KellanStec

This semester, I am taking a course that is new to my college’s catalog: Philosophy of Religion. It is an introductory Philosophy course, and in it we cover various topics pertaining to problems within theistic religion. The first topic of discussion is the Problem of Evil. The syllogism is as follows:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omni benevolent, and omniscient.
2. If God is omnipotent, then he would have power to eliminate evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God would know of all the evils that exist.
4. If God is omni benevolent, then God would have a desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil and God exist, then God either can not eliminate evil, will not eliminate evil, or doesn’t know about evil.
7. Therefore, God (as defined) doesn’t exist.

The syllogism is logically valid, but are the premises true? 1-4 are true by definition, so let’s look at just 5 and 6. 5 is probably the most debatable, because what can be defined as evil? There are a number of defenses to explain the existence of evil: the Free Will Defense, the Greater Goods Defense, and the Greater Unknown Purpose Defense. I will look at these defenses and see if they hold up.

Free Will Defense
The Free Will Defense states that in order to have beings that are significantly free willed, they cannot be causally determined to do only what is right. In other words, free will necessitates evil because in order to choose between good and bad, a bad choice must be made available. This seems reasonable at first, because it shifts the blame for the existence of evil towards free-willed creatures making evil choices. God didn’t voluntarily choose these evils. In order to create free creatures, he had to allow evil as an unfortunate byproduct.

However, there are certain cases in which this does not apply. For example, in cases of natural evils. That is, evils independent of man. These evils can include the suffering that occurs as a result of some animals being carnivorous. Surely there are ways around allowing animals to be killed for food by sharper-toothed animals. Perhaps all animals could be vegetarian–or even photosynthetic. Other natural evils include hurricanes, disease, and earthquakes. How necessary is it to have such things on our earth?

The Greater Goods Defense
The Greater Goods Defense states that perhaps some evils are necessary to create a greater good in the end. This goes along with Leibniz’s work, and is his core argument in attempting to solve the problem of evil. In his writings, he called this world the “best of all possible worlds” by which he meant that maybe there was no other way to create a better world containing any less evil. He reverses the problem and states that since God possesses the qualities stated in the premises, that this must be the best of all possible worlds. However, this creates a weak argument, because one only has to find a single example of something that would make the world better off overall. It also suggests that God is constrained to do all that is good. In that case, then in what sense does God exercise free will?

This argument is demolished by my photosynthetic animal I mentioned above. If no animal consumed meat, then there would be much less gratuitous suffering in the natural world, and as a result, a better overall world. It’s also hard to see why the world is better off with things such as AIDS, hurricanes, and tsunamis. Sure, things like that bring people together, but there must be alternatives to putting thousands of people through misery, death, and displacement. It doesn’t seem like a reasonable trade to me. Maybe I just can’t understand the purpose. This brings me to the final major defense: the Greater Unknown Purpose defense.

Greater Unknown Purpose Defense
The Greater Unknown Purpose Defense states that we as humans are incapable of understanding what the purpose of evil might be. It is outside of our boundaries to judge something that God does as good or evil anyway, since he makes the rules. But then, on what criteria do we say that God is benevolent?

Some say that we must go through this period of injustice, which is justified in the end through eternal life in either heaven or hell. However, if evil is a necessary byproduct of free will, then how will evil be kept out of the afterlife? Will there be free will in the afterlife? If choices are prevented from being made in the afterlife and we experience only eternal bliss, then why even bother with this period of injustice and free will business? Why not skip to the bliss part?

Other responses
There are some more, less popular responses to this problem. One states that we as humans are sinful creatures, and that evil is punishment for sins committed. However, I do not see a child being tormented by a pedophile as a sinful creature. Children are innocent to me, incapable of truly understanding something is wrong and choosing to do it. In addition, if this were true, we would see proportionally more bad things happening to bad people. Instead, we see both bad and good things happening to both bad and good people.

Here is my response to the problem of evil: I question the fifth premise: evil exists. The universe I see is one with no good and no evil. There is nothing inherently evil about anything. Nature is indifferent to everything. It just keeps moving along, unaware of anything going on within it. Yes, there are people who choose to do what we call “evil”, but the fact that carnivores, hurricanes, and diseases exist do not mean that evil exists. I think the way that evil is defined, it is constrained to human activity. A creator, nature, or whatever you want to call it is not evil, because evil is something that man does. I would also question the first four premises since there is nothing to indicate that any of them are true, but I will probably get to those later on.

Conclusion

If we are going to suggest that a creator being could be evil, I would do it like this:

1. If God exists, then God is omniscient.
2. If God knows through his omniscience before creating anyone whether or not they will spend eternity being punished in hell, then God can be considered evil.
3. Hell bound people are created.
4. Therefore, God is either evil or imaginary.

It’s not an airtight syllogism, because I am not a trained philosopher, but my logic is this. The more data we are able to collect from our surroundings, the more accurate our predictions can become. If we know the weight of a falling object from x height, and the acceleration due to gravity, we can predict with extreme accuracy the force that object will have when it hits the ground. If we know the mass of a falling object from x height, and the acceleration due to gravity, we can predict with extreme accuracy the kinetic energy that object will have when it hits the ground. (Thanks, Nick.)

Similarly, an omniscient being would know all data that is possible to know about everything–right down to the atomic level. This would allow this being to make ~99.9% accurate predictions about everything, accounting for all variables that can affect any outcome. This includes our thoughts, since our thoughts are ultimately products of (presumably predictable) physical processes. With this knowledge at hand, God would know whether or not a person will end up in hell (he has the criteria for determining such a fate), and chooses to create that person anyway. This sounds evil to me. Free will doesn’t even come in to play–the person’s free choices were known beforehand!

Predeterminism and free will seem to be mutually exclusive, so we are right back in square one. What do you think?