God is Great, God is Good: Questions About Evil

by Daniel B. Clendenin

Dr. Clendenin is Professor of Christian Studies, Moscow State University.

I will never forget one of my first pastoral visits when I called on a widow who, in a tragic, single accident, lost her father, husband, two sons, nephew and brother-in-law. My mind also goes to a colleague who before age 40 was ravaged with a rare and aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease so that now he has virtually no motor coordination. He, his wife and four children face a future filled with untold pain and stress that is certain to get much worse before it gets any better. As I wrote this article, one of our parishioners lost a second child to another automobile accident. More disturbing still is the realization that instances like these are not uncommon or isolated, and my reader certainly has similar stories to tell. How does one justify the ways of God in light of experiences like these, that being the definition of theodicy (from the two Greek words theos — God, and dike — justice)? Can one in good conscience still recite the childhood table-prayer? Although people have amended the definition, and although we correctly speak of many problems of evil in differing contexts,[1] and different types of theisms, for our purposes we can say the “problem of evil” concerns the apparent contradiction between the reality of evil and the affirmation, attested in the Christian Scriptures, that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. In a passage preserved by the church father Lactantius (AD 260–340), which Boethius, Voltaire, Bayle, Leibniz, Hume and others on down to contemporary scholars like Mackie and Plantinga cite, Epicurus (341–270 BC) gave classic expression to the matter when he suggested that God

either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does He not remove then?[2]

The present essay explores five questions fundamental to theodicy and some of the responses given to these questions.

I. What is Evil?

In his ponderous Theodicy (1710), which gave classic expression to eighteenth-century optimism,[3] Leibniz offered that “evil may be taken metaphysically, physically, and morally.”[4] Metaphysical evil, he suggested, refers to “mere imperfection” or the necessary limitations of a finite order. Paley, likewise, wrote that some evils result “by a kind of necessity, not only from the constitution of our nature, but from a part of that constitution which no one would wish to see altered.”[5] As the most fundamental evil, both natural and moral evil result from metaphysical evil according to Leibniz.

Moral evil refers to the wrong actions of free moral agents, deception, cruelty, hatred and the like. Dostoyevsky paints a portrait of humanity’s inhumanity with hideous detail:

People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took pleasure in torturing children, too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother’s eyes. Doing it before the mother’s eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They’ve planned a diversion; they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby’s face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby’s face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn’t it?[6]

As Kant and others have observed, we deem moral evil like this as absolutely contrary to divine purposefulness either as a means or an end, even though we might allow that some evil, though hard to understand, serves as a means to good.[7] Aquinas, for example, suggested that God “in no way” wills moral evil, although he sometimes indirectly wills natural evil because of the greater goods which attach to it.[8]

Natural or physical evil, on the other hand, originates apart from the free decisions of moral agents and involves the design of the world (deserts, dangerous animals, pests), natural calamities (flood, famines, earthquakes), disease (AIDS, cancer, leprosy), and congenital defects (mental retardation, blindness, deafness).[9] Also included here is animal pain, for it occurred long before humans existed. The Lisbon earthquake on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1755, killed perhaps 30,000 people, and the irony was not lost on Voltaire that the death toll swelled because overcrowded churches crumbled on top of their worshippers. In a heated rage he penned his Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake which, because of the horror of such natural evil, disdained all theodicies.

Few have given more trenchant expression to the vagaries of nature than JS Mill. In Nature he repudiates the idea that nature is a model of divine excellence and a manifestation of God’s will which humans should imitate (cf. Paley’s Natural Theology). In fact, writes Mill, Nature exhibits frightening cruelty:

For how stands the fact? That next to the greatness of these cosmic forces, the quality which most forcibly strikes everyone who does not divert his eyes from it, is their perfect and absolute recklessness. They go straight to their end, without regarding what or whom they crush on the road. . . 

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature’s everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act, Nature does once to every being that lives; and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow creatures.. . Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or Domitian never surpassed. All this, Nature does with a most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and the worst.. .

Thus, Mill concludes:

Not even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good which ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism, can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent.[10]

While some people like Paley might argue that the number of goods in the world outnumbers natural evils,[11] many are convinced that the problem here is the overwhelming amount of natural evil in the world. For thinkers like John Roth and Frederick Sontag, the existence of a benevolent God is not necessarily logically incompatible with the reality of evil; it is only the preponderance of evil overshadowing good that tilts the scale towards agnosticism or atheism. It is no surprise, then, that some theodicists find natural evil more perplexing than moral evil, for while moral evils are assignable to human agents (why blame God for the evil we do?[12]), who but God alone can be responsible for non-moral evil?

In defining evil another tack sometimes taken is to shift the emphasis away from evil’s objective reality to the subjective knower and to define evil as an illusion of our own making. Mary Baker Eddy (1821 — 1910), founder of the Christian Science Movement, espoused a popular but highly influential version of this definition. In her Science and Health (1875) Eddy contended that suffering was not only an illusion but a sinful delusion. A quote by Shakespeare in the book’s frontispiece marks her direction: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Death, sickness and the like are all unreal contrivances of false belief, dreams, things which “do not exist.”[13] Evil, too, is non-existent: “Evil is but an illusion, and it has no real basis. Evil is a false belief.”[14]

Eastern ways of thinking likewise define evil as human illusion, as in the Hindu concept of maya. Alan Watts argues that western perception, language and logic dissect and dichotomize reality into diametrically opposed elements, resulting in a dualistic epistemology that distorts the true nature of reality. “To be specific, the individual’s basic sense of separation from his universe may be a perceptual illusion based upon inadequate concepts of sensing and knowing.”[15] Mythical or poetical ways of thinking, on the other hand, are integrative and express “a point of view in which the dark side of things has its place, or rather, in which the light and the dark are transcended through being seen in terms of a dramatic unity.”[16] Both Eddy and Watts, then, prescribe an epistemological catharsis to a monistic way of thinking that cleanses the mind of faulty ways of perceiving reality.

Spinoza (1632–1677) had already proposed a more scholarly version of this definition of evil in his Ethics. In his scheme of pantheistic determinism God alone is the only infinite substance and determining cause. All other entities exist as modes or attributes of this one substance (minds as the attribute of thought, bodies as the attribute of extension). Although Spinoza describes God as “free,” he insists that all creation flows from him by strict and logical necessity, and since he alone is perfectly good, all of created nature is good. What appears to us as evil is only the result of our own ignorance. In a sense, for Spinoza, evil is undefinable, for it is the figment of misguided perception. People wrongly imagine that creation exists for their own utility and, based on that misperception, make comparisons such as “good, evil, order, confusion, heat, cold, beauty, and deformity.”[17] This, says Spinoza, reveals more about the observer than the ultimate nature of reality, for such comparisons are only the product of an errant imagination:

We see, therefore, that all those methods by which the common people are in the habit of explaining nature are only different sorts of imagination, and do not reveal the nature of anything in itself, but only the constitution of the imagination; and because they have names as if they were entities existing apart from the imagination, I call them entities not of the reason but of imagination.[18]

As with Eddy, and to a lesser extent Watts, this “definition” of evil consists in denying its ultimate reality.

Perhaps the most important definition of evil in terms of historical influence is the idea that it is a privatio boni, a lack, limitation, or distortion of something in itself good. Echoing the Enneads of Plotinus (205 — 270)[19] and the Hexaemeron of Basil the Great of Caesarea (329 — 379),[20] Augustine asked, “What, after all, is anything we call evil except the privation of good?.. .Where there is no privation of the good, there is no evil.. . From this it follows that there is nothing to be called evil if there is nothing good.”[21] Sickness for example, is but the corruption of health, blindness the lack of sight. Evil, in other words, has no independent existence, but is parasitic, accidental, and privative. Repeated by Boethius (480 — 524)[22], Hugh of St. Victor (1096 — 1141)[23], Aquinas (1226–74)[24], Descartes[25], Leibniz[26], Barth’s idea of das Nichtige, and on down to Pope John Paul[27], the idea of evil as a privation of good becomes central in any discussion about the definition of evil. This definition rightly protects the goodness of the created order from any final dualism, but it creates the dilemma of evil springing up ex nihilo. In the context of Adam having been created good, and placed in the moral paradise of Eden, his defection and the appearance of evil appear paradoxical and even absurd, but if he was not created finitely perfect, as some angels apparently were, then responsibility for evil’s intrusion rests even more directly with his creator. Because of this dilemma, some have reasoned that Adam was created either morally neutral[28] or at an “epistemic distance” from God.[29]

II. Whence Evil?

Beyond saying that evil is an inexplicable riddle or mystery and that we can know only its beginning and not its origin,[30] or that evil originates from a God neither infinite[31] nor wholly good,[32] what can we say about its source or cause? Three responses deserve attention. The so-called “free-will defense” located the origin of evil in human volition. According to Augustine, “an evil will, therefore, is the cause of all evils.”[33] Adam’s corrupted will constituted the “original sin” that all people subsequently inherited. Appeals to free will find expression in the works of Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Austin Farrer, Nels Ferre, Charles Journet, John Hick, Stephen Davis, G. Stanley Kane, Keith Yandell, and others,[34] but by most accounts, the pre-eminent free-will defense is given by Alvin Plantinga.[35] Yet the free will defense has a limited function, for it addresses only the matter of moral evil and says little if anything about the origin of non-moral evils.

Plato, and some contemporary process thinkers, locate the origin of evil in the recalcitrance of matter, although Plato does not make it clear whether matter itself is evil or only a medium of evil. Physical matter has existed eternally and its primal chaotic condition forms the source from which “all the wrongs and evils arise.”[36] The “bodily element” in the world’s constitution was responsible for its failure. Beside this cosmology, Plato’s account of human psychology also locates the origin of evil in the material order. In his famous analogy of the charioteer and horses, Plato describes how the soul must battle its unwieldy material body in which it is lodged, the rational element mastering the spiritive and appetitive “parts” like a charioteer driving a pair of horses pulling in opposite directions.[37] By itself, the soul would be free never to stray, but “when the soul uses the instrumentality of the body for any inquiry. .. it is drawn away by the body into the realm of the variable, and loses its way and becomes confused and dizzy, as though it were fuddled.”[38] David Griffin is only one modern process thinker who follows Plato’s lead and suggests that, as with the demiurge in the Timaeus, God is limited by matter which is not entirely under his control.[39]

Although not a widely accepted notion, a final suggestion regarding the origin of evil, especially natural evil, is the idea that much evil results from the machinations of satan and his cohorts. Modern westerners might find such a thesis untenable, but that attitude reveals our own intellectual and cultural provincialisms, as anyone who has taught in a third world setting can affirm. Augustine, CS Lewis, Stephen Davis, and Alvin Plantinga provide examples of this strategy. According to Plantinga,

Satan, so the traditional doctrine goes, is a mighty nonhuman spirit who, along with many other angels, was created long before God created man. Unlike most of his colleagues, Satan rebelled against God and has since been wreaking whatever havoc he can. The result is natural evil. So the natural evil we find is due to the free actions of non-human spirits.[40]

Discounting the possibility of demonic influence in our world cannot claim any scientific support, and it often has its basis in what Lewis called the contemporary “climate of opinion,” which opinion, he suggested, thinking people rightly ignore. Further, the reality of the demonic is firmly and deeply rooted in biblical religion and not something only tangential to it.

Those wishing to retain traditional notions about the goodness and power of God have no alternative but to locate the origin of evil in divine responsibility, a strategy which comes in milder or stronger versions. In a mild form, distinctions are made between what God indirectly or permissively wills, and what He directly and positively causes, the idea being that God allows but does not cause evil for the greater good that will occur: “God neither wills evils to be nor wills evils not to be; he wills to allow them to happen. And this is good.”[41] For Aquinas, the Christ event itself is the ultimate good which arises from the greatest evil, and it evokes his famous “O felix cupla!”[42] This milder version, which the story of Job corroborates, protects the goodness of God by disallowing any hint that evil resides in God (cf. James 1:13–14; 1 Jn. 1:5), while the stronger version does not blush to posit what Hick rightly describes as the “monstrous moral parados” that God deliberately wills evil. Hugh of St. Victor writes that God “wills evil to be, and in this He wills nothing except good, because it is good that there be evil.. . If we do evil He wills that we do not do good, and He approves this because it is good.”[43] Indeed, the doctrine of unconditional predestination, especially the supralapsarian type as propounded by Calvin’s successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza, holds that God actively consigns some people to eternal torment. Calvin called this a “dreadful decree {decretum horribile) and Augustine admitted that it was hard to understand, but both are unrelenting in underscoring the sovereign will of God (cf. Psalm 115:3).[44] Both the milder and stronger versions wrestle with the relationship between human freedom and divine sovereignty. Suggesting that God preordains history (either personal or cosmic) denies human freedom and tends to compromise His goodness by locating the origin of evil in divine responsibility, while stressing human freedom tends to undercut traditonal notions of His power.

III. Does Evil Make Theism Irrational?

Epicurus, as we have seen, locates the problem of evil on the plane of logic, so that a person can affirm only two but not three of the following propositions before lapsing into a logical fallacy: (1) God is perfectly good; (2) God is all-knowing and omnipotent; and (3) Evil exists. Intellectual integrity demands that a person avoid affirming logically incompatible propositions and the question arises whether the theist does just that — hold a faith that requires him or her to jettison the normal canons of logic. As Pike observes, the matter has the logical status of the statement, “If Jones is a bachelor, how does it happen that he has a wife?”[45] Part X of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is usually interpreted to make this point, that theism is not just unlikely given the amount of evil in the world but that it is downright illogical. But the critic’s challenge at this point is probably one of the easiest positions for the theist to refute, for in order to refute what the critic holds is a necessary truth of logic, the theist need only provide a possible reason God had for allowing evil.

John Mackie begins his highly influential article by insisting that theodicy is not a practical or scientific problem but a problem of logic, that because of the presence of evil in the world “it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack support, but that they are positively irrational,” and that theism can be held only by an “extreme rejection of reason.”[46] The theist believes “not merely what cannot be proved, but what can be disproved.”[47] Adequate solutions exist, he observes, for the theist who is willing to relinquish one of Epicurus’s three propositions, and, in fact, this is what many theists do, but only in a half-hearted way. That is, in order to solve the logical problem of evil, some explicitly reject one of the three propositions only to reintroduce them covertly somewhere else in their system.

The real focus of Mackie’s attack, however, is not on these half-hearted solutions that implicitly reassert what was ostensibly rejected, but those fallacious solutions that

explicitly maintain all the constituent propositions, but implicitly reject at least one of them in the course of the argument.. . [I]n order to solve the problem one (or perhaps more) of its constituent propositions is given up, but in such a way that it apears to have been retained, and can therefore be reasserted without qualification in other contexts.[48]

In the course of his article Mackie examines four theistic solutions, all of which suffer from this basic defect. First, to say that evil is a necessary counterpart to good compromises divine omnipotence by maintaining that God could not create one without the other, and denies the reality of evil by implying that, ultimately, it is not really opposed to good. To argue that evil is necessary as a means to good ends likewise undermines omnipotence by subjecting God to causal laws over which He has no power and by implying that good ends cannot result from other means. Third, the vale-of-soul making and aesthetic themes contend that our world is better with some evil than with no evil, but this denies the real opposition between good and evil and suggests that God is not fully good because He chooses not to minimize the world’s suffering. Last, in response to free will defenders, Mackie argues that it is logically possible that God could have created people so that they always choose God freely, and, more fundamentally, to the extent that people are truly free, it means that God cannot control them. He thus triumphantly concludes:

Of the proposed solutions to the problem of evil which we have examined, none has stood up to criticism. .. [T]his study strongly suggests that there is no valid solution of the problem which does not modify at least one of the constituent propositions in such a way which would seriously affect the essential core of the theistic position.[49]

Is the theist guilty of Orwellian “doublethink,” as Flew charges, of simultaneously accepting contradictory beliefs and “playing tricks with reality?”[50] I think not, primarily because Flew, Mackie and their kin simply try to prove too much. By positing merely logically possible reasons for the presence of evil, the theist evades the charge of necessary irrationality, although, of course the theist has done nothing to bolster the probability of his position (which he or she does in other ways). Pike, for example, suggests some “morally sufficient reasons” why God allowed evil, making the analogy that in ordinary life we sometimes absolve people of moral culpability (but not responsibility) when we finally learn of the reasons for their apparently harmful actions. Further, the critic of theism can never claim to have examined all the possible morally sufficient reasons God might have for allowing evil. Indeed, it is not necessarily inconceivable that the best of all possible worlds might contain evil. That point cannot be proven, Pike admits, but neither can it be disproven, and so the mere possibility that evil might be a component in a good world indicates that God could have had a morally sufficient reason for allowing it, and thus the charge of logical incompatibility is not necessary but only possible or probable.[51]

In addition to free will, a common morally sufficient reason to which some appeal is an eschatological scenario in which God will right the wrongs we have experienced. Hick, Stephen Davis, and others consider eschatology essential to any Christian theodicy. The redemptive work of Christ, Scripture attests, ushered in the firstfruits of the age to come and engenders an irrepressible hope that present sufferings do not compare with the glory to come (Rom. 8:18 — 22). Appeals to eschatology, however, must not denigrate the doctrine of creation or mitigate attempts to ameliorate evil in the present age (lifeboat ethics). Ironically, some who insist that God could (should) have made a different world (one with no evil) are the first to reject appeals to just such a world beyond history. Dostoyevsky’s Ivan, for example, demands justice “here on earth” and insists that justice delayed is not justice. Others argue that no future reversal could ever redeem evil or restore what has been lost.[52] Nevertheless, while Christians differ in details (for Hick the eschaton is a continuation of circumstances like those in history, while Davis envisions a radical reversal), eschatology insists that despite current appearances, future blessings will vindicate God’s reasons as morally sufficient for making the world as He did.

What about the contention that God could have made people so that they always (or mostly) and freely choose good? Ninian Smart has met this objection, I think, by insisting that “moral discourse is embedded in the cosmic status quo.”[53] It is possible, he agrees, that God could have created people like this, but such a scenario would have no “clearly assignable content” and we would have to remain agnostic about it. If such a proposed world was basically like our own, changing the set of moral circumstances or the makeup of human nature would also require us to change the meaning of our moral discourse about the world (what it means to be a “good” person, for example), otherwise we would be guilty of equivocating with the use of our terms. If, on the other hand, such a fictional world was basically unlike our own, then it becomes difficult to judge such a radically different world by standards which do not apply to it. Simply put, a world where people always and freely choose good might be logically possible, and people there would clearly be different, but it is not clear what it would mean to call them or their world “good.” We must remain agnostic about such worlds, which is to say that the proposed fiction is not clearly better than reality.

IV. Does Evil Make Theism Improbable?

It is one thing to respond to charges that your position is logically irrational by showing that it is theoretically possible, but quite another to show that the given evidence makes it likely or probable. Thus theodicists sometimes distinguish between the logical and evidential problems of evil. Hume raises this point at the end of Part X of his Dialogues. Even allowing “what can never be proved,” Philo urges that the preponderance of evil is not what we would expect of a wholly good and powerful God. But he retreats from this line of attack and allows for the sake of the argument that evil is logically compatible with theism. He then asks Cleanthes, “what are you advanced by all these concessions? A mere possible compatibility is not sufficient. You must prove these pure, unmixed, and uncontrollable attributes from the present mixed and confused phenomena, and from these alone. A hopeful undertaking!”[54] Contemporary scholars addressing theodicy from the evidentialist perspective include JW Cornman, K Lehrer, George Schlesinger, Wesley Salmon, Nancy Cartwright, Michael Martin, David Basinger, Lawrence Resnick, Harold Moore, Edward Wierenga and R Pargetter.[55] The theist might respond to this evidentialist argument in two ways.

Some follow an inductive and a posteriori method and try to show empirically that the amount of evil in the world does not make belief improbable. The question partly hinges on whether one considers all the evidence in general or gives special emphasis to a particular piece of evidence either pro (the Christ event) or con (the Holocaust, Dostoyevsky’s innocent children who suffer) that is said to have overriding influence. Some have simply concluded that, taken in the balance, goods outnumber evils.[56] I doubt that arithmetical calculation will convince many, but two observations seem to me helpful. First, given the chance, would we choose to live our lives over? Kant raises the question and replies in the negative,[57] but with a slightly different twist a positive affirmation seems more reasonable. Despite the evils we all experience, I think most people would choose to live rather than die, and to live rather than never to have been born. We rightly consider the will to death as abnormal, and if this were not so, as Roth observes, nobody would bother with theodicy in the first place. Along with Roth, John Cobb and David Griffin make similar points, that despite the ravages of evil, healthy-minded people choose life over death or non-existence.[58]

Second, we must remember that theodicy arises because of the ambiguity of human experience, not the unilateral influence of evil, and forgetting this point might cause us to overlook the goodness and teleological ordering that constantly challenges evil. In The Color Purple, Alice Walker’s character Celia incarnates this idea with poignant grace. Despite the radical evil she experienced, Celia observed that it was still wrong not to celebrate the goodness of God in the flowers that dressed the meadowside she walked. HE Fosdick observed that “the mystery of evil is very difficult when we believe in a good God, but the problem of goodness seems to us impossible when we do not.”[59] Indeed, some of the most vociferous critics of theism, many of whom appeal to the problem of evil to make their points, back off when faced with the alternative of embracing atheism. Long considered an atheist by many, JS Mill, for example, shocked his admirers with what they judged were his considerable concessions to theism in his Three Essays on Religion (1874). Despite the chilling detail with which he describes the machinations of nature, and what he felt was the moral sophistry of many theodicists,[60] Mill still concluded that “the adaptations in nature afford a large balance of probability in favor of creation by intelligence. It is equally certain that this is no more than a probability.”[61] Likewise Voltaire, who mercilessly satirized the optimism of the Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man and Leibniz’s Theodicy in his Candide and Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake. Despite the charges of atheism that are understandable but unjustified, he maintained an unswerving belief in a Supreme being, based primarily on his fascination with the teleological ordering of mature. It is likely he subscribed to at least three of Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God. His torrent of invective against establishment Christianity came primarily during the last decade of his life when he was almost obsessed by it, but even then what outraged him was religion’s intolerance, barbarity, despotism and cruelty, not so much cosmological chaos. Even Hume, who scandalized readers with his advice to “commit to the flames” all religious books of “sophistry and illusion” (Enquiries), concluded his Dialogues by surmising that the whole of natural theology “resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined, proposition, ‘That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence,’”[62] an admission which hardly typifies full-fledged atheism. Finally, Dostoyevsky, whose own life was so full of pain and suffering, and who so graphically portrays the atheist apostate in the character of Ivan (The Brothers Karamazov), gives the last word to the novice monk Allyosha, whom he calls the real “hero” in the novel’s preface, and who on the final page of the novel exudes a vibrant faith in the resurrection.

Another response to the evidentialist problem of evil is a priori and deductive, where a person begins in faith and with certain beliefs and subsequently tries to reconcile the observable facts of the world with that belief. While this route will be of little help to the person not convinced of theism on other grounds, it enjoys a long heritage in the Christian tradition. Perhaps Anselm best illustrates this position in his Proslogion, where he proclaims, “I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this too I believe, that ‘unless I believe, I shall not understand.’”[63] Far from denigrating reason or surtailing its proper use, the believing theodicist is convinced that good, hard thinking is most needed in order to combat some of the common reactions people have when they encounter evil: despair, false guilt at seemingly unanswered prayer, naive expections of magical deliverance and so on. Rather, the argument intends to avoid the hubris sometimes attached to natural reason, as when it assumes the prerogative to put God on trial and make Him a defendant. Kierkegaard, contemplating the theme of suffering, rightly responds:

God’s love is never found in this way; accursed of God will the endeavor of doubt be to God, because it begins with audacity. On the contrary, it is the eternal happiness of faith, that God is love. It does not thereby follow that faith understands how God’s plan for man is love. This exactly constitutes the conflict of faith — to believe without being able to understand it.[64]

Anticipating the criticism that a theism of this stripe is non-falsifiable by any empirical data, the theist responds that the criticism is substantial only if empirical evidence alone is one’s sole criterion of truth, but at that point radical empiricism must respond to charges that it courts a reductionistic positivism.

Christian faith demands an especially important affirmation here. It insists that Christology constitutes what Surin rightly calls the “theologically normative” element in theodicy.[65] Pope John Paul reminds us that the answer to evil “has been given by God to man in the cross of Jesus Christ.. . [and] that in the mystery of redemption suffering finds its supreme and surest point of reference.”[66] The Christian traditon insists that Christ conquered both the temporal and eternal dimensions of evil and suffering. Physical death, according to Scripture, epitomizes physical suffering and evil (Gen. 2:17; Rom. 3:23, 5:12 — 21), while sin embodies its moral dimensions. In a sense, then, a truly Christian theodicy is soteriological and rests in the self-justification of God, and especially humans, in the work of Christ. It recognizes the truth that in the person of His Son God not only suffers for us but with us (Heb. 4:15, 5:8). Few have expressed this point of view more eloquently than the great Scottish theologian PT Forsythe (1848 — 1921), who wrestled with evil in the context of World War I:

[T]here is no theodicy in the world except in a theology of the Cross. The only final theodicy is that self-justification of God which was fundamental to his justification of man. No reason of man can justify God in a world like this. He must justify Himself, and He did so in the Cross of His Son.[67]

Coupled with the Pauline truth of redemptive suffering (Colossians 1:24), and the observation that constructive deeds of Christlike acts are themselves responses to the problem of evil even more powerful than words, Christian faith makes a meaningful response indeed to the problem of evil.

V. How Do Divine and Human Discourse Relate?

Perhaps no other aspect of theodicy is as difficult to fathom as that of language about God. To what extent is the divine logic like our own, or to what extent do the normal meanings of moral attributes, when applied to God, correspond to their meaning when applied to people? Hume’s Philo forces this question, asking, “In what respect, then, do God’s benevolence and mercy resemble the benevolence and mercy of men?”[68] He concludes that Cleanthes must assert “that our common measures of truth and falsehood are not applicable” to the question.[69] Are theodicies which retain traditional notions of God’s moral character guilty of a type of “reasoning [that] is of the other world and incomprehensible for the heart of man on earth?”[70] The implication, of course, is that the theodicist equivocates at this point, ascribing a sense of goodness and power to God that has little if any relationship to the normal way we use those words. Consequently, the critic accuses the theist of living in a linguistic Wonderland not unlike that of Alice:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “Whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”[71]

The stakes are high at this point, for if we sever the congruity between divine and human discourse, what God calls heaven we might call hell,[72] and one person’s god becomes another person’s devil.[73]

Following the views of his father,[74] JS Mill pressed this argument against Henry L. Mansel, a follower of William Hamilton, an Oxford Professor who in his Bampton lectures, published as The Limits of Religious Thought, addressed the problem of evil and concluded that the conundrum of Epicurus in Lactantius was an antinomy that had to be accepted in faith. What appears to us evil might well be, from the divine perspective, good. The book, which Mill blasted as “a detestable to me absolutely loathsome book [sic],”[75] evoked his rage, and in a chapter of his An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy he leveled a scathing attack on Mansel’s doctrine. This line of thinking has often been taken, Mill observes, as a rationale for asserting “moral monstrosities” about God and mislabeling them divine perfections.[76]

Mill makes three criticisms. First, Mansel violates the law of noncontradiction by saying, in effect, that A is non-A. If we use the same word to describe something that is fundamentally different in kind, then language no longer has meaning. Second, Mill charges Mansel with moral casuistry, for “to assert in words what we do not think in meaning is as suitable a definition as can be given of a moral falsehood.”[77] Last, Mill contends that the logical outcome of Mansel’s position is agnosticism; we would not “ascribe any moral attributes to God at all, inasmuch as no moral attributes known or conceivable by us are true of him, and we are condemned to absolute ignorance of him as a moral being.”[78]

In a sense this charge against theism is a straw man argument, for few theists argue that God’s attributes are different in kind from our own. With Scripture we acknowledge that our discourse about God is limited in a number of ways and is not univocal; our finitude (Is. 55:8, 1 Cor. 1:18–31), sinfulness (Rom. 1:18), earthbound condition (1 Cor. 13:12; 1 Jn. 3:2), and cultural conditioning all limit our knowledge about God. But based on the imago Dei, and the reality of God’s self-disclosure in Christ, the Christian tradition maintains that God created people with a capacity to know him, and though compromised, our knowledge of him is still a valid knowledge and not equivocal. Thus, older theologians distinguished between a theologica archetypa, that perfect knowledge of God known only to Himself, and a theologica etypa, the knowledge of God available to finite beings. Distinctions in the later category are likewise helpful: there is a theologia beatorum, the knowledge of God of the blessed in heaven, and a theologia viatorum, the pilgrim knowledge of wayfarers on earth. CS Lewis, writing about the goodness of God, put it this way:

[God’s] idea of “goodness” differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards. When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call “better.” The Divine “goodness” differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black, but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel.[79]

In short, the theist claims a knowledge of God that is similar to but not identical with God’s knowledge of Himself, a knowledge which is analogical and neither univocal nor equivocal.

VI. Conclusion

Descartes once observed that he was not “astonished at not being able to understand why God does what he does... I no longer have any difficulty in recognizing that there are an infinity of things within his power the causes of which lie beyond the powers of my mind.” Indeed, certain of God’s purposes remain “impenetrable,”[80] and in their better moments most theodicists admit that a large degree of mystery attaches itself to the problem of evil.[81] That posture does not make ignorance an ally; it only recognizes that theodicy consists of fallible options. While the theist admits that he or she cannot answer every question about evil, that in itself reveals little about the rationality of theistic belief.[82] Furthermore, while critics assail theism with the problem of evil, the fact remains that the problem of evil assaults any world view, not just theism. The responses to the five questions above remain subject to fallability, but they have proven themselves helpful to some of the best minds of the Christian church. Augustine maintained that our felicity on earth does not depend upon knowing completely the mind of God. Alice Walker’s Celia and others like her have proven that point. Still, Augustine advised, we should seek out answers to these questions “at least as far as men may do so in this life,” and, having done that, rest patiently in unknowing.[83] Childhood table prayers, I suggest, are still in order.

Notes

1. Kenneth Surin makes this point in his Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), although as reviewers have noted, he overstates his case. For reviews see Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 41 No. 4 (1988): 539 — 541, and Theology Today Vol. 44.3 (October 1987): 405 - 408.
2. Lactantius, A Treatise on the Anger of God, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, trans. William Fletcher, vol. III (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951): Chapter XIII, p. 271.
3. Next to Leibniz’s Theodicy, Archbishop William King’s De origine mali (1702, with editions of Edmund Law’s English translation in 1731, 1732, 1739, 1758, and 1781) and Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733 — 34) gave fullest expression to the optimistic thesis, as did, to a lesser extent, Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Societies (1711), John Clarke’s Enquiry Into the Cause and Origin of Evil (1720), Soame Jenyn’s Free Inquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), and William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802). What angered most people was not that this optimism denied the reality of evil but that it insisted on it as a necessary component of the overall perfection of the world. Cf. Arthur Lovejoy, “The Principle of Plenitude and Eighteenth-Century Optimism,” in The Great Chain of Being (New York: Harper, 1960).
4. G.W. Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E.M. Huggard (LaSalle: Open Court, 1988): para. 21. Cf. the similar threefold division by Maimonides (1135 — 1204), the leading Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, in The Guide For the Perplexed (III.xii). Archbishop William King likewise uses a threefold classification of evil as imperfection, natural, and moral evil. Cf. his An Essay on the Origin of Evil, trans. Edmund Law (Cambridge, 1758): 92.
5. William Paley, Natural Theology, 2 vols., ed. Elisha Bartlett (New York: Harper, 1857): 2.155.
6. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, n.d.): II.IV.4.
7. Immanuel Kant, On the Failure of All Attempted Philosophical Theodicies (1791), in Michel Despland, ed. and trans., Kant on History and Religion (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1973): 294.
8. Thomas Auqinas, Summa Theologiae, trans, and ed. Thomas Gilby (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1967): Ia. Q19.art.9.
9. Here I am following HJ McCloskey’s categories, Cf. his “God and Evil,” in Nelson Pike, ed., Good and Evil (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964): 63.
10. John Stuart Mill, Nature, in Three Essays on Religion (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969): 28-30. But cf. note 61 below.
11. Paley, Natural Theology, 2:131ff.
12. Cf. Basil, Hexaemeron, III.5: “Do not then go beyond yourself to seek for evil.. .Each of us, let us acknowledge it, is the first author of his own vice.” Maimonides makes a similar point when he refers to self-inflicted evils as the largest class of ills. Cf. his Guide, III.xii.
13. Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: The Mary Baker Trustees, 1934): 188. Cf. pp. 348, 393.
14. Ibid., p. 480. Cf. p. 470: “If God, or good, is real, then evil, the unlikeness of God, is unreal. And evil can only seem to be real by giving reality to the unreal.”
15. Alan Watts, The Two Hands of God (NY: Macmillan, 1963): xix.
16. Ibid., p. 15.
17. Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, ed. Robert Hutching, vol. 31 of Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1952): “Appendix.”
18. Ibid.
19. Plotinus, The Enneads, 3rd edition, trans. Stephen Mackenna (London: Faber and Faber, 1962): 1.8.3.
20. Basil, Hexameron, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. VIII, trans. Blomfield Jackson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951): II.4–5.
21. Augustine, Enchiridion, III. 11–13.
22. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981): Book 3, Prose 10 and 12; Book 4, Prose 2, passim.
23. Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, trans. Roy Deferrari (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1951): I.v.29.
24. Aquinas, ST, Ia.Q48.arts. 1 and 3.
25. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979): 55.
26. Leibniz, Theodicy, para. 32. Cf. paras. 20, 29–33.
27. Pope John Paul II, “Salvifici Doloris: The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering,” Origins 13 (February 1984).
28. Stephen Davis, “Free Will and Evil,” in Encountering Evil, ed. Stephen Davis (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981): 73.
29. John Hick proffers this idea in the various presentations of his Irenaean theodicy.
30. GC Berkouwer, Sin, trans. Philip Holtrop (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977): Chapter 1, “The Question of Origin.”
31. Cf. JS Mill’s finite theism as propounded in his Three Essays.
32. Cf. those who place the origin of evil “in” God as in the theodicies of John Roth, Frederick Sontag, Edgar S Brightman and some process theologians.
33. Augustine, On Free Will, III.xvii.48. Cf. Enchiridion, VIII.23.
34. For bibliographical references see Michael Peterson, “Recent Work on the Problem of Evil,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 4 (October 1983): 335-339.
35. Cf. his God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1967) and The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). A simpler version is found in his God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974).
36. Plato, Statesman, 273.b.
37. Ibid., Phaedrus, 246a-b. Cr. Phaedo, 80a-b.
38. Ibid., 79c.
39. See David Griffin, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia: John Knox, 1976).
40. Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974): 58. On the relationship of demonic powers to evil see the works by Marguerite Shuster, Power, Pathology, Paradox: The Dynamics of Evil and Good (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987), Walter Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) and Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces that Shape Human Existence (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), and GB Caird, Principalities and Powers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956).
41. Aquinas, ST, Ia.Q19.art.9. Cf. Augustine, Enchiridion, XXIV. 95–96, and Leibniz, Theodicy, para. 22–26.
42. Aquinas, ST, III.Q1.,art. 3: “O fortunate crime which merited such and so great a redeemer!”
43. Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, I.iv.23. Cited by Hick, Evil and the God of Love (New York: Harper, 1978): 91.
44. Calvin, Institutes, III.xxiii.7; Augustine, Enchiridion, XXV.99.
45. Nelson Pike, Good and Evil, p. 2. Critics advancing this argument include FH Bradley, JS Mill, JE McTaggart, Anthony Flew, HD Aiken, JL Mackie, CJ Ducasse, HJ McCloskey, WT Stace, and Richard LaCrois. Cf. Pike, pp. 86-87.
46. J. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind, LXIV, 254 (1955), as reprinted in Pike, p. 46.
47. Ibid., p. 47.
48. Ibid., p. 49.
49. Ibid., p. 57.
50. Anthony Flew, “Theology and Falsification,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1964): 108.
51. Pike, “Hume on Evil,” in Pike, God and Evil, pp. 85-102.
52. For two examples, see Jean Paule Sarte, What is Literature?, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1950): 160-162; and Dorothe Soelle, Suffering (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1975): 149. Both examples are taken from Surin, pp. 51, 95. Soelle writes, “the God who causes suffering is not to be justified even by lifting the suffering later. No heaven can rectify Auschwitz” (p. 149). Cf. Roth, p. 10.
53. Ninian Smart, “Omnipotence, Evil, and Supermen,” in Pike, God and Evil, pp. 106, 112.
54. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (New York: Hafner, 1961): 69.
55. For bibliographic references see Peterson, pp. 335-339.
56. William Paley, Natural Theology, 2:131ff.
57. Kant, “On the Failure of All Attempted Theodicies,” p. 287.
58. John Cobb, “The Problem of Evil and The Task of Ministry,” in Davis, Encountering Evil, p. 176; John Roth, “A Theodicy of Protest,” in Davis, p. 10; and Griffin, in Davis, p. 110. By “healthy-minded” people I do not have in mind William James’ idea of a natural predisposition but a deliberate human choice.
59. HE Fosdick, Living Under Tensions (New York: Harper, 1941): 215-216. Cited by Hick, Evil and the God of Love. Others like R Tsanoff, Geddes MacGregor, and JS Whale have made this point. Cf. Hick, p. 11, note 2.
60. JS MIll, Utility of Religion, in Three Essays, pp. 113-114. Cf. also note 10 above.
61. Ibid., Theism, p. 174.
62. Hume, Dialogues, p. 94.
63. Anselm, Proslogion, Chapter I. Cf. Isaiah 7:9.
64. S. Kierkegaard, The Gospel of Suffering, trans. David and Lillian Swenson (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1948): 77. Cf. pp. 70, 84.
65. Surin, p. 61. I think Surin wrongly implies that theodicies of Christian faith necessarily are opposed to philosophical or theoretical theodicies.
66. John Paul, p. 31.
67. PT Forsythe, The Justification of God; Lectures for War-Time on a Christian Theodicy (London: Duckworth, 1916): 64 — 65.
68. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, p. 66.
69. Ibid., p. 69.
70. Dostoyevsky, Brothers, II.IV.4.
71. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday, nd): 230.
72. CS Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Seabury, 1961): 28. Cf. The Problem of Pain (NY: Macmillan, 1962): 26.
73. Anthony Flew, “Divine Omnipotenc and Human Freedom,” in A. Flew and A. MacIntyre, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology, p. 158, note 21.
74. JS Mill, Autobiography (NY: Columbia University Press, 1944): 28—30.
75. Ibid., in Letters, ed. HSR Elliott (1910): I; 272.
76. Ibid. “Mr. Mansel on The Limits of Religious Thought,” from Chapter 7 of his An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1865), contained in Pike’s God and Evil, p. 39.
77. Ibid., p. 43. Cf. Mill’s Theism, p. 187.
78. Ibid., p. 45.
79. CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 39.
80. Descartes, Meditations, p. 53. Cf. pp. 57, 79.
81. Cf. Hick, Evil and the God of Love, pp. 333-335, and Davis, “Free Will and Evil,” p. 94, for two examples.
82. Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, p. 10.
83. Augustine, Enchiridion, V.16.