This is a sketch of a theodicy: an attempt to solve the problem of evil by offering a justification of God’s permission of evil. It is only a sketch: you will have to go and consult the literature to find these theodicies fully and better expressed in all their glorious technical detail.
We are asking why a good God allows bad things to happen. There are classically two answers to this question: a) It’s good for us, and/or b) it’s our fault.
Bad things are good for us
Bad things are good for us because they give us the opportunity to be better people. And we would choose to be better people, if we could. If we lived in a world of pure pleasure and happiness, with no pain or suffering, we wouldn’t have any reason or inclination to do or be any better. We’d have little inclination to do anything at all, in fact. We could just lounge about in our blissed-out state. This isn’t a state that’s particularly conducive to the development of virtue.
Without any pain or suffering in the world, it would be difficult to see how virtue could even be possible. Virtues emerge when we encounter and overcome pain and suffering, or moral vice. But in a world without pain or suffering, there would be nothing to overcome and no possibility of moral vice. Virtue is redundant in such a world, and in being redundant has no value.
In a world free from suffering: Why bother trying to be better? Everything is already as good as it can be.
But we know, at least since Socrates, that once we understand what virtue is then we see that it’s more valuable than pleasure and freedom from pain. We understand that it’s more important to be better than it is to feel better. Pleasure and freedom from pain might be nice, but they’re of no great worth. They are shallow, superficial, lightweight; they lack any deep and meaningful value. They are nothing to be proud of.
A life dedicated to pleasure and the ignorance of virtue might be one that we can envy but it’s not one that we can admire.
A world without pain or suffering is a world as good as it can be, but it’s also a world as flat and as trivial as it can be; it has no depth, no weight, or heights. It is a world without meaning.
Wouldn’t you rather be courageous than cowardly? Wouldn’t you rather be compassionate than cruel? Wouldn’t you rather be wise than foolish? But a cowardly and cruel fool can experience just as much pleasure as a courageous and compassionate sage, and is probably more inclined to avoid pain. Recognising virtue to be of greater value, we would choose to be virtuous, even if it’s the more painful road.
But if we do value virtue above pleasure, why would we be willing to trade the more valuable in exchange for the less valuable? Because that’s what we’d get in a world without pain or suffering: we would trade the great prize of virtue for the trifling compensation of pleasure and freedom from pain.
The world is better, therefore, with some pain and suffering, because such a world allows us to be virtuous. It also allows us to be vicious, of course: it would hardly be possible to be cowardly if there were nothing to fear, or cruel if there were no pain to inflict. This vicious possibility presents us with a serious choice: are we to be good or evil?
All virtue after this question becomes even more valuable because it will be freely-chosen virtue. It’s not virtue that you fell into, or inherited; it’s virtue that you have earned by your own choices and efforts. But in order to earn it, you must face the choice, and that means there must be the real possibility of vice.
Virtues that are freely chosen, earned from our own efforts, are things we can really be proud of. They make us worthy as human beings. But the only way we can achieve these great things is by living in a world of pain and suffering and temptation and vice. Living in such a world literally makes our souls what they are. A soul-making theodicy says that the destination is worth the journey.
We don’t want it to be easy
Why can’t the journey be a bit easier?
It wouldn’t be the same if the journey were easier, because the value of the achievement is in part granted by the difficulty of achieving it. The value of the achievement comes from the fact that you’ve hard-earned it.
Would you want everything to be easy? Would you want everything handed to you on a plate? What would there be to celebrate in having what you have not earned? You would be like a spoilt child boasting about their inherited wealth.
God, like Socrates, wants us to be morally and spiritually virtuous. He understands that, to be of real worth, this needs to be earned. But the way must be hard for the virtues to be hard-earned.
And it is hard to live in such a world, but what’s achieved is valuable precisely because it’s hard. As Kierkegaard said, it’s not that the way is narrow, it’s that the narrowness is the way. If the way were broad and easy, it wouldn’t mean all that much to travel along it, and it would be no great achievement to reach the destination. As Spinoza said, everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare: if it were common and easy, there would be little to celebrate in its achievement. It’s only because it’s difficult that it’s worth anything at all.
So why does a good God allow bad things to happen? Because it’s good for us, because it makes us better people, and because it’s more important to be better than it is to feel better.
We want freedom
But if this is God’s plan, why isn’t the plan going better? Why aren’t we all being better people? Why does a good God allow us to do such bad things?
Because God has given us freedom, and it’s up to us what we do with that freedom. And because it’s up to us, the responsibility is ours. It’s our fault when we go wrong.
In giving us the freedom to choose between virtue and vice, when we choose vice, there’s nothing God can do about it because our decisions are our decisions, not His. As free creatures our choices are not in God’s power. If we go wrong, even He must suffer the consequences of our freely-chosen decisions. We could have freely chosen the good, but we didn’t, so now we must all suffer the consequences.
It’s out of respect for our freedom that we must be allowed to suffer the consequences of our choices. God could, presumably, take our decision away from us, but then He would be robbing us of our freely-chosen virtue, which is the most valuable thing we could have. We can hardly complain if He leaves us with the most valuable thing we could have. We’ve been given the option of living in a world of perfect virtue and yet we continually choose otherwise. We can hardly complain for getting what we choose.
Read more: The Problem of Evil as an Ethical Problem
Read more: The Problem: A Dialogue on the Problem of Evil
Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy
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