A common argument against the existence of God (or at least the Christian God, or a benevolent God) is the presence of evil in the world. If God is benevolent and omnipotent how could He allow evil? That is, if God is good and all-powerful why is there evil? This leads to many questions – we know that evil is real, therefore if we assume God is real and good, then what does the the presence of evil say about God's omnipotence? Is He simply a God with good intentions but unable and incapable of stopping evil? Or, in a more horrifying situation, is God malevolent?
This problem begins with five assertians, assertians about the character of God (and God here is often defined in the Christian sense) and the presence of evil. The problem is that they can’t all be true because they contradict one another (which is a narrow way of thinking, often times in nature we see things we qualities A,B, and C that should by no logic exist, but they do!). The five assertians are 1) God exists, 2) God is perfectly good, 3) God is omniscient, 4) God is omnipotent, and 5) There are instances of evil in the world. Let’s take this apart piece by piece. It is my argument that they are not only incompatible but all true, even in paradoxically. In fact it makes less sense that less than all of these are true. Either they are all true or only one is true (number five).
The first assertian that is undisputably true is number 5: “There are instances of evil in the world”. Only a fool would argue otherwise. In a city like London all you have to do is turn on the news. So, with this one assumed as true, let’s move on to the other pieces, where philosophers begin to have problems.
The next important assertian is that God exists. Throughout human history the question of the supernatural has existed, it is still relevent today and (as far as I’m concerned) as long as we’re human it will be. What is meant by God? Many people from televangelists to men in clean shirts on bicycles going door-to-door would love to offer you an answer, but for now let’s define God by that definition that’s in our guts (the one we have when think of God), that is, the idea of a higher being who is much different than us. So, if we accept – for the sake of argument – that assertian number one is true, then we know two things: God is real, and there is evil in the world. Which leads us to the qualities of God.
“God is perfectly good” - this idea belongs to Judeo-Christian traditions and has not always been part of a culture’s conception of God (the Greek and Roman gods could hardly be called “perfectly good”, in fact, interestingly, they were as bad as humans). So now we are narrowing our definition of God, saying that He is not partly good, or not a cosmic mixture of good and evil, but all good. As in, there is no evil in Him. But an easy objection is raised: if this is true, how does that fit in with assertian number five (“There is evil”)? Assertian number five is undisputably true, it is the assertians that “God exists” and “God is perfectly good” that are a logical climbing further out on a tree limb. For now, let us continue along this tree limb and assume that somehow assertians one, two and five are all true (which is still concievably possible).
“God is omniscient.” To be omniscient is to be all-knowing, or infinitely knowing. In short, if God is omniscient He not only understands all things but is infinitely aware of them. If God is omniscient then He knows where I am as I write this sentence, and He also knows where a small pebble on the surface of Mars is, and what it’s doing (is it being blown upon by the wind?), but on top of that He’s also aware of information like how many pebbles and rocks there are on the whole planet of Mars, or how many neurons are in my brain and how they are sending commands to my fingers to type. If you think about it, there is a lot that could be known and a lot that could be observed. We are limited in both thought and observation, the moment we think of something we are excluding everything else we could be thinking of, the moment we observe something, say, the moment I fix my eye on Big Ben it makes it impossible for me to observe the Eiffel Tower (in fact, I can’t even observe all of Big Ben, but only one side or angle at a time out of an infinite number of sides or angles). But God, if He is omniscient, is both all-knowing and all-observing and conscience of everything in this universe, from this planet to the sun to the stars in the furthest galaxy.
If this is true, then God would be fully aware of every evil action in the world, in fact, He would be aware of every evil action ever. If we wanted a record of every evil thing ever done He could easily give us one. The alternative is that, assuming our previous assumptions are true, God isn’t omniscient. This is often an attempt to find an “easy” answer to evil and God by saying that if God exists and is good, He simply doesn’t know about it. This is comforting if we are trying to prevent ourselves from considering the idea that God is good and all-knowing of evil yet there is still evil. If God is God, aware of evil and benevolent, wouldn’t that mean that He would stop evil? This leads us to the final assertian.
“God is ominpotent”, He has unlimited power. Here all of our previous assertians come together and we can go one of two ways: we can believe that God is omnipotent, that all five assertians are true, even if they are at first glance difficult to reconcile, or we can believe that God is not omnipotent. This is what many philosophers argue. If God exists and is good and is omnipotent then there (according to their logic) would be no evil in the world. But there is evil in the world, so this undoes (for these philosophers) any notion that a an able, powerful, and benevolent God exists. But there is a flaw in this logic, in that it is logic.
Very often we find in nature things that should not, in a logical world, exist. Yet they do. For example, in chemistry there is a very logical order to the different states of matter: matter is (at any time) either a solid, a liquid, or a gas. They teach this very early on in school because it is highly logical and understandable, and its easy to understand the relationship between the three; if you increase an object’s temperature it will proceed from solid to liquid to finally a gas, and so on. But what doesn’t makes sense is the highly illogical but completely real nature of “triple point”. The “triple point” of a substance is when the “three phases [solid, liquid, gas] are in equilibrium” (Gold Book). For example, it is when H2O is at the same time ice, water, and steam. I am told this is true and I believe it (because people much smarter than I believe it) but I can not for the life of me concieve of it. But this does not change its truth or its validity, it only means that I have a small mind and a small imagination.
To apply philosophical arguments on the existence of God based on the question of evil to an empircal discovery of something like “triple point”, it would seem impossible for something like “triple point” to exist, though it does. I do not pretend to know how it exists (logically), but I do know that it does. To argue against it would be against the human spirit of discovery, in fact, such phillistine attitudes are against all areas of discovery: they do not ask questions to seek the truth, they ask the questions to get better answers. If we applied such logic to all areas of discovery in biology, chemistry, and physics, or geology or space exploration we would never learn anything if our first assumption was that whatever we found must fit in with what we already know. Science is always contradicting itself as new discoveries are made that make no logical sense, but, do exist.
Now, to apply the “triple point” metaphor in a new way, we have the same paradox with these five basic assertains about God and evil, that some philosophers (with a small imagination) say cannot all be true. If all are true, that is, God exists, He is perfectly good, He is all-knowing and all-powerful, and there is evil in the world, how does evil exist? And if evil exists, does that mean God doesn’t? Philosophy says the discussion ends here, there are no logical alternatives, but what if we have another “triple point” on our hands? What if all five assertians are true, even though it may be hard to explain, even to comprehend?
Let us focus on Christianity, for the sake of simplicity and because it is the Christian notion of God (benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent) that is being discussed. Christianity believes in a God who created the universe, who is all powerful, who is all-knowing, and is all-loving, and who wants to call Him “Dad”. How does Christianity reconcile such a wonderful and hopeful portrait of God with the reality of evil, or suffering, or pain? First, Christianity’s response is that evil does not come from God, but it is still not outside of His control. He does not lose the quality of “perfect goodness” if He cannot twist evil for good, in fact, He loses His omnipotence if He cannot. In the Old Testement a man named Joseph says to his brothers who betrayed him: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20, ESV). Here is a profound theoligical claim of the Christian God: He is so powerful that evil is bent to His will and changed forever.
I would argue that if one were to inspect closely the claims of Jesus and the Christian God one would find the most satsifying answers of any philosophy in the world. The entire Bible is about the hope of hopes, a time in the future when God will return to earth and destroy evil forever, so that one day it will be a vague memory. In fact the promises of the Bible are that every evil ever done will be undone, because here is God’s true omnipotence, His power to undo every evil we have ever commited. We have ravaged the earth with deforestation and pollution, God will restore it in a new earth, we have destroyed our bodies through overeating, misuse and poor care, He will give us new bodies that will not wear out; we have blackened our hearts with evil actions and thoughts, God will give us a new heart and a new mind, one free from committing evil. If this is true, then this “triple point” is more exciting and hopeful than anything in the world, even if it is paradoxical. But sometimes that’s what’s needed to explain the truth: a paradox.
I’ll end my argument with the central paradox to Christianity: the image of Christ on the cross. Nothing could be more brutal and depressing, yet nothing is more hopeful. A symbol of death as well as life, a point at which evil seems victorious yet is sorely defeated. It really is fascinating to comprehend, and perhaps one of the greatest problems of philosophical thought today is a lack of imagination, a lack of considering the truth to be true in light of contradiction, nay, because of contradiction.
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