On the Problem of Evil

Concerning the problem of evil, I would like to put it in a novel and interesting form. The question as it has been put before is basically two questions: 1) In a world with God, would there be evil? And the second: 2) If a world with God would have evil, would it have as much evil as there is in the actual world? In a digression in my essay, "Concrete Versus Spiritual Good and Evil", I answer the first in arguments that need not be repeated here: yes, it is hardly conceivable that there would be zero suffering in any humanly conceivable world. As to the second, I would like to deal with it here in the following way.

I would put the problem of evil in the following form: Is the world's evil so great that the world itself ought not to have ever been? Would it be have been better for the world to have never existed at all? If the world's evil is to such a degree--and is not sufficiently redeemed by its good--that it would have been better for there to have never been a world existing at all, then there is no God. If, on the other hand, despite the world's evil, it is sufficiently redeemed by the world's good such that it is good that the world--with its good and evil--existed in the first place, then the argument against God from evil fails.

But there is another qualification I must make. This deals with the major problem with Leibniz's "best possible world" theodicy. Suppose we determine that the world's evil is outweighed by its good, is in the end redeemed by that good, and it is not better for the world to have never been. This is not enough; for God needs not only to be good in the Utilitarian sense, but in the Kantian sense. That is, God needs not only to be good, but just. God must be not only a governor or ruler who creates the best possible world; but he needs to arrive at that formula for the best possible world without using and abusing human or other conscious creatures as a means to this end. He not only has to create the best possible world, but he must not allow any creature to be sacrificed mercilessly for that end. We might put it this way: Not only must it not be true that the world ought not to have ever been; but no conscious creature of God, whom God has created, can have suffering to such a magnitude that it ought not to have ever lived. If there is a God, not only is it best that the world existed in the first place, but there must be no individual conscious creature that is so miserable he or she would be better off never having lived.

The reasons for this should be obvious. If God is truly good, he would not create a world that would be better off never having been; but if he is not only good but also truly just, he will not create any individual creature that is better off never having been. For God to create the best possible world is not sufficient, so long as God is allowed to sacrifice innocent conscious beings to this end, use them for the wider picture but condemn these individuals to unredeemed misery.

So here we have the two requirements that are necessary for the problem of evil to be overcome by the theist. 1) The world is sufficiently redeemed by its good to not have been better off never existing; and 2) Each individual creature is sufficiently redeemed by his or her good so as to not have been better off never existing.

As to the first requirement, there is no way to assess it at all, from the human perspective. It is a matter of speculation for which we have neither the data, method of quantifying goods and evils, nor universal perspective necessary to answer the question. Luckily for the theist here, the problem of evil's burden of proof rests on the atheist; for it is he that is asserting God impossible, rather than the theist asserting God in fact exists. The claim of the problem of evil is that God is impossible; and so, having no way to gather data, quantify it and so on, sufficiently to answer the question even with probabilities, the question dies unanswered, and God has not been shown impossible. But as to the second question, the answer is most probably that there indeed are many, many conscious creatures that would have been better off never having been. With our focus on an individual, we are sufficiently narrowed in our assessment as to make a probable, if not obvious, assessment here. Consider babies that are born and then immediately exposed, starved and frozen as in infanticide; consider animals raised in a miserable factory farm under deplorable conditions then painfully slaughtered; consider children who face hunger from the first day of their lives and finally die from it at five or six years old. It would seem that we could make a confident assessment that, yes, there indeed are many, many conscious beings that would have been better off never having been.

One point that needs to be considered here is that God needs to be just (i.e., not create any creature that is better off never having been), but he is not necessarily required to be fair. If I were to go out on the street and give one beggar five dollars, another one dollar, and a third nothing, though they are equally deserving of alms, I could not be blamed as doing wrong, simply for not giving all of them five dollars. I am not required to give any of them anything; the fact that I was generous to one of them does not mean I commit a wrong against every other beggar whom I give less or nothing. God may be allowed to give blessings unequally, so long as they remain true blessings; he may give one man a great life, another a good but not great life, and a third a mediocre life that is perhaps just a bit redeemed in its goods over its evils. The fact that God blesses one man with abundance does not mean he does wrong to give a man with equal merits less. But what we shall not allow him to do is create creatures that are abused to such a degree that just in creating them God has done them wrong. He may bestow his blessings unequally, but they must be, fundamentally, blessings; as soon as he tortures creatures enough to make them sacrifices used ruthlessly in creating a greater good for the whole, God may be faulted.

And we may say, after all, that God has done so, at least insofar as a life is truly as long as we perceive it. For the theist has an out here, and this is in the possibility, so bound up with nearly all religions, that our lives are longer than our term on earth. Putting the idea of true immortality aside (which, strictly speaking, is not only life after death but life for eternity), if humans' and animals' lives reach before birth or after death for a sufficient period, we may say that, unperceived by us, even babies exposed at birth may have their good redeem the evils they suffer, goods they experience before birth and after death. Thus, with his trump card of life after death (or before birth), the theist is rescued here from a conclusive defeat. No one can prove conclusively that our term of life is bound to that of the flesh, and so we cannot say for certain that there are creatures who are better off never having been. Were it not for the idea of life beyond the term of the flesh, God would be shown improbable or impossible; but the theist is rescued by our ignorance in this particular. If, after all, human suffering is just punishment for crimes committed on another plane before birth; or if, even though human suffering is undeserved, the good outweighs the bad when the whole span of life beyond the term of flesh is considered, then God is not disproved.

I will not attempt to answer these questions here; it is really impossible to answer, whether evil disproves God, when the question is put as I have put it here. All I am doing is giving the question a novel form that interests me most; but the question as I have phrased it depends upon so much of what we cannot verify one way or the other, that no firm conclusions will be arrived at here.

Angelhaunt.net: Because earth's madness is heaven's sense.