A reader writes:
“I’m atheist after a long life of evangelicalism because I see no evidence of a benevolent god. To the contrary, bad things happen to children, the innocent, animals, our planet that I’d hope a benevolent god would circumvent. And the explanation that god works in mysterious ways, and it’s not for us to know is a BS excuse.
I’d be ok if I’m wrong but I’d have a lot of questions for that god.
Oddly enough, I’m kinder, happier, more forgiving and charitable as an atheist than I ever was as a believer.”
Yours is one of the only two worthy objections to theism that St. Thomas could find in the whole history of human thought
Objection 1. It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.
Put more colloquially, bad shit happens, so there’s no God.
The other objection, curiously, makes the exact opposite claim
Objection 2. Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God’s existence.
Put more colloquially, “Everything works just fine without God, so there is no God.”
In some forms, the objections often get jumbled up that the complaint is not so much to the existence of God as to his goodness. In short, it can be read as “He’s there and he’s a son of a bitch.” (which at least has the virtue of coherence). But often, many people waver between those two stools and incoherently argue “He’s not there and he’s a son of a bitch”.
Also curiously, evolutionary argument against God seem to me to deploy both objections at once without noting the contradiction. Bad things (namely, death) happen so there’s no God but also this beautiful, glorious world of ever-ramifying complexity and staggering ingenuity works fine without God, so there’s no God.
All such ponderings spring, of course, from a monotheistic worldview. If you are a Zoroastrian or other polytheist, you don’t have to ask why a bad god is bad any more than you have to trouble yourself about why Satan permits evil. Loki is a jerk. Apollo gets off on cruel pranks. But monotheism makes pressing the problem of why a good, omnipotent God permits evil. And that, says the Christian tradition with considerable intellectual heft, is what both reason and revelation tells us who God is and what he does.
Christianity (and indeed any theistic belief) does indeed acknowledge that God works in mysterious ways. But then getting rid of God does not dispense with the mystery of evil or, still less, the mystery of the goodness of the world. It just gets rid of the hope of anything coming of the evil. Reducing evil to meaningless shit that happens does not seem to me to solve the mystery of evil any more than pretending that evil is really good in disguise (which is what the “mysterious ways” thing is attempting to do).
It seems to me that what Christianity proposes is not any “solution” to evil but rather the proposition that God himself has joined with us in enduring it and, by his cross and resurrection, giving us the hope that nothing, not even sin, death, and evil, can have the final word. In short, it is not about God preventing evil, but about him letting evil do its worst and redeeming even *that*. Why would he do things that way? Beats me. But then I’m not God and cannot see all possible ends in a universe where creatures have freedom while God is sovereign.
I personally suspect that there is no “solution” to evil. But I also think that the very fact that we object to it is the toehold of the Spirit in our hearts. And, of course, I also think that there is much more to the world than simply evil, which is what the atheist argument from evil seems to always overlook (and which, weirdly, comes back in the other atheist argument that this beautiful and glorious world is working fine without any help from God, thankyouveddymuch). To claim there is no evidence of a benevolent God, none whatsoever, seems to me to be absurd overreach, for it is to claim that there is no beauty, no goodness, no kindness, no joy, no love, no nobility, no glory whatsoever in the universe. Since that is plainly not so, we again find the objections oscillating between 1 and 2, which I think telling that there is something flawed in the analysis.
For myself, I did not become a believer (I’m a convert) out of fear of hell or to find a “solution” to evil but because my entire life I have experienced a deep longing for the goodness and beauty from whence the world springs. In Christ, it seems to me that goodness and beauty took on flesh and said, “I’m the one you’ve been looking for.” So I follow.
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9 Responses
There is so much more beauty and goodness than evil. Evil is like a worm eating an apple–hoping to consume it until there is nothing. It can’t create an apple, it can’t produce new seeds. It can only take and corrupt.
I would be more scandalized by evil if Jesus hadn’t endured it. Which reminds me of something you talked about a couple of years ago Mark; the idea that maybe God *didn’t* send his son to die on a cross to redeem us. God just knew what evil people would do. Yes, he came to redeem us, and demonstrate what good does in the face of evil. I thought of that during last Sunday’s reading–how Isaac prefigures Jesus, only God intervenes and stops the evil from happening. Evil wanted the precious child immolated. Why doesn’t God stop all evil from happening? He could, but then we’d all be a bunch of slaves to the good.
Some of the little kids that I teach get really upset by creatures dying. There was an Instagram reel going around, of a little girl crying her eyes out over the leaves falling from a tree in the fall. Her parent is trying to console her and the little girl, who is apologizing to the leaves says in a distraught voice, “they were my friends!!” It is so sweet and sad to see her in such honest pain.
I have observed that some children pick up on the atheism of their parents, and feel paralyzing fear over the idea of death, while others have no problem at all picturing themselves in the palm of the creator of such a vast and beautiful world and universe. I miss those days of such complete and utter confidence, –but even if a troubling doubt enters my mind, the fact that I am alive and even thinking at all in the midst of so much complex beauty stops me in my tracks. I often think about Jesus asserting that “the kingdom of heaven is now”. It is all around us and in us.
Spring and Fall
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
to a young child
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
“It is Margaret you mourn for.”
Oh wow. Thanks. How perfect.
I don’t know all that the letter writer thinks, but if he’s making the usual theodicy type argument as they are usually made, he’s making an argument usually attributed to Epicurus, that’s been around for a very long time.
According to Epicurus, human welfare consists of feelings of being pleased/pleasantness/pleasure, which nowadays is called ‘utility’, hence ‘utilitarianism’ being the word that a Yale ethical philosophy professor would use. Then Epicurus says that if God is God, God must be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, and points out given the way the world is, that at best God can only be two of the three, therefore no God. If one accepts his premises, Epicurus is unanswerable, as in he is surely correct, and we’re done here and can go on to something else.
Epicurus’s argument depends on what he thinks about God and man, what God is like and what man is like in the sense of what a man’s well being is. In the past, not as much ink got spilled on theodicy as nowadays since though people who argued about such things, many of whom were pagans, agreed with Epicurus about God, they thought his theory of what constituted human welfare, pleasure or pleasantness, was balderdash, they thought human welfare consisted of virtue, in the sense that Joe being virtuous might be good for society or the people around him, yes, but the person Joe’s virtue benefited the most was Joe himself.
So, guys like Aristotle or St Thomas Aquinas didn’t really spill all that much ink on theodicy, since without the premise of utilitarianism it’s not that much of a problem in the intellectual sense. Living virtuously often is very hard and difficult, as in unpleasant and painful, even necessarily so, one can even say that the world having pain in it is a good thing. STA would deny that pain or suffering is necessarily evil, so equating pain with evil is where one is going wrong. If one does, Epicurus is right.
Not that STA would deny there is evil, though he’d tell you to look in your mirror if you want to find out where it comes from.
It seems that nowadays one can get a PhD from Yale in ethical philosophy, sometimes one might think Georgetown too, unfortunately, without ever questioning the premise which underlies utilitarianism, and then the Epicurean argument easily follows.
I think it comes with being rich, as no society in the past was as rich as people in some societies in the present are. Decadence or Epicureanism, requires one be rich, as in not a small number of mistakes from starving, and in the past there might have been rich parts of various societies who were remarkably decadent, like French aristocrats in the 1700’s, no society has been like ours and had the mass affluence where everyone is or can be an Epicurean and get to mass decadence. Maybe that’s why it’s different nowadays.
Thank you for this. I hadn’t thought through the presuppositions of utilitarianism in much modern thought.
Ahh but is utility (being pleased/pleasantness/pleasure) a *bad* thing? In other words, would an infinitely good God experience displeasure, unpleasantness, discomfort? What about those of us humans who are with him in heaven?
I would agree that as a human, purely seeking utility is seeking an idol. That is, while we can say God has utility, utility is not God. Certainly something to think about during Lent!
Certainly, utility is a good thing. Utilitarianism means making “utility” the highest good.
“I personally suspect that there is no “solution” to evil.”
I don’t see how there is if we really have free will.
It’s pretty radical concept at its core: that God created us not as mere automatons, who though technically free have no reason to do anything other than good. Rather, he permits us to even be capable of finding reasons to do evil.
The other side of this, however, is that our decisions to do good are more significant than they would be if we had no reason to do anything else, and as you pointed out, God’s suffering alongside us and offering of redemption are even more significant.
For me personally, the most significant counterpoint is all of those bad things that happen don’t matter in the end. “Death, where is your sting?” I accept on faith that the goodness of God is so great that it is worth enduring those bad things in order to experience redemption and God’s love. The difficulty arise from the fact that we aren’t able to see that final goodness in our earthly lives.
Anyways, I’m glad you were willing to look at the points raised by the questioner a little more broadly and give credit to his objections, because frankly, my own inclination is simply to point out the incoherence of the argument, “I don’t like this, therefore it must be false.” It’s an easy defense for me, but probably not the most evangelically effective approach.
By the way, that was one of the main arguments against Einstein’s theories of relativity, but his critics were demonstrated with increasing confidence from further research to be wrong. Ironically, it was also Einstein’s argument against quantum mechanics, but he also was demonstrated with increasing confidence from further research to be wrong. “I don’t like this, therefore it must be false,” is a very common human reaction – everyone from one of the smartest people who ever lived to my 5 year old does it.
Awesome. This is why I keep coming back, Mark. Between your erudition and the com box regulars, I learn something new all the time.
Hope all you all are having a great lent!