How To—and How Not To—Solve the Problem of Evil

Against a piecemeal approach

Suppose you know that A entails B, C, D, E, and F. Additionally, you know there’s a good reason for permitting A, but A doesn’t seem to obviously admit of an explanation for its existence, yet B, C, D, E, and F seem like the types of things that there positively is not an explanation of. Additionally, there are ways to bring about B, C, D, E, and F without needing A. It seems this gives you a strong reason to infer that there’s a good reason for A itself, rather than B, C, D, E, and F.

It would be a strange coincidence for there to be a reason for all of B, C, D, E and F, when they don’t seem to admit of an explanation. What are the odds that all of B, C, D, E, and F would all have an explanation? Much lower than the odds that just A would, and then B, C, D, E, and F are unfortunate side-effects.

Yet when it comes to the problem of evil, people try to adopt the opposite approach. They draw up a long catalogue of various evils—animal suffering, bug suffering, horrendous evil, people stepping on cactuses, people being allowed to commit horrifying crimes—and then try to track down particular reasons for each of the evils. Now, this isn’t a totally failed project. Some of the evils can, especially on an emotional level, seem so utterly horrifying that they vitiate the possibility of some grand, perfect, redemptive plan.

For instance, I was recently reading the story of Junko Furuta, a girl in Japan who was tortured in the most grotesque, brutal, and inhumane ways over the course of many weeks. I won’t go into the details, but they are utterly shocking. As I was reading about her story, I felt quite a deep conviction that there couldn’t be a God who would allow such a horrible thing. No perfect being would stand aside as horrors that breathtakingly profound sweep the world. Anyone who would do nothing as a girl is getting tortured in ways too disturbing to even contemplate, ways that made me verbally cry out just reading about them, is not divine, and certainly not worthy of worship.

This is one mistake that apologists make when grappling with the problem of evil—treating it as trivial. If one goes on Twitter and searches through the phrase “if God, why bad things happen?” they’ll find a vast number of people downplaying the problem as something trite or trivial (one can always find people saying dumb or evil things on Twitter). They employ the effective rebuttal strategy of “paraphrase your opponents argument in a dumb voice with incorrect grammar.” Even if you think there’s a successful theodicy, evil is not a trivial problem—it’s not something to be taken lightly. In a world where children get cancer, trillions of animals starve and are eaten alive, and horrors like the holocaust occur regularly, there is strong evidence against a perfect God.

Seeing how those evils, despite their horror, could perhaps be redeemed and defeated in the end helps make it seem more plausible that evil is, while an extremely serious challenge to theism, not totally decisive. Reading Marilyn McCord Adams’s paper God and Horrendous Evils and imagining that God would use the suffering of people like Furuta to bring them closer to him, to bring about a stronger relationship of infinite value, made it easier to see how God could allow such horrifying things to happen. Contemplating God’s ultimate defeat of evils, incorporating them into some great good, can make it less obvious that they are ultimately gratuitous.

But it also can’t be a complete picture, for a few reasons.

First, if it really were the case that every bad thing had some grander purpose that made the world greater for it having existed, then one would have no reason to prevent evil. One shouldn’t stop things that are ultimately conducive to the greater good. Yet clearly great evils—malaria, child molestation, torture—are worth preventing. So they must not ultimately be for the greater good. Now, perhaps despite their horror, God is ultimately able to redeem them, make them into something ultimately grand, but the world is not better for their having existed.

Second, many of the evils in the world stem from simple things. Numerous forms of suffering follow from the evolutionary process. The suffering of moral patients, agony serving an evolutionary role, vastly excessive suffering, and the tremendous misery and death in nature all follow from evolution. But it’s much more likely that there is a some reason for evolution than it is that each of the evils that follow from evolution has a reason. What are the odds that the best distribution of pleasure and pain happens to be the one derivable from an evolutionary process?

Third, there seem to be great goods that are never experienced. It seems like for many people, great transcendent bliss of a quality that thoroughly outstrips the badness of torture would be good for them in the long run. Yet almost no one has that. What are the odds that there are so few people for whom a world like that would be desirable?

Instead, it’s much more plausible that there’s some underlying great good that comes from a universe like ours. Perhaps, as Dustin Crummett has suggested, our world follows from the free will of demons. On this account, any deviation from the world would be a violation of free will, which might be very bad. Or perhaps there’s something valuable about a world that has conscious agents capable of possessing moral knowledge, yet which is otherwise indifferent. Perhaps our experience with an indifferent universe later strengthens the intensity of the beatific vision, or the strength of our relationships in the afterlife. Perhaps there’s something special about our particular laws, that makes them of great valuable to our total spiritual journey over the course of eternity. Or perhaps, as the panpsychists say, atoms are conscious. Perhaps they’re engaged in valuable projects that interfering with nature would seriously muck up. Or, most likely, perhaps the reason for great evil is something that we can’t guess given our grave epistemic limitations.

None of this strikes me as super plausible, just as no solution to the problem of evil strikes me as super plausible. But it’s much more plausible that God has a very strong reason for allowing these fundamental features of the world to be as they are than it is that each of the vast panoply of horrors has some redeeming benefit. If A entails B, C, D, E, and F, it’s easier to explain the reason for B, C, D, E, and F, in terms of A than the other way around.