Board index ‹ The Problem of Evil and Suffering

[Olivia]

My professor brought up the idea that God punishes the world for their evil things by performing natural disasters and other things such as 9/11. We watched a video about some people saying that 9/11 was what we deserved because we allow gay people to live in our society and it is God's way of telling us that that is wrong. From one of your responses, you said God doesn't put evil things upon us. But how do you explain to people about natural disasters and such?

[jimwalton]

Here's my take on it: God created the world with cause and effect, and for the most part, he doesn't interfere with the cause-and-effect nature of the world. If He did, we're back to the "he'd mess everything up and we wouldn't be human anymore" stuff. Obviously, some people believe that God is always messing with cause-and-effect, and they thank God that they got a particular green light when they're in a hurry. My opinion? That's nonsense. God doesn't change the timing of the traffic signals for you, nor does he make it be a sunny day just because you're having a picnic. For that matter, God hardly ever interferes with the circumstances of our lives. God's main work is INSIDE of people. He works on the heart, not on the timing of the traffic signal. His work is salvation, strength, peace, forgiveness, joy, patience, goodness, self-control, etc. For the most part, he leaves the weather to do its own thing.

The wind, then, brings us many good things, but every Fall, because of the movement of the sun, there are hurricanes. God didn't send them; it's part of the cause-and-effect nature of creation. So also earthquakes, tidal waves, tsunamis, and the extraordinarily magnificent weather on the islands of Hawaii. (Just for the record, I am NOT advocating agnosticism or deism, where God wound up the world like a clock and then lets it run while he’s watching reruns on TV. The Bible’s truth is worlds away from those deceptions.)

But also just for the record, there are times that he does mess with the weather, though those times are few and far between. The Bible records a few of them: the flood of Gn. 6 is a classic example (though even that one I could argue was a matter of timing, not of messing). The earthquake of Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction, the earthquake of Jericho's demise, etc—but remember, it's an area of the world prone to earthquakes, so let's not get too mystical. Obviously, the book of Revelation is dripping with such stuff, but that's Revelation. Revelation is in a league by itself.

After 9/11, some preachers (Oral Roberts, I believe, or was it Jerry Falwell?) said that it was God's judgment on our society for gays. You know what I think?: Hogwash. That man was making us all look like idiots, and I didn't appreciate it. Obviously that was their opinion, but there's no way they can know that, and I believe it was irresponsible of them to say it.

I will say this, though, and I think it's related: the spiritual world and the physical world are somehow oddly connected. In Genesis there seems to have been a harmony of all things, and that got messed up when sin entered the world. So yes, I actually believe that there is some truth to astrology, but it has been so warped that it's detestable in God's sight. There is something to physical omens, but the same depravity and detestableness. So saying, I think that to some extent our physical world reflects the spiritual world. As the spiritual world worsens, so also the physical world, especially climate. That's why, for instance, when Jesus died the sky turned dark, and there was an earthquake. That's why, in Revelation (as well as Jesus' prophecies of the end times, such as in Mt. 24), there will be physical and weather signs of the things that are about to happen spiritually. But I'll tell ya, that's a far cry from saying God sends this stuff because we've been naughty. I don't believe that at all.

So how do I explain natural disasters? We live in a world of cause and effect, and we get some nice days and some rain. And when we have a warm Fall here in Buffalo, then the cold Canadian winds pick up moisture off the lake and dump snow on us. God isn't punishing us; it's just the weather. And natural disasters happen. God didn't do it, but He sure is pleased when we all pitch in and help feed the hungry, bring water for survival, and help rebuild from the mess.

[Newbie]

But, for instance, a tsunami hits the coast and wipes out thousands of people. God could have stopped that. Doesn't that make God immoral? It does in my mind.

[jimwalton]

Great question. Certainly we all distinguish between moral evil (evil that results from human choice) and physical evil (evil that is not the result of human choice, such as a tsunami). The Bible indicates that God created weather and climate to bring functional order to the world, and that the world operates on the scientific principles of cause and effect. The world turns, cold and warm air rise and fall creating wind currents and rain patterns, the tectonic plates are in movement, and it sounds as if you want God to not only regulate those so that no one would perceive any notion of "physical evil", but to micromanage them so that there is never any chance of physical evil. So what you're requiring is that the world not run on cause-and-effect, but every movement of nature regulated so that no storm ever caught a ship, no avalanche ever happened when people were around, no earthquake ever caused a building to fall on a person or animal, etc. So what you're requiring for God to be moral is that the world no longer be rational or contingent, and that science not be possible, for without regularity and predictability, the scientific method is useless. Does this make God immoral because he doesn't micromanage the world and all that is in it? I don't think so.

There are five theses that the theist would claim are relevant: God exists, God is omnipotent, God is omniscient, God is wholly good, and evil exists. The first point to be made is that these five items do not in and of themselves formally entail a logical contradiction. Something must be added for that. If such a statement is added, it must necessarily contradict all five of the above statements, and all five of the statements must contradict it, since the Bible teaches all five. So what is the proposition that brings such an argument? That's something you need to provide. Without it, we can still conclude that God is moral. The assumption that a moral God must necessarily eliminate evil as far as he can is not true at all. A doctor who can eliminate the pain in your knee only by removing your leg does not forfeit his claim to moral excellence by failing to do so. It is not true that a person (or God) is wholly good only if that person (or God) tries to eliminate every state of affairs that he believes is evil or that someone else believes is evil.

[Newbie]

And who set this system up as such? According to theology, God. I am wondering why an omnibenevolent being that supposedly respects free will designs a system where a person's free will can be removed at any second through no act of their own. If I were to set up a world with living creatures and I designed it so they could be killed daily by no fault of their own, and sometimes in the quarter of millions, you would consider me a monster, if it was in my capability to design a world where that didn't occur. Are you saying God, omnipotent God, was incapable of designing a world where physical evil did not occur? If he allowed it after the Fall, he would be even more evil.

You wrote, "There are five theses that the theist would claim are relevant: God exists, God is omnipotent, God is omniscient, God is wholly good, and evil still exists. The first point to be made is that these five items do not in and of themselves formally entail a logical contradiction." You are loose with your word "good". I agree, if you drop Omnibenevolent, the argument is valid. I will gladly concede that.
The problem will still arise with violations of free will though depending on how you define "wholly good". Please clarify, if you don't mind.

[jimwalton]

I don't mind at all. The "good" that the Bible defines God as is untainted by anything evil or immoral, and incapable of it. You are right in hearing me say that God, omnipotent God, was incapable of designing a world where physical evil did not occur. Your question seems to be, "Can an omnipotent being make things which he cannot control?" If I answer yes, it follows that if God actually makes things he cannot control, he is not omnipotent once he has made them, and there are things he cannot do. If I answer no, then we are admitting there are things he cannot do, and then he is not omnipotent. Am I with you?

But are these things true? For instance, no one expects an omnipotent being to be capable of performing logically impossible actions, such as creating a square circle. So is omnipotence, then, the capability of performing logically possible actions? But the action of making a table God did not make is surely a logically possible action. What if we said, "God is omnipotent if and only if He is capable of performing any action such that the action God performs on it is logically possible. That kind of stuff just leaves scratching our heads, going, "Whaaaa????" So what about, "God is not omnipotent because he is incapable of making a stone he cannot lift." Well, that's self-contradictory, and we're into nonsense, and it has nothing to do with omnipotence. Your accusation involves an assumption that if God is truly omnipotent he can lift anything, even that which by definition is unliftable. What makes more sense is the proposition, "It is possible that God is omnipotent and it is possible that there are things God cannot control." That is consistent and logically possible.

[Newbie]

I get what you're saying with logical impossibilities. And I agree with it.

My issue is that designing a world where no physical evils happen is demonstrably possible. You just have to look at video games. Tsunamis don't strike in role playing games unless programmed in, and there are games that program them in. But there are plenty where they are not programmed in.

I mean I could design a better test in principle. One in which each "soul" lives the EXACT SAME life. All physical evils are done to simulacrums. Your life is the ONLY real life, and is experienced by billions of souls. That is a fair test. This world is automatically unfair by virtue of different experiences and physical evils.

An omnipotent deity would have ZERO difficulty implementing that system by virtue of its omnipotence. Thing is, that's an insane idea with no evidence to back it up.

To say God couldn't design a world in which no physical evils occurred is a lack of imagination in my opinions, not a violation of logical principles.

Edit: Again, can God stop a hurricane? You seem to be saying that is logically impossible. Can God design a world on which no hurricanes form? You seem to be saying that is logically impossible.

[jimwalton]

You know, this is a GREAT conversation. Thank you for the fun. I'm thinking this: Your example of the video game, while sounding good on the surface, does not really present a comparable situation, and my allegation rests on your term "programmed in." The video game is a determined environment, whereas real life, according to science and the Bible, works according to chaos theory (randomness). In real life, the spinning pivoting planet in elliptical orbit, creating temperature variances and random motions goes along well with the logical sequences I previously postulated, where an omnipotent God need not, and cannot, control all variables to be omnipotent. What is "programmed" into real life is cause-and-effect randomness. The result is some sun, some rain, some flood, some famine, some ice, some desert. Logically speaking, it does not make God immoral to have created such a world. As I previously mentioned, a God who determines all natural events to exclude all physical evils would have to strip away all cause and effect, order, regularity, and predictability. One minute to the next none of us would ever know what was going to happen, because it wouldn't depend on anything except an unknown MIND regulating according to unknown RULES in unknown sequences, if we could even call them that. There would be no science, no possibility of it, and for the most part, no knowledge. An omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity need not create such a sterile, meaningless world to maintain his or her morality, goodness, or knowledge. Actually, I see it quite the opposite: to create a world as you are proposing is not a lack of imagination, but a thing of beauty. The diversity and randomness of our world is part of its exquisite allure. Because of cause and effect, there is always another side to it, and that other side is tsunamis. The wind that brings the rain sometimes bring too much; it's the nature of nature. The other alternative is a world of sterility, ignorance, determinism, and unhumanness—not at all attractive by anyone's imagination.

Can God stop a hurricane? According to the Biblical definition of God, yes. The stories of Jesus record one such incident (Mk. 4.41): "Even the wind and the waves obey him." Can God design a world in which no hurricanes form? Again, I have to say yes, because according to the Biblical definition of heaven, there will be no sorrow, suffering, or death. I can hear you saying, "Well then God is immoral to allow them." What you are implying is that God must be good in such a way that he, then, always eliminates evil as far as he can, and since there are no limits to what God can do, He must be immoral for not doing them. Hang with me here back to a previous illustration: a surgeon who amputates your leg to save your life is a moral surgeon, because a greater good is achieved. So perhaps we can say that a person is not morally culpable in "producing" an evil if he justifiably believes that he can produce a good (you live) that outweighs the evil (the disease in your leg) only by producing some kind of evil (he cut your bloody leg off!); nor is he culpable in failing to eliminate an evil if he justifiably believes he can eliminate it only by eliminating a greater good. So it's true that a person is wholly good only if that person tries to eliminate every state of affairs that he believes is evil, and that he believes he can eliminate without eliminating a greater good. Let me give an example, if I may:

Bishop Desmond Tutu, in South Africa, sat through the hearings of the crimes that whites committed on blacks in the name of God and the government. Yet after two years of listening to such horrific accounts, Bishop Tutu came away with his faith strengthened. The hearings convinced him that perpetrators are morally accountable, that good and evil are real and that they matter. Despite relentless accounts of inhumanity, Tutu emerge from the hearings with this conviction: “For us who are Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is proof positive that love is stronger than hate, that life is stronger than death, that light is stronger than darkness, that laughter and joy, and compassion and gentleness and truth, all these are so much stronger than their ghastly counterparts.” Richard Dawkins, by contrast, believes the universe has “precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Stephen Jay Gould describes humans as “a cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted.” The tragedy in Newtown, CT, in December of 2012, tells a different story. There was an outpouring of grief, compassion, and generosity, not blind, pitiless indifference. There were acts of selflessness, not selfishness: in the school staff who sacrificed their lives to save children, in the sympathetic response of a community and a nation. There was a deep belief that the people who died mattered, and that something of inestimable worth was snuffed out on December 14.

We just can't assume that every case of evil is one which an omnipotent being can eliminate without eliminating a greater good. As I have just shown, there are many cases where courage, fortitude, love, grace, and caring in the face of suffering outweigh the suffering in question, and not even God can eliminate Joe Smith's suffering without eliminating Joe Smith's courage and fortitude in his suffering. Consider any evil state of affairs such that there is a good state of affairs which can outweigh it. The good and the evil together, then, are a good state of affairs. Hence, any evil which is outweighed by at least one good is necessary to have a good state of affairs which outweighs it. AND THIS MEANS that an OMNIPOTENT and MORAL being can permit as much evil as he pleases without forfeiting his claim to being good, as long as for every evil state of affairs he permits, there is a greater good. That is to say, he could permit as much evil as he pleased, provided there was a balance of good over evil in the universe as a whole, and this would be so even if it were within his power to create a better universe just by excising some or all of the evil states of affairs. Have I made sense?