The Problem of Evil

1
The Problem of Evil

• How does an all loving God
• allow the existence of evil?

2
Why Evil?

• The term evil is subjective i.e. Relative to
  a situation or person
• What is evil to us may not, in fact, be evil to
  God
• It goes beyond our understanding
• Gods understanding may be greater than ours

3
Free Will

• Human Causes
• Human beings exercise their free will and in this
  exercise, bring evil into the world
• The human cost is always that the weak or the
  marginalized are the ones who suffer
• Our actions produce consequences

4
Scientific Understanding of Evil

• Natural Causes
• Science would claim that there is no such thing
  as evil
• Natural process or natural events

5
Theodicy

• Theodicy literally the justification of God
• The term was coined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  in 1710 in his essay on the Goodness of God
• Leibniz was concerned with the addressing the
  atheist who claimed that evil takes away from the
  attributes of God

6
Invalid logic

• 1) If God were all-powerful, all-knowing, and
  all-good, then this world would be the best
  possible world.
• 2) But surely this world is not the best possible
  world.
• 3) Thus, God is not all-powerful, all-knowing,
  and all-good.

7
Leibnizs response

• Leibniz's response to this sort of criticism
  comes in two stages.
• First, Leibniz says that while we can think of
  certain token features of the world that might be
  better than they are taken individually, we don't
  know whether or not it is possible to create a
  better world without those features, since we are
  never sure of what the connections between the
  token events and other events in the world might
  be.
• If we could improve the token event without
  otherwise changing the world, we may well have a
  better world.
• Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing if
  changing the token would leave the world
  otherwise unchanged, or might instead make
  things, on balance, worse.

8
Leibnizs response

• Second, examples such as these are deceptive
  because they presume that God utilizes standards
  of world goodness that he does not use.
• For example, it might presume that a world is
  only good if each part taken in isolation is good
  (a standard we have seen Leibniz argues against).
  
• Or, it might presume that a world is good only if
  earthly humans enjoy happiness.

9
Valid logic

• 1) The best world is the one which maximizes
  happiness (i.e., virtue) of rational beings.
• 2) The best world is the one which maximizes the
  "quantity of essence."
• 3) The best world is the one which yields the
  greatest variety of phenomena governed by the
  simplest set of laws

10
In summary

• In general, Leibniz holds that God creates the
  world in order to share his goodness with created
  things in the most perfect manner possible.
• Since limited created things can only mirror the
  divine goodness in limited respects, God creates
  a variety of things, each of which has an essence
  that reflects different facets of divine
  perfection in unique ways.
• Since this is God's goal in creating, it would be
  reasonable to think that maximizing the mirroring
  of divine goodness in creation is the goal that
  God seeks in creating.

11
In summary

• We might call this the "maximization of essence"
  standard.
• Leibniz seemed convinced that the actual world
  met this standard and that we could therefore
  find creatures which mirrored the divine
  perfections in all the sorts of ways that
  creatures could do this.
• Thus, there are creatures with bodies and
  creatures without, creatures with freedom and
  intelligence and creatures without, creatures
  with sentience and creatures without, etc.

12
What does all that have to do with the problem of
evil?

• Leibniz was the first philosopher to introduce a
  coherent possible world theory.
• "If I drop the pen, it will fall." Even if I
  don't drop the pen, I hold this proposition to be
  true.
• What does it mean for a counterfactual
  proposition to be true? That is, what exactly is
  the correspondent in nature to "If I drop the
  pen, it will fall" when I never drop the pen?
• I know had I dropped the pen it would have
  fallen. Leibniz believed there was such a
  correspondent in a possible world, a world that
  could be actual according to logical possibility,
  but is not in fact actual.
• This possible world must have some ontology, that
  is, must in some sense exist, though perhaps not
  physically. In order for the proposition "If I
  drop the pen, it will fall" to be true, this
  proposition must have a correspondent somewhere.

13
What does all that have to do with the problem of
evil?

• Leibniz believed its correspondent was an aspect
  of the psychology of God.
• God is aware of this possible world in which I do
  drop the pen--and all logically possible
  worlds--though he only makes one of those
  infinite possible worlds actual and physical.
• Thus, every world that is logically possible
  exists in some sense (in the psychology of God)
  but God only makes one of these worlds actual and
  physical.
• Which one? The one that is the besti.e., has the
  least evil.
• God can comprehend and evaluate every world that
  it is possible to make, and chooses the best
  among them, the one with the greatest good and
  least evil.
• Since God cannot create a true contradiction,
  there will be some evil in every possible world,
  insofar as the elimination of such evil is
  logically inconsistent with a greater good, or
  the elimination of a greater evil.

14
David Hume on the problem of Evil

• If God allows evil to exist in the world, God
  cannot be all loving
• If evil is outside the control of God, then God
  cannot be all powerful
• God cannot be both all powerful and all loving
  and still allow for the existence of evil