Five Points Against the Problem of Evil

The problem of evil is a good argument, but it doesn't decisively refute theism

The problem of evil is the best argument for atheism. If God exists and is perfect and loves us, why do children get cancer? Why is the natural world stained red with the blood of countless dead and dying animals? Why has it been for hundreds of millions of years? Why do babies starve in the arms of their mother? If God loves us, why does he let such dreadful things happen to us?

When I was becoming a theist, this was the main consideration that pulled me away from belief in God. God explained so much about the world, yet explained so little about evil. The atheist, it seemed to me, was left with myriad unsolvable mysteries; the theist had just one terrible mystery, present in each of the world’s sorrows, each time two loved ones must say goodbye for the final time (in this life, at least).

In this piece, I’m not going to give a comprehensive explanation of why God allows evil. If you want my preferred solution, you can read it here. Instead, I’m just going to make some points that I found helpful for illustrating that there might be a solution to the problem of evil. Ideally I want to convince you that it’s not obviously totally impossible that God has some reason to allow evil, the way I used to think it was. My suggestions will undercut the evidential force of the problem even without being a complete solution.

A child might not understand precisely why their parent brings them to undergo a surgery. But they might nevertheless have good reason to think their parent has such a reason. So too for God.

1 Minor evils

The problem of evil generally focuses on really big evils: genocide, slavery, rape, torture, etc. But there are many more bad things in the world than these. People routinely stub their toes, feel mild irritation, and prick their fingers. While the problem of horrendous evils is generally seen as a horrendous problem, the problem of trivial evils is seen as comparatively trivial. If all the evils in the world were small and minor, that wouldn’t automatically solve the problem of evil, but it would make it look a lot less impossible to solve. Evil would remain some kind of intellectual problem, but it would no longer possess the same crushing existential weight.

But note that if theism is true, then the evils in the world really are small and trivial compared to the goods of the afterlife. All Earthly suffering is a comparatively insignificant speck next to heaven. One second of heaven more than outweighs all the suffering experienced so far in human history by infinity orders of magnitude. If Earthly evils were a pale shadow, heaven would be a supernova. If suffering all your Earthly sorrows would make a single second of heaven 1% sweeter, it would be worth it.

God has infinite power. Insofar as he is perfectly good and cares for us, we should expect the goods he’ll provide in the life to come to be infinitely large. So if theism is true, compared to the goodness of what is to come, all evils are minor. This is not to downplay the horrific things that happen on Earth. It is merely to note that they are nothing compared to God’s infinite goodness. However dark and painful this life is, a single second of heaven is more than enough to compensate it. Everyone who suffers, from animals to children, will experience joy too boundless to comprehend.

Now, I don’t think this single-handedly defangs the problem of evil. The problem of minor evils is still a big problem. In fact, I find it a lot more serious than most people do. It’s hard to see how God would have a reason for allowing so many minor evils—many of which seem not to serve any greater purpose. But when one fixates on how good the afterlife may be, the problem of evil begins to look not much more serious than the problem of minor evils.

2 Unknown reasons

It’s hard to know why God allows evil. But oftentimes people much smarter than me do things that I don’t understand. I generally don’t know why Magnus Carlsen makes the chess moves that he does or why Terrence Tao includes a particular calculation in his papers. Nonetheless, I trust that they have good reasons for what they do. Insofar as there is good reason to think God exists, then we should similarly trust him. The gulf between us and God is infinitely larger than the gulf between us and merely very skilled humans.

Now, I am not saying that we are totally in the dark about what God would do. I am not saying—nor do I think—that we haven’t the faintest clue what God would do, so no features of the world are ever evidence against God. I don’t buy this skeptical theist claim. I’m merely saying that God knows many things we don’t, so we should be wary about confidently concluding from the fact that we can’t see a reason for God to permit evil that he has no such reason.

Sometimes we do think that a person’s behavior is good evidence against their expertise. If someone claimed to be a good chess player, and then began making obviously terrible moves, we would begin to doubt them. So should we do the same for God? Yes, to some degree. Evil is evidence against the existence of God. But it is not totally decisive evidence on its own.

It’s hard to be extremely confident from our vantage point that some feature of the world has no ultimate justification. We peer through an arbitrarily small window into ultimate reality. So it is less like we witness repeated obviously terrible moves, and more like we witness moves that seem bad to us in a game with rules we don’t understand, where we can’t see most of the gameboard, and we’re on move two out of infinity.

3 Eternal benefits

If God exists and cares about us, he has no need to capriciously snuff us out after a few decades. He can keep us around forever, experiencing infinite joy for infinite time. Thus, insofar as the evils do anything to enhance relationships we have with others stretched out across an infinite period of time, they pay off infinitely. Alexander Pruss put it well (though I find the problem far more compelling than he does):

I want to confess something: I do not find the problem of evil compelling. I think to myself: Here, during the blink of an eye, there are horrendous things happening. But there is infinitely long life afterwards if God exists. For all we know, the horrendous things are just a blip in these infinitely long lives. And it just doesn’t seem hard to think that over an infinite future that initial blip could be justified, redeemed, defeated, compensated for with moral adequacy, sublated, etc.

It sounds insensitive to talk of the horrors that people live through as a blip. But a hundred years really is the blink of an eye in the face of eternity.

When you vividly contemplate the fact that there are infinity seconds in the afterlife for every second of earthly life, theodicies begin to seem markedly less absurd. The goods standardly appealed to by theodicies—soul building, connection building, deepening our relationship with God in some way—last forever. In their infinitude, they’re more than enough to outweigh earthly evils.

4 God might have a reason to allow the world to be ruined

The world has many different evils, many of which seem much more likely given an indifferent world than one with a God who cares about us. Consider the suffering of the deer in the forest fire. It is not plausible that some great good accrues from the deer experiencing the pain of being burned to death. It would be very surprising if the semirandom mix of evils produced by evolution happened to be optimal for our spiritual flourishing.

So if theists were committed to the idea that every one of the world’s evils leads to greater goods, then theism would be very implausible indeed. It would also be morally dubious. If the world is better because it has malaria, why bother treating malaria? One should not ordinarily rid the world of good things.

Fortunately, theists are not committed to this. What they should instead think is that God had reason to allow the world to be ruined. One version of this view, though far from the most plausible one, is the Christian doctrine of the fall—that God had reason to permit early humans to plunge the world into blazing indifference if they so choose. Alternative versions attribute the world’s indifferent state to omissions from powerful non-human entities, misconduct from simulators, and more.

Any account like this will require positing somewhat surprising things for which we do not have decisive independent evidence. So theism will pay a cost in probability. But it is cheaper for theism to pay a cost once for all evils than a different time for each evil. It is more likely that God has some good reason to allow the world to be screwed up than that there is some separate reason to permit each of the world’s evils.

Those pressing the problem of evil often have a tendency to treat evils as probabilistically independent. But they’re not. If God has a reason to allow a world with cancer, torture, flesh-eating parasites, and evolutionary suffering, that at least raises the odds that he has a good reason to permit lupus. To explain a few evils, one must posit that God has a reason to allow a world to become screwed up, which will then explain the remaining evils.

5 Bias

There are philosophically potent arguments for both theism and atheism. Yet the arguments for theism tend, in general, to be pretty abstract. While you might be convinced by the argument from psychophysical harmony or fine-tuning, it doesn’t have any emotional or existential pull. The arguments for theism are largely cool intellectual puzzles; the arguments for atheism make us want to shake our fists at God in rage.

You should expect yourself to have some bias to overrate arguments that have more emotional force. Because the problem of evil is an emotional problem and not just an intellectual one, we are liable to overrate its intellectual force. Our emotions affect our perception of arguments more than we like to think.

Now, I am not suggesting that the problem of evil is only an emotional problem and that it lacks intellectual force. I don’t believe that, and I hate when apologists say it! My claim is simply that we should expect ourselves to overrate the force of the problem of evil relative to other arguments that are similarly evidentially compelling but lack the same kind of emotional payload.

When I reflected, I noticed this in myself. Even when, say, the Anthropic argument strikes me as about as compelling as the problem of evil, it doesn’t pull me psychologically in the same way. But when there’s a judgment that seems good to you rationally, you shouldn’t reject it just because your emotional state can’t get on board.

6 Conclusion

Mill famously titled one of his chapters in Utilitarianism “Of What Sort of Proof the Principle of Utility Is Susceptible.” Think of this essay in a similar spirit. I have not given a solution to the problem of evil. I have merely aimed to argue that it’s not obviously impossible that there is a solution. Explaining evil given theism isn’t obviously more difficult than explaining psychophysical harmony or fine-tuning given atheism.

When one considers the eternity to come, the infinite goods available to God, and all the things God knows that we don’t, it seems like he just might have a reason to permit evil for a short period of time. Eventually, every tear will be wiped away, everything sad made untrue.