Copyright© Struan Hellier 2003 - Feel free to use this essay as you wish, but please leave my name on it.
With reference to David Hume's 'Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion' analyse the view that there is an inconsistency between the fact of suffering and the existence of God.
In this essay I will firstly analyse the premises of the statement in the title before looking at ways in which the problem may be answered by a theist. It will be my intention to show that theodicies which involve life after death are empirically weak while theodicies which rely upon, "means to an end," ideas or the free will defence are weak on a priori grounds.
Epicurus posed the questions: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Is he able, but not willing? Is he both able and willing? These questions are restated by Philo in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and are serious challenges to the concept of a theistic God. If the first question is answered positively then God is impotent. The second, then he is malevolent. The third, then evil should not exist.
It seems clear that this essentially logical problem does not call into question the existence of God 'per se' but is restricted to a refutation of the theistic God of traditional religion. It is therefore a question of the attributes of God. If one were to allow that God were not omnipotent, or less than wholly good then the problem is solved and no more need be said.
The argument, for Cleanthes and Philo relies upon the premise that there is great suffering in the world which far outweighs the good. Philo parodies the design argument saying, "Look around the universe. . . . how hostile and destructive. . . . how contemptible and odious to the spectator." Cleanthes accepts that if this dysteleological argument were to prevail, " there is an end to all religion." If benevolence is in question then what use is God?
A further premise is that good and evil are oppositional in the sense that a wholly good being would eliminate evil if he had the ability to do so but this premise itself assumes that what humans perceive as good is the same as God's good. This may not be the case. Attempts have been made to show that God's good may not be the good of mankind and Philo himself allows that there is no reason to infer that this is so. John Stuart Mill points out that this simply avoids the problem. By hardening the heart to misery this reasoning implies that the goodness of God lies in his willing of virtue rather than happiness and in this way nature is still just. But nature is not just. The death of a new born baby is not just unless we forward a philosophy of life after death and with it reward and punishment in a future state.
This is precisely the position of Demea. He fully agrees that the world is evil, both moral and natural, but insists that, "This life (is) but a moment in comparison of eternity." Cleanthes, donning Philo the sceptic's hat, points out that life after death is a mere hypothesis with no empirical evidence to support it and as such serves only to weaken the possibility of divine benevolence. A similar objection may be made against the idea that while moral evil is the result of a lack of goodness in men, natural evil is the result of fallen angels. We have no empirical evidence for fallen angels.
Most traditional theodicies rely on the notion of life after death to a great extent and Hick's "vale of soul making" is no exception. This is a "means to an end" theodicy which suggests that evil is a necessary means to good as it develops character and allows us the opportunity to exhibit that which is best in us such as bravery, compassion, fortitude etc. The problem with this, as with all means to an end theodicies, is that they seemingly deny the omnipotence of God. Since God was responsible for the laws of cause and effect and can by definition adapt them as he wishes, he has no need to use means to achieve his ends. If this is the case what sort of God would put his creations through extreme and persistent suffering unnecessarily.
More subtle is the suggestion that a world with evil in it is better than a world without evil. Kant called this an endless progress towards perfection with the overcoming of evil seen as a greater good than would be a state of perfect good. Thus the showing of compassion to a cancer patient may be a greater good than the evil of the cancer. Assuming that the ethical question raised by Swinburne of whether God has the right to inflict pain on one person for the benefit of others can be surmounted, this still leaves us with a huge number of what Mackie calls "unabsorbed evils." It would be obscene to suggest that all the evils of the Holocaust were somehow absorbed into a greater good and so a further explanation is required and is forthcoming in the free will defence.
This defence reasons that God has endowed man with the ability to choose right or wrong and that this free will is therefore a higher good than the evils which will inevitably follow. One initial problem is that this could only cover moral evils unless other supernatural beings are equally allowed free will and as we have seen this is an empirically weak argument.
Flew seeks to distinguish two types of free will. The uncaused cause in which free will is unpredictable and the caused cause where every action is, at least theoretically, predictable. For example, if a bus is hurtling towards me I can choose to jump out of the way or not. The fact that on every occasion I would jump out of the way is not relevant. In a fundamental sense I could have acted differently. In these types of situation it would be absurd to hold anyone accountable for their actions and hence the concept of moral evil loses validity. If God causes people to act as they do then why could he not always cause us to make the right choice without impeding free will. If on the other hand, free will is uncaused then this becomes impossible to reconcile this with the theistic view that God caused everything. Equally, if God does not control mans actions but is omnipotent he is able to control mans choices and is therefore responsible for his sins. If he cannot control mans choices then whence is omnipotence.
For the reasons outlined above it seems probable that the fact of suffering is incompatible with the existence of the traditional theistic God, but as Cleanthes' says "the total infirmity of human reason and the absolute incomprehensibility of the divine," make it rash to draw firm conclusions. Interestingly Cleanthes himself seems to accept Philo's argument that it is impossible to argue from a mix of good and evil on earth to a wholly good God and thus takes on board the possibility that God is finite. Philo concedes that a deistic God is not beyond probability and so the two come closer together than at any other time in the dialogues.