommodate many religions and philosophies. However, classical theism tends to use suffering as a tool to enforce divine law. Think of punishments meted out in the Jewish scriptures to transgressors, and the ultimate suffering of Hell for those who don't believe in the New Testament. So obviously, suffering is considered a bad thing in these systems, and if we posit the suffering is great enough, it still demands attention even if you think it's not the bees knees of moral norms. Does it have to be THIS bad?
2. Posit a Big Bad Guy who makes or represents evil. This can be Satan or Ahriman or Apophis, etc. and its not hard to find one in various theologies. But the theist is then presented with another dilemma: either he allows Big Bad, and we're back to square one, or he accepts that his deity is not quite powerful enough to do away with Big Bad completely. Classical theism cannot countenance this, although I have to ask: is a "God who is really powerful but just a little short of infinite power so that Bad Guy From The Game still causes trouble" really so awful? It can still be that ones deity is far more powerful than humanity, yet still not powerful enough to prevent evil. After all, if evil is as large in scope as you imply, that's a tall order for anyone. Would theism be more palpable if God was "A little less than omnipotent?"
3. If nothing is as great as the creator deity, then it stands to reason that this world is less perfect than he is. Perhaps the complexity of life, and this imperfection, means that suffering will always occur through probability, the equivalent of bugs in the system, and the fact that a complex world cannot satisfy everyone with their nuanced, complex values and needs. This may or may not require #2 to work.
3. Accept that evil is indeed under the control of one's god and deal with it. I've actually had a Jew tell me that Hitler was an instrument of his God's wrath! But again the amount of suffering makes one ask "Did it have to be this much?" and the arbitrariness of it also demands how productive it is. Could not more nazis have suffered than Jews under Hitler and still make it count? This just handwaves away omnibenevolence, or redefines it so as to be unrecognizable as we use it.
4. On the acceptance of suffering as good, I have seen some Orthodox and traditionalist Catholics say that yes, the more you suffer, the better. This seems masochistic, and requires acceptance of point #1, but still ends up appearing to make suffering the point, against the promises of happiness and blessings in this life. Even the most stoic philosopher would not want people to actively enjoy suffering. I should also note other religions and philosophies that have a warrior ethos (Norse, Bushido, etc.) can also fall under the umbrella, approaching suffering in the world as part of the battle. Of course the Norse religion also has point #2 in its belief, and Bushido incorporates Buddhism which rejects classical theism.
“This just handwaves away omnibenevolence, or redefines it so as to be unrecognizable as we use it.” As most theodicies do.
Hit the nail on the head.
We may also ask whether or not omnibenevolence really is a required trait. A deity can be more loving than people, but perhaps not in an infinite sense.
Ultimately, religion is less valuable to me in explaining evil than reacting to it.
I'm more understanding of a God who says "Hey in order to make this universe diverse and complex enough to express all of my potentiality and give you enough to do, it also came with a lot of bad stuff as a byproduct. I can't make a rock to heavy to lift and I can't give you paradise and variety. But we can make it work together" than one who says "I'm the best and most loving and the evil in the world is just part of my loving perfection."
That description seems more like a non-omnipotent God rather than a non-omnibenevolent one. Omnipotence really does seem to be the most disposable, especially when we can compromise with “most-powerful” instead of all powerful.
Prescribing people to an illusion of creation’s perfection, then forcing people to swallow the “This evil is a part of My living perfection” pill when their illusion of the world’s perfection is inevitably shattered, is such a bone-headed & ham-fisted non-solution that has caused so much additional unnecessary suffering.
Why not just say creation, and therefor perfection, is still in progress? Perhaps God’s incarnation into, solidarity with, and sacrifice for the world is part of its redemption and its final perfection and most full state of creation? The beginning, the cross, the end, all part of the same process?
Absolute omnipotence does seem the weakest link, at least if one insists that an omnipotent deity would be able to make a universe free of suffering, no matter how complex and diverse that universe is. This may stray into the "can God make a rock too heavy to lift" if we think such a universe is logically impossible once set in motion, but the obstinate classical theist can always insist it could have been otherwise especially if God is the author of logic.
That creation is still in progress, and that humans must participate in it, seems reasonable to assume given our observations of change and the necessity of acting in the world. Religion in general seems to emphasize a relationship with the divine to maintain some sort of order and lessening of harms within society, so it meshes well the idea of divine-human solidarity. I think your proposal promotes feelings of intimacy and closeness to the divine as well; always a good thing.
According to Hinduism, this awareness that the suffering in this world is wrong is the cause of liberation (moksha). The suffering in this world isn’t something the animals or barbarians are worried about. If we don’t think there’s a problem, we won’t search for a solution.
I don’t see that every theist is committed to condoning the suffering in this world or think that any instance of suffering is justified or ok. You say “theism”, but you seem to mean “Christianity”.
It is a problem for theist so long as they are committed to the goodness of “God’s will” combined with God’s omnipotence to do otherwise.
Given that Hinduism is a massive continent of different beliefs, I’m sure this is a problem some but perhaps not others.
My point wasn’t there is no problem of evil, it’s that theism doesn’t demand we endorse or affirm that the evil and suffering in the world is morally acceptable.
But my point is that God’s *power*, when we talk about God as an agent with his/her own will, is unavoidably connected to the problem of evil that plagues the world. God seems to endorse the suffering by refusing to use their omnipotence to end the suffering. Worse still, such omnipotence is often suspect to be involved in the creation of the initial conditions for suffering.
Given that theism demands that we endorse and affirm God, the problem lies in the fact that we must now endorse the suffering God leaves unsolved or even potentially caused.
Of course, this all depends on how you define God.
I understand the logic involved and I agree with the sentiment that the evil and suffering in this world are unacceptable.
But blaming God is a reaction that falls short of a solution. The author may refuse to believe in God as some kind of protest, because it “seems like” God must endorse the suffering.
Ok, now what? The suffering we’ve declared unacceptable is still there. Withholding belief in God as an ethical protest is a sentimental reaction that achieves nothing.
This is the point where Hinduism considers our real human life to begin, at this realisation of the ethical unacceptability of our existence here. Now we’re ready to seriously inquire into not only the cause, but more importantly, the solution for evil and suffering.
To quote from my former days as an apologist: most all emotions have an underlying rationale, and rationality does not function without a values that are inherently emotional in nature. The goal isn’t to blame God as much as it is to blame and highlight an inconsistency with *belief in such* as good. (And only a good God can be real right?)
The whole point of Emerson’s original article is to demonstrate that withholding belief does accomplish something: the first being the acknowledgement of the lack of logical consistency of an all good and an all knowing/powerful God, and the second addressing some of the suffering itself. Belief or disbelief in God may not solve the problem of suffering, but a tri-omni type God understood with its full implications ADDS to it by introducing more absurdities, such as his benevolent all-encompassing divine will endorsing all that comes to pass, including all the evil. This demand perverts and undermines our understanding of goodness and is ultimately nihilistic.
Those who are relieved of suffering by believing in (such type of) God are either in denial or ignorance of its dark side, or are worshiping a fundamentally different type of God that happens to have the same name. Holding on to a belief of this view of God as an ethical protest or a sentimental reaction achieves nothing.
Emerson’s purpose here isn’t to propose an exhaustive solution to suffering, but Hinduism (or any religion’s) call to heroic action function perfectly fine without a foreknowing and omnipotent God. Perhaps it would function even better, since we do not have to question our loyalty and love to the deity we devote ourselves too
Hinduism’s solution to suffering doesn’t function at all without God. Without God there is no solution to evil and suffering, we can only endure it. For Hindu metaphysics, the idea God has a dark side, or that he creates (or endorses) suffering is logically incoherent. It’s like saying darkness can exist in the presence of light, or that light creates and endorses darkness.
If someone is as concerned about suffering as Emerson says he is - “That suffering bird is a thing of cosmic significance...” you’d expect him to be desperate to find a solution. But he concludes non-belief in God is the best moral stance. His solution reduces us to impotent bystanders who can do nothing but helplessly weep at our existential predicament. There are far better answers available.
Excellent article. The ultimate POE is that our world is structured such that life will ALWAYS experience scarcity, starvation, and the need to destroy other life to survive, in large quantity. And these destructions are and will continue to be horrific. There is NO WAY to rationalize that this world is the best of all possible worlds, which monotheists need to do.
You do not seem to realize there are several solutions to the POE, though, that do not sacrifice a God's benevolence.
Solution 1: massively polytheistic universe, with limited Gods. Every God's will is therefore being overruled all the time, and no God own's any outcome. One of these Gods can be omnibenevolent.
Solution 2: This universe is a quickly constructed training ground created by a benevolent God, to further strengthen itself by building allies/additions through a harsh training environment. This universe would be just an annex on a larger one, in which our postulated God is besieged/at-risk by enemies. The poor construction/planning would be due to our God's attention mostly being elsewhere.
Solution 3: This universe has both an omnibenevolent, and an omni harmful God in it, and they mostly counter what the other does. Hence once more the structure of the universe is not a free variable available for an omnibenevolent entity to rework as desired.
My experience of mysticism reveals that there really is a loving deity in it, and option 3 as what our world seems to consist of.
Great post and you are right in that any theist, and in particular Christians (as I commit to), have to take the problem of suffering and evil very seriously in every respect. Pat Flynn has a great Substack (tongue-in-cheekily called “Journal of Absolute Truth”) where he approaches a lot of these challenges in a few solid ways. I would have linked to it, but I’m apparently not smart enough to figure out how to do so in an iPhone..🤷♂️
If I have the correct article in mind, it’s one that’s saying the problem of evil for the physicalist is also problematic. Yet I would argue that the traditional tri-omni-max conception of theism adds and compounds the problem of suffering in a way no other worldview can. Every theodicy that refuses to undermine God’s power ends up undermining or redefining omni-benevolence beyond recognition.
I think this argument accidentally makes a case for Theism while placing the responsibility on each individual. If the question is about a belief in God being immoral because a theist would have to, at least implicitly, endorse the suffering of another, while the sufferer themselves would not agree, I would question why the question about whether the theist believes that they would agree to the same, or any type of suffering for that matter, is not being raised. If their belief in God meant that they felt that any suffering they endured in view of a greater good would be justified, you would basically be saying that their belief in God is immoral even though it would be consistent and not hypocritical in terms of permissible suffering. Either their belief is not immoral because it is consistent, or they can only account for the permissible suffering justification for their own life. In which case the responsibility would be placed on each individual.
The immorality would then lie in the level of authority the belief demands from others who are not convinced of the legitimacy of this definition of the greater good.
What someone’s suffering means to them is up for them to determine and they should not be forced into a lesser solution.
That’s fair enough, but undermines the purpose of the OP which suggests that the belief is immoral on the basis of betraying the suffering of others.
I think there might be another demand of theism that you don't consider above. You're right that theism has normative implications, but not just for what we already believe about the moral state of the world. If theism is true, there are more values than you would otherwise think, and more final values than you would otherwise think. For example, union with God is a final value that's not possibly realized on atheism. So a particular state of affairs that has weighty final disvalue on atheism might have an instrumental value or irrelevant disvalue on theism.
Think of Cain and Abel, following Eleonore Stump. Cain's brutal, needless, unjustified murder of Abel is surely horrific and disvaluable in its own right. Theists can say this. But given Abel's right-standing with God, his union with God is protected. He is in a morally significant sense (according to theism) safe. Cain, on the other hand, is in poor standing with God given his sin. Cain is in danger, despite the security of his earthly well-being.
I don't raise this example as any kind of theodicy, or even that you would find the example persuasive, but only to illustrate some normative aspects of theism that I think are commonly neglected, especially by those with consequentialist tendencies. If you are really to entertain the moral state of the world on theism, you have to also thereby consider what theism predicts is valuable, and most importantly what it says is of final value. This might require going beyond bare theism.
Regarding some of the other points, I truly lament that you have found some Christians or otherwise theists dismissive of suffering. That surely is not warranted. With respect to animal suffering, I find Swinburne's line persuasive, or at least plausible, that animals are not cognitively sophisticated enough to appreciate the badness of pain. This way, they don't suffer as much as we think they do.
So what do we make of events that draw people away from God that isn’t of their own doing? The same problem remains.
What suffering means to someone is a process they must work through on their own, and whatever prescribed and perhaps preordained meaning assigned to their suffering or violation is insulting. Religions should focus on using their tools for redeeming suffering instead of committing themselves to views that say suffering was never that terrible to begin with, bc they are a part of some higher values they were yet to be convinced of. Why else can’t I just abduct people for scientific experimentation for the greater good?
Union with God is far from an orthodox value in the western Church, though it brings some interesting perspective of “perhaps the suffering was really of my own doing,” because the individual becomes closer to being the divine and its will.
The western churches have pretty explicitly put the exaltation of Godself as the ultimate moral goal. The elevation of Godself and his will over the suffering creature comes off as dismissive and contemptible, which perhaps wouldn’t be so problematic if the expectation of God was set to be exhaustively caring and the value of a human life to be so solemnly important.