The Problem of Evil Dr. Peter Kreeft The problem of evil is life’s greatest problem for everybody. It’s certainly the strongest argument for atheism. One of the ancient skeptics said: “If there’s a God why is there evil, but if there’s no God why is there good?” Those are two very challenging questions, and mystery is either way. In the first page of your outline I divide the problem into five different problems, because there are five different dimensions: practical, logical, religious, epistemological, and theological. The practical problem, which everybody faces, whether they think about it or not, is ‘we all suffer and die’. We want not just an explanation, but a real solution. The second problem is a logical problem: the existence of evil seems to disprove the existence of God. There are many ways to formulate this. When Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica he looked for as many objections as he possibly could to the many thesis that he tried to prove. And to the first and most important one, that there is a God, he found only two very strong objections to the existence of God. The first one was the existence of evil. If God is infinite goodness there is no room for evil. If there is room for evil, therefore God doesn’t exist. The other one was the apparent adequacy of the natural human sciences to explain everything without Him. It doesn’t really prove that God doesn’t exist, it proves that you don't have to believe in God to explain everything else. So really there is one really strong argument against the existence of God, and that is the problem of evil. The religious problem. Religion being a personal relationship with God, the problem is how can I trust a God that is omnipotent and can do everything He wants deliberately allows me to suffer. Why doesn’t He get me out of it? The epistemological problem: why don’t we know the answer? Why can’t we solve the problem? Why is it a mystery that always has dark areas? You get some light but not enough. We are never satisfied with that answer, no matter who we are. Why? And, finally, the deeper theological problem is that within Christian theology we have a doctrine called hell or eternal damnation; which is certainly Christianity’s most unpopular doctrine, and the most difficult one to defend. That seems to contradict a God of infinite power and infinite love. Doesn’t that mean God in the end loses? I like hard questions; they stimulate thought much more than the easy ones. So, in making the question five-fold instead of just single I try to make it five times harder. Let's start with the practical problem. On page two I gave you four distinct answers to the practical problem. The first and most obvious one is that there is no answer. ‘Life stinks then you die’. Do the best you can. Nobody can get out of suffering; nobody can live without suffering, and nobody can live without dying. So there is no answer. There are also a number of ways to mitigate or lessen our suffering. That’s the second answer. At least an honest one. Surely medical technology is a terribly important thing because it deals with us, with our very bodies, that part of the universe which is us. Technology is not always and uniformly a good thing. Most of us would wish there weren't nuclear bombs and drone warfare. But technology is a wonderful thing. It’s a natural thing, it’s a human thing, and especially nobody wants to go without medical technology. This is a clear example of that. This doesn’t totally solve the problem, but it certainly helps. That’s just a negative thing though. It reduces pain. We can also compensate by adding pleasures. Divert ourselves by adding pleasures, where you can include mental pleasures, and emotional pleasures and physical pleasures. That doesn’t totally solve the problem, but it’s definitely a part of human life. Or thirdly, we can deal with ourselves, those who are suffering, and learn mechanisms to cope with it from within. The most obvious one is courage. Courage is the willingness to endure pain for a good reason. Another is compassion. If we didn’t see other people suffer, we would have no reason for compassion. The third one is hope. That extends our positive attitude into the future and not just in the present. And almost any psychologist would say that these are very important virtues. You don’t need to believe in God to believe in courage, compassion and hope. The third and more radical answer to the problem of suffering on a practical level is a kind of surgery. Recognize the thing that suffers in us and try to amend it, and maybe take it away and hide it. And the thing that causes us to suffer is that contradiction between our desires and our satisfactions. Our desires always exceed our satisfactions. Or to quote the most famous and the most rich philosopher in the world, Jagger, “you can’t always get what you want”. An ancient philosophy, and a very popular one, Stoicism, which deals directly with the problem of suffering by saying, ‘well, there are some things you can control, and there are some things that you can’t. Stop trying to control the things you can’t control. Don’t rebel against it, that adds to the suffering. And concentrate on changing what you can, especially gratitudes’. There is a lot of practical wisdom in Stoicism, although there is a lot missing. Buddhism goes one step farther than Stoicism and says let us subtract not only superfluous desires that can’t be satisfied, let us subtract all desires. If you have only a thousand dollars and you desire a million, stop desiring the other 999 thousand. Buddhism says, stop desiring even what you have because you will lose it with death. So, develop a conscience by Buddhist meditation that has no desires in it at all. Buddhism also says that ‘we’ there that suffers. You realize that you don’t really exist, you are a series of events, psychological events. Then, if there is no ‘you’ who suffers, no suffering still happens if it’s not happening in anybody. Personally I am not terribly attracted to that. It sounds a little bit like spiritual euthanasia. You kill or deny the patient in order to solve the problem. Christianity has a very practical answer to the problem of evil, it’s Jesus Christ. He suffered with us, and for us and in us so that suffering is not removed but transformed. Something with meaning. Something like the meaning of childbirth. It’s a great pain, but if you want the baby that changes the meaning of pain. It’s worth it. So if somehow you are identified with Christ's suffering, it doesn’t take your suffering away but it gives it a new meaning, a new purpose. It is better to embrace it freely, than to suffer it unwillingly. Finally the most practical answer to the problem of suffering and death is that Jesus rose from the dead. The conquest of death entails the conquest of suffering. Not an answer but an actual solution. Because the problem is not just how you explain it but what you do about it. And if His resurrection and our resurrection go together, so everyone of us will solve the problem of death definitively. I would like to concentrate on the second formulation of the problem: the logical, apologetic, philosophical. This is the deepest threat for those who believe in God. The existence of evil seems to definitively disprove the existence of God. Three formulations. The first one is the happiness on, why doesn’t God make us happy? If He won’t, He’s not ​ ​ all-good; if he can’t He’s not all-powerful. In any case, He doesn’t deserve the name God. The second formulation which is similar, is simpler, is the concept of infinite goodness. A good that is partly good and partly evil doesn’t deserve the name God. And a God who is beyond good and evil He is not God to pray to or worship. If one of two opposites is infinite, the other is unreal. Evil disproves infinite goodness (God). There would not be room for evil if there was an infinite goodness. So, if there is evil that doesn’t disprove the existence of goodness, but of infinite goodness. Most contemporary atheists use the third formulation, The concept “God” includes infinite goodness, infinite power, and infinite wisdom. If he has infinite goodness, he wants nothing but good. And if he has infinite power he gets everything he wants, and if he has infinite wisdom, then he knows how to get it. So It logically follows that if God exists, there can be no evil. So, if there is evil, either there is no God at all or he’s a wicked God, or a weak God, or he’s an unwise God. Fourth formulation is much simpler and more practical. Life sucks and then you die. You find that in Atheists like Sartre and Camus. That's what it looks like. How can life look like that if there is God. Finally, the moral formulation, the injustice formulation, the fifth one, is why do bad things happen to good people? Why do people get not what they want, how come the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper? That’s not fair.