On the Problem of Evil: Why Passionate Atheism Doesn't Make Sense

Here is the famous Epicurean formulation of the problem of evil.

P1:         God exists.

P2:         God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

P2a:       An omnipotent being has the power to prevent evil.

P2b:       An omniscient being knows that evil exists.

P2c:       An omnibenevolent would want to prevent evil.

P3:         Evil exists.

These propositions are inconsistent. That is, at least one of these propositions must be false: either God does not exist, evil does not exist, or God is not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent. More on P2. Given that evil exists, if God is omnipotent, he either does not know that evil exists (not omniscient) or does not want to prevent evil (not omnibenevolent); if God is omniscient, he either has no power to prevent evil (not omnipotent) or does not want to prevent evil (not omnibenevolent); if God is omnibenevolent, he either has no power to prevent evil (not omnipotent) or does not know that evil exists (omniscient). However, if God is not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent, why call such a being God? Thus, the tension comes down to P1 and P3. Either God or evil exists, but not both.

The conclusion of this argument is a truism. Logic captures eternal truth, and God must work in respect to the rules of logic. That much is uncontroversial. What is interesting is that atheists take this problem to be the evidence that God does not exist, i.e., P1 is false. They take P3 as true.

There are three hackneyed responses to this atheist take on the problem of evil.

First, it is often argued that humans brought evil into the world by their freewill in which case God is vindicated. However, human freewill and omniscience of God are ontologically incompatible. Even if, based on some definition of freewill and humanity, we accept that humans may have freewill, the problem persists. Just as God is inconsistent with evil due to his nature (omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence), human freewill is logically inconsistent with the presence of evil as well in respect to God’s nature. The possibility of bringing evil into the world is just not part of what freewill is capable of doing; saying that freewill is capable of bringing evil into the world is like saying red is rectangular—it simply makes no sense.

Second, God is often construed as to be working to eradicate evil in the world. But this construal would not justify the presence of evil because the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being that God is should have prevented, not eradicate, evil to begin with. God who plans to and is able to eradicate evil may be omnipotent and omnibenevolent, but not omniscient—he should have discovered at some point that evil exists, but he did not know this fact until then which means he is not omniscient.

Third, some attempt to nullify P2 by arguing that our concept of God and, therefore, of omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience must be incomplete. But incomplete in what sense? If God’s concept of evil and of omnipotence, etc., are so alien to us, do these concepts even matter? After all, the evil we are concerned with is what our concept of evil refers to. This evil is either preventable or not. Whatever concept of omnipotence God may have in mind, if it is not about the power that can prevent evil, we are not interested in it. And the rules of logic require that, should evil be unpreventable, God does not exist.

Thus, I think that the traditional apologetic responses fail. To be frank, I am not sure why it took so many years of debates among scholars to realize the plain fact that these responses are fallacious.

My argument against the atheist conclusion from the problem of evil has the stronger and the weaker version. The stronger version is the rejection of P3, i.e., that evil does not exist. A careful understanding of the concept of evil shows that evil does not exist in the world, but only in the misled mind of people. The weaker version is that atheists have no problem of evil in their reserve of arguments. In other words, atheists cannot take for granted that P3 is true. In this essay, I will only argue for the weaker version and merely hint at how the stronger version is implied by the weaker version.

What is good? Different ethical theories provide different conceptions of good (and of evil). For utilitarians, good is the maximization of happiness. For deontologists, good is fulfilling the duty according to categorical imperatives. Whichever ethical theory may be endorsed, one thing about goodness is universal. The judgment of whether something is good or evil depends on how it fits with other things, within the big picture. What is deemed to be harmful or unfortunate for now could be re-evaluated if it turns out to bring about unexpected outcomes. What seems to diminish happiness for now could turn out to be the only way in which happiness is maximized in long run. What seems to be a failure to fulfill the duty could turn out to be the only way the duty is actually fulfilled. Whether something is good or evil, the judgment of this fact must wait until the true (moral) meaning of the event unfolds in future.

Given this temporal characteristic of good (and evil), the real charge of the atheist argument based on the problem of evil is then that—what is judged as of now to be evil—this is what God must have prevented. Here, the current moral judgment serves as the focal point of the picture in which something is good or evil. Yet, is our piecemeal intuition any reliable judge of the holistic harmony of the big picture within which things are fit? To say that it is so is to ignore the empirical nature of human knowledge.

Perhaps, what the atheist argument is really saying is that, if God exists, there should be no temporal development of how things are, i.e., things should be good once and for all to begin with. Why let people suffer if the suffering could have been prevented in the first place? There is something to this line of thought. But this “something” is less than what it seems. This “something” is really the presumption that happiness (or good) is merely the absence of suffering (or evil). This is an idealistic notion of goodness.

We must make a distinction between evil tout court and seemingly evil. When the atheist argues against the existence of God on the presumption that good is the absence of evil, the type of evil in concern here is seemingly evil. That is, when it is argued that there should not be evil once and for all to begin with, what is really being said is that there should not be what could be judged as evil (i.e., what seems to be evil) at any point in time once and for all to begin with. This is because there is no way for empirical agents such as us humans to conclusively know whether an event is evil, period. But when atheists assert that P3 is true, they are referring to evil tout court. There is a mismatch between the problem of evil and the actual argument made by atheists in favor of the existence of evil.

To be consistent in their argument, atheists must change P3 into the proposition that seemingly evil exists and claim that God must prevent not only evil tout court, but also that which could be judged as evil at some point in time, i.e., what could seem evil. But could atheists really make this argument?

Let us say that some event (e.g., natural disaster) has happened to me and that this event is judged (by me) to be evil (giving sufferings) for now. I have two choices insofar as I seek to continue living on. Regard the event either as a tic and move on or as whose (moral) meaning is yet to be known within the grand scheme of things.

The first way is to accept that there is no inherent moral meaning to any event. What good is sorrow if I am going to live on anyway? Why not just pick myself up and look for a way to recover from the damages instead of wasting time by grieving? But if nothing is inherently good or evil and everything is merely one event after another, where does evil (both types, evil tout court and seemingly evil) exist? If nothing is inherently meaningful, God may or may not exist. But, since evil does not exist either, atheists cannot appeal to the problem of evil to deny God.

The second way is to withhold any judgment on the meaning of events. What seems to be evil may turn out to be good in long run. Perhaps, in dealing with natural disasters, I was able to discover which friends would help me or not in difficult times. Based on this, I may become able to avoid those that would have taken advantage of me in future. You just never know whether falling off the horse would serve you good or bad until the future unfolds. Yet, if I accept to withhold moral judgments, what use is the concept of seemingly evil? Moreover, the fact that I decided to withhold the judgments and move on as to see how things unfold instead of despairing on the present condition implies that I am expecting the end to be good. Otherwise, I have no reason to go on. For, by not expecting that the end would be good, I am judging not only that things seem to be evil for now, but also that all things are eventually working towards evil tout court, i.e., the end is evil no matter what.

Thus, the only rational conclusion from accepting P3 in the sense that it is evil tout court which exists is taking one’s own life—a total despair. Yet, the atheists who denies God on the problem of evil are those that are still alive. Otherwise, they would not be here making and preaching the argument. Clearly, these atheists have some reason to go on, in which case they have accepted either that there is no inherent moral meaning and it is all one event after another or that judgments must be withheld in expectation of good in the end. In neither case, atheists have the ground to appeal to the truth of P3 in arguing against the existence of God. Either they must become nihilists (in which case they have no reason to fervently argue against God, for nothing matters) or accept that God exists (by admitting that their atheism was rooted in irrationality and logically fallacious passion).

It is quite easy to see how this weaker claim implies the stronger argument that evil does not exist. There is no good sense in which atheists could claim that evil tout court exists, for either neither good nor evil exists or every event is unto the good (i.e., the presumption that good is the absence of evil is wrong, for good is not the absence of seemingly evil although it may be the absence of evil tout court—to believe that all things are working towards the final good is to accept that evil tout court is not in the world). Evil may exist in some other world. It was sufficient to prove that evil does not exist in our world. Insofar as our world is concerned, there is no reason to unconditionally accept that P3 is true. Thus, contra atheists, I argue that the problem of evil does not automatically deny the truth of P1.

The problem of evil is only a heuristic tool with which we reflect on our concept of evil and suffering only to come to the realization that our moral concepts on these matters were after all grounded on the feeble understanding of the meaning of life and our rightful place in nature.