Introduction to the problem of evil

1. The existence of suffering

List pages on the Problem of Evil on this site by Vexen

If God is all-powerful and all-good, it would have created a universe with no suffering and no evil. But, evil and suffering exist. Therefore God does not exist, is not all-powerful or is not benevolent. Attempts to justify the existence of evil are called theodicies. There have been no fully working theodicies created to date, even popular ones such as the free will theodicy were rejected thousands of years ago for reasons that still stand today. It seems that if there is a god, it is not the all-good moral being that classical religions would have us believe.

"The presence of evil and suffering in the world has even been argued by some philosophers from Epicurus (341-270bce) to David Hume (1711-76ce) to cast doubt on the existence of God. Other more modern writers such as Freud and Marx sought to show that religion's explanations of the presence of evil and suffering were based on delusions"

"The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach" by Momen, 1999
p214. More quotes from this book

 

• List of many attempts to explain why God created evil

 

Christianity has always struggled with this problem. Ancient forms of Christianity in the first century, before the Pauline Christianity that we known today became dominant, held a multitude of beliefs on why evil existed. Bart Ehrman is one of the most qualified historians of early Christianity. In "Lost Christianities" he summarizes a few major different beliefs that the original Christians had about the source of evil:

• Some believed that there were two gods, a good god (Jehovah) and an evil one (Satan), and they were equal (like in Zoroastrianism, a slightly earlier religion)

• "others believed that this world had been created by a subordinate, ignorant divinity. (Why else would the world be filled with such misery and hardship?)" [Ehrman, p2]

• "Yet other Christians thought it was worse than that, that this world was a cosmic mistake created by a malevolent divinity as a place of imprisonment, to trap humans and subject them to pain and suffering" [Ehrman, p2]

2. Theodicies

There are no theodicies that succeed in explaining why an all-powerful, good god would create evil. Nonetheless there have been many attempts to do so, and some of them are listed here. Click on the titles to view full pages about them.

2.1. Free Will Theodicy: Suffering exists because of our free will

"The free will justification for evil does not work. Free will does not require the existence of evil or suffering. Heaven is a place where there is free will, and no suffering. There is a lot of suffering and evil that are not the result of free will, such as natural disasters, so free will could not actually account for all suffering, only some of it. Also, the free will of one person can cause suffering for another innocent person, God should not allow the moral choices of one being affect other beings as this goes against moral accountability."

"The Free Will Theodicy does not work" by Vexen 2003 Apr 28

2.2. Experience Theodicy: Suffering exists because we need to experience or have knowledge of it

"It is inadequate to say merely that knowledge or experience of suffering is requirement for us to enter heaven as a justification of why suffering exists. God can give us innate knowledge of evil, rather than let us experience it directly, and if babies or the unborn go to heaven then is clear that experience of the suffering of life is not actually required, after all. If angels or god exist in heaven then it shows that it is possible for beings to be in heaven without first experiencing suffering. The experience theodicy does not work."

"Experience of Evil theodicy" by Vexen 2003 Apr 29

2.3. Absence Theodicy: Evil is simply the Absence of God/Good

"The Absence Theodicy is the argument that seen as "God" is "goodness", anything not good such as evil and suffering, is the absence of God. Therefore, the absence theodicy claims that God is not responsible for evil, merely for good.

What this does is put "good" and "evil" either side of a scale. We define many scales as part of our experience. From "hot" to "cold", from "rich" to "poor", we measure all kinds of things on all kinds of scales. What all of them have in common is that God created them. God, in most monotheistic religions including Christianity and Islam, created heat and cold, created the "ups" and "downs" and created every little in-between bit of all those scales. Likewise, God created the scale of good and evil. God could have created a scale of "amazing goodness" through to "medium goodness" down to "amateur goodness", and therefore let all beings experience no evil or suffering. That God decided to create evil, suffering and pain and put them on the scale is an inexplicable act for a supposedly all-good god. The explanation that suffering is the absence of good is not sufficient to explain why God created suffering in the first place"