Notes on the Problem of Evil

Philosopher J. L. Mackie published “Evil and Omnipotence” in 1955. That article has become a classic philosophical statement of the problem of evil. Mackie’s article serves as the broad outline for these notes.

You’ve probably heard of the problem of evil (also known as the problem of suffering): if God loves us, as Christians say, and he is just and fair and all-knowing and omnipotent, then why is human life often so full of suffering? The suffering of innocent people, e.g., children, seems especially cruel. The God of Christianity knows that innocent children suffer. He's omnipotent, which means he could make the suffering go away. And he's supposedly a loving God (a loving father, according to popular imagery); what kind of loving father would allow his child to starve to death or die from some horrible disease? Some people, like J. L. Mackie, view the problem of evil as the most powerful argument for atheism. A famous literary statement of the problem of evil can be found in Feodor Dostoevsky's famous novel The Brothers Karamazov.

Here is one way to run the atheist argument that arises from the problem of evil.

To prove: There is no God (“God” meaning a being who is both omnipotent and totally good).

This argument is in reductio ad absurdum form: if absurd consequences can be shown to follow from the supposition that there is an omnipotent and totally good God, then that supposition cannot be true. If that supposition cannot be true, then the thing we have set out to prove (what’s on the “To prove:” line) has now been proved. (Logicians write “Q.E.D.” after showing the absurd consequences; “Q.E.D.” stands for the Latin quod erat demonstratum, or “that which we set out to prove has now been demonstrated.” Hence the call letters of the San Francisco public TV and radio stations.)

As I have presented the argument, it may sound dry. But it carries a lot of emotional weight. Many people struggle with suffering – health problems, war, famine, losses of all kinds. Religious people often tell sufferers to have faith that God will take their suffering away. But I think sufferers want to know why they’re suffering to begin with. If God could have eliminated suffering, and he didn’t, then why didn’t he? And if he didn’t eliminate suffering, how can he be called good at all (let alone totally good); he seems to be just a sadist. This is a hard problem for believers as well as unbelievers; religious bookstores frequently have titles such as “Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen to Good People?” or “Why Did You Do This to Me, God?”.

Now, you can make the problem of evil go away, but you have to deny key elements of Christian doctrine. In other words, the genuine solutions are unorthodox. “Orthodox” is an interesting words. Many of you know the word “orthodontia” because you’ve had your teeth straightened. The “ortho” in “orthodontia” means “straight” or “going the right way.” The “ortho” in “orthodox” also means “straight” or “going the right way.” If your opinions (doxa) are orthodox, they are along the right lines; they are on the straight path and will not lead you astray. Many Christian sects enforce doctrinal orthodoxy; that is, in order to be a member in good standing, you must profess belief in certain articles of faith, and if you don’t profess belief, you can’t be a member of the church in good standing (you become a heretic or an apostate). Among these articles of faith – or presupposed by them – are the claims that God is totally good, God is omnipotent, and evil is real. There’s no problem of evil if you’re willing to deny any of these claims. So …

According to Mackie, the usual “orthodox” solutions you hear in churches are actually not orthodox at all. The actually presuppose one or more of the unorthodox solutions described in the previous section. Thus, according to Mackie, there are no orthodox solutions to the problem of evil.

You see this “solution” in the movie Oh, God. A child asks God (George Burns) why he created the world with evil and suffering. God answers, “Can you tell me another way I could have done it?” Sometimes believers use the analogy of a mountain and a valley: they say, “You can’t make a mountain without simultaneously making a valley. And in the same way, God can’t create good things without simultaneously bringing bad things into existence as a necessary consequence.”

But wait a minute: God is supposed to be omnipotent. That means there are no limits to what he can do. Maybe we can’t think of a way to make a mountain without a valley, but we’re not omnipotent. So there are no logical paradoxes if we can’t do it. But it’s not immediately obvious why an omnipotent God couldn’t do it.

In other words, Mackie says, this so-called “solution” really presupposes unorthodox solution #1: it presupposes that God is not really omnipotent after all – an unorthodox view. “Orthodox” solution #1 is really unorthodox solution #1.

First we need to understand what this “solution” means. According to Mackie, it means that evil must necessarily exist if good exists, since “good” and “evil” are logical opposites in the same way as “red” and “non-red”: everything is either red or non-red, and if something isn’t one, it is necessarily the other. In other words, if something is red, and more than one thing exists, then everything else that exists must be either red or non-red. In the same way, if something is good, then everything that exists is either good or non-good. Since “non-good” means evil, evil must exist if good exists.

Mackie does not agree. In order to understand Mackie’s counterargument, you need to understand the different logical senses of “counterpart” or “opposite.”

Two claims are contradictory (strongly opposed) iff: if one is true, the other is necessarily false; AND if one is false, the other is necessarily true.

For example, the statements “All WVC students are men” and “Some WVC students are not men” are contradictories. If either of these statements is true, the other must be false; and if either statement is false, the other must be true.

You can also state this kind of strong opposition in terms of sets. Two sets are logical complements of each other if everything in the universe is a member of one or the other set and not both. Pairs of sets such as “dogs” and “non-dogs” are contradictories, because everything in the universe is either a dog or it isn’t: “non-dogs” is the logical complement of “dogs.” So if more than one thing exists, then everything that exists is either a dog or a non-dog.

Two claims are contraries of each other iff: if one is true, the other is false, but they might both be false. The two claims are still opposed, or “counterparts,” of each other; but they are not as strongly opposed as contradictory claims. For example, the statements “All WVC students are men” and “No WVC students are men” are opposed, in the sense that if one is true, the other must be false – but they could both be (and in fact both are) false. The same goes for set pairs such as “Republican” and “Democrat”: if you’re a member of one set, you’re not a member of the other, but you could also be neither.

If “evil” and “good” are opposites in the strong sense, must evil exist if good exists, then? Mackie says no. The fact that something is red, say, doesn’t mean that non-red things have to exist. Everything might be red. There is no logical necessity that non-red things exist. As Hume points out, nothing exists a priori.

Besides, “good” and “evil” are not opposites in the strong sense at all! They are contraries, not contradictories. And if “evil” and “good” are contraries, evil things don’t have to exist either. “Evil” and “good” are opposites in the same way as “Republican” and “Democrat”: if one is a Republican, one isn’t a Democrat, but one could be neither a Republican nor a Democrat (one could be a Libertarian or a Green, for example). It’s true that if something is good, it is not evil; but if something is not good, that doesn’t necessarily make it evil – it could be morally in-between, morally neutral, etc. For example, it may be good to exercise, but that doesn’t necessarily make it evil not to.

Believers often give solution #2 to explain how we learn the difference between good and evil. And solution #2 probably is a good description of how we do learn: we learn by noting how things are the same and different. We learn what’s good by contrast with the bad. If everything seemed to be good all the time, maybe we’d never be able to tell the difference between good and evil.

But even if that’s true, that doesn’t explain why evil and suffering have to exist. If God’s purpose in creating or allowing evil is simply pedagogical (to teach us the difference), then surely he could think of a way to give us the lesson without tormenting us in the process. If he can’t, he’s not omnipotent (unorthodox solution #1). Furthermore, even if evil did have to exist for us to learn about it – and it’s not clear why this should be so if God is omnipotent – then why so much evil? It seems we could learn what’s bad without suffering quite so much. However, God allows some people to suffer quite horribly and protractedly – much more than enough for them to learn the lesson. This seems to show God’s just not very nice (unorthodox solution #2).

Orthodox solution 3 says the universe is actually better with some evil in it than it would be if there were none, since evil gives us the opportunity to grow and develop morally and spiritually as a result of our confronting it in faith. For example, if you get an opportunity to give charity to a suffering person, then someone must be suffering in order to be the recipient of your charity. If you yourself suffer, your suffering provides an opportunity for you or someone else to grow morally and spiritually. Human suffering simply must exist for people to grow morally and spiritually.

It’s just a matter of understanding God’s priorities, a believer would say. God wants us to reach our full spiritual potential: God wants us to be as good as possible. It is more important to God that we reach our full spiritual potential than that we be happy all the time (or ever, in this life). In other words, we are happiest only after we have suffered.

If you point out to a religious person that this scenario makes God seem less than totally good (not to say sadistic), the religious person will answer that we are happiest when we are most fully developed morally and spiritually. If you ask the religious person why God set things up that way and not another – for surely an omnipotent God could have made human spiritual development possible without suffering – the religious person says “I don’t know; His ways are not our ways.”

But it rings hollow when believers tell sufferers that “God is good” or “God loves you.” For sufferers, God is like the guard in a concentration camp; he doesn’t have to torture you, but he does anyway, and then tells you, absurdly, that he’s torturing you because he loves you. For Mackie, this so-called orthodox “solution” masks unorthodox solution #2.

Orthodox solution #4 is often found in combination with orthodox solution #3. Solution #4 kicks in when solution #3 produces unsatisfactory outcomes. For example, suppose a young couple marry and have an adored child. The husband’s boss is thinking of giving him a promotion, but decides the young man must be tested and made to suffer to prove he is worthy of the promotion. So the boss puts plutonium into the baby’s food, and the child dies horribly, after much suffering. The parents are emotionally and financially devastated. The mother in her grief commits suicide. The young man becomes embittered and cold and indifferent to the sufferings of others. The boss now says, “Well, I gave him the chance to prove himself, didn’t I? And he chose not to avail himself of that chance. It was his decision, not mine. So he’s not going to get that promotion after all.”

Mackie says the main reason to reject solution #4 is the “incoherence” of the notion of free will. Having just studied the free will controversy, you should know what Mackie means.

There’s more to the Mackie article – and more to the discussion of the problem of suffering – but these notes have covered all the arguments I’d like you to know for Philosophy 1. Read the Mackie article yourself if you like; it’s on reserve in the WVC library.

[1] Some liberal Protestant theologians – pushing the envelope of orthodoxy – actually favor unorthodox solution #1 (God is not omnipotent). Omnipotence is not an essential attribute of God, they say. Unlimited omnipotence is incoherent anyway: can God create a stone he can’t lift? (If he can, he’s not omnipotent because he can’t lift it; if he can’t, he’s not omnipotent, because he can’t create it.) Can God violate the laws of logic? Not a logos-type God, they say. So don’t worry about God not being omnipotent, they say; he’s still way more powerful than anything else.