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The Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil
The Problem of Evil
Posted by Dr. Peter Kreeft • October 10, 2010 • Printer-friendly
The Problem of Evil
The problem of evil is the most serious problem in the world. It is also the one serious objection to the existence of God. No sane person wants hell to exist.
The problem of evil is the most serious problem in the world. It is also the one serious objection to the existence of God.
When Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote his great Summa Theologica, he could find only two objections to the existence of God, even though he tried to list at least three objections to every one of the thousands of theses he tried to prove in that great work. One of the two objections is the apparent ability of natural science to explain everything in our experience without God; and the other is the problem of evil.
More people have abandoned their faith because of the problem of evil than for any other reason. It is certainly the greatest test of faith, the greatest temptation to unbelief. And it's not just an intellectual objection. We feel it. We live it. That's why the Book of Job is so arresting.
The problem can be stated very simply: If God is so good, why is his world so bad? If an all-good, all-wise, all-loving, all-just, and all-powerful God is running the show, why does he seem to be doing such a miserable job of it? Why do bad things happen to good people?
The unbeliever who asks that question is usually feeling resentment toward and rebellion against God, not just lacking evidence for his existence. C. S. Lewis recalls that as an atheist he “did not believe God existed. I was also very angry with him for not existing. I was also angry with him for having created the world."
When you talk to such a person, remember that it is more like talking to a divorce than to a skeptical scientist. The reason for unbelief is an unfaithful lover, not an inadequate hypothesis. The unbeliever's problem is not just a soft head but a hard heart. And the good apologist knows how to let the heart lead the head as well as vice versa.
There are four parts to the solution to the problem of evil. First, evil is not a thing, an entity, a being. All beings are either the Creator or creatures created by the Creator. But every thing God created is good, according to Genesis. We naturally tend to picture evil as a thing—a black cloud, or a dangerous storm, or a grimacing face, or dirt. But these pictures mislead us. If God is the Creator of all things and evil is a thing, then God is the Creator of evil, and he is to blame for its existence. No, evil is not a thing but a wrong choice, or the damage done by a wrong choice. Evil is no more a positive thing than blindness is. But it is just as real. It is not a thing, but it is not an illusion..
Second, the origin of evil is not the Creator but the creature's freely choosing sin and selfishness. Take away all sin and selfishness and you would have heaven on earth. Even the remaining physical evils would no longer rankle and embitter us. Saints endure and even embrace suffering and death as lovers embrace heroic challenges. But they do not embrace sin.
Furthermore, the cause of physical evil is spiritual evil. The cause of suffering is sin. After Genesis tells the story of the good God creating a good world, it next answers the obvious question “Where did evil come from then?” By the story of the fall of mankind. How are we to understand this? How can spiritual evil (sin) cause physical evil (suffering and death)?
God is the source of all life and joy. Therefore, when the human soul rebels against God, it loses its life and joy. Now a human being is body as well as soul. We are single creatures, not double: we are not even body and soul as much as we are embodied soul, or ensouled body. So the body must share in the soul's inevitable punishment—a punishment as natural and unavoidable as broken bones from jumping off a cliff or a sick stomach from eating rotten food rather than a punishment as artificial and external as a grade for a course or a slap on the hands for taking the cookies.
Whether this consequence of sin was a physical change in the world or only a spiritual change in human consciousness—whether the “ thorns and thistles” grew in the garden only after the fall or whether they were always there but were only felt as painful by the newly fallen consclousness-is another question. But in either case the connection between spiritual evil and physical evil has to be as close as the connection between the two things they affect, the human soul and the human body.
If the origin of evil is free will, and God is the origin of free will, isn't God then the origin of evil? Only as parents are the origin of the misdeeds their children commit by being the origin of their children. The all-powerful God gave us a share in his power to choose freely. Would we prefer he had not and had made us robots rather than human beings?
A third part of the solution to the problem of evil is the most important part: how to resolve the problem in practice, not just in theory; in life, not just in thought. Although evil is a serious problem for thought (for it seems to disprove the existence of God), it is even more of a problem in life (for it is the real exclusion of God). But even if you think the solution in thought is obscure and uncertain, the solution in practice is as strong and clear as the sun: it is the Son. God's solution to the problem of evil is his Son Jesus Christ. The Father `s love sent his Son to die for us to defeat the power of evil in human nature: that's the heart of the Christian story. We do not worship a deistic God, an absentee landlord who ignores his slum; we worship a garbageman God who came right down into our worst garbage to clean it up. How do we get God off the hook for allowing evil? God is not off the hook; God is the hook. That's the point of a crucifix.
The Cross is God's part of the practical solution to evil. Our part, according to the same Gospel, is to repent, to believe, and to work with God in fighting evil by the power of love. The King has invaded; we are finishing the mop-up operation.
Finally, what about the philosophical problem? It is not logically contradictory to say an all-powerful and all-loving God tolerates so much evil when he could eradicate it? Why do bad things happen to good people? The question makes three questionable assumptions.
First, who's to say we are good people? The question should be not “Why do bad things happen to good people?” but “Why do good things happen to bad people?” If the fairy godmother tells Cinderella that she can wear her magic gown until midnight, the question should be not “Why not after midnight?” but “Why did I get to wear it at all?” The question is not why the glass of water is half empty but why it is half full, for all goodness is gift. The best people are the ones who are most reluctant to call themselves good people. Sinners think they are saints, but saints know they are Sinners. The best man who ever lived once said, “No one is good but God alone. “
Second, who's to say suffering is all bad? Life without it would produce spoiled brats and tyrants, not joyful saints. Rabbi Abraham Heschel says simply, “The man who has not suffered, what can he possibly know, anyway?” Suffering can work for the greater good of wisdom. It is not true that all things are good, but it is true that “all things work together for good to those who love God.”
Third, who's to say we have to know all God's reasons? Who ever promised us all the answers? Animals can't understand much about us; why should we be able to understand everything about God? The obvious point of the Book of Job, the world's greatest exploration of the problem of evil, is that we just don't know what God is up to. What a hard lesson to learn: Lesson One, that we are ignorant, that we are infants! No wonder Socrates was declared by the Delphic oracle to be the wisest man in the world. He interpreted that declaration to mean that he alone knew that he did not have wisdom, and that was true wisdom for man.
A child on the tenth story of a burning building cannot see the firefighters with their safety net on the street. They call up, “Jump! We'll catch you. Trust us. “ The child objects, “But I can't see you.” The firefighter replies, “That's all right. I can see you.”
We are like that child, evil is like the fire, our ignorance is like the smoke, God is like the firefighter, and Christ is like the safety net. If there are situations like this where we must trust even fallible human beings with our lives, where we must trust what we hear, not what we see, then it is reasonable that we must trust the infallible, all-seeing God when we hear from his word but do not see from our reason or experience. We cannot know all God's reasons, but we can know why we cannot know.
God has let us know a lot. He has lifted the curtain on the problem of evil with Christ. There, the greatest evil that ever happened, both the greatest spiritual evil and the greatest physical evil, both the greatest sin (deicide) and the greatest suffering (perfect love hated and crucified), is revealed as his wise and loving plan to bring about the greatest good, the salvation of the world from sin and suffering eternally. There, the greatest injustice of all time is integrated into the plan of salvation that Saint Paul calls “the righteousness (Justice) of God”. Love finds a way. Love is very tricky. But love needs to be trusted.
The worst aspect of the problem of evil is eternal evil, hell. Does hell not contradict a loving and omnipotent God? No, for hell is the consequence of free will. We freely choose hell for ourselves; God does not cast anyone into hell against his will. If a creature is really free to say yes or no to the Creator's offer of love and spiritual marriage, then it must be possible for the creature to say no. And that is what hell is, essentially. Free will, in turn, was created out of God's love. Therefore hell is a result of God's love. Everything is.
No sane person wants hell to exist. No sane person wants evil to exist. But hell is just evil eternalized. If there is evil and if there is eternity, there can be hell. If it is intellectually dishonest to disbelieve in evil just because it is shocking and uncomfortable, it is the same with hell. Reality has hard corners, surprises, and terrible dangers in it. We desperately need a true road map, not nice feelings, if we are to get home. It is true, as people often say, that “hell just feels unreal, impossible.” Yes. So does Auschwitz. So does Calvary.

We The People

God Bless The USA by Lee Greenwood

Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)

Have You Forgotten?

Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (The Angry American)

Works and Days » From the Unbelievable to the Passé

Works and Days » From the Unbelievable to the Passé
From time to time I stop and wonder how the unbelievable can become the accepted. Let me list four arbitrary, but still representative, examples of what I mean.
1) Embracing unworkable statism.
Everywhere one looks statism is a failure. Contrast resource-rich Venezuela with Chile. Juxtapose Cuba to Colombia. Of course, compare Dark Age North Korea with the 21st-century South. Look at the UK in 1954 and 1990.
They are rioting in Europe not to embrace socialism, but in petulant fashion to find someone somehow to pay for it — as if “they” and “them” are partying in some remote Aegean island, with vaults of stashed euros.
Whether hard communism or soft socialism, statism does not work. We all know why — it goes against human nature, rewarding mediocrity and punishing merit, professing egalitarianism for the masses, while the operators of the system, whether the old Soviet apparatchiks or the new crony EU Brussels bureaucrats, satisfy their appetites like capitalists. Ultimately, it is simply like coasting on a bike uphill. The last hard peddles are simply not enough to push the bike and rider over the hill: finally the brilliant small manufacturer, the lean contractor, the enterprising farmer, the late-into-the-night engineer — they cannot carry any longer the clerk, the auditor, the regulator, the tax man, and the bureaucrat who wish not merely to piggy-back onto the biker, but to try to stop his peddling even as they demand to get over the crest.
Yet we are finishing a second year of absorbing banks, insurance companies, auto manufacturers, and the health care system, borrowing trillions to redistribute in new entitlements, with more lust for equality of ends notions like cap and trade and immigration amnesty. Any House member who went along with all this and lives outside a blue-gerrymandered district or San Francisco or Chicago cannot run on the Obama agenda.
The entire statist protocol polls well below 50%. Past leftist candidates like Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, George McGovern, or Walter Mondale could not get elected on their visions; those who did (Carter and Clinton) either imploded after a single term or triangulated and so found a way to a two-term presidency despite never getting 50% of the popular vote.
Statism versus free markets is about as easy to understand as the difference between Singapore and Greece, and yet here we go again. This weird suicidal statist impulse seems for Obama to trump almost every other consideration: he may well destroy the Democratic Party for a decade just when it was recovering; he has so terrified private enterprise that trillions of dollars in capital are simply sitting out his first two years, waiting for the end of his congressional majorities, and hence his agenda to implode.
All this goes on as Obama sees the EU running away from precisely what he wishes to implement, while at home a high-tax, high-entitlement, redistributive economy like California has managed to destroy the most richly endowed human and natural landscape — agriculture, tourism, high-tech, oil and gas, Hollywood, Napa Valley, Silicon Valley — in the nation. And yet here we continue down into the abyss.

2) Higher education.
Most of what we are told about universities is untrue. America’s reputation for higher learning excellence (in business, sciences, medicine, engineering, and finance) is despite not because of the humanities and social sciences. Current research in the liberal arts (the portfolio the English or sociology prof is tenured on) increasingly has almost no relevance to the general public or applicability to teaching or even scholarly merit.
Diversity is Orwellian: the university is the most politically intolerant and monolithic institution in the country, even as it demands the continuance of tenure to protect supposedly unpopular expression. Even its emphases on racial diversity is entirely constructed and absurd: Latin Americans add an accent and a trill and they become victimized Chicanos; one-half African-Americans claim they are more people of color than much darker Punjabis; the children of Asian optometrists seek minority and victim status.
Meanwhile on the labor front, liberal faculties prove far more illiberal than K-Mart. Part-time faculties now account for 40% of the units offered at many universities, earning 30-40% of the wages per unit of full professors, and mostly without benefits. There is no outrage from those who customarily damn CEOs from the lounge. Tuition rises faster than both inflation and the cost of health care, and yet the twin promises of a BA degree are no longer kept: today’s graduates are not so likely to get a choice job, and are not certified as literate in English or competent in math.
At some point, all this cannot go on, and we will have the academic version of September 15, 2008 — as parents no longer choose to take on $200,000 in debt to send their children to 4-year liberal arts schools, in which they will be likely indoctrinated that they should oppose the very American institutions that created the wealth and freedom that fuel their colleges and pay their faculties.
We have in a way already reverted to the sociology of the 19th century of an elite and a non-lettered mass, but without its benefits. One-hundred years ago, very few went to college. Only a well-schooled elite did, as the rest learned through the school of hard knocks. (My grandfather never went to college, but used to chant to me when I came home from college his high-school Latin “amo-amas-amat” as he irrigated the vineyard at 82.) Today we try to graduate almost everyone, in the process ensuring that for 4-6 years they are not apprenticing at anything other than Starbucks, “The Poetics of the Low-rider,” and university psycho-dramas over dating and oogling. I wonder whether today’s entering freshman is any better educated than someone in 1890 who was farming at the same age. I note that 50% of incoming freshmen at the CSU system must take remedial math and English. I suppose the new Obama student loan take-over in part is designed to protect the status quo, ossified university that staffs his administration and provides the fire for so many of his agendas.

3) Technology.
I remember as a little boy going to the Big Fresno Fair to see the “picto-phone,” huge monstrosities that we were told one day would allow us to phone and simultaneously see the other person on the other end of the line. Then quietly in the 1970s all that disappeared and the idea became Edsel-like.
But wait — suddenly without as much as a whimper one can Skype across the globe for free. Is not that a revolution in the human experience that has transpired without notice?
The current technological revolution is stealthy like that. The advancing pace of change is geometric but not the human reaction to it, which devolves to quiet indifference. So we look at terrorists in Waziristan from Las Vegas and decide in judge/jury/executioner fashion whether the big face on the screen lives or dies that nano-second. And sigh? I fly to an airport, have a minute, and access over 60 million words of the corpus of ancient Greek literature in between flights. Big deal?
The strange thing is that none of this has been quite factored into fossilized metrics that supposedly quantify the standard of living, poverty rates, GDP, etc. In the grocery line not long ago, two teens were chatting in Spanish to relatives by iPhone in distant Mexico. Are they impoverished or enjoying a privilege exclusive to royalty just forty years ago? Today’s Kia is more comfortable and electronically sophisticated than the Rolls and Bentley of just 20 years ago — and available to drive off to anyone with a credit card for the down payment. Surely, our social and political barometers of success and failure have simply not caught up to the technological revolution, more like horse-and-buggy calibrations trying to quantify gasoline engines.

4. The Plutocratic party?
I cannot fathom how the Democratic Party became run by those who live lives nothing remotely similar to what they profess. Yes, I know the Roosevelt-Kennedy tradition of limousine liberals, but today’s chasm between word and deed is stunning — and never remarked on. Are we to believe that prep-schooled and Ivy Leagued millionaire Barack Obama is the blue-collar face of the Democratic Party, while one of twelve children John Boehner is some sort of J.P. Morgan insider rich man? No wonder that Obama must fake his cadences, bowl, and try to eat cabbage instead of arugula.
The Al Gore, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros phenomenon is baffling. The best I can make of it goes something like this. Once someone makes enough money truly to be exempt from worries over taxation (but even Kerry proved that $1 billion does not quite end the impulse to dodge sales taxes), or is deeply burrowed within government so that almost everything is free or subsidized, then some sort of human desire to help the “other” kicks in as a sort of penance for the enjoyment of privilege.
How could Barack Obama, community organizer par excellence, send his kids to Sidwell Friends? How does Bill Gates, Sr. tour the country, hectoring to re-impose inheritance taxes? Did Al Gore need the extra Montecito home or John Kerry the $7 million yacht (cf. “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money”)? Why did the Clintons shake down corporations for gifts to their DC home and Bill’s library?
Stranger still is this new Democratic emperor/bread-and-circus alliance. The very wealthy promise largess to the poorer on the premise that both despise the culture of the aspiring, the one in condescending disdain, the other in bitter envy. Jimmy Carter laments, near life’s end, the unfairness of it all, as the ignorant never appreciated his godhead. John Kerry wails about how a slogan or two misled us from his message. Obama re-channels the poor clueless clingers trope from the Ground Zero mosque to the upcoming election. “What’s the matter with Kansas?” is the gnashing of the well-off who cannot understand why the less well-off don’t join them in redistributing their far smaller incomes.
The final irony? Lost in all this sanctimonious moralizing by the Bill Maher/Michael Moore/George Soros left is that there is redistribution going on constantly. In every extended family someone has done pretty well. What happens? He loans money to cousins. She puts up a nephew in the extra bedroom, gives a lot to her church, pays for bats at Little League, takes her daughter’s fellow Brownies to pizza, or co-signs the nephew’s car loan.
The upper-middle-class is not greedy, but they do have three reservations about the Obama pie-slicing: they want to have a little say in the distribution; they better than Obama know how much they can afford to give; and they sense that something for nothing is not a neutral act, but a sort of evil in creating dependency and destroying initiative — all for that selfish feeling of benefaction among elites that comes from handing out someone else’s money.
No, I cannot quite believe how quietly and without audit America’s moneyed and cognitive elites became such hectoring populists — with the constant assumption they could still live, school, work, and marry largely among like kind — oh so distant from the objects of their concern.