…Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able to? Then he is not omnipotent.
…Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
…Is he both willing and able? Then whence cometh evil? Then why call him god?
~ Epicurus (341-271 B.C.E.) ~
I couldn’t have said it better myself. There have been many others who proposed their own formulation, and there may have been some who said it earlier, but none have said it better than old Epicurus. Epicurus and other like-minded philosophers have bedeviled Christian, Islamic and Jewish thinkers for millennia.
First a short sidebar on Epicurus: Epicurus was a Greek philosopher in the image of Plato (who died seven years before Epicurus was born) and Aristotle. He was born on the Greek island of Samos in the Aegean Sea, but his bloodlines ran to Athens. He was a prolific writer, although few of his original works have survived the centuries. Most of his thinking was expressed through other writers whose works did survive. It is said that he believed the purpose of his philosophy was to attain ataraxia – peace and freedom from fear,… and aporia – the absence of pain. I can certainly buy into that. He was a polytheist – that is to say, like most of his contemporaries he believed in a plethora of gods, but that the gods had no involvement in humankind and did not punish nor reward people for their actions. Somewhere along the way he got the bad rap of being the patron of drunkards and gluttons… thus, Epicureanism was often given short shrift among the pantheon of Greek philosophers. It is said, however, that his thinking had substantial impact on those who came after, including John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and even Karl Marx, as well as Immanuel Kant.
So let me “unpack” this for you. Epicurus was asking the question that all of us at some time wanted to ask our preacher, rabbi, or imam. Can evil and god co-exist? Epicurus’ answer was, No they cannot. And since we have ample evidence of evil all around us, that leads to the inevitable conclusion that god does not,.. exist, that is. You can see why this has had all the great theologians gulping hard and coming up with all manner of very confusing refutations of his thesis. In fact, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 C.E.), writing almost 1000 years later and with the benefit of a lot of hindsight, wrote in his magnum opus, Summa Theologica, that there were only two objections to the existence of god that worried him. The first was the apparent ability of natural science to explain everything in our experience without god, and the second was The Problem of Evil (as expressed by Epicurus). I’m not going to try to deal with the first, but I do have a few observations about The Problem and Nature of Evil.
I guess we should start with evil. You can get into deep waters pretty quickly by trying to define the various sorts of evil that exist in the world, so let me try to keep it simple. A man pulls out his gun and kills a fellow man… that is moral evil. Lightening strikes and kills a fellow man… that is natural evil. Another way to say it is that a moral evil is a bad thing caused by human activity. A natural evil is an evil for which no non-divine agent can be held morally responsible. On a much larger scale, think of the Holocaust – a moral evil of inestimable proportions… and Hurricane Katrina – a natural evil almost beyond accounting. I’m tempted to include a third evil… accidental evil, an example of which would be the meltdown of the Russian nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. For my purposes though, I’m going to stick to the more familiar turf of moral and natural evils. Unfortunately they have to be treated separately for reasons that only theologians can answer. More on this later. One last definition of evil would be that which is expressed in the King James version of the Christian bible. “Evil is any action, thought, or attitude that is contrary to the character or will of god.” Hmm? Do you believe that The Great Death caused by the bubonic plague, which killed upwards of 50 million people in the 14th century, is or is not “contrary to the will of god”? You just have to scratch your head over that one. Most would say that this event was contrary to the character, if not the will of god. It follows to ask then, why would an all powerful god allow it to happen?
All of the great religious thinkers since time immemorial have struggled to come up with reasons why evil, moral or natural, exists in the face of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent god. There is even a term used to describe the various defenses, refutations, and explanations of this apparently inexplicable logical conundrum. They are called The Theodicies, which, in their most common form, are an attempt to answer the question: Why would a a good god permit the manifestation of evil? Some theories will make you think. Others will make your eyes cross. Let me give you an example of the eye-crossing kind of theodicy. It comes from the well-known writings of St. Augustine in the 4th century. It goes like this: “All things created by god are good, therefore evil (not being good) was not caused by god.” What? Where does that come from? In my Philosophy 101 class, in which I scored a gentleman’s B, this would have been cited as a perfect false syllogism. Another theodicy is from the previously cited St. Thomas Aquinas, who said in his top ten seller, The Moral Sufficiency of Logical Necessity, that “Natural evil comes from natural law and is unavoidable; therefore, god is not responsible.” Huh? God is not responsible?
Let me get to the bottom line, because, believe me, there has been far more fuzzy thinking around this subject than you can possible imagine, and it been going on for a long, long time. The most prevalent theodicies dealing with moral evil are 1) The Greater Good Theory: God permits evil to exist to prevent a greater evil or encourage a response that leads to a greater good, and 2) The Free Will Theory: God permits evil to exist so as to allow man to exercise his own free will. So if man chooses poorly and evil results, it is man’s fault and not god’s. I’m not even going to comment on the shortcomings of these theories, except to say it seems to me that an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent god, could figure out a way to overcome even these obstacles. If he can do so in Heaven, why can’t he do it on Earth. As for natural evil, the explanation of the best religious thinkers is, well, er, uh, cough, cough… there is really no good explanation. About the best they can do is to opine that natural evil is the result of natural law, and therefore god is not responsible. Egads, even I could do better than that. Why not also tie in the free will argument, by saying that man can only live and exert his free will if natural law is allowed to run its course? Yes, I know that’s pretty weak, but this is a hard one for theologians to talk about.
One of the most specious theodicies I ran across regarding natural evil is that it may be the result of God’s Nudging. God may permit some natural evil because it “challenges people to think about god for the first time.” Yikes! God allows the bubonic plague to kill 50 million people in order to encourage a few of the great unwashed to think about god “for the first time?” No way. Not even a bad god would do that.
Some try to work the Greater Good theory into their defense of natural evil. Not long ago I heard a preacher at a funeral service for a pre-teen girl that had been brought down by a childhood cancer. His explanation was that god permitted the cancer to end the life of the young innocent because it would demonstrate to those she came in contact with during her short fight for life that that life is beautiful and that her short life ended by cancer would encourage others to find god. There was much nodding of heads and murmured “amens” from the audience.
It’s easy to get wrapped around the axel when trying to think through the balance of god and evil. People far smarter than you and I have been trying to sort it all out for hundreds, even thousands of years. We all have to come to our own conclusion sooner or later. Let me tell you where I have wound up. Nothing I can find in literature, nor in the writings of even the most thoughtful, says that a god in the tradition of Abraham can co-exist with the moral and natural evil that manifests itself all around us. Let me describe the Problem of Evil in my own words: I’m buying into the notion of the god of the Abrahamic religions (some 4.2 billion believers), who knows all, has the power do anything he wants, and is all good. That would be a god that even I can get behind… but then there is that nasty fact that evil exists. Unfortunately, it is all around us all the time. That leads to my sentiment that god either a) permits evil to exist for his own reasons which I may never understand, in which case I’m gonna look for a more perfect god that I can understand, or b) no god exists. This conclusion would place me squarely in the midst of that most hated of all peoples… the atheists. No, I don’t describe myself that way, because I refuse to characterize my personal philosophy as a negative (i.e “I don’t believe in god”). I much prefer to talk about what I do believe, and although I have not yet found a perfect label for my philosophy, there are a few things that are central to my beliefs. For example:
…..Life is an unending search for truth that is best guided by rational thought and reason.
…..I can live an ethical and moral life without religion or god.
…..I am an integral part of nature and resist any reliance on super-naturalism.
There was a time, not too long ago, when expressing such beliefs would have landed me in the hoosegow, or even worse. And I suspect that even now there are still some among us who will think less of me for having done so. Others may pray for me. That’s all right. But life is finite, and I’m at the point where I want to say exactly what I think (so long as it does no harm to others), and I want what I think to be known by others around me. Best of all, I’m at peace with my beliefs and stand ready to accept the consequences, whatever they may be. Yes, I know that there are those, probably in the majority, who will say that my problem is not the Problem from Evil, but that I lack faith. To that I will plead guilty, while noting that. in my view, faith is belief in that which has not and cannot be proven, while beliefs are faith in that which has been proven. I am sure evil exists, I’m not so sure about anything else.
Carl Sagan said it far more elegantly than I when he said, “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” But then again, I was sure Hillary was going to be our next president.
