It is incomprehensible how a good God and evil can both exist. But we know evil exists. So how can God?
Simply put, this is the problem of evil, and it is the most devastating argument against the existence of God, by far. For those who deny God, this, overwhelmingly, is the most frequently cited reason.
They aren’t alone. Those who believe also struggle mightily with this problem, me included. Trying to reconcile the enormity and absurdity of suffering with a loving God is agonizingly difficult.
But would it surprise you to learn that atheist philosophers have largely abandoned this argument? The last major philosophical work to make this argument came in 1982. Since then, the philosophical world hasn’t followed this tact in any significant way, pursuing other arguments instead. (see Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2008, pp. 22-27)
The reason? They’ve come to realize that the problem of evil can only be a problem IF God exists. The only way to object that an all-good and all-powerful God can’t exist is if evil is real and not just some illusion. Otherwise, if evil is just an illusion, there would be no contradiction. A good God could still exist.
But if evil is real, this means there has to be some objective grounds for making the judgement that some things are evil. In other words, there has to be an absolute standard of good and evil that transcends any given time or place. And such a standard necessarily implies a God as its source.
The problem of suffering presumes the existence of God.
Please note, this doesn’t prove that God exists. It only says that IF evil is real, then a God is required for this standard of moral judgement (good v. evil) to exist.
Last week on the evening news, there was a story about the brutal civil war in Yemen. It featured footage of the immediate aftermath of an airstrike. An armament hit a bus of kids who were on a field trip. One boy, only about five or six years old, clearly dazed by the blow, could be seen trying to get up off the ground. He quickly stumbled and fell unconscious, struggling for life. He may have even died. Many on the bus did—strewn about him were the blown-up body parts of his classmates.
I can’t get the image of those poor kids out of my mind. It was sickening. Innocent kids, one moment enjoying a fieldtrip, the next, their little bodies torn apart, mortally wounded in a civil war they have nothing to do with. You couldn’t watch that story without thinking: This is pure evil.
Those who want to deny the reality of evil, who want to argue that it’s an illusion, a purely materialistic, human construct, only have two options: either, what we call evil is just a matter of preference, something humans happen to find repulsive; or, it’s a matter of reason, something that logic tells us to avoid because it is a threat to our happiness.
If what we call evil is just a matter of preference, of taste, then it is entirely subjective. We may think it reprehensible when Bernie Madoff swindles hundreds of people—many of them elderly—out of their life savings, but that makes no difference. On the same basis, he can justify what he is doing as perfectly acceptable. If evil is just a matter of personal taste, what right do we have to protest?
If what we call evil is simply something reason tells us is harmful to human flourishing, then all kinds of things can be rationalized. For example, many Nazis thought it was perfectly reasonable to eliminate so-called “inferior” races in the interest of creating a master race for the sake of human advancement, for the “greater good”. On rational grounds they believed it would ultimately achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
Genocide in Rwanda. Sex trafficking. The Holocaust. 9-11. Newtown. The Los Vegas massacre. The priest abuse scandal. Who could deny these things are anything but evil? How insulting to call them anything else!
Clearly, it’s both absurd and offensive to try and reduce what we call evil to merely subjective preference or irrational behavior. When we say something is evil, we mean so much more.
Evil implies that something is intrinsically condemnable—that it’s wrong and ought not be done.
In fact, the basic assumption behind the problem of evil is that evil shouldn’t exist, that evil itself is intrinsically condemnable.
But where did we ever get the idea that evil ought not to be? That beyond being repulsive or irrational, it’s not supposed to exist? That there’s something wrong with reality?
Certainly not nature. All it teaches us is that the fittest survive. Moreover, nature is indifferent. That tsunami doesn’t care that it just killed thousands of people in the blink of an eye. Nature is completely amoral.
Where did we get it from then? Definitely not history. History is riddled with examples of “man’s inhumanity to man.”
Where then? Not as an adaptive response. It frustrates natural selection. Our survival instinct would have us discard the weakest among us, the disabled, diseased, and so forth. But we think it especially abhorrent to mistreat or pick on the most vulnerable. We make all kinds of provisions for their care when they can’t care for themselves, because we say it’s wrong not to. Why? Natural selection doesn’t have a good answer.
Or consider altruism. Within one’s own group, altruism can have adaptive advantages. But, as evolutionists now virtually universally acknowledge, this doesn’t work outside of one’s own group, for example, if someone gives their life to save a stranger or an enemy. Yet, we praise those who perform heroic acts of self-sacrifice for a stranger or an enemy as being the most noble among us. (For more on this see Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, New York, NY: Free Press, 2006, pp.27-29.)
In other words, the way we innately think things ought to be often works against adaptation, and thus, can’t be explained by it.
By all accounts then, we should just accept things as they are, as the only possible way they could be. We should think that indifference and cruelty are the norm. That this is just how the universe works.
But instead we object, vehemently declaring that what is good ought to be and what is evil shouldn’t be. Even if we disagree at times about what is good and what is evil, we innately see all of reality in terms of the overarching, absolute categories of good and evil.
This is remarkable. By every indication, we shouldn’t be capable of thinking this way.
Through this prism of good and evil, we are somehow able to see reality from a position and perspective that transcends the natural order.
Without this innate awareness of an absolute standard of good and evil, we would never protest that reality should be any different than it is.
Without this sense of “oughtness”, the problem of suffering would never occur to us.
Without a God, evil would never be the pervasive and perplexing reality that it is for us.
So the real question evil raises isn’t the existence of God. The real question evil raises is the character of God—whether a God who allows such incomprehensible suffering can really be a loving God.
We will wrestle with this question in many future blogs.
