The Problem of Evil

For many people the problem of evil is an insurmountable difficulty for faith. The idea is that if God is both all-powerful and all-beneficent, why can he not simply do away with evil? In fact, an all-beneficent being would do away with evil if it could. Therefore either God is not all-powerful, or he is not all-beneficent. Either of these alternatives is simply another way of saying he does not exist.

Of course there are a number of ways one could approach this conundrum. I believe the best way is to examine closely the terminology. Doing so will discover certain flaws and allow us to understand the nature of God’s relationship to what we call “evil.”

To begin with, there is no such thing as “evil” in a concrete sense. This is because evil is parasitic on good. Good has a positive existence—we can understand goodness as pure being. That which exists is good. But evil is the corruption or destruction of that which is. Now while things can exist without being corrupted, there can be nothing to corrupt without things existing.

So “evil,” then, is the corruption or destruction of things that exist. But if we consider all being as the result of God’s will and intention, how can anything exist that will corrupt what God has made? Is not that thing itself a product of God’s will and intention, and therefore neither corrupt nor corruptible? How can evil arise from good creation?

Clearly evil must be the product of a will and intention that is opposed to the all-beneficent will of God. How can such a thing arise? It can only arise if it is possible for there to be wills other than and different from God’s. This, of course, is the notion of free will. Evil is only possible on the basis of free will.

By “free will” we mean a will that is somehow independent of God’s will. And here we come to a crux of understanding. There are those who will argue that God cannot create a will that is independent of his own. But any argument that says, “An omnipotent being cannot do something” is logically suspect.

Now it is clear that an omnipotent being cannot do things that are logically incoherent, but this is not a limitation on omnipotence. Logically incoherent things cannot exist. The term “square circle,” for example, does not designate anything that can exist.

Here is an example of how this kind of thinking can be misleading. One of the standard conundrums that people pose against the existence of an omnipotent God is to ask, “Can God make a rock so heavy that he can’t lift it?” At first sight it would seem that any answer must somehow contradict the notion of omnipotence. But the dilemma evaporates if we examine the conundrum a little. First we observe that “being too heavy to lift” is a relationship. Something too heavy for me to lift, for example, will not be too heavy for a crane, or a winch, or even a stronger person, to lift. In other words, rather than writing

THTL(X)

that is, X is too heavy to lift, we must write

THTL(X, Y)

meaning that X is too heavy for Y to lift.

If we instantiate Y to be “an omnipotent being,” then it is clear that there is no object X for which

THTL(X, AN-OMNIPOTENT-BEING)

can be true. The relationship is as incoherent for an omnipotent being as the notion of a square circle. Thus the proper answer to “Can God make a rock too heavy for him to lift?” is “No, because it is logically contradictory for an object that cannot be lifted by an all-powerful being to exist.”

(Note that this view asserts that the omnipotent God’s ability to lift rocks is unlimited, but also note that it places no limits on God’s ability to make rocks of any logically possible mass.)

Now if we look at the question of free will, we must phrase it correctly. “Can God make a will that he cannot control?” seems to be of the same form as “Can God make a rock that he cannot lift?” But if we phrase it as “Can God make a will that he does not control?” the answer would seem to be “Yes, he can do anything that is logically coherent.” There is nothing logically contradictory for God to make a being with a will that he does not exercise control over. This does not mean that he cannot exercise control over it, but that he chooses as God to “keep his hands off.” There does not seem to be any logical reason to rule out the existence of multiple wills even if one of them belongs to an omnipotent being.

The second question is that of all-beneficence. If God creates multiple wills, and if it is possible that some of those wills could rebel and corrupt the goodness of what God has made, would not an all-beneficent being avoid creation of such wills?

Here again we have to examine our terminology carefully. Most people claim that the issue of evil is that of suffering. Can goodness coexist with suffering? The Bible clearly indicates that it is possible. Romans speaks of “boasting in our sufferings” because those sufferings make us better. Romans goes on to say that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”

We call the process whereby God turns suffering—and even evil itself—to good redemption. It is described as a new creation. To say that God cannot, through his creative act of redemption, work out even the worst suffering for the absolute good of the one who suffered is to deny God’s power. Apart from this, God himself suffered in the person of his Son. Thus suffering cannot be incompatible with ultimate blessedness or evil would have triumphed somehow over God.

To put it another way, the notion of redemption means that God takes the onus upon himself to make good the suffering of all who are in loving relationship with him. Thus there does not seem to be a logical contradiction of a universe where suffering is present having been made by an all-beneficent, all-powerful creator, assuming we accept that he is capable of redeeming suffering. And so he claims, and how can we say he cannot do it? Even in this life we often (though clearly not always) experience redemption of suffering, feeling that it has made us a better person.

If suffering is compatible with goodness, is there any issue left for those who would find a problem with God’s goodness? It would seem that the problem boils down to those who reject whatever redemption God offers, those who refuse to allow their wills to accept God’s love and his purposes. Two questions arise from this.

First, given the possibility that some would oppose their wills to God and so bring about corruption and destruction—that is, evil—should not God have avoided this possibility by not creating free wills?

There is no logically binding answer to this question. It boils down to the issue of God’s knowledge. It also boils down to the definition of good. And if we take seriously the notion that being is good, then it is better for things to be than for God to avoid them for fear that they might be corrupted. Of course this turns on God’s ability to redeem the corruption. But the point is that it is logically possible that a good God, one who seeks being and the full expression thereof, might prefer to create with the possibility that the process might involve pain and suffering and even failure—as long as the success outweighs the failure. And this is what the Bible claims: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” The success so vastly outweighs the failure that the failure is not worth comparing to the success.

The second issue is what becomes of the failures? This is the issue of hell.

If we think of hell as that place where you go when you want nothing to do with God, you can see the kind of quandary it produces. How can there be a place where there is no God? And why would anyone want to be there anyway? Yet in the same way that the tree of knowledge of good and evil represented free choice to Adam and Eve, so hell represents freedom in our current situation. That is, imagine Eden without the tree. There would be no way for Adam and Eve to choose against God. If they decided to have a will different from his, what form would it take? There would be nothing they could do that would be outside God’s will. By placing the tree in the garden, he gave them a way to express their rebellion against his will—and also to refrain from doing so. Every day they did not eat of the tree, they affirmed their relationship and trust with God. When, finally, they ate of the tree, it represented their rejection of God as the guiding light of their lives. Henceforth they would decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong.

What, then, is hell? Hell again represents an alternative to God. But we see that such an alternative becomes more problematic when God is “all in all.” If God is the one who upholds and sustains everything, what happens to someone who has rejected that sustenance?

Many of the images of hell involve fire. The word Jesus often uses for hell—gehenna—was a place outside Jerusalem where unclean things were burnt. The lake of fire spoken of in Revelation also involves a fire that burns with unquenchable flame. Many argue that this notion of hell—burning forever—cannot be morally explicable for a beneficent God.

However, it is quite possible that hell is a place where those who refuse a universe of love are finally burned up and disappear. The Bible speaks of the Day of the Lord saying that for some “they … shall be as though they had never been” (Obadiah 1:16). The image of a garbage dump that burns up all the garbage seems to imply that nothing is left.

Another way to think about hell is to think of it as the state—I do not say place—where the process of incurvatus in se—curving in on yourself—is complete. In the same way that a star can collapse into a black hole where the mass of the star becomes a single point and nothing can escape the star, one can imagine a life that is so curved in on itself—because it has rejected everything but its own will—that it has become a spiritual point. But a point cannot be found—it is too small. And so the soul is, literally, lost. And even if you could find it, you could not be aware of it because it lets nothing out by which you could be affected. So it is as if it had no existence.

This is just an analogy, of course. And it says nothing about the experience of the soul in that state.

The images used in the Bible imply, first, the irrevocable state of that soul—it has become something final, something from which it cannot recover. Second, it is not able to do anything to affect others or make them suffer. It is unreachable, truly lost. It is excluded from everything. Is it excluded from existence itself? Can anything exist that has rejected the all-in-all of God? This is the paradox of evil.