Theodicy is the term used for the apologetics of the problem of evil; explaining why there is evil in the world, and how a good God can allow evil to exist. Many explanations have been offered by better authors than me, and in more depth than I can go here. For example, C. S. Lewis has a go at it in his book God in the Dock. For a good on-line look at the topic, see this on YouTube. The topic is huge and, in the end, the sum of the responses and explanations is probably inadequate or unsatisfying to many, and perhaps especially for atheists. Nevertheless, I will have a go at it from my own perspective.
Few people will doubt that evil exists in the world; bad things do happen to everyone at some point. It is widely accepted that there are two types of evil in the world. Moral evil can be attributed to humans: starvation, war, murder, theft, rape, abuse, cheating, corruption, etc. Natural evil, on the other hand, refers to other forms of suffering not attributable to people: diseases of various sorts, earthquakes, tornados, floods, and other natural disasters, often referred to as "acts of God", even though they are all in the natural realm. In some cases, there is overlap between these two types, as when humans purposely spread, or withhold treatment for an otherwise natural disease, for example. There is also a third type of evil; spiritual evil, as in the actions of demons, curses, spells, and other occult phenomena. But if you don't believe in God, you probably don't believe in such things anyway, so here I will focus only on the moral and natural evils afflicting our world.
At the highest level, the explanation for both types of evil is 'The Fall'. Man rebelled against God, so things broke down and went wrong. In the garden of Eden, the first humans decided they knew better than God what was good for them and so went their own way, separating themselves from him. As a result they were evicted from the garden and had to deal with the resulting problems. Adam and Eve could have stayed in Eden with the tree of life, enjoying easy living forever, but foolishly they chose to rebel against God's simple instruction, and got what they were warned about. According to this doctrine, even the world itself suffered, and became less comfortable for people, animals and the rest of creation. Creation was damaged by man's disobedience, resulting in ongoing sin, death, suffering and evil.
No one is perfect and we all make stupid mistakes that sometimes cause hurt or damage, and sometimes we do these things on purpose. In Christianity, this tendency is called original sin. Whether you take the Eden story literally or allegorically, all humans are clearly prone to sin and, without guidance and discipline, do not naturally seek God and their neighbour's good. Even with careful upbringing and education, all people sometimes do things they know they shouldn't, or fail to do what they know is right. With this understanding, we see that God did not create the evil in the world, but he allowed it to happen. This explanation does not satisfy most people, so I will need to expand on it.
We humans were created with free will, the ability to choose between different actions for our own reasons. God values and honours our free will, in particular, our ability to ignore or deny him, so he allows evil to exist in the world as the direct result of our choices. The Bible teaches that we all have some evil in our hearts, that none of us on our own will seek God or always do the right thing. This doctrine of original sin is easy to demonstrate: every honest person will surely admit to knowingly doing things that were wrong. Pride, greed, envy, vengeance, hatred, fear, jealousy, ill wish, competition, and so on, are feelings experienced by all humans, and we all at various times succumb to and act on them, causing bad things to happen. I doesn't take much imagination to see how this explanation accounts for most if not all moral evil at the individual, group, national and global scales.
Suppose that God were to step in to stop our actions or block our evil intentions in order to prevent the evil from happening. We would then not be truly free, as for example, in a 1984-like police state where our every thought and move are monitored, and we are coerced into only one path at every choice of consequence. Not much free will there! Moreover, if our mistakes were corrected at each pass, we would never learn from them. Of course we are all free to choose the good and right, and perhaps we mostly do so, but we are still prone to evil choices and deeds, and God usually allows us to proceed, regardless of the consequences. God does not like what we do wrong, but he constrains himself in order to honour our free choices.
In addition to our free will, God values faith and wants us to recognize his existence, as well as his goals and desires for us. If God acted all the time to stop evil, there wouldn't be much room for faith since his actions would be obvious and predictable. This does not mean, I hasten to add, that believers don't continue to sin. We are ALL broken and fallen and need God's grace to grow in goodness, and we ALL need his forgiveness for our misdeeds. With sin and evil all around, it is hard - even impossible - to think and act perfectly, unless your name is Jesus the Christ.
In this approach to the issue, God's highest priority is not our health, comfort, safety, or well being, although he does want those for us. Rather his highest goal is for us to seek and find him, to turn our lives, hopes, dreams, behaviour, and thinking over to him willingly, trusting that he knows what is best for each of us. Our relationship with him is more important than minimizing or removing evil from the world. To maintain our free will, God allows our evil acts, even when they cause serious harm to others or his creation. And of course, he sent his Son Jesus to take the burden of our sins so that we would not have to pay the penalty for them - a penalty we could not possibly ever pay.
Some apologists for Christianity point out that not all pain and suffering is necessarily evil. Pain serves a purpose as physiological warnings: remove hand from hot surface, avoid those cactus spines, stop exercising when it hurts, etc. And we know we should seek help for injury or prolonged pain; e.g. toothache, sickness, overwork, self-harm, etc. Rest that sprained ankle, it hurts for a good reason!
Moreover, some types of suffering may build strength of character; the Christian version of, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you better". Some people who go through evil times come out wiser and better for it, and in hindsight, no longer condemn the suffering they faced. Many Christians even report that more serious evils in their lives helped them grow as persons or believers. Some readers may find this questionable, but it is an oft-reported reality.
Humans may also be personally complicit in some types of seemingly 'natural' evils. It is hard to blame God for your lung cancer if you've been smoking all your life. If you break his rules about sexuality and catch a serious disease, don't rail against God. If you live on the shallow waterfront of a river, or ocean beach front in Florida, don't complain to God when you are flooded during a hurricane or spring runoff. Many similar situations could be listed. God gave us minds to make wise decisions, not to ignore danger signs we know about and understand.
According to Bible, the Fall also caused some natural evils to arise: labour pains for women, tough soil and weeds in farming, and ultimately, death itself (see Genesis 3:16-19). The moral aspects of all of creation are entwined together, so that our hereditary rebellion affects everything. This concept of evil could therefore be extended, in principle, to other perceived evils: animal attacks, sicknesses, even natural disasters.
It will, of course, be argued that natural disasters are entirely natural and not man made. But as science and technology progress, we have an increasing ability to mitigate or prevent these "evils" through, for example, tornado and tsunami warnings, rescue teams, safety standards and building codes, hurricane evacuations, reliability improvements, vaccines, cancer treatments, modern health-care, etc. To the extent that we do NOT develop and widely apply these so that suffering continues and people are hurt, some of these natural evils begin to look more like moral evils - largely intentional failures or oversights on our part in caring for our fellow humans. If we collectively choose to fund weapons development above health care or disease prevention, do we not become complicit in the resulting evils?
Nevertheless, these broad "explanations" cannot cover all forms of perceived evil in the world. They are particularly unsatisfying for certain specific evils: children dying of cancer, healthy people dying of heart attacks or struck by lightning, tornado deaths, random accidents, etc. These seem like real evils that mankind cannot completely mitigate or prevent. So there is always some residue of evil that is difficult to "explain away". In such cases, Christians fall back on trusting God and knowing that his ways are largely inscrutable to us mere mortals (see Isaiah 55:8-9, or Romans 11:33). That explanation will, of course, be particularly unsatisfying to non-believers. Theodicy can perhaps account for and explain most forms of evil to some degree, but the problem of evil does not go away, and remains a mystery and one of the most difficult areas of Christian theology.
To turn the tables, however, atheism also has a serious problem with evil. In a materialist world - nature is all, there is no God, no heaven or hell, etc. - there can be no good or bad other than how we individually or collectively feel about things. There is no absolute right or wrong, no "ought", only "what is". So how can atheists complain about evil except as special pleading, "I don't like this or that"? After all, we do not consider a lion to be evil when it kills an antelope to eat. If we are all just evolved apes, then how can we cry foul when bad things happen to us, or to our family and friends? To complain about evil in the world is to recognize that good and evil truly exist and that we have a moral compass to recognize unfairness and to express our deepest indignation about the suffering and harm so apparent around us. Ultimately to recognize good and evil as realities implies a moral source and some standard above material existence to judge events and their effects. That begins to look like spirituality, pointing to a Source for truth, or even to God. In this way, "the problem of evil" becomes a pointer to God's very existence.
There are many other similar postings, essays and entire books on the general subject of theodicy. Here, for example, is an excerpt from one such article:
"For Augustine the Fall is central. According to him, God created an idyllic paradise with no suffering, death, or natural disasters. It was human disobedience that introduced these things into creation. Most educated people in the West no longer find that account plausible. The whole process of evolution involved the suffering and death of millions upon millions of creatures, within a context that included occasional earthquakes and floods. These facts are now part of the scientific data we must accept. And they strongly suggest that God, in the process of creation, built in the inevitability of suffering as a part of His method."I hope my writing here at least partly addresses the widespread complaint against Christianity regarding evil in the world. I am aware that it does not completely satisfy, but perhaps it cuts evil down to something less enormous and impossible to deal with. And discussion about evil should not be all negative or unhappy. There are things each of us can do to limit or mitigate evil in and around us. The next time you are upset about some particular evil in your life or in the world, consider:
- Have I helped bring this on by my own choices and actions? e.g. obesity, smoking, lack of exercise, unwilling to share my resources, being unkind, ignoring warnings, taking risks, letting anger, revenge, or hatred loose. There are many ways we can contribute to or aggravate evil around us.
- Is there something I or we could do to mitigate the effects of this wrong? e.g. can I help with pollution, hunger, loneliness, pandemics, poverty, crime, distrust, etc. How could I live better? e.g. honesty, generosity, love, compassion, gentleness, etc. There are many things even individuals can do to make the world a better place.
- If the "evil" is truly not my fault and cannot be significantly prevented or mitigated, then where do I go for comfort, solace, support, etc? Family, neighbours, agencies, government, or maybe, perhaps even God? God invites us to bring our cares to him in prayer, and many people do receive these, along with a degree of peace.
Addendum: Some Later (much later!) Thoughts.
There is far more to say on this topic. People have studied, speculated, analysed, struggled and theologized about it for millennia, in far more depth than I can pretend to. I am obviously not going to resolve it in a blog post - even an extended one. However, I have lately been reading Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick, an excellent introduction to theodicy from a historical and philosophical perspective. While he plays loose and fast with scripture, he does cover the topic and makes the reader think deeply. As I read through it therefore, some additional thoughts came to mind, as follows.
A major area of confusion I've seen is regarding the meanings of "good" and "evil" - whose good and what counts as evil? Some authors consider any pain or suffering from any cause to be 'evil'. Some even worry about 'metaphysical evil': why the world is not more perfect in every way? And why isn't everything angelic everywhere? That seems unnecessarily demanding, to my mind. We know that God made the world "very good", and was originally pleased with it. That should be good enough for us too, I trust, rather than being concerned about how God could somehow have made it 'better'.
Limiting ourselves to more prosaic, but very real sorts of evil, what should we include as "evil"? A wild-fire burns trees, a bird eats worms, a lion kills and eats a gazelle; surely those are not evil events? It is a lion's created nature to hunt, kill and eat other animals. The world's long history is filled with death and destruction: viruses kill bacteria, plants die and rot, animals are killed and eaten, violent natural disasters strike, and so on - all part of the natural, created order that long preceded humans and the Fall. Indeed scientists say that 99% of species that ever existed on Earth are now extinct. Is all that history truly evil? Perhaps the extinctions made way for better lifeforms or more variation over time, leading eventually to ourselves. Thus, while it may be disappointing for many to have no more trilobites or dinosaurs, their disappearance from creation need not be considered 'evil' in any moral sense. Mind you, I'm sure the gazelle is not happy to be killed in such a violent and painful way, and the dinosaurs probably felt pain as they were wiped out, but was any of that truly evil?
While I cannot speak for plants and animals, and they rarely speak for themselves, if we limit evil to include only natural evil affecting humans, combined with moral evil produced by human sin, then we vastly reduce the 'problem' of evil in the world to recent geological time when humans existed, or even later, after the Fall of Adam and Eve through their disobedience. Their sin was tasting of the fruit of the tree of "the knowledge of good an evil" against God's explicit command (Genesis 3:1-6). If good and evil were not known by humans prior to the Fall, then that should be a good place to start studying the problem of evil. I'll say more on this below.
On the other side of the question, what should be meant by "good"? There is the good of our individual private desires, the good for humanity's well being, and God's good for his eternal purposes; perhaps his creation's stability and endurance. Clearly these "goods" are not all the same. Your wishes can be the opposite of another person's, making it impossible to please you both. Surely that is not an evil, and even God could not fulfil each person's every wish. Moreover, as fallen humans, many of our wishes are wrong - indeed, evil - so we should look at a higher level to define "good". I suggest that since God is good, his definition of good should be the benchmark here. Of course we don't know for sure what that entails over the history of the universe, but we can hope and trust that it includes what is best for humanity in the long run. After all, God did send his son to pay for our sins and lift us out of our fallen condition, so he clearly wants the best for us - within his own context - as he originally intended.
Based on these understandings of "good and evil", there should be fewer distractions and difficulties to consider as we further discuss theodicy. My previous notes about evil and, especially, the human responsibility for essentially all moral evil, and perhaps aspects of natural evils, can still be applied. The following are some additional thoughts which may help explain why some level of 'evil' in the world is inevitable and thereby limit the arguments against a good God that started the need for a theodicy.
One such consideration is the overall story of the universe. Any good story - one worth reading or being part of - requires a plot and a variety of characters. If all the characters were identical, and perfectly good to each other, or if there were no difficulties, tensions or conflicts to be overcome in the story, it would be rather tedious and boring for all involved. Perhaps God, in his wisdom, made the universe including both good and the potential for evil - or at least difficulties to be dealt with - in order to make things interesting and worth doing, not just for him, but also for his creatures, especially those with spirits and the capability to commune with him; that is, us. We need challenges to help us strive, learn and grow. Some of those challenges may hurt or set us back, and so often seem like evil to us. Yet often in retrospect we see that we are better for the difficulties we have gone through. This does not absolve us or all evils, but may explain some of the gentler ones better, and narrow down the field a bit.
That explanation is a version of the "aesthetic approach" to theodicy, in which God allows certain problems and difficulties in order to make the world a better place - more beautiful, varied, exciting and changing - for its inhabitants. I note that some theologians' focus on "perfection" of the created world, including sinless humans is somewhat misplaced. God never viewed his creation as 'perfect', rather he called it "good" and then "very good". This suggests that there was room for conflict, disagreement, disappointment, sorrow, struggle, etc. and hence 'evil' at some level. Here too perhaps, the perfect is enemy of the good?
Another thought: perhaps in Eden human beings were endowed in a way that kept natural evils at bay. Carnivores would not harm them, they were immune from diseases, natural disasters occurred elsewhere, they were perhaps warned of impending dangers, and so on. Or perhaps those blessings would have been included with the fruit of "the tree of life", which they did not get around to eating? Once evicted from the garden, however, through their own fault, any such attributes were stripped off or faded away, making then susceptible to the same sufferings and hurts experienced by other animals, as suggested in Genesis 3:17-19.
Some more thoughts on the Fall: the "felix culpa" (happy fault) view holds that while God intended Adam and Eve to be innocent and naïve for a time, their Fall gave them "knowledge of good and evil", thereby allowing them to become fully moral creatures, for better or worse, and ultimately calling on Jesus as the blessed Redeemer to enter creation on our behalf as part of the unfolding of God's kingdom. Or perhaps God was saving the "knowledge of good and evil" for later, once they had matured in the protected place. Why else have that tree in the garden? Note too that Eden was indeed a garden and not the entire created world, suggesting that God started his people off there as a sort of newbie 'sandbox' environment, to let them grow and mature before releasing them into the wild world. They however, jumped the gun, gaining God's displeasure, and making life harder for themselves - a sort of hasty "childhood's end" that brought misery along with the opportunity for growth - but He still loved them and continued to care for them, albeit at some distance.
Having herein dabbled into theodicy and 'the problem of pain', evil and pain do not disappear, of course. Neither is all apparent evil our own fault or the due penalty for our own misdeeds. Evils, both natural and moral, are very real and the mystery of evil in a good world, with a loving God remains. However, by dividing up the scope and types of evil and explaining some of the above aspects of it, I hope I have provided a more nuanced perspective, reducing the scale and range of the problem, and opening up some avenues for further personal reflection. The problem of evil is very real and isn't going to go away, but it can be reconciled with a good and loving God who still wants the best for us and has done his best to make it possible for his spiritual creatures to have a good life, in fellowship with him, both now and eternally.
