Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Theodicy

My Positions

  1. No theodicy succeeds. Each either denies the suffering, gives up one of god's attributes, or declares the question unanswerable, and the last is a surrender presented as an answer.
  2. The problem of evil does not disprove every god. It disproves the one who is all three of omnipotent, omniscient and good. That is the one on offer.
  3. I have tried to state each defence in its strongest form below. The replies are short because the failures are simple.

The defences

The free-will defence. Evil is the price of creatures who can genuinely choose; a world with free beings who sometimes choose badly is better than a world of puppets. Alvin Plantinga's 1974 version is generally agreed to have answered the logical problem (it is not strictly contradictory for a good god and some evil to coexist).

  • It says nothing about natural evil. Earthquakes, childhood leukaemia, the parasite that eats the eye of a child, and five hundred million years of animals being eaten alive before any human chose anything are not the consequence of anyone's freedom.
  • Heaven is, on every account, full of free beings who never sin. If God can do that there, he could have done it here.
  • It assumes that free will of the required kind exists (Freewill vs Determinism), that it is worth any quantity of suffering, and that a good being would let a child be tortured rather than restrain the torturer, which no good human being would accept as a description of themselves.

The soul-making defence. Suffering develops courage, compassion and character; a world without it would produce no virtue. This is John Hick's version, drawing on Irenaeus.

  • The distribution is wrong. Suffering falls on infants, animals and the dying, who learn nothing from it, and it destroys at least as many characters as it builds.
  • The quantity is wrong. A world with one fewer famine would still make souls. The defence justifies some suffering and is used to excuse all of it.
  • It makes the Holocaust a curriculum, and it is to the credit of most believers that they cannot say so out loud.

Sceptical theism. We are not in a position to know what reasons God might have; the fact that we cannot see a justification does not mean there is none.

  • This proves too much. If we cannot judge God's reasons for permitting evil, we cannot judge that he is good either, and every inference from the world to God's character, including the ones the apologist likes, is cut off at the root. It is the Appeal to Ignorance applied to oneself, and it makes "God is good" an unfalsifiable claim (Popper's Razor).
  • It is morally paralysing. If any evil might serve an unknown greater good, there is no reason to prevent one.

The greater good / best of all possible worlds. Leibniz: every evil is necessary for a greater good, and this is the best world God could have made. Voltaire wrote Candide in reply, after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed tens of thousands on All Saints' Day, many of them in church, and there has not been a better reply since.

The punishment theodicy. Suffering is deserved. This is the position of Job's friends, and the Book of Job itself condemns it. Applied to children and animals it is monstrous; applied across lifetimes it becomes karma (Reincarnation and Karma) and fails the same way.

Evil as privation. Augustine: evil is not a thing but an absence of good, so God did not create it. This is a word game. The child with bone cancer is not experiencing an absence.

Afterlife compensation. All will be made right in heaven. Compensation is not justification. One cannot torture a man and settle the matter afterwards with a cheque, and a being who could have prevented the harm has no need of a compensation scheme.

Notes

  1. David Hume put the evidential form in 1779: the world looks exactly as it would if its cause were indifferent to us, and nothing like what a benevolent omnipotence would produce. William Rowe's fawn, burning slowly in a forest fire that no one witnesses, is the modern statement: suffering that serves no purpose any being could have. The theist's task is not to show that some suffering could be justified, which everyone grants, but that this much, so distributed, is what a loving omnipotence would choose. No theodicy attempts that, because none could.
  2. The problem is only a problem for the god with all three attributes. Drop omnipotence (process theology, a god who is doing his best), drop goodness (Deism, a watchmaker who does not care), or drop omniscience, and the difficulty goes away, along with most of the reasons anyone wanted that god in the first place.
  3. Stephen Fry's 2015 remarks on Irish television put the matter in a minute: bone cancer in children, what's that about? The reaction to them, an attempt to prosecute him for blasphemy, is its own answer about how good the theodicies are (Blasphemy).

Sources

  • Plantinga, A., God, Freedom, and Evil (1974)
  • Mackie, J. L., "Evil and Omnipotence", Mind 64 (1955)
  • Hick, J., Evil and the God of Love (1966)
  • Rowe, W. L., "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism", American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979)
  • Wykstra, S. J., "The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering", International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984)
  • Hume, D., Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Parts X–XI
  • Voltaire, Candide (1759)

Also see