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1. Proem
A strong argument against the existence
of the Christian god (henceforth referred to as God) is contained
in the theodicy problem, which can be stated in the following
manner:
To make the argument clearer, consider the
following clarifications. An all-knowing being will be aware of
suffering; an all-powerful being will be able to prevent suffering;
and a perfectly good being will desire to prevent suffering. If
suffering exists, then God - who is characterized by the three
attributes stated in point 1 - does not exist. It is possible
for some other, non-Biblical god to exist, but he cannot be all-knowing,
all-powerful, and perfectly good, though he may be one
or two of these.
This essay will take a look at the most
common, and perhaps the only possible, counter-argument, the
free-will defense [henceforth the FWD]. In brief, it says
that point 2 above is incorrect because suffering is a result
of the free actions of human beings, created by God with a capacity
to choose either good or evil. Hence, it is the fault of humans
that suffering exists and not of God. Below, I will present this
counter-argument in more detail and, as the main contribution,
show that it is unsound and that, as a result, the theodicy problem
remains intact. In this venture, I will present an argument of
my own along with extensive quotes.
2. The FWD
In considering the problem of evil, the
theist must explain how it is that he holds the existence of God
to be true while admitting that suffering, or evil, exists. In
doing so, he may question point 2 above.[3]
We will take a closer look at the strongest and the ostensibly
most plausible of such possible questionings, the FWD.
For a flavor of the argument, Swinburne (1991, p. 200)
asserts that "[a] good God would have reason to create a
world in which there were men with a choice of destiny and responsibility
for each other, despite the evils which would inevitably or almost
inevitably be presented in it, for the sake of the good which
it contained." In other words, God chose to create a world
with evil in it because he valued the moral autonomy of humans
- which he knew would lead to evil - higher than pure goodness.[4]
Let us try to spell out the basic idea in some detail, and let us do so under the assumption (to be abandoned in Section 3) that Christianity is true. First, God has existed for ever, and he has always been all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good. At some point in time t1, he decided to create the universe.
In the Garden of Eden, the two humans, Adam
and Eve, who lived in a perfectly good state of affairs, were
tempted by the Devil to rebel against God and chose to do so.
By eating of the forbidden fruit, they committed a sin which separated
them from God. As a result of this fall, their harmony was lost
and death made its entrance into the world. All humans are implicated
in the sin of Adam and Eve (cf. Romans 5:12, 18, 19) in that this
sin affected the human nature, which was transmitted to coming
generations. Hence, we can trace moral evil to the voluntary decision
of our ancestors, who did not act in accordance with God's will.
This doctrine is regularly referred to as the doctrine of original
sin. As a result, no one can avoid committing sin.
Let us furthermore quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994, §§403-404)
at some length: "Following St. Paul, the Church has always
taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their
inclination towards evil and death cannot be understood apart
from their connection with Adam's sin and the fact that he has
transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted,
a sin which is the 'death of the soul.' /…/ How did the sin
of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? The whole human
race is in Adam 'as one body of one man.' By this 'unity of the
human race' all men are implicated in Adam's sin, as all are implicated
in Christ's justice. /…/ By yielding to the tempter, Adam
and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected
the human nature that they would then transmit in a
fallen state. It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation
to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature
deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original
sin is called 'sin' only in an analogical sense: it is a sin 'contracted'
and not 'committed' - a state and not an act."
This general view was supported by the Protestant
reformers, who taught that original sin had radically perverted
man and destroyed his freedom: they identified the sin inherited
by each man with the tendency to evil (concupiscentia),
which would be insurmountable. For instance, the commentary to
Martin Luther's Small Catechism (1898, p. 45)
states that original sin is the in-born corruption of our nature,
which makes us prone to evil and incapable of good (in support
of this thesis, Ps. 51:5, John 3:6, and Rom. 7:14 are quoted).[5]
Some modern Protestants, although acknowledging
the overall doctrine of original sin, have a slightly different
version which says that children up to an "age of accountability",
albeit sinful, are guilt-free (see Robertson, 1987, pp. 57-58).[6]
One remark is in order, namely, that this version of the doctrine
in effect entails the same qualitative view with respect to human
action as the Catholic and the more traditional Protestant view,
viz., that no human can avoid sinning as a result of the corruption
brought upon all men as a result of the fall in the Garden of
Eden.[7]
To summarize, then, the Christian reply
to the theodicy problem may take the following form: God valued
moral autonomy so highly that he created Adam and Eve in spite
of knowing that they would choose evil. But the central thing
to note is that it was Adam and Eve who voluntarily choose
to sin, and God would have desired that they freely would have
chosen good. Hence, God is not to blame for the emergence of evil
in the human race.
3. The Shortcomings of the FWD
The FWD to many seems quite convincing,
especially to Christians, as a result of what it supposedly does:
rescue their faith from a strong challenge. However, in this section
I will make clear why the FWD is not a sound argument and why
the problem of evil still indicates that God does not exist.
3.1 Non-moral evil
First of all, it is important to note that
the FWD fails entirely as a way to free God of responsibility
for non-moral, often called physical or natural, evil, since this
type of evil is independent of any actions of men. Some usual
examples are famines, floods, disease, and earthquakes. Plantinga (1974, p. 192)
argues that neither God nor humans are responsible for these things,
but that fallen angels cause them.
Mackie (1982, pp. 162-163)
notes: "Formally, no doubt, this is possible; but it is another
of what Cleanthes called arbitrary suppositions. While we have
a direct acquaintance with some wrong human choices - our own
- and our everyday understanding extends to the recognition of
the like choices of other human beings, we have no such knowledge
of the activities of angels, fallen or otherwise: these are at
best part of the religious hypothesis which is still in dispute,
and cannot be relied upon to give it any positive support."
And Gale (1991, p. 111)
remarks: "[T]he atheological argument based on natural evil
is an impure atheological one, due to the proposition that there
is natural evil being taken to be only contingent by the theist.
In denying that there is in fact any natural evil, it is not shown
that the initial set of this argument does not entail a contradiction.
And, if it does, so does the proposition that the conjunction
of the propositions in its initial set is possibly true. Thus,
to neutralize the deductive argument based on natural evil, Plantinga
must show not just that every alleged natural evil really is or
could be a moral evil but that it is logically impossible
that there be a natural evil. And that he has not done.
Nor do I think it can be done. And if so, we must recognize that
the FWD can work as a defense of God only for moral evil."[8]
And so, we can already establish that there
is evil which must be attributed to God, and consequently, the
argument in Section 1 holds. In order to make this an even firmer
conclusion, let us also see why moral evil cannot be explained
away as not being God's responsibility by means of the FWD.
3.2 My argument
The primary argument is quite simple. The
FWD holds that humans have free will to do either good or evil.
My argument states - on the basis of the Bible - that humans
do not have free will, and hence, that God is responsible
and blameworthy also for what is referred to as moral evil. But
then we are back at the insight that this situation is incompatible
with God's being in possession of the three characteristics listed
in point 1 of Section 1 - and hence, he does not exist.[9]
Let me elaborate on why this argument is
correct. Let us, for the sake of argument, grant the Christian
that Adam and Eve did have a genuine free choice and that they
chose to sin. As a result, the evil which directly came about
was a result of a choice which was made by morally autonomous
beings. From the argument that God valued moral autonomy highly
enough for him to accept its evil consequences, it follows that
the evils which directly emerged as a result of what Adam and
Eve did were justified. That is, God set up a wager for the two
humans: either obey me and live in perfect harmony or disobey
me and bring about disharmony. Whatever one may think about such
an ultimatum, it is possible to hold that the circumstances in
which it was put forth were such as to pose a real and neutral
opportunity for choice.
However, the reason why God is responsible
and blameworthy for much of the moral evil which has emerged
after Adam and Eve is found in the doctrine of original sin. As
we have seen, this doctrine holds that all subsequent human
beings did not face a neutral choice, like Adam and Eve, but that
they instead were born with a sinful nature which forced them
to commit sin. This is what the Bible [10]
says on the matter:
Clearly and without doubt, the Bible states
that no human being can avoid committing sin. But if each human
had been born with a neutral nature, such that his nature did
not, per se, entail any tendency towards either good or
evil (as in the case of Adam and Eve), it could not necessarily
hold in a setting with agents with a free will that everyone of
them would commit sin. (One could argue that it is highly probable
that all humans would sin even with a neutral nature, but this
does not affect the argument of this section: the introduction
by God of a sinful nature must in any case increase the amount
of sin committed by humans.) Consequently, the Bible implicitly
teaches that genuine free will is not present in the human race
after Adam and Eve. And from that we can infer that if people
commit at least some evil acts out of necessity, they cannot be
held accountable for them - which implies that God is responsible
and blameworthy for a substantial portion of evil acts carried
out by humans.
As Rand (1961, pp. 136-137)
colorfully states it: "A sin without volition is a slap at
morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is
outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.
If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it;
if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is
amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is
a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery
of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was
born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where
no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality,
nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat
of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.
Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with
free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled
with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man
to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility
and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of
a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is
of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of
his choice, his will is not free."
How, more precisely, can God be held guilty
of acts of evil committed by man? The answer is found in focusing
on the transmission mechanism of the effects of the choice
of Adam and Eve. The quote from the Catholic Church (1994)
above mentions this and clarifies that the sinful nature incurred
by Adam and Eve was propagated to all coming humans. But,
and here is the crux of the argument, who determined the
particular transmission mechanism by which all humans contracted
a sinful nature which led to their not being able to avoid committing
evil acts? God did. God, who is omnipotent, chose to construct
the world such that whatever Adam and Eve did would directly influence
the choices of all humans.
Is this particular transmission mechanism
necessary or contingent? Surely it is contingent, since God's
omnipotence means that he can do anything which is logically possible;
and hence, God could have let the consequences of Adam's and Eve's
sin last with them and not predispose every other human being
to sin and evil.[11] For
instance, he could have made the world such that each new individual
started afresh, like Adam and Eve, with a perfectly neutral nature,
on the basis of which truly free choices could then be made. It
bears noting that if he had done this, there would have been less
evil and a freer human will![12]
This he did not do, and he is therefore at least partly responsible
and blameworthy, not only for non-moral evil, but also for what
is normally referred to as moral evil. And this inductive insight
renders the deductive argument of Section 1 valid, i.e., God does
not exist.
Gale (1991, p. 157 ff.) argues, on a more abstract level, a similar point, and he claims that "God's way of causing created persons to act /…/ is freedom canceling." That is to say, humans are not free agents and hence not ultimately blameworthy for their acts of evil. He lists certain freedom-canceling sufficient conditions:
"Is God's relation to created persons
in the FWD such that it satisfies C1 and/or C2?
If it satisfies either, no less both, the FWD is in trouble, as
would be the soul-building defense as well. I submit that it satisfies
both, and thus it is time for the nervous smile to replace the
smirk."
"It is clear that it satisfies C1,
since according to the FWD, God intentionally causes a created
free person to have all of her freedom-neutral properties, which
include her psychological makeup. The Free Will Defender will
make the Libertarian claim that these inner traits only 'incline,'
but do not causally determine, the person to perform various actions
or act in a certain regular manner, but this does not make the
God-man case significantly disanalogous to the type-1 man-man
cases; for even if we imagine that our intentional psychological-trait
inducers could render it only probably according to various statistical
laws that their victims would behave in certain characteristic
ways, they still would exercise a global freedom-canceling control
in which the person is rendered nonfree due to her not having
a mind of her own."
"The God-man relation in the FWD also
satisfies C2; for, when God instantiates diminished
possible persons or sets of freedom-neutral properties, he does
have middle knowledge of what choices and actions will result,
and thereby sufficiently causes them. And he does so quite independently
of whether or not he is blameless for the untoward ones among
them."
We see that my argument fits nicely with
Gale's exposition, especially C1. (Subsection 3.4 below
presents an argument which primarily fits with C2.)
The interesting thing in what I show is that there is a strong
Biblical basis for why C1 holds and for why
humans are not in possession of a free will.
3.3 Mackie's argument
There is another, rather different argument
which also undermines the FWD, and it is that of Mackie (1982, pp. 150-176).
Both the argument above and this one are, in themselves, sufficient
to show that the FWD is unsound, but if this point can be supported
by two independent rationales, all the better. It is to be noted
that Mackie assumes throughout that the Biblical doctrine of free
will indeed says that there is such a thing, whereas I have showed
that this assumption is erroneous. In any case, the FWD does not
hold.[13]
Here is the argument: "If God has made
men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what
is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made
men such that they always freely choose the good? Since there
seems to be no reason why an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly
good god would not have preferred this alternative, the theist
who maintains that there is such a god, and yet that he did not
opt for this - since by his own account human beings make bad
free choices - seems to be committed to an inconsistent set of
assertions."
"For at least some theists, this difficulty
is made even more acute by some of their further beliefs: I mean
those who envisage a happier or more perfect state of affairs
than now exists, whether they look forward to the kingdom of God
on earth, or confine their optimism to the expectation of heaven.
In either case they are explicitly recognizing the possibility
of a state of affairs in which created beings always freely choose
the good. If such a state of affairs is coherent enough to be
the object of a reasonable hope or faith, it is hard to explain
why it does not obtain already."
"Nevertheless, it is often thought
that this suggestion, that God could have made men such that they
would always freely choose the good, is not coherent. Sometimes
this objection rests merely on a confusion. It would, no doubt,
be incoherent to say that God makes men freely choose the good:
if God had made men choose, that is, forced them to choose one
way rather than the other, they would not have been choosing freely.
But that is not what was suggested, which was rather that God
might have made - that is, created - beings, human or not, such
that they would always freely choose the good; and there is
at least no immediate incoherence or self-contradiction in that."
Mackie goes on to show that it is not logically
impossible that men should be such that they always freely choose
the good and that it is logically possible that God should create
them so. And he concludes: "In short, all forms of the FWD
fail, and since this defence alone had any chance of success there
is no plausible theodicy on offer." To recapitulate: since
God could have made men such they would always freely choose the
good, and since he did not do this, he is responsible for so-called
moral evil.
Likewise, in Smart & Haldane (1996, pp.68-73),
this view is forcefully defended: "Even in a world such as
ours where bad consequences may occur through lack of knowledge,
free but wicked choices might be impossible. God could have created
beings with purely moral desires, from which they would always
act. Even on a libertarian theory of free will it is logically
possible that everyone would always in fact act rightly.
God, who surveys all time and space, could have created such a
world."
"Because free will is compatible with
determinism God could have set up the universe so that we always
acted rightly, and so for this reason alone the FWD does not work.
I do have some sympathy with the view that the compatibilist account
of free will does not quite capture the ordinary person's concept
of free will. This, however, is because the ordinary person's
concept of free will, if one gets him or her arguing in a pub,
say, is inconsistent. The ordinary person wants the action to
be determined, not merely random, but undetermined too. The compatibilist
can say that if this is the concept of free will we clearly do
not have free will, just as I don't have a round square table
in my study. Once again the FWD fails."
On a similar note, Smith (1979, p. 83)
remarks that any goal which God wants to achieve, he can achieve
in any logically possible way he wants. That is, if we say that
evil (or a capacity for God's created beings to use evil) is a
method used by God to obtain goal x, then God is blameworthy for
evil, since he could have used some other method which does not
include evil.
3.4 Russell's argument
There is a similar argument which states
that God is responsible for whatever happens, since he created
everything contingently, since he knew, a priori, exactly
what would happen, and since he sustains everything at any point
in time. A Christian would probably say that this is true but
that God is not blameworthy for the evil which arises from the
acts of free humans. Above, we argued that humans are not free
with regard to performing good and evil acts, and that even if
they are, God could have made humans such that they would always
freely choose the good, which makes him ultimately blameworthy
for all evil. Now we add a clarifying argument, namely, that all
forms of evil are, in essence, non-moral and hence attributable
to God. Russell puts it thus:
"[I]t is clear that the fundamental
doctrines of Christianity demand a great deal of ethical perversion
before they can be accepted. The world, we are told, was created
by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the
world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain;
He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue
that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place,
this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow
their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it
would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing
that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be
responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of
which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all
the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man."
"The usual Christian argument is that
the suffering in the world is a purification for sin and is therefore
a good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalization
of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. I would
invite any Christian to accompany me to the children's ward of
a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured,
and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so
morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order
to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all
feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself
as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man who believes that
all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical
values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for
pain and misery."[14]
Russell thus proffers the view that God
is not justified in allowing evil, irrespective of whether there
is free will or not: if there is a god, then he must be evil.
This assertion modifies point 1 in Section 1 in that god is no
longer assumed to be all-good; but he may exist.[15]
3.5 Other possibilities
Here, I will consider three other possibilities
for the Christian to escape the theodicy problem as stated in
Section 1. However, it will turn out that none of them are successful.
1. The first possibility is an epistemological
one and focuses on the concept of goodness in relation to God.
It states that God's goodness is not our goodness, i.e., that
it is impossible for us to meaningfully apply terms such as good
or evil to God. In reply, Smith (1979, p. 81)
argues: "The Christian, by proclaiming that God is good,
commits himself to the position that man is capable of distinguishing
good from evil - for, if he is not, how did the Christian arrive
at his judgment of 'good' as applied to God? Therefore, any attempt
to resolve the problem of evil by arguing that man cannot correctly
distinguish good from evil destroys the original premise which
it purports to defend and thus collapses from the weight of an
internal inconsistency." See also Mackie (1982, p. 156).
If we acknowledge that we can, indeed, use
these terms in a discussion of God's character, might the Christian
escape the problem of evil by simply conceding that god is evil
(as suggested by Russell)? While this would undermine point 4
in the argument in Section 1, it is hardly an attractive path
to take for the Christian. While he can account for the existence
of moral and non-moral evil, he runs into two substantial problems:
first, he departs from the classical Christian concept of God,
e.g., as expressed by Jesus in Lk. 18:19: "And Jesus said
to him, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.'"
and by the Catholic Church (1994, §385):
"God is infinitely good and all his works are good.";
and second, he must explain why he worships an evil being (instead
of, say, solely submitting to this being).
2. The second possibility is about arguing
that god is not really omnipotent. The main problem here is that
this assertion is inconsistent with Biblical teachings, e.g.,
Jer. 32:17 ("Ah Lord GOD! It is thou who hast made the heavens
and the earth by thy great power and by thy outstretched arm!
Nothing is too hard for thee,"), Mk. 10:27 ("Jesus looked
at them and said, 'With men it is impossible, but not with God;
for all things are possible with God.'"), and Lk. 1:37 ("For
with God nothing will be impossible").
The view that God is not omnipotent is also
at odds with the classical conception of God in the Christian
Church, e.g., as expressed in both the Apostles' Creed ("I
believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.")
and the Nicene Creed ("We believe in one God, the Father,
the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen
and unseen.") As the Catholic Church (1994, §268)
affirms: "Of all the divine attributes, only God's omnipotence
is named in the Creed: to confess this power has great bearing
on our lives. We believe that his might is universal, for
God who created everything also rules everything and can do anything."
3. The third possibility deals with God's
being omniscient and says that god is limited in what he knows
about the future. In essence, one may envisage god's being in
possession of different degrees of information, and it is possible
that when god created the universe, he was not able to foresee
the evil which would encompass it (i.e., he was without middle
knowledge).[16] Again, however,
the theist arguing thus faces at least two problems. First, it
seems as if the Bible describes its god as being at least spatially
omniscient:
In addition, the god of the Bible also seems to know the future, as the often-mentioned phenomenon of prophecy indicates; hence, he is also temporally omniscient. As stated by the Catholic Church (1994, §2115): "God can reveal the future to his prophets and to other saints."- and how could he do that without knowing, himself, what will happen? In fact, the following Bible passages confirm that God knows the future and that he knows it with regard to human choices:
All of these quotes refer to prophecies
which crucially depend on future human behavior. For instance,
in the last quote, the precise actions of certain Jews in Jerusalem
are predicted through the Holy Spirit. Hence, it is absolutely
clear, to anyone who considers the Bible a reliable source of
information about God, that it is not logically impossible for
God to know what choices human beings will make in the future.
It may be argued that God only knows parts of the future;
but how can it be explained that God is thus limited? By what?
By whom? For what reason?
Consider the type of god who does not know what will happen in
the future. Mackie (1982, pp. 175-176)
writes: "When God created free agents - free in this sense
- he had to do so without knowing how they would use their freedom.
This development of the defence succeeds better than any other
in detaching moral evils, the wrong choices of free agents, from
God. But it does so at the price of a very serious invasion of
what has commonly been meant by the omniscience ascribed to God.
If he does not know future contingents, and, in particular, does
not know what free choices human agents will make, it follows
that in 1935, for example, he knew little more than we did about
the catastrophic events of the twenty years to 1955, and equally
he knows little more than we do about the next twenty years. And
such a limitation of his knowledge carries with it a serious effective
limitation of his power. Also, this account forces the theologian
to put God very firmly inside time. It could only be before
God created Adam and Eve that he could not know what they would
do if he created them, and the theologian cannot, without contradiction,
give God also an extra-temporal existence and extra-temporal knowledge."
"But even this is not the end of the matter. Although, on
this account, God could not have known what Adam and Eve, or Satan,
would do if he created them, he could surely know what they might
do: that is compatible even with this extreme libertarianism.
If so, he was taking, literally, a hell of a risk when he created
Adam and Eve, no less than when he created Satan. Was the freedom
to make unforeseeable choices so great a good that it outweighed
this risk? This question must be answered not only with reference
to the degree of human wickedness that has actually occurred:
men might (strange as it may seem) have been much worse than they
are, and God (on this account) was accepting that risk too. He
would not then be the author of sin in the sense of having knowingly
produced it; he could not be accused of malice aforethought; but
he would be open to a charge of gross negligence or recklessness."
Second, even if god was unaware of what would ensue after his
having created the universe, he is still admitted by the theist
to know what happens spatially, i.e., at any point in time, as
happenings are, indeed, realized. If so, god would have known,
a posteriori, what his creation had given rise to, and
hence could have rectified anything with which he was discontent
(due to his omnipotence). This he has not done and thus is blameworthy
for evil.
4. Conclusions
Possibly the strongest argument
against the existence of the Christian god is contained in the
theodicy problem, i.e., the problem of defending God in the presence
of evil. The Christian may try to escape from this problem by
claiming that God is not responsible and blameworthy for (moral)
evil, since it follows from the free actions of human beings,
who are morally autonomous. What this essay has demonstrated is
that this attempt to escape from the problem of evil - known as
the free-will defense - is a failure. Why is that so? For at least
three reasons, each of them sufficient to enable the theodicy
problem, as stated in Section 1, to hold against the FWD.
1. The FWD does not cover non-moral evils, which are not the result
of the actions of men.
2. The Bible informs us that man does not, in fact, have free
will, since he is born with a sinful nature (the doctrine of original
sin) such that he cannot avoid sinning. Hence, God - who decided
that two persons' wrong choice would cause every human being to
be born sinful - is blameworthy for this evil-prone nature of
man - and, ultimately, then, for all evil.[17]
3. Even if man is believed to have free will, God could have created
humans such that they would always freely choose the good. This
he did not do and is therefore ultimately responsible and blameworthy
for any evil act which humans perform.
We can now conclude that the theodicy problem remains intact:
a god who is responsible and blameworthy for evil is, himself,
evil, and hence, God (who is defined as being all-good) does not
exist. The FWD can do nothing to alter this conclusion.
However, the Christian might offer a final reply to this, namely,
that the existence of evil is a mystery which finite human minds
cannot properly comprehend; and if we just put our (blind) faith
in God, we can maintain the conviction, that he actually does
exist. To state this incorporates admitting that religious belief
has nothing to do with reason: it is a whim which is sustained
irrespective of rational arguments. This amounts to adhering to
religious belief, not because one is interested in the truthfulness
of it all, but because it fulfills some particular need (such
as providing comfort and friendship). But this misology constitutes
slippery ground.
To quote Le Poidevin (1996, p. 102):
"What I want to suggest is that theists who refuse to answer
the problem of evil are guilty of internal irrationality, at least
if they hold the following beliefs:"
"Now, if from the human perspective,
belief in a loving creator cannot be squared with the presence
of suffering, then it is simply not rational to continue to hold
on to that belief. /…/ [I]f, from our perspective, there
is no justification for suffering, then that is a reason to reject,
as mistaken, any perspective (including God's) in which there
is a justification for suffering. If it turned out that, from
God's perspective, any amount of human suffering is perfectly
acceptable, then that would be a horrible discovery to make. We
simply could not go on believing that God was genuinely benevolent,
at least as we conceive of benevolence."
"So, if we believe that theism can only be entertained if
it is rational, and we believe that we cannot produce a satisfactory
justification of suffering in terms of God's purposes, then we
must reject theism. If the theist admits to (2), then (1) must
be given up."
References
Notes
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