God: Divine Author

A Brief Note on the "Problems" of Evil

The most powerful objections to theism, in my estimation, are the various problems of evil. How can an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God allow for the existence of evil? Problems of evil have a recognized force in the philosophy of religion, and despite the various forms such an argument might take, beneath them is a gross anthropomorphism. Brian Davies has pointed this out in The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, by showing that ‘omnibenevolence’ for thinkers like Aquinas and Augustine, does not mean “perfect moral agent”, but rather, an intrinsically perfect being to whom all things are directed as their final cause.

God, being outside of the created order, is not subject to natural law, which is the foundation of all moral obligation. As a human being, I am obligated to stop evil (all-else-equal), but there is no good inference from this fact to the claim that a being of pure actuality is similarly obligated. God does bring about greater goods through the permission of evil according to St. Thomas and St. Augustine, but this is due to his willing that goodness prevail over evil, rather than having a set of obligations towards creatures. For any explanation of God’s permitting of evil in the world to stand, we must acknowledge that God is divinely simply, free of moral obligation, and the author of our story rather than a simple character.

Several theodicies (theories about why God allows for evil actions to occur) have been developed. For instance, some have forwarded a soul-building theodicy on which God allows for the existence of evil for the purpose of bringing about development in the character of his creatures. The appeal of this account cannot be understated: in our lives, suffering and evil often allow for us to triumph over them, and become better people as a result. Another popular theodicy consists in an appeal to creaturely freedom as a good that ‘justifies’ God’s permission of evil. The thought is that, for any agent, A, if A cannot commit evil, then A is not free, and God desires the freedom of A, justifying his allowance of evils perpetrated by A.

I haven’t done full justice to each of these views, and there are plenty of other theodicies on offer, but I want to use these as a starting point. Soul-building is attractive particularly because of it’s resonance with our experience. I can testify that suffering and evil have helped me improve as a person, and I suspect many others can say the same. The issue with such an account, if understood as a universal claim about evil, is that there are plenty of evils incongruent with this analysis. Imagine two non-human predators in the jungle battling for survival, resulting in the painful death of them both. No soul was built up in this process. The proponent of soul-building may find this lacking precisely because animals are not moral agents, but this won’t do for two reasons: 1) the scenario described may not involve moral agents, but can we deny that it carries imperfection? If so, how does God bring about greater goods from it? 2) Imagine Jack kills Jill brutally, and is killed by police immediately afterwards. Unless we want to posit an afterlife of soul-building for Jack, the soul-building account fails to explain why God allows cases like this to occur.

Free-will theodicies fail on several grounds. Is it really necessary for A to be able to sin to be free in the truest sense of the word? God is freedom itself, yet cannot sin, and scripture presents freedom as being directly correlated with the increasing inability to sin. We are freer after sanctification than prior, despite our ability to sin being increasingly destroyed by the life of prayer, mortification, and sacramental participation. It is also not a contradiction in terms for a human to be free and impeccable. Christ was perfect man, and could not sin. The Blessed Virgin Mary never sinned, according to Catholic and Orthodox teaching, and she was certainly free! Even if one wants to reject these two examples as actual, they’d be in a pickle if they wanted to deny their possibility. The free-will theodicies, without being supplemented by an Authorial-Classical model of God, fail to account for why God didn’t have his cake and eat it through the creation of morally perfect, yet free, agents.

My point here is that the only way to solve the problem of evil is to acknowledge the classical theism of Aquinas and Augustine, in which saying ‘God is good’ means something similar to, yet different from, ‘Martha is good’. God is the author of the story, not a character within it. Just as an author like Tolkien or Lewis allows various kinds of evil to occur in their stories for various reasons, God has various reasons for permitting evil, and no charge could be laid against him. I don’t deny the viability of soul-building as an explanation for many instances of evil and suffering, but this one piece of a bigger story. Free-will theodicies suffer a deeper problem in that they assume a notion of freedom I’m inclined to reject. I don’t think the capacity to sin is per se necessary for morally responsible free agents to exist. This begs the question as to why God permits us to be free in such a way so as to be able to sin, as opposed to creating us with perfect moral character from the jump.

The author does not need to explain to the characters why he allows them to suffer, since they exist on a different level of being. We can ascertain the reasons God might have for allowing evil through philosophy, but we will never have an exhaustive list of them. In my view, almost all of the mainstream theodicies get something right, but need to work together, with the background of classical theism, and consequently, God’s authorial role over creation, in view. We can maintain, I think, the claim that there is no successful problem of evil, because such problems presuppose a humanoid god that is in someway expected to stop evil from ever occurring, without compromising the fact that God has various reasons for permitting evil, some of which we can know through the book of God’s natural revelation. We have no reason to expect that God wouldn’t allow evil or that we would have exhaustive knowledge of his reasons for doing so.

God is not bound by the obligations governing his creatures anymore than Tolkien is bound by the obligations his characters have. Since we are characters, we cannot generate any prediction that we will be able to access God’s reasons for permitting evil, at least not exhaustively. but there is certainly no logical problem of evil that we need to solve. It’s a pseudo-problem from the beginning. The upshot of thinking about God as telling a story through his creatures is the expectation that God would permit evil. If I went into a Barnes and Noble and picked up a book that claimed to be authored by the best writer in history, and the back of the book claimed that ‘no evil or suffering occurs in these pages’, I would put the book back and look for something better. An essential part of a good narrative is the various trials and tribulations the characters—and the world itself—experience. God did not have to permit evil and suffering, but if his creative act is analogous to authorship (an analogy intrinsic to the classical model of Aquinas and Augustine), there is a fittingness for him to allow evil such that we’d be reasonable to expect him to do so.

Besides the philosophical problem(s) of evil, aimed at disproving the existence of God, there is what I’d call the “existential” or “emotional” problem of evil, which is much harder to solve. How do I, knowing that God has allowed suffering and evil to infect the world, continue to push forward? How do I deal with it? How do I overcome my suffering? How do I cease from doing evil? Christ is the only answer to this problem. God has become a man for our sake, and suffered more than all of humanity put together in his sorrowful life and passion. The solution is Christ. Unite yourself to Christ in suffering, in joy, in love, in hatred for evil, and depend on him to deliver you from this world to the next. God has become the protagonist in our story to save us. There’s nothing you or I have suffered that compares to the suffering of the Son of God. The Prophet Jeremiah writes: “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger” (Lamentations 1:12). The sins of humanity were thrust upon the Blessed One, and he conquered them in his resurrection.

I can see a philosopher coming to terms with classical theism and it’s resolution to the 'problem’ of evil, while remaining dead in their sin, unable to understand how they are to conquer evil and suffering in their lives. The only path to freedom from these powers is through the power of Christ, who has provided us the possibility of resurrection to everlasting happiness, on the condition that we obey and follow him. As St. Paul writes:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Cor 15:55-58).