When you teach at a small Catholic school, theodicy is a question it’s relatively easy to get students excited about: how can God permit the world to be so full of suffering? The problem is finding a good reading to engage students’ interest, one that isn’t full of formal logic’s technical jargon. (We’re talking first-year non-majors taking a required class.) So far, alas, when I’ve found such jargon-free readings, they tend to be exclusively about the “problem of evil.” Which makes them useless.
Evil, per se, is something of a red herring when it comes to theodicy. Evil is what we think of first, after the human-inflicted horrors of the twentieth century. And yet evil is the easy part. Why is there evil? Because human beings have free will, of course, and it’s good for them to have free will. Now, there are some problems with the free-will defence, questions that Augustine grapples with in On Free Choice of the Will – why is it good for humans to have free will, if it leads to all these evil acts? But the answers to those problems are pretty well thought out – determinate good is just not as good as freely chosen good.
The tougher part of the problem is those sufferings for which free will is no defence. I think people understood this part better before the twentieth century, when human-caused suffering was lesser than the suffering of natural disasters – when, as Susan Neiman notes, the one-word reply to claims of God’s goodness was not Auschwitz but Lisbon. Young children, too young to have committed any serious wrong, die in earthquakes, in hurricanes and tsunamis, from tuberculosis. Old people get afflicted by ALS, a cruel degenerative disease that makes people prisoners in their own bodies. This is “evil” only in the old sense, where “evil” just meant “bad” – this isn’t something that we did, a bad action, it’s just a bad thing that happens. Some theologians have tried to come up with justifications for this as well; but it’s much harder to justify these natural sufferings. Can we really say that the torturous drowning of innocent children is justified as part of a larger plan?
People smarter than I am have answered yes. Maybe we can still legitimately believe in God in the face of natural suffering. But let’s not distract ourselves from the real issue by calling it the “problem of evil,” and allowing believers to get out of it with the far-too-easy answer of free will. Call it the problem of pain, as C.S. Lewis did; or call it the problem of suffering, a more common answer. But don’t weasel out of the problem by claiming it’s all about evil. There’s no point in explaining how God could permit Auschwitz if you can’t also explain how he could permit – or cause – Lisbon.
Totally agree. The problem of “evil” has a relatively easy solution: “evil” acts are necessary consequences of a good thing: free will. We needn’t look any further than the tsunamis in the southeast pacific to see the incoherence of a Theodicy.
Thanks, Nick – good to see you again. There are some possible answers to the problem of suffering in a larger sense – it will all get worked out in the afterlife, it’s what allows other humans to act and fix the problem, and so on. I think one can make a relatively coherent theology on such grounds, so I wouldn’t go so far as to call theodicy completely incoherent, but I’ll agree that I don’t find any of these answers particularly convincing.
Don’t inflict symbolic logic on your hapless students, there is already too much pain in the world. One has always felt that such papers are the last refuge of the analytic philosopher that has run out of ideas. You have first to make the argument before you can formalise it.
‘What about Lisbon’, ‘What about tsunamis? You may as well say, ‘What about the laws of physics?’ You look at the beautiful sunlit photograph of an Edwardian tennis party and know that all the players have one thing in common. They are all dead. There is no sense of an evil fate even though some if not all of their deaths were painful.
Consciousness involving introspection is a late blooming thing in the history of the cosmos. What’s the point of that and how did it come about? Theodicy is analogically speaking the virus that is surrounded and defeated by a larger sense of meaning and purpose. It is not an independent question that must be answered right off before we can proceed to forge meaning out of the ‘wreckage’.
It’s a while since I read Mans’ Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Must root it out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning
Thanks, Michael. I do think there’s a time and a place for symbolic logic, as for most specialized technical languages; it’s just a very limited one. And Religion 100 is certainly not it.
A sense of meaning is something that helps a lot in dealing with the world’s pain, I think. Two related problems: one, it is no good for those who cannot find meaning. The infant drowned horribly in a tsunami or thrown into a concentration camp’s incinerator is not developed enough to grasp the idea of meaning and purpose, but suffers all the same.
Two, a sense of meaning deals with pain at the level of the individual who has the meaning, not a larger cosmic level. In other words, while it may be able to deal with theodicy in a more generalized philosophical sense, it still doesn’t explain God’s actions – it doesn’t allow an omnipotent omnibenevolent God as the source of that meaning. (It could certainly allow some other sort of God, a small-g god like Ganesh who is not omnipotent, or a god so universal he contains all evil as well as all good within him.)
I should add that I haven’t read Frankl’s book, but I’d like to.
Fraught question, some stray thoughts:
If there was a ‘God for Dummies’ book it would have a chapter entitled – Dealing with Evil or When Bad Things Happen. Having a plan for that or an understanding that includes the torment of the innocent does not naturally issue, I think, from a rational understanding of the deity.
Theodicy is based on a naturalistic understanding of a deity that is subject to rational logical considerations. But that god is not the God of religion. The God of religion is mediated by an incarnation and our understanding is modified by that manifestation of the divine. Only Islam and Judaism have no strict theological sense of the human/divine though one could claim that there is a strong heterodox element in Islam amongst Sufi saints that have claimed divinisation. The faith that is preached through the sermon on the mount or the Bhagavad Gita is one in which cosmic justice prevails. The devotee trusts the word of the master on this.
The question remains whether a rational theodicy is possible. Taking theodicy as a rational exercise it is clear that the first step must be to demonstrate the existence of God. Having done so you can progress to examine the concept of god for its coherence. Is it not redundant to claim that there can be no God (or that there is probably no God and you are moreover on the wrong bus) because theodicy reveals difficulty in the concept of god. So what is logically impossible or inconceivable then determines what is or is not. Ought not the actuality of what is or is not be an empirical and not a logical question.
I suppose one’s theodicy will itself depend on the way one gets to God. If you accept a deterministic proof like Anselm’s in which God’s existence is necessary, then theodicy will not do as an objection – it might be easier in that view to deny the existence of suffering in the world, to say it’s an illusion. On a probabilistic proof like the design argument (God as the best explanation for the world, the hypothesis that Darwin entertained before he found the evidence for evolution), suffering is much more decisive, a reason to reject the hypothesis. The First Explanation proof is somewhere in the middle; there, some sort of God must exist despite the suffering, but it’s not hard to deny that God’s omnipotence, and one might even be able to deny his omnibenevolence.
Now if one’s understanding of God is not based on rational considerations, then theodicy may be the least of one’s worries, but it’s still a problem. One is supposed to simply put one’s trust in the God who drowns innocent chidren in Hurricane Katrina, or allows them to be burned alive at Auschwitz? What has this God done to earn our trust? Trust in wiser souls is important in nearly every tradition – but that trust must be merited, and must be merited far more so if the trust is to be blind and irrational.
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