[lit-ideas] Re: The Problem of Evil
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 14:16:56 -0800
John Wager wrote:
The Catholic "move" is to say that God can't do evil, so in that sense
is NOT all-powerful, but in that sense only. (God can't make 2+2 = 7,
either.) If God can't create evil, then all that exists must be good.
That is: if God is 'responsible' for the whole created universe all that
exists must be good (if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and competent).
It doesn't follow that if God can't create evil, there is no evil; all
that follows if that there is evil, God didn't create it. So, the
question still might be: even if God didn't create evil, why is there
evil? 'The problem of evil,' in any case, is shorthand for a more
interesting problem, the problem of why a God of justice and mercy
allows gratuitous pain and suffering. That children die from cancer;
that innocent motorists are crushed by falling rocks isn't because of
the actions of those who choose evil, so the 'in order to have free will
we must be able to choose the bad as well as the good' (an unintended
consequence?) theory doesn't account for these things.
Aquinas, following Aristotle somewhat, sees all that exists as good;
literally there is no "thing" that is evil, as a "thing." Evil then is
a lack of something that should be there, not something real in itself.
Pain and suffering exist. Surely the argument can't be that there is no
pain and suffering, only the absence of comfort and ease.
So evil does NOT exist, denying your premise 3. The part of Bin Laden
that's real is loved by God as good. The part of Bin Laden that's evil
is the thing he should have but doesn't, like compassion for the
innocent, etc. Personally, I find this appealing if not convincing.
Again, the Problem of Evil just isn't the problem of how there can be
evil agents, or of how they are allowed to behave in evil ways. If it
were, it would be a purely theological problem, in the sense that people
aren't puzzled by how there can BE Bin Ladens and Jeffrey Dahmers. What
they're puzzled by is how there can be a God of justice and mercy who
allows people to die in horrible ways through no fault of their own.
(Remember, this is the same God we've had all along, and what's curable
now wasn't, until quite recently, as universes go.)
The Protestant "move" is to say that God's power and omniscience makes
all our own efforts to define "goodness" bound to fail, so that what
looks like real evil to us is not evil to God, in this case denying
premise 4 I think. (We can't know what "good" really means, so we have
to have faith that God is still omnipotent, omniscient, and
omnibenevolent.)
I've never heard a 'Protestant' say that, but perhaps some do. It seems
like an unhelpful move. If we can't define 'goodness,' what's the point
of saying that God is (supremely) good, or of the divine exhortation to
avoid evil? That there's really no such thing as evil may be true (even
Plato thought this, in a sense), but to say that there's no such thing
as good (or evil) because we can't know what 'good' ('evil') really
means should, by parity of reasoning, lead to the conclusion that God
(of whom some say names are predicated analogically) might possibly not
be good, either, good's being as opaque as anything else.
Emil Fachenheim takes it one step further: BECAUSE we can't make sense
out of the world and of God, we MUST depend on God to help us through
life. Even if God is not "worthy" of worship, we must turn to him for
the strength to confront a senseless world of evil; without God's help,
we would despair at the evil.
That because we cannot make sense of x and y, we must depend on one of
them to make sense of the other hardly seems an attractive way out.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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