The Problem of Evil
The problem of evil is perhaps the greatest of all challenges to religious belief. The world in which we live contains many defects. Moral evils are abundant; we frequently inflict suffering upon one another. Natural evil is also all around us; even before we face the problems caused by other human beings, life is quite hard enough.
If there really were a God, would he not have prevented these evils from arising? Do not the defects of the world prove that it is not the product of divine designer? How are we to reconcile what we know of the world with what we know of God?
These questions are old ones, and were familiar even by the time of Epicurus. The problem of evil has been reconsidered, and reformulated, many times since. John Stuart Mill and CS Lewis are among those who have wrestled with it. Formally stated, the problem is this:
(1) If God exists then he is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.
(2) If there were an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God, then evil would not exist.
(3) Evil does exist.
Therefore:
(4) God does not exist.
The Nature of God
The problem of evil focuses on a very specific understanding of God’s nature. The god whose existence is called into question by the problem of evil is omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and perfectly good. If a theist is willing to deny that God possesses any of these attributes, then he may be able to evade the problem. Some theists do indeed think along these lines.
Peter Geach, for example, calls into question God’s omnipotence. God must, of course, be seen as very powerful. He need not, however, be seen as able to do absolutely anything. God’s power is limited, for example, by the laws of logic; God cannot make square circles. God’s power is also limited by his own moral nature; God cannot sin. It may be that God’s power, though great, is insufficient to prevent evil, at least without still greater loss.
Divine omniscience, too, is open to doubt. A recent movement called open theism denies that God knows the future. The common complaint that God ought to have foreseen the evil that would come into the world, and refrained from creating it, may therefore be resisted.
Even God’s goodness is not wholly uncontroversial among theists. Brian Davies argues that moral appraisal is appropriate only for those who have moral duties, and so that God, who has no duties, can be neither good nor bad. This view of God as amoral effectively dissolves the problem of evil.
Theodicies
Those reponses to the problem of evil that deny its conception of God are in the minority; most theists who offer a response to the problem, a theodicy, offer an explanation of why an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God would allow evil.
One of the best known of these theodicies is the free-will defence, advanced by Alvin Plantinga (among many others). This suggests that the evil in the world comes not from God but from the free choices of rational creatures. God could, of course, have created a world without such creatures, but he chose not to. A world without free agency would be morally dead, worse than a world containing evil. Evil is the price that we pay for freedom, and it is a price worth paying.
Evil
Probably the most radical solution to the problem of evil involves denying the existence of evil. Part of St Augustine’s theodicy was the denial that evil has any positive existence. Evil, according to St Augustine, is simply the privation of good, not a thing in its own right. On this view, even though the world contains evil, we cannot complain that God created it; everything that God created is good.
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