The Odyssey—wait, I mean

Theodicy

Note: Throughout this essay, God is referred to as “He” and humanity is referred to as “Man.” This simply reflects the language traditionally used when talking about God.

As long as people have questioned theism, there have been those who claim that God cannot exist because God and evil cannot coexist, and evil clearly does exist. They argue that if God were omnipotent and wholly good, He could have created a world without evil. Barring that, He should at the very least have been able to create a world in which the magnitude and duration of evil was less that we observe it to be. These arguments are in no way trivial, and many say they prove without a doubt that there can be no God. Theists, then, are faced with the imposing task of justifying the existence of God despite the existence of evil.

Many theodicies rely heavily on the idea of free will. Specifically, their authors claim that in God’s opinion, our ability to freely choose how to act is morally “better” than being free from evil without being free to choose how we act. However, the idea of free will has always been a very messy one at best. For this argument, it is enough to realize that even determinists tend to agree that it is possible to learn, whether or not we have the freedom to choose what to learn or what to do with the knowledge we acquire. Even a hard determinist will admit that the amount of knowledge contained within a human mind can increase over time.

God did not create Man to be perfect. Rather, He created us in His image. This can be seen as similar to human parents creating an infant. The infant looks fairly similar to its parents—two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, two arms, two legs, five digits on each hand and foot, et cetera—but is far from the same as its parents in terms of knowledge and general awareness of the world. Suppose God believes learning something is morally superior to simply being created with that knowledge. What would be the purpose of creating Man to be as perfect as He is? God doing this would be similar to adult humans duplicating themselves instead of having children. Granted, we do not currently have the technology to duplicate an entire human being, knowledge and all, but I doubt many people would give up childbearing if we did have such technology. Human beings, like God, seem to think that it is better to learn and grow than to be created as a fully formed entity with all the corresponding knowledge already there.

God, then, can be seen as the Father of Man. This is in keeping with the very paternal God seen in most Judeo-Christian and Muslim theology. Like any human father, God knows that there are times when it is better to point one’s children in the right direction, and that there are other times when it is better to let one’s children learn from their own mistakes. Scripture, then, comes from some of the more significant times God has intervened to point us in the right direction. Human evil comes from the mistakes God allows us to make. It is our job to learn from these mistakes and to progress as a species.

Natural evil, on the other hand, is not so easily explained. Why is it necessary for the world to have hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, and so on? Couldn’t God have created a world in which the only evil was the result of human sin? Peter van Inwagen seems to imply that God in fact couldn’t have created such a world. “If you think that it would be possible to design a planet, and a universe to contain it, that was both capable of supporting human life and contained no earthquakes or tornadoes, I can only point out that you have never tried” (Reason and Responsibility, p. 102). However, the vast majority of theists would reject this argument as severely limiting what God can do. For this reason, I shall continue with the assumption that God could have created any kind of world He wanted to create. Therefore, the question remains as to why God chose to put natural evil into our world.

There is only so much we can learn through dealing with human evil. For instance, how much would we know or even care about the movement of air if it wasn’t for severe weather? We can acquire far greater forms of knowledge when we combine what we know about meteorology with what we know about other natural processes such as the spread of diseases. One could understandably argue that no amount of knowledge is worth the millions of people who have died and the millions more who have suffered horribly as the result of such natural evils. However, we are not in a position to judge the value of lasting knowledge against the value of suffering which may be only temporary. We have no knowledge of the situation in which those who suffered the consequences of natural disasters now find themselves. If they are in Heaven, and completely free of suffering, we have no right to say their temporary suffering while on Earth outweighs the long-lasting knowledge the rest of us gain from studying nature’s processes.

Some very significant objections to the coexistence of God and evil still remain. For instance, there is the question as to why the magnitude, duration, and distribution of evil are as great as they are. Magnitude and duration can actually be seen as the same thing. Magnitude means how much evil is in a given time and duration means how much time there has been with evil in it. Both involve the sheer amount of evil in the universe. The most common claim made on this issue is that God could have helped us learn and grow just as much without having allowed quite so much evil to exist. Without the infinite knowledge God has, though, we as human beings are too ignorant to know precisely how much evil He needs to realize His plans for the universe. We have no way of knowing exactly what those plans are, so we cannot know the minimum amount of evil necessary to realize them. In this way, one might actually justify any amount of evil, no matter how great or small.

Many would see the above argument as a sort of copout, because it uses our ignorance as a way to avoid the question. However, anyone who sees it this way is unaware of how profound that ignorance really is. In some ways, ignorance is the single most important aspect of the current state of humanity. We are ignorant of the totality of the consequences of our actions, so we frequently act wrongly. We are ignorant of how we might act in a given situation, so we frequently judge those who are in that situation, no matter how they act. We are ignorant of God’s plan (or whether He has such a plan at all), so we may frequently act in ways that are not in harmony with that plan. In order for us to gain any knowledge, we previously had to lack that knowledge, and thus be ignorant. If we weren’t ignorant, we would not have anything more to learn, and we would already be one with God. All human evil can be seen as resulting in some way from our ignorance. Any discussion that deals with evil must therefore deal with our ignorance.

When it comes to the distribution of evil, people argue that if evil is necessary for us to learn from our mistakes, those innocent of the mistakes shouldn’t fall victim to evil. That is, they ask why evil things happen to good people. I say in return that if evil things only happened to evil people, no one would even call it evil. There would just be one segment of society in which people kept killing and torturing each other, leaving the rest of us untouched. It is only by letting evil things happen to innocent people that God can allow the majority of us to learn such values as compassion and bravery. Granted, some would be compassionate even to those who are guilty of evil, but they are vastly outnumbered by less altruistic members of the human race. Ideally, after learning how to show compassion to victims of evil, the rest of us will also learn how to show compassion to committers of evil. Most religions agree that someone who is able to show compassion and love to his or her enemies is a good person indeed.

To sum everything up, God believes learning to be morally superior to being created with the knowledge already there. He created Man not as something as perfect as He is, but rather as something in His image. God can be seen as our father in this respect; like any father, He would rather see his creation learn and grow than create something that is already fully-formed. Human evil is the result of mistakes God allows us to make, so we can learn from them. Natural evil is a process God started so that we may learn things we could not have learned through human evil alone. We cannot say there could be less evil in the world, because we are ignorant of God’s plan, and therefore of the level of evil necessary to realize this plan. Evil things happen to good people because most of us are far more willing to show compassion toward innocents than towards evil people. Ideally, we may eventually learn to show compassion toward those who do evil as well as those innocent of any evil.

There are no doubt many possible objections to my argument that I haven’t addressed here. However, if I were to deal with every possible aspect of the problem of God and evil, I would have to write a mulivolume series on the subject. This being an assignment that is supposed to be less than six pages long, I'll leave it as it is.