4 Suffering and Evil (I)
SUFFERING AND
EVIL (I)
Undoubtedly the greatest intellectual obstacle to belief in God—for both the Christian and the non-Christian—is the so-called problem of evil. That is to say, it seems unbelievable that if an all-powerful and all-loving God exists, He would permit so much pain and suffering in the world.
The amount of human misery and pain in the world is, indeed, incalculable. On the one hand, there are all the evils that are the result of man’s own inhumanity to man. Unlike the beasts, man seems to have a penchant for almost unimaginable cruelty to others. Perhaps the most forceful way to bring this home is to read a book such as Daniel P. Mannix’s History of Torture1 or to visit a medieval castle and look at the terrible devices used to inflict pain on prisoners. What is especially sickening is that historically the church has been part of this barbarism. Between 1096 and 1274, for example, the medieval church launched eight major Crusades, as well as numerous smaller ventures, aimed at liberating the Holy Land from Islamic control. These expeditions, which were characterized by greed, deceit, and the lust for power, accomplished almost nothing and resulted in the loss of thousands of lives. The fourth Crusade, for example, launched in 1204, was supposed to be aimed at Egypt, but at the last minute the Crusaders diverted the mission and sacked instead the Christian city of Zara and then attacked Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Christian empire, pillaging the city with what one historian described as “unparalleled horrors.” But the most heinous of these expeditions was the so-called Children’s Crusade of 1212. In this ludicrous mission, thousands of children were recruited to form an army to liberate the Holy Land. But the children never got any farther than Marseille, France. There they were kidnapped and sold into slavery by the leaders of the Crusade.
The history of mankind is a history of bloodshed and war. Some years ago on PBS I saw a ten-part serial, “The World at War,” which presented a history of the Second World War. The last installment of the program calculated the lives lost in that conflict: 6 million Jews slain in Nazi concentration camps, 16 million lives lost in Germany, 20 million persons killed in the Soviet Union, and so on. The numbers were staggering. In all, some 51 million people were killed in World War II. Think of it! And that says nothing of the millions and millions of wounded, of the untold suffering of the living, of the poverty, starvation, dehumanization, immorality, and disruption of normal lives that war throws up in its wake. And lest those statistics numb us by their inconceivability, we ought to remind ourselves that those people died one at a time.
Perhaps no one has stated more powerfully the objection that human, moral evil poses to the existence of God than the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In a scene in the novel The Brothers Karamazov the atheist Ivan explains to his brother Alyosha, a Russian Orthodox priest, how evil in the world makes it impossible for him to believe in God:
“By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow,” Ivan went on, seeming not to hear his brother’s words, “told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general rising of the Slavs. . . . People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beast; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. . . . These Turks took a 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. . . .
“But I’ve still better things about children. I’ve collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding. . . . This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? . . . Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have lasted on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to dear, kind God!”2
Such moral evil is bad enough, but perhaps even more difficult to reconcile with the existence of an all-powerful and loving God is the suffering brought on by natural causes in the world. One thinks of natural disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, or tornadoes; of the different sorts of diseases, such as smallpox, polio, cancer, or leukemia; of congenital disabilities, such as muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, or encephalitis; of accidents and injuries, such as being burned, drowning, or falling. Sometimes these natural evils are intertwined with human evils: for example, there are countries in which millions face starvation, not because there are not enough relief supplies to meet the need, but because the government will not permit those supplies to reach the people but instead uses food as a political weapon to crush rebel resistance.
In 1985 the horror of natural evils was brought home to me in a powerful way through two incidents shown on television. In Mexico City a terrible earthquake had devastated blocks of high-rise apartment buildings. As rescue teams in the aftermath of the quake searched the rubble for survivors, they came across a ten-year-old boy who was trapped alive somewhere in the recesses of a collapsed building. During the next several days, the whole world watched in agony as the teams tried to remove the rubble to get to the boy. They could communicate with him, but could not reach him. His grandfather, who had been trapped with him, was already dead. “I’m scared!” he cried. After about eleven days, there was silence. Alone in the darkness, trapped without food, afraid, the little boy died before the rescue teams could free him.
That same year a mudslide swept over a village in Colombia. As rescuers came to help survivors, they came across a little girl who was pinned up to her chin in muddy water. For some reason or other, they could not free her or remove the water. All they could do was stand by helplessly and watch her die. Every night on the news we saw films of the little girl’s decline. It was the most pathetic sight I have ever seen. She stood there, unable to move, spitting out the water that continually flowed into her mouth. As the days went by, she became more exhausted, and deep, black circles formed under her eyes. She was dying before our very eyes, as we watched on television. Finally, the evening newscaster reported that she was gone.
Those two incidents rent my heart. Oh, God! I thought. How could You permit those children to die like that? If they had to die, so be it! But You could have let the boy be killed instantly by the collapse of the building or let the little girl drown suddenly. Why these torturous pointless, lingering deaths? I’ll be honest with you. When I see these sorts of things go on, it makes it hard to believe in God.
When I was a very young Christian, I thought that such things didn’t happen to Christians who were walking in God’s will. Didn’t Romans 8:28 say that “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose”? Christians who experienced pointless, gratuitous suffering must have strayed from God’s will. But such a naive outlook is obviously incorrect, for the righteous and innocent do suffer. I think of a prominent Christian leader in my home town who was decapitated in a sledding accident when he ran into a barbed wire fence he hadn’t seen; or of a pastor who backed out of his driveway and ran over his infant son, who had been playing behind the car; or of some Canadian missionaries who were forced to return from the field when their little daughter fell from her third-story window to the concrete driveway below and suffered severe brain damage. Clearly, Christians have not been exempted from the apparently pointless evils of the world.
In light of the quantity and nature of the suffering brought on by human or natural causes, how can it be that an all-powerful, all-good God exists? This is a question that must trouble many people, for several years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner was able to make his book a best-seller by titling it When Bad Things Happen to Good People.3 Unfortunately, he could not solve the problem, for he could answer the question only by denying that God is all-powerful. But if we stick with the biblical conception of God, how are we to account for the existence of evil in a world that was made and is sustained by an all-powerful, all-good God?
Let me begin by making a number of distinctions to help us to keep our thinking straight. In the first place, we must distinguish between the intellectual problem of evil and the emotional problem of evil. The intellectual problem of evil concerns how to give a rational explanation of God and evil. The emotional problem of evil concerns how to comfort or console those who are suffering and how to dissolve the emotional dislike people have of a God who would permit such evil. The intellectual problem is in the province of the philosopher; the emotional problem is in the province of the counselor. It is important to understand this distinction, because the solution to the intellectual problem is apt to appear dry, uncaring, and uncomforting to someone who is going through suffering, whereas the solution to the emotional problem is apt to appear deficient as an explanation of evil to someone contemplating it abstractly.
Keeping this distinction in mind, let us turn first to the intellectual problem of evil.
Here again, we need to make a distinction. There are two ways of formulating the intellectual problem of evil, either as an internal problem or as an external problem. That is to say, the problem may be presented as arising from certain beliefs to which Christians are committed in virtue of being Christians, so that the Christian world-view is somehow at odds with itself. On the other hand, the problem may be presented in terms of truths to which Christians are not committed as Christians but which we nonetheless have good reason to believe. The first approach tries to expose an inner tension within the Christian worldview itself; the second approach attempts to present evidence against the truth of the Christian worldview.
Now the internal problem of evil takes two forms: the logical version and the probabilistic version. In the logical version of the problem, the atheist’s goal is to show that it is logically impossible for both God and evil to exist, just as it is logically inconsistent to say that an irresistible force and an immovable object both exist. The two are logically incompatible. If one exists, the other does not. The Christian faith is committed to the reality of evil, just as it is to the reality of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. But this is inconsistent. Since we know that evil exists, the argument goes, it follows logically that God must not exist.
In the probabilistic version of the problem, the admission is made that it is possible that God and evil coexist, but it is insisted that such a coexistence of God and evil is highly improbable. Thus, the Christian theist is stuck with two beliefs which tend to undermine each other. Given that the evil in the world is real, it is highly improbable that God exists.
We can graphically display these distinctions as follows:
Let us examine each of these versions of the argument in turn. We shall consider first the internal problem of evil. As we have noted, this version of the problem holds that the two statements “An all-powerful, all-good God exists” and “Evil exists” are logically inconsistent. They cannot both be true.
Now at face value, those statements are not inconsistent. There is not an explicit contradiction between them. But if the atheist means that there is some implicit contradiction between them, he must be assuming some hidden premises that would serve to bring out the contradiction and make it explicit. But what are those assumptions?
There seem to be two: (1) if God is all-powerful, then He can create any world that He chooses, and (2) if God is all-good, then He would prefer a world without evil over a world with evil. The atheist reasons that since God is all-powerful, He could create a world containing free creatures who always freely choose to do right. Such a world would be a sinless world, free of all human, moral evils. By the same token, being all-powerful, God could as well create a world in which no natural evils ever occurred. It would be a world free of evil, pain, and suffering.
Now notice that the atheist is not saying that men would be mere puppets in such a world. No, he’s saying that it’s possible for a world to exist in which everyone freely makes the right decision. Such a world must be possible from the Christian point of view, for if it were not, we would be saying that sin is necessary, which would be unbiblical. Thus whenever a moral decision is made, it is theoretically possible always to decide to do the right thing. So we can imagine a world in which everyone freely chooses every time to do the right thing, and, since God is all-powerful, He must be able to create it.
But since God is also all-good, the objector continues, He would, of course, prefer such a world to any world infected with evil. If God had the choice between creating a flawless world and a world with evil in it like this one, He would surely choose the flawless world. Otherwise, He would Himself be evil to prefer that His creatures experience pain and suffering when He could have given them happiness and prosperity.
The eighteenth-century Scottish skeptic David Hume summarized the logical problem of evil nicely when he asked concerning God, “Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”4
But the fallacy with this line of argument is that the two assumptions made by the atheist objector are not necessarily true. In the first place, it is not necessarily true that an all-powerful God can create just any possible world. God’s being all-powerful does not mean that He can do logical impossibilities, such as make a round square, or make someone freely choose to do something. If you cause a person to make a specific choice, then the choice is no longer free. Thus, if God grants people genuine freedom to choose as they like, then it is impossible for Him to determine what their choices will be. All He can do is create the circumstances in which a person is able to make a free choice and then stand back and let him make that choice. Now what that means is that there may be worlds that are possible in and of themselves, but that God is incapable of creating. Suppose, for example, that in every world where God created free creatures those creatures would freely choose to do evil. In such a case, it is the creatures themselves who bring about the evil, and God can do nothing to prevent their doing so unless He removes their free will. Thus it is possible that every world God could create containing free creatures would be a world with sin and evil.
Moreover, as for natural evils, those could be the result of demonic activity in the world. Demons have freedom just as do human beings, and it is possible that God could not preclude natural evil without removing the free will of demonic creatures. Now you might be thinking that such a resolution to the problem of natural evil is ridiculous and even frivolous, but then you would be confusing the logical problem of evil with the probabilistic problem of evil. Admittedly, ascribing all evil to demonic beings is improbable, but that is strictly irrelevant here. All we are trying to show now is that such an explanation is possible and that, as a consequence, the atheist’s argument that God and evil are logically incompatible fails.
So the first assumption made by the atheist objector, namely, that an all-powerful God can create any world that He chooses, is just not necessarily true. Therefore, the objector’s argument on this ground alone is invalid.
But what about the second assumption, that if God is all-good, then He would prefer a world without evil over a world with evil? Again, such an assumption is not necessarily true. The fact is that in many cases we allow pain and suffering to occur in a person’s life in order to bring about some greater good or because we have some sufficient reason for allowing it. Every parent knows this fact. There comes a point at which a parent can no longer protect his child from every scrape, bruise, or mishap; and there are other times when discipline must be inflicted on the child in order to teach him to become a mature, responsible adult. Similarly, God may permit suffering in our lives to build us or to test us, or to build and test others, or to achieve some other overriding end.
Sometimes this process can be very painful, as C. S. Lewis discovered upon the death of his wife. Comparing God to a Cosmic Surgeon rather than to a Cosmic Sadist, Lewis mused,
The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is . . . hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport—might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless.
What do people mean when they say, “I am not afraid of God because I know He is good”? Have they never even been to a dentist?5
Thus, even though God is all-good, He might well have sufficient reasons for permitting pain and suffering in the world. Consequently, the second assumption of our atheist objector, that an all-good God would prefer a world with no evil over a world with evil, is not necessarily true.
The bottom line is that the logical version of the problem of evil does not stand up to scrutiny. No one has been able to formulate a valid argument to prove that God and evil are inconsistent.
But those who propound the logical problem of evil can regroup and return for a second wave of attack. They can admit that there is no inconsistency between God and evil in general but still argue that the existence of God is inconsistent with the quantity and quality of evil in the world. In other words, though abstractly speaking there is no inconsistency between God and evil, there is an inconsistency between God and the amount and kinds of evil that actually exist. For example, even if God’s existence is compatible with, say, the fact that innocent persons are sometimes murdered, it is not compatible with the fact that so many people are killed and that they are killed in such torturous, gruesome ways. An all-good and powerful God would not permit such things to happen.
But the crucial assumption behind this reasoning is that God cannot have morally sufficient reasons for permitting the amount and kinds of evil that exist. The failing in this assumption is that it is just not clear that the assumption is necessarily true. Consider first the amount of evil in the world. As terrible a place as the world is, there is still on balance a great deal more good in the world than evil. Otherwise everyone would commit suicide. But people generally agree that despite its ills life is worth living, and when things are going bad, people characteristically look to the future in hope that things will get better.
Now it’s possible, given human freedom, that in any other world God could have created, the balance between good and evil would have been even worse than in this one. That is to say, any world containing less evil might also have contained less good. Maybe the world we presently have has in it the most good God could get for the least amount of evil. Now you might say that seems pretty unlikely. But then you would be confusing once again the logical problem of evil with the probabilistic problem of evil. To refute the logical version of the problem of evil, the Christian does not have to suggest a plausible or likely solution—all he has to do is suggest a possible one. All he needs to do is show that God and the amount of evil in the world are both possible—and that he seems to have done.
Now consider the kinds of evil in the world. The Christian believes that God has overriding reasons for permitting the world’s most terrible atrocities to occur. For example, it may be that God places such a premium on human freedom that He is willing to permit atrocities to occur rather than to remove the free will of those who commit them. (Perhaps God will punish the wrongdoers in the afterlife and comfort those who were victimized, but that is beside the point at this stage of the argument.) Similarly, if we adopt the hypothesis that natural evils are the result of the free activity of demons, then the same point about free will applies there, too. Now it still might be objected that God could have created a world of free creatures in which they committed fewer atrocities. But then the same argument applies as before: though it is possible that in such a world there would be less evil, there might also have been less good.
The point is, if the objector aims to show that it is logically impossible for God and the evil in the world to both exist, then he has to prove that God cannot have morally sufficient reasons for permitting the amount and kinds of evil that exist. And he hasn’t given us any proof for that assumption.
We can go even further than this. Not only has the objector failed to prove that God and evil are inconsistent, but we can, on the contrary, prove that they are consistent. In order to do that, all we have to do is provide some possible explanation of the evil in the world that is compatible with God’s existence. And the following is such an explanation:
God could not have created a world that had so much good as the actual world but had less evil, both in terms of quantity and quality; and, moreover, God has morally sufficient reasons for the evil that exists.
So long as this explanation is even possible, it proves that God and the evil in the world are logically compatible.
So, to sum up our discussion of the logical problem of evil, we have seen that there is no necessary incompatibility between the presence of an all-good, all-powerful God and the presence of evil in the world. And I’m extremely pleased to report to you that after centuries of discussion, contemporary philosophy has come to recognize this fact. It is now widely admitted that the logical problem of evil has been solved. (Praise the Lord for Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga to whom this result is due!)6
But before we breathe too easily, we have to confront the probabilistic problem of evil. This we shall do in the next chapter.
1 Daniel P. Mannix, History of Torture (Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 2003).
2 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: New American Library, 1957), 219-223.
3 Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981).
4 David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited with an introduction by Norman Kemp Smith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), part 10, 198.
5 C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), 55-56.
6 This chapter is a popularization of the Free Will Defense laid out by Plantinga in The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 164-195; see further, Alvin Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” in James Tomberlin and Peter Van Inwagen, eds., Alvin Plantinga, Profiles, vol. 5. (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1985), 36-55.