The problem of evil is the problem of reconciling belief in a good and powerful God with a sincere recognition of the evil and suffering that exists in our world. This problem is often expressed as an ‘inconsistent triad’: three propositions (i.e., a ‘triad’) that appear to be incapable of all being true at the same time (i.e., are logically ‘inconsistent’). God is good; God is powerful; evil exists. It seems, at least at first glance, that if any two of these propositions are true then the third must be false. If God is good and powerful, then why would God let bad things happen to good people or otherwise innocent creatures? Given that we recognise the occurrence of many injustices and varied bad things, it must be either that God wants to prevent these things from happening but is not able to, or else is able to prevent bad things happening but chooses not to, or is both unable and unwilling, which is a state so low that it hardly qualifies as divine; so either God is not powerful or God is not good or God is non-existent. Or else we are wrong when we recognise the bad things in the world, all the evil and suffering, as something that a good and powerful thing would prevent, if they could.
Consult your down-to-earth intuition: we tend to think that if someone is a good person then they would do what they can to stop something bad from happening. Imagine a doctor has the medicine needed to treat a sick and suffering child. Imagine the child was bitten by a snake and all that’s needed is the anti-venom, or the child has a simple infection that would be easily cured by a dose of antibiotics. All the doctor needs to do is administer the medicine and the child will get better. There is nothing preventing them from doing this: they have the medicine, they know the child is sick, no obvious harm will come from saving the child, and the child is in their care. Now imagine that the doctor does not administer the medicine: the child continues to be sick, suffering greatly, and then dies. The parents of the child implore the doctor to administer the medicine, but the doctor steadfastly ignores them and allows the child to die. No reason or justification is offered by the doctor for their behaviour. As far as we can tell, there is no reason for the doctor not to administer the medicine. And yet they don’t. What would the parents say? What would you think of such a doctor? Would you call them a good doctor?
In this example, to say that the doctor is ‘good’ presents an intuitive paradox: if the doctor really were good, then why would they not administer the medicine to save the dying child? We want an answer; the parents want an answer; they want to understand why their child was allowed to die. They are owed an explanation. The doctor is good, the doctor had the medicine, and yet the medicine was not administered and the child died. Why was this allowed to happen? Why did they look on yet would not take their part? Did the doctor have any reason to behave as they did? Could any such reason be good enough?
You can construct structurally-similar examples for almost anything that we call ‘good’. This doesn’t even need to be ‘goodness’ in a distinctively moral sense. Imagine a good baker of bread. The baker is good; the baker has all the resources necessary for the baking of good bread; and yet they repeatedly churn out lousy loaf after lousy loaf. What’s going on here? Why does an apparently ‘good’ baker seem to be incapable of baking a decent loaf? We want an explanation. The most intuitive explanation is that one of our propositions must be wrong. It turns out that, contrary to our belief, the baker did not have all the resources necessary for the baking of good bread, or perhaps they simply weren’t such a good baker after all. It’s even possible that we, as it turns out, are not reliable judges of good bread. They are making ‘good’ bread, we just don’t like it.
We can even construct structurally-similar examples where, not only is the ‘goodness’ in question not distinctively moral, the thing it is applied to could not be considered a bearer of moral attributes. Imagine a good tool, like a saw. If we say the saw is good, and the wood is ordinary, and yet the saw cannot cut the wood, then we are presented with a paradox. If the saw cannot cut the wood, then we must suppose that either the wood must be unusual in some way, or else the saw must not be a very good saw after all. A good saw can cut ordinary wood: that is what we mean by a ‘good’ saw.
The problem of evil is structurally similar to these examples. If God is good, then God would, presumably, do what He can to prevent or alleviate evil and suffering; like a good doctor heals patients when they can and a good baker bakes good bread and a good saw can cut ordinary wood. If God is powerful, then God, presumably, has the power to prevent or alleviate evil and suffering; like a doctor having the necessary medicine to hand or a baker having everything they need to make bread or a saw only being tested on ordinary wood. And yet apparently preventable evil and suffering continues to exist, and to a degree of intensity that seems quite capable of being alleviated. What’s going on here? Why doesn’t God prevent or alleviate the intense evil and suffering in the world? Just like the cases of the good doctor or baker or saw, we want an explanation. We want to make sense of the apparent contradiction. This is the problem of evil.
The Philosophical Problem of Evil
This is the problem of evil as it is understood in the philosophical context: it is primarily a matter of achieving a consistent set of beliefs. We want an explanation that enables us to resolve the paradox of the ‘inconsistent triad’, either by learning which of our beliefs is false, or else how the three beliefs can be consistent, even though they appear not to be. What we are left with is a philosophical puzzle that needs to be worked through and resolved.
The problem would take a different form in other contexts. A distinctively religious form of the problem of evil might be more concerned with the task of keeping one’s faith in the presence of evil and suffering. For this purpose, resolving an apparent philosophical inconsistency might not be necessary; a leap of faith might be the answer. Similarly, a distinctively practical or pastoral form of the problem of evil might only ask what we can do to prevent or alleviate evil and suffering, and philosophical speculations can appear idle and somewhat trivial to such a task. Questions of logical consistency seem less of a priority in either case.
These kinds of variations of the form of the problem of evil – the theoretical versus the practical, the philosophical versus the theological, etc. – have been acknowledged and discussed for some time now. I am keen to stress what might have been overlooked, which is the variety of forms of the problem of evil that we can identify even within the distinctively philosophical context. It’s easy to miss the extent of historical variation in the problem of evil within the philosophical context, and even easier to impress an unwarranted homogeneity over the variations that are recognised. We end up with an over-simplified ‘standard’ version of the problem of evil, which ends up leading us astray. To illustrate this, I think it’s helpful to take a quick tour through the history of the problem of evil, from its origins to its present form; not for the purpose of teaching you what you (no doubt) already know, but with the intention of attending closely to the differences. If we resist any anachronistic attribution of our now well-established philosophical form of the problem of evil, I think we will see some very different philosophical problems.
I began this book with a claim that our philosophical understanding of the problem of evil is not healthy. The first step in finding a cure is finding a diagnosis, and any good diagnosis should take account of the patient’s history. This is that patient history.
The Origins of the Problem of Evil, in a Philosophical Context
To start at the beginning, the idea of the problem of evil has probably existed for as long as there have been ideas about gods. It has always been understood that gods can do things: they can create, they can act, they can intervene. We tell their stories. Many gods are also understood to have personalities or character traits, often reflecting our own human traits. Gods love, they get angry, they seek revenge. Gods care. Or at least we humans think that the gods care.
But according to Epicurus, an Ancient Greek philosopher of the third century BC and the traditional origin point for the philosophical problem of evil, the gods do not care, and this is an important lesson. Epicurus creates the first philosophical formulation of the problem of evil in order to teach us this important lesson. His reason for doing so is wrapped up in his eponymous school of philosophical thought: Epicureanism. To better understand Epicurus’s first philosophical formulation of the problem of evil, it’s worth spending some time covering the basics of that school of thought.
(This will seem like a lengthy tangent in an introductory chapter to a book about the problem of evil. It is lengthy and tangential by design. Along the way, remember that our purpose here is to acknowledge any differences between this and the now standard form of the problem of evil.)
Epicureanism
Like many ancient philosophers, Epicurus was only really concerned with one philosophical problem: What is it to live well as a human being, and how do we go about doing this? Solving abstract philosophical puzzles was a part of that task, but only a part: philosophical puzzles were not all that important in themselves unless they helped you to understand what it was to live well and teach you how to do so.
For Epicurus, living well as a human being means nothing more than maximising pleasures and minimising pains. He comes to this answer by route of his best attempt at an explanation of the physical world. Following Democritus, and responding to the paradoxes of earlier pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides and Zeno – philosophical puzzles that were intended to demonstrate that all change and motion is impossible, such as the famous ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’ paradox – Epicurus suggested that change and motion would be possible if the physical world were composed of distinct ‘un-cuttable’ pieces (atoms) that could swerve and rearrange themselves in the void. This would solve the earlier philosophical problem, accounting for both the permanence of ‘being’ together with the impermanence of objects, but the sparsely reductive physics that results has important consequences for the question of what it is to live well as a human being.
If all there is in existence is random atoms in the void, then a human being is nothing more than a collection of these atoms. Consequently, all we could experience is the interaction of our bodily ‘atoms’ with the ‘atoms’ of the world. We experience this as sense data. A ‘fire’ atom interacts with our ‘skin’ atom and we experience the sense data of ‘burning’, and we find this painful. A ‘water’ atom interacts with our burned ‘skin’ atom and we experience the sense data of ‘soothing’ or ‘cooling’, and we find this pleasurable. Epicurus makes use of a bit of an ad hoc bodge by introducing the notion of a ‘soul atom’ to account for the conscious aspect of this atomic interaction, but a basic physicalism remains his foundation.
What does this mean for the question of living well as a human being? Simply this: according to Epicurus’s physics, there is no other mechanism by which we could recognise things that are good or things that are bad besides the interaction of the ‘atoms’ in our bodies with the ‘atoms’ out there in the world. We experience this interaction as sense data, and therefore sense data is the only mechanism by which we can recognise good things as good and bad things as bad. When we experience pleasurable sense data, we call this ‘good’; when we experience painful sense data, we call this ‘bad’. Whatever might be out there in the world, when it comes to questions of good or bad, we only have our senses to go on, and so pleasures and pains are the only indicators of the good (or the bad).
This is not quite full-blown hedonism – the philosophical theory that good and bad are exclusively defined by pleasure and pain: nothing but pleasure has positive value, nothing but pain has negative value – because Epicurus does not define good and bad in terms of pleasure and pain. He only claims that pleasures and pains are the only indicators, for us, of what is good or bad. But either way, when it comes to understanding how to live well as human beings, we should prioritise our sense data, and that means maximising pleasures and minimising pains.
The Four-Part Cure
How do we go about doing this? One option is obvious: seek pleasure, in all its forms, pursue it as much as you can at all times, and always run away from pains. Such a pleasure-seeker and pain-avoider, whilst they might experience some very good times, is certain to experience a lot of bad times too and is perpetually and extremely vulnerable to catastrophe. Such a person does not understand that you can desire too much of a good thing. Eat or drink too much and you will feel sick, suffer a hangover, get fat, and suffer long-term health problems. Do too many drugs and you will get addicted, rot your brain, destroy your health. Have too much sex and you are likely to catch something nasty, fail to maintain your relationships, or be burdened with unwanted responsibilities. For all the pleasure found in such a pleasure-seeking life, it comes at the cost of a great deal of pain. On that basis, it looks like a less-good deal.
Epicurus does not recommend the pleasure-seeking option. Instead, he suggests that the best approach to maximising pleasures and minimising pains is not to pursue pleasure, but to train yourself to experience more pleasure in what you already have or can easily acquire. Rather than trying to make the world fit to you, try to make yourself fit to the world. This might seem more difficult in the short term, but with training it becomes easier in the long term and is the surer route to a life that maximises pleasures over pains.
The first step in training oneself to experience more pleasure in what we already have is to distinguish between various types of pleasures. Some pleasures are what Epicurus calls ‘kinetic’: these pleasures are like quenching your thirst, satisfying your hunger, getting what you want, winning an argument, or having good sex with someone that you strongly desire. Whilst immensely pleasurable, these pleasures require some pain in order to achieve: you need to experience not having what you want before you can get what you want, you need to have an argument (and risk losing) in order to win, and you experience lustful and frustrated longing before you fulfil your sexual desire. These are unpleasant states of desire, relievable only by fulfilling your desire but perpetually vulnerable to frustration. As a result, they are not states that would be the first choice of someone looking to maximise pleasures over pains. Kinetic pleasures tend to leave you locked in a cycle of desire, frustration, fulfilment, leading to boredom, frustration, and more desire. You encounter pain constantly along the way to your desired pleasure. But is it not possible to get the pleasure without the pain?
Yes, says Epicurus, if you try your best to limit your pleasures to what he calls ‘static’ pleasures. These are pleasures which don’t require the experience of any pain in order to achieve. These are more like passive states of being than distinct experiences: like being in a comfortable temperature, not too hot or too cold, or having a pleasant conversation with a friend. These ‘static’ pleasurable states can be achieved without going through the kinetic cycle of desire and frustration. They are more appropriately characterised as an absence of desire: to be at a comfortable temperature is the pleasurable experience of not needing or wanting the temperature to be any different than it is.
Of the two types of pleasure, then, we should desire the static rather than the kinetic, since that is the surest way to maximise pleasures whilst minimising pains. What sort of static pleasures should we desire? Epicurus identifies three types of desires to help us choose. Firstly, he acknowledges that there are some desires and pleasurable or painful states that human beings do not have the option of opting out of. We need food, water, and shelter, and given that we are innately social animals, for the most part, we also benefit from social interaction. These necessities have their corresponding pains – hunger, thirst, exposure, loneliness – giving rise to a desire to be free from such pains and the experience of a statically pleasurable state when we are. Epicurus calls these kinds of desires ‘natural necessary’ desires, since they are ‘natural’ to us as human beings (it would be different if we were lizards or robots) and ‘necessary’ for our continued existence (we must satisfy our hunger sometimes, or else we will starve to death). Since there is no opting out of these natural necessary desires, we should accept them and try to find them as pleasurable as possible, as far as we can keeping ourselves in a static state of pleasure: enjoy simple food, water, a comfortable environment, and pleasant conversation with friends or family. If you can learn to enjoy such a simple life, you will be well on the way to living in a way that maximises pleasures over pains.
The danger comes from wanting more. Too often we get distracted by other desires, or else get led astray into wanting more than we need. Epicurus calls these the ‘natural non-necessary’ desires and, whilst perfectly natural for a human being to want, we should do our best to avoid them when we can because they will inevitably lead to pain. We need food but we do not need that food to be extravagant or particularly tasty. We need water but we do not need wine or beer or coffee or coca-cola. We need social interaction, but we do not need to be revered, celebrated, desired, and held in the highest esteem by everyone we have ever met. Pursuing these ‘natural’ desires beyond the point of necessity is bound to put us back into the kinetic cycle of desire and frustration, with predictably negative results. This should be avoided.
Thirdly and finally, Epicurus identifies the worst of all desires to pursue: what he calls the ‘non-natural’ or ‘empty’ desires. These are desires for which there can never be any fulfilment, though human beings are often inclined to believe otherwise. The desire to live forever, the desire for fame, the desire for wealth. There is no end to these desires, either because there is no possibility of them happening (no one lives forever, e.g.), or else there is no end point for their fulfilment. How much fame is enough; how much wealth? If you desire such a thing as fame or wealth, you will never satisfy that desire; no matter how much you get, it will never be enough. You think you need just a little bit more, but when you get there you find yourself still wanting more. ‘The wealth of vain fancies recedes to an infinite distance.’ Satisfaction is always just out of reach. And all along the way you torture yourself with unnecessary pains and frustrations. You can never fulfil your desire, so end up trapped in a static state of painful frustration. This should be avoided at all costs.
The route to an Epicurean happy life is to train yourself to desire only what you need, find as much pleasure as possible in these ‘natural necessary’ things, and to the best of your ability remain in an untroubled static state of pleasure. Epicurus’s word for this state is ‘ataraxia’.
Ataraxia is a difficult state to achieve and just as difficult to maintain, not least because human beings are vulnerable to all sorts of troubles. That we know we are so vulnerable causes us to worry, compounding troubles by troubling us even when they are not there. We fear death even though we are alive; we fear poverty whilst we have wealth; we fear sickness whilst we have health; we fear abandonment whilst we have companionship. Seeking to preserve our untroubled state, Epicurean philosophy works hard to alleviate our anxiety about the troubles we might face. To this end, it offers us the ‘tetrapharmakos’ or ‘four-part cure’:
God is not to be feared; Death is not to be worried about; What’s good is easily got; What’s bad is easily endured.
Each of these statements acts as a short-hand reminder for the philosophical arguments that support them, offering an Epicurean disciple a to-hand summary of their philosophical way of life, providing comfort in challenging times. I will leave any further exploration of that way of life to other works. I have covered the Epicurean ground this far to make one point: the first part of Epicurus’s ‘four-part cure’ is God is not to be feared, and it is the problem of evil that provides the supporting argument for this reassuring statement.
God is Not to be Feared
Imagine you are in ancient Greece, or many other parts of the ancient world, raised in a society that believes there to be a pantheon of gods, each with their own responsibilities and proclivities. These gods must be appeased and must not be angered or else crops will fail, storms will rise at sea, battles will be lost, or disease or general disaster will lay waste to your home and family. You are naturally fearful of the gods, since they hold your fate in their hands, and you go to great lengths to perform the right rites and rituals, the appropriate sacrifices, and anything else you can do to keep the gods on side. This can be a great source of anxiety and trouble and, if left unchecked, is liable to disturb the untroubled Epicurean mind.
Epicurus does his best to put your mind at ease by pointing out that, contrary to the popular belief of the time, the gods do not seem to care all that much about human beings and their affairs. Many pious people seem to suffer terrible evil; many impious people seem to receive many blessings. There seems to be little actual correlation between being good in the eyes of the gods and getting good from the hands of the gods. If the gods were really good and just and powerful, and cared about human beings and their lives on earth, why would so many bad things happen to good people, or good things happen to bad people? In actual fact, it seems more the case that people pick and choose when to see the hands of the gods at work: when good people receive blessings and bad people receive punishments, people say it is the will of the gods, but they do not say the same when good people receive punishments and bad people receive blessings. There is an apparent contradiction here: if the gods were as people believed, then the world would consistently show a divine justice; but it does not. And yet people still believe that the gods are good and just and powerful and care about human affairs.
Instead, Epicurus wants us to understand that the gods are immortal and happy. As such, they cannot possibly be troubled by human affairs: we have no power to harm or benefit them. And as a result, they have no inclination to harm or benefit us. The gods are indifferent to human affairs, and so we can stop worrying about what they think about us and our attempts to be pious. Pleasing the gods is a paradigmatically ‘non-natural’ or ‘empty’ desire: it is impossible to please the gods because they are already perfectly pleased. You should abandon this ‘empty’ desire. Do not condemn yourself to the statically painful state of fearing the gods.
The problem of evil, in its first drafting, is not an argument for the non-existence of God, nor even the raw material for such an argument. It argues on the basis of the existence and nature of the gods to the conclusion that the gods are indifferent to human affairs. And it does so for the sole purpose of putting our minds at ease.
Chronic Anachronism
Tradition has come to look on Epicurus as the originator of the problem of evil in a philosophical context. In large part, this seems to be due to David Hume, who attributed these ‘old questions’ to Epicurus:
Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?
Would we describe this as a fair reconstruction of Epicurus’s position? I would argue not. I would suggest that it is unrecognisable, if we are attentive to the differences. Hume’s version could not serve Epicurus’s purposes. How could these questions help to put our minds at ease? Should we be more reassured by the prospect of an impotent or malevolent God? If anything, the need to solve the paradox just gives us one more thing to worry about.
At the very least, Hume’s attribution smuggles some anachronistic cargo. Epicurus does not question the power or goodness or existence of the gods, nor even allow the possibility of such a question, and he explicitly contradicts the notion that they would be ‘malevolent’ if they chose not to intervene in human affairs. For Epicurus, choosing not to trouble yourself with the affairs of others is exactly what we would expect from a perfectly virtuous, and hence happy, immortal being. Why on earth would the gods trouble themselves with our affairs?! How much worry we would cause them!
But philosophical tradition has seamlessly absorbed Hume’s attribution into the canon. The important point here is not who said what, when where or why (for the curious: Hume seems to follow Lactantius, at an uncharitable five-hundred years’ distance from Epicurus, and Gassendi at over a thousand more). The important point is that the casualness and widespread acceptance of this attribution shows how easily we overlook certain features of Epicurus’s original philosophical context. The point is that questioning this allows us to recognise a difference, many differences, and that opens the way to a healthier understanding of the problem of evil.
The initial philosophical context of the problem of evil is a distinct philosophical school of thought. It is oriented towards the question of living well as a human being. It is about the maximisation of pleasures and the minimisation of pains. It is grounded in a physicalist metaphysics. Its only function is as a remedy to a barrier to living anxiety-free. It is these things that give rise to the problem of evil, for Epicurus. I think if we attend to the differences here then we would see a very different form of the problem of evil than Hume’s attribution suggests. Hume’s version is very familiar to us, immediately recognisable as a form of the ‘inconsistent triad’, a theoretical rather than practical problem, raw material for an argument for atheism; Epicurus’s version is none of these things.
Neither is any version of the problem of evil that we find in other ancient philosophical schools of thought, such as Stoicism. The Stoics held that the world was created perfect by a perfectly rational divine being. It follows from this that there can be no imperfection in the world. Why, then, do we perceive the world as being anything other than perfect? Why are we troubled by the apparent existence of ‘evil’ and ‘suffering’?
For the Stoics, the fault lies with us and our faulty opinions. The Stoic problem of evil, if we can call it that, encourages us only to reflect on our faulty opinions. Its purpose is only to strengthen our Stoic resolve. It remains a practically-oriented problem. There is no question of questioning the perfect nature of God or God’s creation. To do otherwise would be to abandon Stoicism as such.
And similar could be said of the Neoplatonists, though with them the problem of evil begins to take on a more theoretical and less overtly practical nature. Ambiguously so, however, because Neoplatonism esteems intellectual understanding as a quasi-spiritual virtue. For them, to live well as a human being is to live in intellectual contemplation of the truth. And so having a coherent picture of Neoplatonist metaphysics is an absolute spiritual and moral duty. Any problems must be resolved. Problems such as the problem of evil: If, as a Neoplatonist would claim, all that exists comes as an emanation from a perfect and ineffable ‘One’, how could that One, in being perfect, give rise to anything other than perfect goodness? It doesn’t make sense; it’s like a source of heat making something cold. It is a metaphysical puzzle that must be solved. Plotinus resolves this ‘problem of evil’ by arguing that the One cannot give rise to anything that is not perfectly good, but distance from the One necessarily equates to a distance from perfect goodness. In being distant from the One, we therefore experience a distance from perfect goodness, which we experience as a lack of goodness. This lack of goodness we call evil and suffering, but evil and suffering do not really exist in themselves, being mere absences of the good. It would be wrong to say that the One is ‘making’ this evil and suffering, in the same way it would be wrong to say that the fire is ‘making’ us cold when we move away from it. Perhaps more famously, Augustine used the Neoplatonic metaphysics of the problem of evil to remind us of our distance from God, our fallen nature, and thus the need for Christianity to recover the distance. This is still a practical matter of living well as a (Christian) human being.
Again, I would like to attend to the differences between this and the now standard form of the problem of evil. The Neoplatonic question is not so much ‘does God have a morally sufficient reason for permitting evil and suffering?’ as it is ‘how is it metaphysically possible for a perfect being to create anything that is not perfectly good?’ It is this Neoplatonic version of the problem of evil that goes forward into early Christian tradition, and later into Islamic philosophy, setting the terms of the debate for the next 1000 years. It is this version that we see reappear in Aquinas, for example. It remains long enough to be inherited by the modern period in Europe, in the likes of Descartes and Spinoza, and onwards to Leibniz, who argued on this basis for the metaphysical necessity of this world being the best of all possible worlds.
Only then, it seems, does this ‘theodicy’ attract the response that the existence of evil and suffering, as it is evident to us in the world, is incompatible with the existence of a good and powerful God; that is, only then does it become recognisable as the now ‘standard’ form of the problem of evil, provoking a debate about whether and to what extent God has a justification for the creation or permission of evils. You could even make the case that it is only by offering a justification for God that you open up the question of whether or not God is justified.
That this happened only in the 18th century likely correlates with the new-found publicly-philosophical possibility of atheism as much as anything else. But either way, it is here that we get Voltaire’s savage satire of Leibniz, and Hume’s attribution to Epicurus, and the emergence of philosophers and theologians offering theodicies for the purpose of defending rational belief in the existence and nature of God. I think it was anachronistic of Hume to attribute this to Epicurus, but it is Hume’s version of the problem of evil that goes forward as the standard form in philosophical tradition.
Interlude: Kant
Kant is an interesting marker here, particularly with his ‘On the miscarriage of all philosophical trials in theodicy’ (1791). His work is interesting in itself, but also for the way it shows the traditional ‘solutions’ to the problem of evil being seamlessly co-opted to respond to the new version of the problem, as if those solutions have always been responding to Hume’s kind of problem. Whilst Kant’s discussion of the problem of evil is clearly recognisably similar to the now standard Hume-ish form of the problem, it is considerably more nuanced. Kant does not recognise one problem of evil, but three: Why does God permit pain and suffering? Why does God permit moral evil and injustice? Why does God permit there to be no proportionate relationship between moral virtue and happiness, or moral evil and suffering? Each of these appear ‘counter’ to God’s ‘purposes’ as a good, holy, and just God. The purpose of a good God is the happiness of creation; the purpose of a holy God is moral goodness; the purpose of a just God is to ensure the proportionate correlation of happiness with virtue, or suffering with vice. It would seem that if God were truly good, there should be no suffering; if God were truly holy, there should be no moral evil; if God were truly just, there should be happiness in proportion to virtue and suffering in proportion to vice. But we see suffering, we see moral evil, and we see no proportionate correlation between virtue and happiness. Why would God permit such counterpurposive features in His creation?
Kant considers all the traditional solutions, rejecting each one in turn. His reasons for rejecting the solutions are interesting and well worth a look for any student of the problem of evil, but his conclusion is more interesting. Kant concludes by citing the Biblical example of Job. In the Book of Job we are told that Job suffers terribly at the hands of Satan, permitted by God. Job demands an explanation: why should he suffer so? Job’s friends try to comfort Job by offering various solutions to this ‘problem of evil’. Perhaps Job deserved it; perhaps the reason for God’s permission of this suffering is beyond Job’s understanding. Job rejects these attempts at theodicy: he knows he is innocent and he demands an explanation. God speaks from a whirlwind, not giving Job an explanation, but seeming only to assert His mighty power in contrast to meagre Job: ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?’ Job acknowledges God’s power and place and chooses to say no more about it: ‘I have said too much already’, as some contemporary translations put it.
What is it about Job’s response that Kant cites so favourably? Job is, above all else, honest: he is honest when he suffers, honest in his confusion, honest in his demands for an explanation, honest in his rejection of the inadequate solutions offered by his friends, and honest in his recognition of God’s power. (And we all know how Kant feels about honesty…) Job sticks with what he knows. Job’s friends, in contrast, speak of what they do not know. As a result, they are dishonest, to themselves and to Job: they tell him lies when they are in no position to know the truth. Better to remain silent and be thought to have no adequate solution to the problem of evil than speak out and remove all doubt. Kant points out that God Himself agrees here, saying to one of Job’s comforters: ‘I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.’
Kant’s request for an honest quietism went unheeded. Philosophising about the problem of evil continued, as did the construction of theodicy. But by now we have made a distinct break from the form of problem that came before. This change in the form of the problem is shown in the change in the ways of responding to it, and in the motivations for doing so.
An Ethical Question
At some point the problem of evil ceased to be something that was meant to help us live well as human beings. Once upon a time, the purpose of philosophizing about the problem was to correct our attitude to the world, one way or another. Whether to alleviate our anxieties about pleasing the gods, or to remind us of our faulty opinions, or to reassure us about the ultimate underlying goodness of the physical world, we wanted to reconcile our beliefs about God and evil in order to rightly orient ourselves in the world. This seems to me to have been a noble aim: can we say the same now?
How could offering excuses for the permission of the terrible evils of the world help you orient yourself rightly in this world? What purpose would nit-picking about the improbability of God’s existence serve? There might be answers to these rhetorical questions, but if we don’t know why we are philosophizing about the problem of evil, how can we possibly know whether or when we have achieved what we set out to do?
That we have lost something important in our thinking about the problem of evil is the first part of my diagnosis. It seems to me that we have chosen to believe that the now standard form of the problem of evil – the one that tries to attack or defend the rationality of theistic belief – is and has always been the only philosophical form available: all other variations are ‘religious’ or ‘theological’ or ‘pastoral’ but not really philosophical. I think this is a mistake, and one that robs us of some of the most profound ways of approaching our thinking about the problem. It was not always the case. Philosophical reflection on the problem of evil can tell us something important about how to live well as human beings, but only if we let it. It can reassure us about the ultimate goodness of the created order; if true, what could be more important than that? It can also show us the essentially chaotic, cruel, and unjust nature of the world; and that’s an important thing to recognise too, if true. Either way, the problem of evil ought to help us orient ourselves in the world and live in a way that we consider right and true.
Epicurus’s first philosophical formulation of the problem of evil is offered as a solution to what we might now call the ‘pastoral’ problem of evil: its purpose is to alleviate suffering in the here and now, and it poses the philosophical conundrum only to serve that purpose. Surely we would recognise this as being very different from Hume’s version and the standard philosophical form that followed. The Stoics reflected on the problem in order to expose our faulty opinions about suffering, for the purpose of strengthening our resolve in the face of that suffering. The Neoplatonists reflected on the problem in order to better understand what they already knew to be true, seeing intellectual understanding as a spiritual virtue. Even Kant discussed the problem of evil for the purpose of reminding us about the importance of honesty. There was no question of defending or questioning the nature or existence of God, but they were no worse off for that. I would say they were better off. The purpose of philosophising about the problem of evil was not to tell us anything about the probability of the existence of God; the purpose of philosophising about the problem of evil was to tell us something important about ourselves, our values, and our perspective on the world. In short, it was an answer to an ethical question.
The 20th Century
By the 20th century, it’s clear that the problem of evil has ceased to be an answer to an ethical question. It is now an answer to a question in the philosophy of religion, which by this point, at least in the Anglophone world, is a philosophical sub-discipline that is increasingly dominated by arguments for and against the rationality of theistic belief. By 1955, J. L. Mackie can present the next instalment of the standard form of the problem of evil in a philosophical context:
The traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly criticised by philosophers. […] I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational…
Clearly we are now a long way removed from any sense that the problem of evil is an ethical question about ourselves, our values, and our perspective on the world: the question is only about the rationality (or not) of religious belief. And this is the ‘traditional’ problem of evil. The contrast with Epicurus ought to be clear.
But Mackie presents his now-famous argument and leaves us with a challenge about the nature of free will and the role that it can play in solving the problem of evil. It is a pointed challenge, a particular gauntlet laid down, and it’s this particular gauntlet that is picked up by Alvin Plantinga.
It is a rare thing in philosophy for someone to ‘win’ an argument or ‘settle’ a debate. The progress of philosophy is rarely linear. But the progress of the problem of evil from Mackie through Plantinga is an exception. Mackie asks a question, Plantinga gives an answer. The consensus unites in agreement with Plantinga’s answer.
Mackie says that there is no reason an omnipotent and wholly good being could not create free creatures that freely choose to do good. Plantinga says there is such a reason, and that reason is the free will of those creatures. God cannot create a world with creatures that only freely choose the good, even if He wanted to, because God is not free to create any world that He chooses. There are certain logical limits on what God can create, as even Mackie would agree. God cannot create a world with square circles, four-sided triangles, or married bachelors. An inability to do so would not be seen as a lack of omnipotence but only a definition of its limits. The free will of free creatures is another example of a logical limit on God’s power.
If God gives His creatures free will, He cannot then decide what those creatures do with their free will; it would be neither their will nor ‘free’ if He did. But if this is so, then whenever those free creatures exert their free will, they do something that God cannot control. What those creatures do, in exerting their free will, is choose which of a number of possibilities they will make actual. They choose to have toast for breakfast, rather than cereal, for example. Prior to their decision, both options are possible; but once they decide to have toast and have toast, that possibility – ‘I choose toast’ – becomes actual, rendering the other possibility counterfactual. ‘I choose toast’ becomes the way the world is, and ‘I choose cereal’ becomes how the world could have been. It could have been different if they’d chosen differently, but they didn’t, and so that counterfactual ‘possibility’ is not actual.
Could God have made that counterfactual world actual? Plantinga says no. That world is the world in which our breakfast-eater chooses to eat cereal, and that choice is not God’s to make. It is not in God’s power to make our breakfast-eater’s choices for them. This remains the case no matter how the world is created. God could, presumably, have made different worlds, but whatever world God makes, as long as those worlds contain free creatures it is never going to be in God’s power to make our choices for us. As a result, our free will acts as a limit on which worlds God can create. We decide which possibilities become actual and even God has to suffer the consequences.
Replace ‘toast’ with ‘evil’ and you will get something relevant for the problem of evil. If a free creature freely chooses to do or be evil, such as Lucifer freely choosing to rebel against God or Adam and Eve freely choosing to eat of the forbidden fruit, there is nothing God can do about it. It is logically impossible for God to make us freely choose to do or be good all the time. If we go wrong, even He must suffer the consequences of our freely-chosen decisions. It could have been different, if we had chosen differently, but it was never up to God, only us.
This successfully evades Mackie’s argument. Equipped with his free-will defence, Plantinga can agree that God is wholly good, omnipotent (within logical limits), and that evil exists, and consistently maintain the truth of all three propositions if it’s the case that a) God creates free creatures and b) those free creatures misuse their free will to bring about evil.God cannot create creatures that freely choose always to do the good, because what those free creatures freely choose is not up to God; it’s up to them. It is not in God’s power to prevent the evil that we choose for ourselves.
There is no reason to insist that this is actually the case, of course, or that we must choose evil for ourselves. The conclusion remains behind a hypothetical ‘if’. Plantinga offers only a free will ‘defence’ rather than a ‘theodicy’ because, even if we accept his claims about our free will acting as a limit on God’s power, it remains possible that there are evils in this world that are not the products of our free choices. The problem of evil could be revived on those terms. It also remains a counterfactual possibility that we could have chosen only good and not brought evil into the world. Under those circumstances, God would have created creatures that freely choose only good, which is what Mackie wanted. Sadly, though, it wasn’t up to God whether that world become actual, and clearly that world is not our world, so it’s not clear what good it would do us to reflect on that unfulfilled possibility at this stage.
These possibilities are not relevant for Plantinga’s purposes, either way. All that Plantinga needed to establish in order to avoid Mackie’s logical problem of evil is that it is possible that there are no evils in this world that are not the products of our – or other fallen free creatures’ – free choices, and consequently there is nothing essentially inconsistent about the theist’s position. It’s this that fatally undermines Mackie’s logical formulation of the problem of evil, and it is this that brings about the downfall of logical formulations of the problem of evil as such. As I said, the consensus unites in agreement that Plantinga settles the debate about free will and its role in undermining the logical problem of evil.
Perhaps there are many questions that remain unanswered in this argument: Why allow the option of choosing badly or, if we must allow that option, why allow the damage that results from those bad choices? Why, if freedom is so important, force creatures into a situation that is not of their choosing? Why create free will at all?
There are also serious questions to ask about what moral status we would assign to this story, even if true. Consider a simple analogy: Imagine you are a teacher organising a school skiing trip. You send the kids to the top of a mountain that has two routes down: one route down is nice and fine and lovely, the other is certain death and painful destruction. The kids are given a free choice about which route to take but limited indication which is which. That some of them might choose the bad route is not going to be your decision, of course, but entirely theirs. Once they have chosen that route, there’s nothing you can do about it. In fact, as you send them off up on the ski-lift, there’s really nothing you could have done about it beyond that point other than shout after them: ‘Make sure you choose the good route! You’ll suffer if you don’t!’
And then, inevitably or not, some children choose the bad route and suffer death and painful destruction. There is outcry. Questions are asked about why on earth anyone organised a ski trip for children that offered the option of such a dangerous route. Further questions are asked about why they weren’t given more information to help them to avoid the bad route. Yet further questions are asked about why they were left to their own devices, without adequate supervision. As the teacher and organiser, what are your responses here? That the painful consequences were the product of their decisions, not yours? That there was nothing you could do, once they’d decided to go down the bad route? That all you could do is choose not to send them up that mountain in the first place, and anyway they all wanted to go skiing… Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m not sure any of these responses would cut it in a court of law. Most reasonable people would say that you should have done more to protect those children under your care.
But these questions and objections are tangential to the precision of Plantinga’s aims. What he has established is that if God creates free creatures and those creatures choose badly then there is nothing God can do about it. Consequently, it is not entirely in God’s power to create creatures that always freely choose the good, as Mackie suggests, because as free creatures our choices are not in God’s power. We could have freely chosen the good, but we didn’t, so now we must all suffer the consequences.
The Evidential Problem of Evil
Reeling from Plantinga’s refutation, the problem of evil pivots away from the logical formulation and returns as the ‘evidential’ formulation. The turning point is traditionally attributed to William Rowe’s 1979 ‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’. This version of the problem of evil does not make the ‘extravagant’ claim that evil is logically inconsistent with the existence of God, but only that evil offers good evidence to think that God does not exist. I think this is a spurious distinction, especially on the basis as just stated, and have argued as much in previous work. The evidential formulation of the problem of evil, at least in William Rowe’s first famous incarnation, maintains that certain types of evil – pointless evil – are inconsistent with God’s existence, and that is why they would count as evidence against God’s existence, if they existed. What is left uncertain is whether such types of evil actually exist, or whether the evils that we see in the world are all of this type, and it’s this matter-of-fact uncertainty that affords the problem its ‘evidential’ rather than ‘logical’ status.
But this uncertainty doesn’t mean all that much in itself. In his ‘logical’ formulation, Mackie seems to allow the possibility of some evil being consistent with God’s existence, such as when he concedes the possibility of higher-order goods morally justifying the existence of first-order evils, or when he points out that only a tiny speck of evil would be necessary for good to be defined in ontological relation.And in his ‘logical’ formulation of the problem of evil of the same era, McCloskey only argues that God in incompatible with any ‘unnecessary’ or ‘superfluous’ evil, not that He is under obligation to create a totally perfect world. There is some room to manoeuvre, even in logical formulations. Mackie’s conclusion indicates that he would have little cause to complain about a world with a little pain, a little hunger, and a lot of moral goodness: in that world, there would be some ‘evils’ that are compatible with a perfectly good and powerful God. If any of those pictures of the world were actual, there would be some ‘evil’ existing in happy compatibility with God; it’s just that they are clearly not, and contingently not, actual.And besides, this is not what theists believe, and Mackie is interested in the consistency of theistic belief. Mackie and McCloskey’s logical formulations of the problem of evil are about the actual evils in the actual world and the actual beliefs that theists have about them. In that, they are no different from Rowe’s so-called evidential formulation.
The evidential problem of evil suggests that whilst there might be some reason justifying the permission of the evils that we see in the world, for a great many of them there does not seem to be any reason at all. Lightning strikes a tree causing a forest fire in which a little baby deer is horribly burned. The baby deer lies in agony for days until a slow death puts it out of its misery. What reason is there for this innocent suffering? Can it be attributed to the consequences of any human choice? Can it be justified by appeal to some greater good? What greater good could be achieved by a three-day death that could not have been achieved by two? It stretches credulity to suggest reasons here. And so whilst Rowe concedes that it remains possible that there is a good reason justifying all this, it is not reasonable to believe that there is, based upon the evidence in front of us. And since God would only permit evil and suffering with good reason, on the basis of the evidence in front of us we should conclude that it is not reasonable to believe in the existence of God.
All this will by now be very familiar to any student of the problem of evil and will be found in any introductory work on the topic. From here the story continues with the soul-making theodicy, and sceptical theism, and patient-centred conditions, and horrendous evils, and cumulative case arguments, and inferences to the best explanation, and justifications for genocide, and now the terms of the debate will have been completely established and the ‘standard’ form of the problem of evil is settled upon. Our position is entrenched. The debate is about whether or not there is good reason to believe the evils of this world are justified by a morally-sufficient reason. Those are the terms of the debate – those are our trenches – and all we can seem to do is work with what we have, or slowly dig ourselves in deeper.
Do you think we should keep digging? Why? For what purpose? What are you hoping will happen? If you do not have a ready answer to this question, I question whether we might have lost sight of our purpose, our ‘that for the sake of which’ we are philosophising about the problem of evil.
It seems to me that most philosophical discussion of the problem of evil, and most philosophy of religion, and most contemporary philosophy, is characterised by an eagerness to further fortify ourselves against the opposing position, or else find new positions along the line to fortify. It is hard, dirty work. And all the while we are living in trenches. It is not a healthy place to be.
The End of History
Trench warfare is a grim simile for philosophy. Perhaps it is hyperbolic. Perhaps you’d prefer to see it as a tennis match that has been stuck at deuce for 2,000 years. Any simile will work so long as it captures the sense that a) there are some clearly-defined positions, historically established, b) those positions oppose one another, and c) there is little evidence of progress. The tennis match simile captures these and perhaps also a sense of the futility of the game, but perhaps you can still enjoy hitting a good shot once in a while. Tennis is a leisure activity, after all; there’s no absolute duty not to play tennis badly or even to play tennis at all. Is philosophy no more important than a leisurely game of tennis?
I would add another feature, which is that the longer you play the game, or remain entrenched, the harder it is to see the purpose of this practice, to the point that it’s not clear what progress would look like. Progress towards what? Winning the game? (Is it a game?) Ending the war? (Is it a war?) What is expected here?
When you are in a trench, it is difficult to see out; it is difficult to see that there might be another way. You are not inclined to look for another way because sticking your head above the parapet is a risky business. And so you keep your head down and keep digging. You look left and right and see other people digging, and they congratulate you on your work, even awarding you occasional medals for your service. It provides you with a living. You’re not sure why you are doing what you do but you feel like you have no choice but to keep on digging. Your position depends upon it.
We dedicate our lives to these matters. Shouldn’t we be clear about their value? We, of all people. Are we not philosophers?
Diagnosis
Let’s recap. I began this book by suggesting that our understanding of the problem of evil is not in a healthy state. I began this chapter by suggesting that any remedy requires, first, a diagnosis, and that any diagnosis benefits from a patient history. Our patient here is the philosophical discussion of the problem of evil, and we’ve just seen a brief version of its long history. It began as a tool to help us live well as human beings; it ends in the futility of trench warfare. Where did it all go wrong?
I speculatively suggest three influential factors; or sources of infection, if you will. Firstly, there is the general (but radical) drift away from philosophy as a way of life. (I take my lead from Pierre Hadot here.) Once a ‘philosopher’ was someone who lived a certain way, with a certain cultivated ethical attitude to the world. Philosophy was a way of life. Intellectual exploration was a part of this way of life, but only a part; and when it was a part it was more properly called a ‘spiritual exercise’. These philosophers came in many diverse forms but what made them a philosopher was how they lived and not only what they thought, whatever their school of thought.Philosophy was an ethical vocation. Philosophy had an essential ethical dimension. The theoretical exercise of philosophy was only an easy way into the more difficult task of living ethically as a philosopher; if you stopped at only the theory then you were not properly called a philosopher. This essential ethical dimension of philosophy seems to have slowly faded as the discipline became handmaiden to theology during the middle ages. The monks kept up their spiritual exercises, made them their own, and kept them for themselves. When secular philosophy is revived as ‘natural philosophy’ in the enlightenment period, and with the emergence of modern science, the essential ethical dimension of classical philosophy gets left behind. Philosophy and its ethical vocation are now separable: you can now be a ‘philosopher’ with theory alone. Note, I do not say philosophy and ethics, because today even the philosophical sub-discipline of ethics is separable from any ethical vocation. That we can now do ethics without necessarily needing to try to be ethical should set alarm bells ringing as a warning for how detached we have become from our proper philosophical subject matter.
Secondly, with a separation from this essential ethical dimension to philosophy comes the possibility of offering abstract and merely intellectual justifications for the goodness of God’s work. This is not done for the purpose of helping us to live well but only as an intellectual exercise. It can then be questioned on that purely theoretical level, and swiftly this emphasis on the rational defensibility of the goodness of God’s work leads to an emphasis on the rationality of theistic belief. We are left with a question only about the rationality of theistic belief. Ethical questions fall out of the picture.
Thirdly, I don’t think it is a coincidence that the origin of the standard philosophical form of the problem of evil is attributed to Epicurus, the hedonist, via Hume, the sentimentalist. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the problem is revived by J. L. Mackie, the error theorist. It takes a certain ethical or metaethical perspective to see the problem of evil in its standard form. (Others can of course simply follow in that standard without sharing the ethical perspective.) Few theists would be hedonists or sentimentalists or error theorists, I would imagine, and yet they are engaging with a problem that sometimes comes from those bases. Few atheists would be Neoplatonists, divine command theorists, or straightforward moral realists, I would imagine, yet they are sending a problem sometimes against those bases. Can we be surprised when we all get confused? The solution to this confusion seems to have been to simply not talk about it; try to speak as if from no ethical or metaethical place at all, then trust everyone will know what you mean when you talk about ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Any complications can be glossed over as belonging to another debate (that we don’t have time to go into here). But these are not trivial matters and should not be glossed aside.
Speculation only, and even if true there’s little to be done about it now. At the end of our brief history of the problem of evil, what we are left with is a ‘standard’ form of the problem of evil that is evidential (not logical) and presents a challenge to the rationality of theistic belief. And that’s it. For me, this standard is wrong-headed and aspirationally impoverished. It is a corrupted form of the problem. But the venom has been injected, infection has set in; it’s too late for medicine. Should this gangrenous limb be cut off in the hope of saving the rest of the body?
In the next chapter, I will make an attempt at reconstructing a version of the problem of evil that is logical and presents a challenge to more than just the rationality of theistic belief. It should clarify and defend what can be meant by a ‘logical’ formulation of the problem of evil, setting the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling a set of beliefs, and its purpose will be to tell us something important about our ethical selves. In so doing, it ought to have a role in helping us to live well as human beings and, what is more, as philosophers worthy of the name.
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