Hi guys. Here's the last of my first year essays with one concerning the problem of evil in philosophy of religion.
Evil is everywhere. We see it on the news, we experience it everyday in different ways and we partake in it whether it is by choice or otherwise. For the purposes of discussion in this essay, I will look at the question raised over the co-existence of evil and God and rationalisations raised by philosophers over the years.
The problem of evil was concisely argued in J.L. Mackie’s article ‘Evil and Omnipotence’ as follows: In its simplest form the problem is this :
God is omnipotent ; God is wholly good ; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions : the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.
Simply put, if God is omnipotent, he can do anything. If God is all good as well as omnipotent , then he can eliminate all evil. But then what of the apparent evil in the world? Does it not prove God’s non existence?
. Theism would appear to be quite foolish if this were the case. One of the main responses to the problem. One of the main lines of argument in defence of God and evil’s co-existence is based in the premise of free will. The argument is as follows:
1. Evil done by people is done out of their own free will.
2. Free will is a good thing.
3. God cannot control what people do out of free will (or else it would not be free will).
4. The goodness of God giving us free will is greater than the evil done with it.
This argument claims that God cannot control what people do as they have free will. Personally, I see this as a contradiction to God’s omnipotence. If there was something that God could not do, regardless of what it was, he would not be the omnipotent God of classical Theism. However, this is not the only ‘free will’ based defence.
Another defence comes from John Hick in his book Evil and the God of Love. Hick basically says that if God called people into existence with no possible way of not being aware of his existence, then we would no be able to choose to believe in and follow God. Thus, the universe we are in would be morally static. If God only makes his existence to us vague, then we may make the choice of following Him or not. Those who don’t can cause the evils which are only there as challenges to overcome and learn from.
The main problem raised by evil is that it’s co-existence with God seems to hold a contradiction which can only be resolved in conceding that one of the two doesn’t exist. However, instead in God, what if we considered the non-existence of evil?
Thomas Aquinas has been the leading figure in argument based in the unreality of evil. According to Aquinas, evil is not a positive quality you can ascribe to something or someone in the same way that you can call a table metallic or a window transparent. Instead, the word evil is only used to represent the lack of good. Along this line of thought, Aquinas holds that God can only create what is conceivably possible. If evil is not an actual thing that can exist, then God cannot create it or allow it to be in the world of His creation. Evil’s reality is only the cause of a certain good missing at any time.
All the defences above seem to be rationalising the co-existence of God and evil in the world but what part does good play? Where is the role of all the good in the world mentioned? What about the role of charities, aid organizations and just acts of good will?
If people have free will, then they are free to choose to act with good or evil intentions. Seeing as how there are two possibilities here, should there not be an equal amount of good done in the world than evil. If so, all the evil in the world would morally be cancelled out by the good, leaving the goodness of free will untouched. To think of it mathematically, we could equate the good in the world to a positive number, evil as a number of equal value but negative and free will as another positive number because it is good. If all of these were added together, the sum would be a positive number, equal to the value we ascribed to free will. Would this not also rationalise the problem of evil and God’s existence?
By this line of argument, God allows there to be evil in the world to balance out the good. This state of balance is essential in the operation of the universe as everything that exists must have an opposite. Light has dark, up has down, back has front, matter has anti matter…each existing thing in the universe can only exist with respect to it’s opposite. If something had no opposite, it wouldn’t exist. Therefore is there was no evil, there would be no good. And since God is all good and allows good, there must be evil. Is this not a valid argument?
For as long as the concept of God has been considered and analysed, so has the concept of evil. As I have discussed, some philosopher’s, such as J.L. Mackie have claimed that evil is strong evidence against God’s existence. Others, such as Hick, state that evil is necessary for God’s existence and then there are those of the same school of thought of Aquinas who believe that evil doesn’t even exist, only God and good. There are many other possible discussions that can arise from any one of these beliefs such as what constitutes something to be “good”, “evil” or even the definition of the terms “omnipotent”, “omniscient” and “omnibenevolent” but I will not digress with these topics as they are trivial to this concise essay.
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