What's the Problem?

Why is “the problem of evil” such common currency in Western thought? We find it in theology and also in popular outcries: “How could a just God permit something like this?” There is even a highly developed branch of philosophy specifically devoted to the subject, theodicy, a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in light of the existence of evil.

I’m somewhat addicted to looking up etymologies because they help me understand what people once meant when they first coined words. Theodicy comes from the Greek words for God (theos) and for right or justice (dike), hence god-justification or god-defense. But let’s move on. The need for theodicy arises because Christian theology developed an elaborate specification of God’s attributes over the medieval centuries; these attributes included omniscience, omnipotence, and absolute goodness. Based on the Judaic transmission, viewed as divine revelation—thus God’s own self-disclosure—Christian theology also pictures God as the sources and creator of everything by a conscious and deliberate act. The problem of evil develops out of this definitional enterprise. When we apply our reasoning here, it becomes very easy to see that a Being of such overwhelming power and superiority must be responsible for evil in the world. And here arises the problem.

Aristotle suggested that unless we begin with a law of non-contradiction, we cannot know anything. That principle, in Aristotle’s words is that “It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect.”† The presence of evil in the world contradicts God’s overwhelming and original power and goodness. This then sets out the issues that theodicy then proceeds to explain so that the contradiction is removed.

In the West the name most closely associated with theodicy is that of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). He wrote Théodicée, evidently coining the word. In the manner of that time a one-word title was rarely used. The full version is Essays of theodicy on the goodness of God, the freedom of man and the origin of evil. The essence is already in the title, and the theme, crassly summarized, is that God created the best of all possible worlds; in that world freedom is present as a perfection—without it, after all, the world would be a mere deterministic machine. But once you make room for freedom—all hell breaks out. Not Leibniz’s actual words, I hasten to add, but a phrase that sticks in the mind. Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), the Sufi philosopher, is sometimes credited with having said the same thing; Ghazali said something like that, but his context was different. Speaking of the world he said: “It is not possible that there is something better, more perfect, more complete.” He was not philosophizing but commenting on God’s transcendence. One source is here.

Deriving evil, particularly moral evil, from the presence of freedom is a potent argument. It serves as theodicy in that God gave created agencies freedom, which is a good. The evil arises from its abuse. That an omniscient God would know in advance that freedom will be abused and will thus produce suffering and pain—that God should therefore have denied his creatures freedom—represents more of the same presumption that those indulged in who began giving God all kinds of attributes in the first place. My personal inclination is to adhere to another western tradition, negative theology. This formulation has its roots in Neoplatonism, ultimately pointing back to Plato and his school. Augustine, within the Christian fold, leaned in this direction too. The Kabbalists also share this view. It is that the reality of God really is transcending. You cannot know anything about it. For people like us there is just as much evil as for the other side, but there is no problem of evil because it is pure presumption in us to try to pin it on the Absolute.

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†Metaphysics, IV 3 1005b19–20.