Philosophy 3 – Thinking about God and evil

Definition:
● 'serious unjustified harm on sentient beings' (Kekes)
● 'all of life's minuses' (Adams)
Types of evil:
● Natural – (Ganssle) required for regularity of cause and effect
● Moral – (Arendt) 'banality of evil'
Responses to evil:
● (Ganssle) Philosophical/theological
● (Ganssle) Existential
● (AJC) combines the two – feelingful
Which raises the question/problem of evil:
● Mackie (quoted in Ganssle)
○ God is all good, all powerful and all knowing
○ A powerful God could remove all evil
○ A good God would remove all evil
○ Yet, evil exists
● Problem could be denied:
○ Radicalise God's freedom (Descartes) – God can do things which are illogical to us
○ Redefine God's attributes – God can't make square circles, God can't know future evil
acts (Swinburne). Therefore God isn't responsible.
○ Abandon God's attributes
■ God not all powerful – finite godism
■ God has reserved power – process theology (Hartshorne) So God acts persuasively
not coercively
■ Evil is used by God to produce higher goods (Pittenger)
Theodicy
● Term invented by Leibniz from θεος and δικη
Classic theodicies
● Augustine
○ Context: Against Manicheism – dualist good and evil, all physical things are bad
○ Early position:
■ God created a good world
■ Evil is the privation of good, the removal of good from something
● ie an out-of-stepness, a disorder from God's intended purposes
■ neoPlatonic view
■ evil is in the cosmos
○ Later position:
■ Loves gone wrong, disordered
■ Evil is within human beings individually
■ More biblical anthropology
○ Critique of Augustine
■ Arrival problem: how to well-created beings go bad?
 ■ Development: How does a once-perfect creation theory fit with theory of evolution?
■ Survival: How does eternal hell resolve the problem, if evil will continue to exist?
● Irenaeus
○ Context: against Gnostics – all physical things bad
○ All things will be perfected in Christ
■ Creation was good, new creation will be great.
■ Human creation was in the 'image of God' maturing to the 'likeness of God'.
■ ie never perfect before
■ Incarnation is the preview of perfected creatureliness
○ Soul making
■ God uses evil to train his children in righteousness
■ Freewill enables us to distinguish good from bad
● Moral evil is the result of bad choices
● Natural evil is the result of bad angels/spiritual beings
○ Exercise of free will
■ 'Man is endowed with the faculty of distinguishing good and evil'
○ Critique
■ Notion of perfection
● Hellenistic ideas of perfection equated it with the good, so good creation must
have been a perfect one.
■ Cost of free-will
● Is suffering worth it, to learn good and evil?
Biblical considerations for the problem of evil
● Serpent, war in heaven, angelic insurrection, Origin of the devil
● Powers and principalities
● Protest of puzzlement – Ps 13.1 – 'How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? ...'
● No simple solution - Job, disciples in John 9 – 'Who sinned, this man or his parents?'

● God created the world as good with the potential for evil
Christological alleviation
● The cross in salvation history
○ Offers hope in the trustworthiness of God
○ Jesus engages with the evil of this world and destroys it with his own body
● Eschatological resolution
○ 'I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be
revealed in us.' (Rom 8.18)
○ Future hope, that despair will end
● Strange logic of trust
○ Suffering that enables

Conclusion
The philosophical answer doesn't help us in the end.
We need to get through, then hope. ie don't short-circuit the lament!