The Problem of Evil

2300 years ago, the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus came up with the problem of evil. Or at least it's believed that he came up with it.

The problem of evil is a problem that religious people have struggled with for a very long time. I used to think that it was not a very good argument, but after seeing how religious people interact with it I now think that it shows a very clear tension between their beliefs and the evidence we see. Every attempt to deal with it requires a significant theological or moral concession.

David Hume summarises his original argument like this:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then from whence comes evil?

A more explicit version looks like this:

1. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
2. A benevolent being seeks to prevent any evil it is aware of.
3. An omniscient being is aware of everything.
4. An omnipotent being achieves everything it seeks.
5. A being with all 3 attributes will prevent all evil. It will be aware of all evil, want to stop it, and be capable of stopping it.
6. Evil exists
7. Therefore God cannot exist

The evidential version

The argument I showed is often referred to as the logical problem of evil. In addition to this, there is also the evidential problem of evil. The logical version aims to logically disprove God. The evidential version aims to argue that the existence of gratituous evil should lower one's credence in the existence of God.

Imagine you were locked in a room and had no information about the outside world. You believe that there is a being that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all good. What would you expect to see when you go outside and look at the world? How much suffering would you expect to see?

You could, for any observation that you make, come up with a reason why such a being would make things that way, but they would all be post-hoc. The most likely prediction is that there would be very little suffering. You would not expect to see excessive suffering.

Conversely, how much suffering would you expect to see if God didn't exist? Well, that depends. If there is no life, then none at all. But if there is some life, then there's a good chance that it can feel pain. But not constant unrelenting agony. You would expect suffering to exist if life exists because there is no super powerful being that cares about reducing it.

But there's a problem. When you run this experiment and look at the world, it's not that hard to find suffering. If you're a good Bayesian, you would reduce your credence in such an entity, given the evidence. It's still arguably possible, but it's now made less likely.

Imagine if you saw a world with life and no suffering. Would that increase your credence in God? Would it decrease it? Would it make no difference? Think of any arguments people might make to square the existence of suffering with God. If you seriously believe in those arguments, then the no suffering world should decrease your credence in God.

When a plane crashes, and a child gets saved, people see this as evidence of a merciful God, ignoring the 250 other passengers.

Imagine a bus driver, taking students on a school trip to the twin towers shortly before they were aquainted with an aircraft. And imagine that the bus driver knew in advance that 9/11 was going to happen. But takes the children there anyway, and then provides first aid to one of the students. How merciful would you think that bus driver is?

The Cookie Monster

Now, with the problem of evil we run the risk of becoming emotionally charged and not thinking clearly. So I'll provide a more off-beat analogy to illustrate this point.

What would you say if I told you that in this room is the cookie monster. You can't see him because he's invisible, but I assure you he's there. And all he wants to do is consume cookies with a vengeance.

But suppose the room has cookies that are undisturbed. Whilst it is logically possible that there is an invisible cookie monster in a room where the cookies are not being disturbed, the fact that the cookies aren't being eaten is evidence that there is no invisible cookie monster in the room. You could say that the cookie monster knows we won't get more cookies if he eats them now, and is waiting for even more cookies before making his attack. Or maybe the cookie monster is on a diet. Or is really interested in browser cookies. Or maybe we just know so little about eating cookies that it is the height of ignorance for us to judge the cookie monster's cookie eating strategy. But all these assumptions make an already unlikely hypothesis even more unlikely.

Defining Evil

I should note that some versions of the argument replace the word evil with suffering. The word evil is there for historical reasons relating to the translation of the original argument, it does not actually correspond to what people mean by evil today.

Saying that evil exists, or that a benevolent being would reduce it, seems to be assuming an objective morality. A theist might ask, where is the atheist getting this objective morality from?

I would say that the theist is also assuming an objective morality.

This is because theists say "God is good". This means that there is an external standard of good, and God satisfies it. Otherwise, that statement is completely meaningless. Like saying "Pete is Pete". If we say that someone is tall, that assumes an objective well understood definition of tall.

I could write an entire essay on whether morality is objective and if so what that morality is, but books have been written about this and it's not necessary for this essay.

If using words like "good", "evil", and "benevolent" seem unjustified here, then just replace them with words like "suffering", and "caring", and the problem remains. A caring being would try to reduce suffering. Suffering exists. And Islam and Christianity both describe God as caring.

Implications

There are conceptions of God that are unaffected by the problem of evil, such as a deistic notions. However, both Christianity and Islam have attributes that the are incompatible with the existence of evil. Since half of the world believes in the Abrahamic God, and a handful of theologians believe in a deistic God only when talking to Atheists, the Abrahamic God is what my focus will be on. In the next few sections I will demonstrate that these religions do have these attributes.

God is Good

According to Christianity and Islam. God is good. There are numerous scriptural verses that support this.

The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made. -Psalm 145:9 Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! -Psalm 34:8 Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever! -Psalm 107:1 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. -John 4:8

Here are some of Allah's 99 names:

• Al-Wadud: The Loving
• Al-Lateef: The Gentle
• Al-Kareem: The Generous
• Al-Hameed: The praiseworthy
• Ar-Ra’oof: The most kind

I think the attributes listed here are sufficient to describe a being that seeks to alleviate suffering.

God is All-Knowing And All Powerful

Say, "Would you acquaint Allah with your religion while Allah knows whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth, and Allah is Knowing of all things?" - Quran 49:16

Do they not see that Allah, who created the heavens and earth and did not fail in their creation, is able to give life to the dead? Yes. Indeed, He is over all things competent. - Quran 46:33

He it is who gives life and causes death; and when He decrees a matter, He but says to it, "Be," and it is. - Quran 40:68

Do you know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of him who is perfect in knowledge -Job 37:16 But Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” -Matthew 19:26

Suffering Exists

In case you're not convinced that there's a lot of suffering in the world, I'll describe a few cases here.

Dracunculiasis. This is also known as parasitic guniea worm disease. If you drink water with guinea worm larvae, they spread around your body, and over the next year they grow up to 80cm. They then mate, inside your body, and migrate to your subcutaneous tissue and give you a very painful blister and give you the urge to submerge the wound in water. Over the next several days and weeks, the worm emerges and expels more larvae into the water. There is no vaccine or immunity. Often people are infected as a result of the wound.

Or what about river blindness? This is when a black fly bites your skin and deposits its larvae inside you. The larvae grow into adult worms that can live for up to 15 years and produce thousands more larvae per day. If they travel to your eye, they can permanently blind you.

9 million children die each year before they reach the age of 5.

For most of history, most children died before the age of 5. Many mothers died during childbirth. When women found out they were pregant, they would often prepare a will. Estimates say that a quarter of children died within their first year, and just over half made it to adulthood.

Then there's the Holocaust. The systematic genocide of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany. They were shot, starved, gassed to death, worked to death, beaten to death. They were killed by disease, cold, medical experimets, and death marches. 5 million non-Jews were also killed, including Roma, Poles, Ukranians, black Germans, gay people, and disabled people. Children were not spared in this.

That's just human suffering. But other animals also experience lots of suffering. Charles Darwin was a very religious man. He wanted to become a member of the clergy. But after his famous voyage of the Beagle, where he went to explore what he believed to be God's wonderous creation, he became more and more horrified.

What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!

A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one"

Animal suffering is not only caused by human activity, it's part of nature, and God could have made it differently.

Objections

Suffering Is Punishment For Sin

Everytime there's an earthquake or some other natural disaster religious figures decide that it's appropirate to blame people who went through extreme suffering.

Except, natural disasters are indiscriminate. They kill children and adults alike. Unless if sin is geographically distributed and possible for infants and animals, this explanation does not agree with the evidence.

Free Will

One common objection to the problem of evil is that God cannot stop humans from commiting evil without violating free will. There are many problems with this.

For a start, not all suffering is caused by free will. Earthquakes, diseases, starvation, are all examples of natural suffering that God can prevent without impeding free will.

Another problem with this is that presumably there is free will in heaven, but in heaven there is no suffering. Since most theists believe in heaven, they can't believe that it's impossible to remove suffering without removing free will.

Free will and suffering are not as connected as they are made out to be. It's physically impossible for us to telekinetically choke each other, but that's not an imposition on our free will, that's simply a limit on the tools we have at our disposal and the laws of nature. God could have created a world where we cannot physically strangle each other.

Free will cannot be a satisfactory explanation for why a benevolent God would allow suffering to exist.

Natural Law

Imagine if God magically intervened whenever you tripped to stop you from getting hurt. That would be ridiculous, right? If God keeps intervening to remove evil then we would no longer live in a universe with rules and that would be its own sort of evil.

That's how the argument goes. As is the case with most of these arguments, the proponent lacks imagination when it suits them.

For a start, how many people would genuinely ask God to bring back suffering if God did this? How many people would rather the rules of gravity held firm than that their children would be crushed by a building after an earthquake?

But most importantly, God makes the rules! He's not just the local universe Spiderman, stepping in to save the day. He makes the laws that our universe follows. Just like he can make one where suffering arises naturally, he can make a world where no suffering arises naturally.

There's a name for a place where no suffering can occur. What's it called? H something? Heaven?

Being telekinetically choked is something none of us have to worry about because it can't be done in our world, and being actually choked could be remedied the same way by an omnipotent being.

Higher Order Good

This objection says that some evils are necessary because they make certain goods possible. Without fear, there can be no bravery. Without scarcity, there can be no generousity. The first problem with this is heaven. In heaven there is nothing to fear, and there is abundance. That means there is no bravery or generousity in heaven. Presumably this is not an intolerable state of affairs.

The second problem with this argument is that these higher order goods are not intrinsically good, they're good to the extent that they eliminate some evil.

No one would argue that we need buildings to burn because otherwise we would have no firemen. We would all prefer a world where they were not necessary.

Other Reasons

According to this argument, God has other reasons for allowing suffering. In the case of Christianity, it's often about having a relationship with humanity. And for Islam, it's for testing people.

In order to achieve these goals whilst not violating free will, it may be that it is logically impossible for God to do this and eliminate all suffering. God cannot do what is logically impossible, and so gratituous suffering does not exist.

The first problem with this is that libertarian free will involves agent causation. If whether or not God chooses to eliminate suffering has causal influence on whether a free agent chooses to have a relationship with him, this agent does not have libertarian free will. Especially if God can see in advance what effect it would have. If free will is thrown away, God can remove all suffering and have a relationship with everyone.

The second problem is that this is just fucked up. God won't cure cancer because he wants a relationship or wants to test how people react to it. This is not compatible with being good, or loving, or caring.

The Perfect Utilitarian

According to this argument, God is so much wiser than us that although something may look bad to our limited minds, it is actually for a greater good over the long run.

Just like parents may subject their children to painful injections in order to protect them from disease, whilst the child is scared and doesn't understand what is going on, God is in an analogous position to us.

I think that this does not hold up to scrutiny. Imagine if an equally effective pill existed. If the doctor or the parent chose to use the more painful alternative when it was not necessary, we would hold them responsible. But God is in exactly that position, he's omnipotent. He can achieve anything without the need for suffering. This argument only makes sense if God is really someone like Prometheus - interested in humans, greater than them, but also limited. This is not the God of Abraham.

Evil Does Not Exist

This objection comes in two flavours. One is to simply not look at the overwhelming evidence, or to become a solipsist. The other flavour amounts to the same thing with extra steps. It works by saying that evil is merely a lack of good, like how dark is a lack of light. I'm not sure what rape is an absence of exactly. This is a stupid ontology. We aren't experiencing constant agony only abating when we cover it up with good.

For a nicer take on this, Bertrand Russel says:

the belief that, as a matter of fact, nothing that exists is evil, is one which no one would advocate except a metaphysician defending a theory. Pain and hatred and envy and cruelty are surely things that exist, and are not merely the absence of their opposites; but the theory should hold that they are indistinguishable from the blank unconsciousness of an oyster. Indeed, it would seem that this whole theory has been advanced solely because of the unconscious bias in favour of optimism, and that its opposite is logically just as tenable. We might urge that evil consists in existence, and good in non-existence; that therefore the sum-total of existence is the worst thing there is, and that only non-existence is good. Indeed, Buddhism does seem to maintain some such view. It is plain that this view is false; but logically it is no more absurd than its opposite.

Most objects in the universe show no capacity for the experience of suffering. It is only conscious agents that have demonstrated such a capacity. On the privation view, we should be pansychists.

Another issue with this is that it removes our ability to hold people accountable for evil actions. If God gets away with this argument, then the serial killer can say "death is just the absence of life".

The Afterlife Makes It Ok

Sure there's a lot of suffering on Earth, but it's only finite, the argument goes. Life on Earth is like a dream that you barely remember once you get to heaven. Death, rather than being the end, is merely a change in scenery.

This is tricky to deal with because adding infinites makes reasoning difficult. But this, like with other arguments, also makes it difficult to hold people accountable on Earth. Someone could torture and murder a family, and ask what difference it makes in the face of infinite bliss. If God can get away with it, why not the murderer? A theist might respond that God forbids murder, so the murderer is bad because they are disobeying God. On this view, something is wrong purely because God disapproves. If God says don't murder, and God says don't eat shellfish, they're wrong for the same reason.

Now theists can believe this, but this undercuts how they typically want to treat morality.

The problem of good

I can write an almost mirrored essay to this one. A philosopher explored the idea of an evil God. One of the objections to the idea is that if an all-powerful, all-knowing being existed and was evil, then how can there be any good in the world.

And so he explored a few ways to reconcile the them. And these ways are all inverses of these theodies. To recap:

• Free will. Some people choose to do good, and suffering is not really meaningful without free will.
• Higher order evil. Without trust there can be no betrayal.
• Utilitarian. Makes even greater evil possible

Why am I mentioning this?

Because something has got to give. If the same evidence can be made consistent with opposite observations, then the methods to do so must be faulty. These explanations cannot work.

Conclusion

Given the suffering in the world, it's hard to reconcile that with a benevolent, omni-potent being. Most attempts fail out-right, and those that don't require even more beliefs, making God an even less likely proposition. All attempts make God less predictive, and therefore weaken all arguments for the existence of God. This makes the no-god position quite strong.

Beyond this, there are more worrysome implications for the believer. The problem of evil undermines the moral argument for God. Believers don't typically just have different views about the origin of the universe, they also believe that they are ethically required to obey God, and that he has a purpose for them that is good. But if God is not good, why listen to him? What's so good about his commands or teachings. At best you follow him for self-preservation.