The Problem of Evil is often known these days as a “knockout punch” used by skeptics to debunk Christians and their silly claims about God. I know I have certainly used it in the past, and on the surface it seems quite strong! The Christian God is claimed to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Evil appears to exist, so either he is powerless to stop it (so no longer omnipotent), doesn’t know it is going to happen until it is too late (so no longer omniscient), or doesn’t care to stop it (so no longer omnibenevolent). Boom, Christianity is debunked! We can have our Sunday mornings back…

The Problem with the Problem of Evil

Not so fast. Let’s take a closer look at the Problem of Evil and see if it needs some tweaking. For one, you need to start with quite a large assumption to even pose the question in the first place: we assume evil actually exists. The Problem of Evil would hardly be worth anything if we could look at the world and say: “Life is pretty great and painless! Boy I’m glad evil is simply a thought experiment and doesn’t actually exist in our reality.” So we come into the discussion with an assumption (an assumption that is nevertheless well-documented and justified) that evil exists and should be stopped. The issue arises when we assert that this apparent fact of reality proves God cannot exist, and thus throwing evil out with the bath water.

Think of it this way. If evil really existed, that would necessarily imply that real good existed. If I see the tails side of a coin, I can be justified in presuming that there is some other side to the coin and that tails does not tell me the whole story. This real good, in the Christian understanding, is ultimately God (James 1:17). Continuing on with the coin analogy, the Problem of Evil often times sounds like this to me: “We all know that tails (evil) exists, so therefore heads (God) cannot possibly exist!”

Now I will concede that there is a version of the Problem of Evil that is less foundationally shaky, and that is to treat it like an internal critique. If you can show that evil as understood in the Bible is definitionally contradictory to a Biblical understanding of God, then you win in proving the God of the Bible does not exist. I just don’t believe this is the case, and one can simply read the Bible to see why. It is littered with people suffering from real evil all the time (books like Job, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations comes to mind). The Bible, aka one of God’s primary means by which we know about him, does not seem to shy away from sharing quite heinous evil. We will return to investigate this Biblical understanding of God’s relationship with evil later on.

So what are the valid stances provided by the current form of the Problem of Evil? I believe there are only two. One, God doesn’t exist and so therefore any conception of evil is no longer grounded. Anything we had been calling “evil” up to this point just simply is, any attempts to apply moral value to actions are simply a fools errand and we ultimately must fall back into moral relativism.

Let’s think of another analogy to drive this home further. Say I have been using a ruler to define the lengths of objects in my house. However, I (for whatever reason) take offense to the idea that this same ruler tells me how long a foot is. What if I really wanted my desk to be 3 feet wide instead of 2? One day I get it into my head that maybe I don’t have to listen to the judgements my ruler makes on the measurements of my everyday objects. My solution? I simply get rid of the ruler. My problem is now I no longer have the foundation that had previously made sense of my old measurements, and I can’t possibly hope to make any meaningful measurements in the future. Now this may seem like a benign analogy because there isn’t really a concerning result that comes out of it. So what I mistake 2 feet to be 3 feet? But when we translate this to our understanding of a “moral ruler”, it could mean the difference between a stranger helping you fix your flat tire and a different stranger killing you and stealing your car. Who are you to tell the second person he can’t do that, if his own moral ruler says it is just fine?

Likewise, in a desire to remove God (the ruler), we remove the very thing that made the evil we have seen throughout history (the previous measurements) mean anything at all. Even worse, we completely lose our ability to discern between good and evil in the present day (the future measurements). As far as I can understand it, by removing God from the discussions about morality, we lose any grounding for calling events like the Holocaust evil while essentially guaranteeing that we will stumble our way into our own horrific event while believing what we are doing is just fine.

You might object and say that as a collective society we can learn from the past, and follow the science, to make sure we behave “good” in the future (which I claim no longer means anything at this point). The problem here is constantly making the assumption that our current understanding of the world is as good is it has ever been. Nazi Germany certainly thought that when they started throwing Jews into gas chambers. Americans thought that as they purchased, abused, raped, and killed African slaves for centuries. Romans thought that as they regularly hung men from crosses to be eaten alive in public without so much as batting an eye. To believe that we really have it figured out this time is simply naive in my estimation. Just imagine trying to explain to someone 100 years ago that nearly 1 million unborn babies are killed every year in the U.S. alone. To think that they would judge us as becoming “more civilized” or some derivative of that is quite a stretch. I don’t wish to turn this into a post about abortion (perhaps for another time), but I hope my point is starting to become clearer.

In this God-less worldview, you are forced to say that any “pain, suffering, or evil” experienced by individuals is actually just a current inconvenience that is causing certain hormonal compounds to make us feel all sorts of negative emotions. Couldn’t we just resolve this by simply going into the brain and rewiring it so that at minimum, we no longer get upset over evil? We could call it a surgical procedure and fund it as another form of healthcare (“have you gotten your kid’s negative emotions cut yet?”).

What is ultimately the justification for not aiming to achieve for everyone what this wonderful meme depicts if suffering is simply something to minimize, and pleasure something to maximize? Forgive me, but this is where I believe the God-less system logically leads to, and it is simply not a stance I am willing to entertain. Funny enough, I saw this problem almost instantly while I was still an atheist taking a course on the Philosophy of Ethics during my first year of college (I had not yet softened in my posture towards religion). Something within me was so disgusted by the conclusions that naturally come from a subjective morality that I immediately wanted alternatives. Unfortunately for me, I still lacked the foresight at the time needed to realize that this was a problem that was actually stuck to my atheism, and not just my ethics.

So, our first valid conclusion from the Problem of Evil is that evil doesn’t actually exist at all. Likewise good doesn’t actually exist at all, and thus moral actions are ultimately useful made-up stories we tell ourselves. These useful stories are equally valid regardless of the time and culture that shapes them because who is to say your made-up story is better than my made-up story?

To me, the first conclusion is quite a horrifically bleak conclusion. Is there another option? Or is this the only valid conclusion to the drawn? I would like to propose that there is indeed a second valid conclusion to be made. That in the same way heads proves the existence of tails, so too evil proves the existence of God.

I imagine this is only truly convincing for those who are not willing to let go of the belief that real evil exists. Again, that is technically a valid position to hold. I just imagine it is rather easy to hold that position when we are simply observers in a thought experiment, as opposed to victims of said evil. Imagine trying to convince a rape victim, or a slave, or a torture victim, that what they went through wasn’t evil. Just think about that short trend of asking women whether they would prefer to be alone with a man or a bear in a forest. The answer was essentially unanimous, and not just among the women but from men as well! The man in the thought experiment is an overwhelmingly worse proposition, but why? If anyone’s ultimate concern is their own personal survival, what would be the qualitative difference between the two? Can’t they both kill you? There is something seemingly unique to humans that instills a more gut-wrenching fear than a creature that weighs several hundred pounds more than us, can run up to 30 mph, and has razor sharp teeth and claws that can completely dismember us beyond recognition. I am proposing that this qualitative difference between the man and the bear is the man’s genuine capacity for evil. Human evil is simply too well historically documented for me to go on in this present day and age and say “evil is just a useful delusion”.

Teaser: Investigating the Internal Critique

Earlier in this post, I mentioned that the Problem of Evil has a better form to it, and that is in the form of an internal critique. Now I am sorry to disappoint the reader, but I have decided to not yet expound on this internal critique. I feel as though I could do more reading of my own to give a more robust and interesting response because this is quickly going to become an investigation along the lines of “Is the God of the Old Testament evil”. I obviously am going to argue against that proposition, but I also know how pervasive a claim it is (I really believed it myself), so I imagine it will take genuinely good responses to disarm the accusation.

I hope that at this point for the reader, I have at least put the “external critique” form of the Problem of Evil to bed. I am NOT sidestepping the internal critique form of the objection. It is 100% a valid objection that deserves good answers (hence my desire to do some more reading first). That next post will address that issue along with the question of why God doesn’t end all the evil and suffering we see today immediately. I hope to accomplish this sooner rather than later, but until then, thanks for reading.