The Problem of Evil, as it is typically called, is the strongest argument against the existence of a Deity who is at once all-powerful, all-knowing, kind and loving, and whose reach extends everywhere. Simply stated, the existence of such a being is incompatible with the existence of evil and suffering in the world. We know that evil and suffering exist; thus a Deity such as that described above cannot exist.
Notice that the Problem of Evil is a problem of logic. If we were to change one or more attributes of our hypothetical Deity – if, for example, he happened to be kind and loving but limited in power – then perhaps the amount of evil in the world could be explained. We could argue that God wants to stop evil, but is for some reason impotent. Likewise, if we were to assert that while God is all-powerful, but lacking in the compassion department, a conundrum is again avoided; God simply doesn't care about evil and human suffering.
But if, as most Christian apologists do, we insist on a God who possesses all the attributes ascribed to him by traditional theists, despite the often appalling suffering which afflicts our fellow humans, we have a problem.
The sort of argument we are making is known as modus tollens. A modus tollens argument takes the following form: if P, then Q. Not Q, therefore not P.
Applying this to the Problem of Evil, here's what we are saying: If there is a God that is all-powerful, unlimited in compassion, all-knowing, and whose reach extends everywhere – our P – then the world such a Being created should be the storied Best of All Possible Worlds – our Q. But anyone familiar with the amount of human suffering that has existed historically and at present (and certainly anyone who has read Candide) would conclude that this is not the case. When one considers bubonic plague, smallpox, AIDS, earthquakes, tsunamis, child rape, the Holocaust, Pol Pot, Rwanda, Darfur, and so on ad nauseum, it seems untenable that we are living in a Q world. And if not Q, then not P.
However, dogma dies hard, and for centuries theologians have been searching for ways to escape from the modus tollens trap to circumvent the Problem of Evil. Since if the premises of the argument – that a P God would mean a Q world – are granted, the traditional theist loses the match because the conclusion follows inevitably, theologians through the ages have attempted to challenge the premise that a perfect Creator would imply the Best of All Possible Worlds.
Such attempts are known as theodicies, and the most common theodicy is the so-called ‘Free-Will Theodicy.’ The basic premise is this: God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all the rest, but he wanted us, his creatures, to have free will. One can only have free will if one has actual choices to make. Thus, God had to allow us to choose between good and evil. Being the sort of despicable creatures that we are, we (or at least our first ancestors) chose evil.
Some may be impressed by the Free Will Theodicy, but there is no need to be. There are many ways in which it falls short.
Let us begin by saying that it seems to be the case that those who rely on the Free Will Theodicy appear to not really understand human suffering, or choose to turn a blind eye to its magnitude. There is something callous in arguing that horrible suffering has to happen, mostly to others, for the fulfillment of some sort of Divine purpose. Must a child be raped or murdered to fulfill God's plan for the world? Did six million Jews have to die in the Holocaust? Would not three million, or half a million, or fifty thousand, have been enough? Does it follow from the free will argument that so much suffering exists?
In his great novel The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky – himself an existential sort of Christian in his later years – explores this issue, and makes it real in the way that only a great literary mind can. In the chapter titled ‘Rebellion,’ the atheist Ivan Karamazov discusses with his pious and saintly younger brother, Alyosha, the suffering of children. Ivan recounts:
‘A little girl of five was abused by her parents, ‘decent and most respectable people, well-educated and cultured’… Those educated parents subjected that poor little five-year-old to every conceivable torture. They beat her, whipped her, kicked her till she was black and blue, all for no reason. Finally, they thought of the ultimate punishment; she shut her up all night in the outside privy, in the cold and frost, because she wet herself at night (as if a five-year-old, sleeping soundly like an angel, could excuse herself in time) – for this, they smeared her face with her excrement and forced her to eat it, and it was her mother, her mother who did this to her! And that mother slept unconcernedly at night, oblivious to the sobs of the poor child shut up in that foul place! Can you understand such a thing: that small child, unable to comprehend what is done to her, in the dark and the cold of that foul place, beating her little panting breast with her tiny fists, sobbing, weeping humble tears of bloodstained innocence, praying to ‘Dear Father God’ to protect her – do you understand this obscenity, my friend, my brother, my holy and meek monk, do you understand why such an obscenity should be so necessary, and what is the point of it? They say without it man could not live on this earth, for he would not understand the difference between good and evil. Why should one understand that damned difference between good and evil if that's the price to be paid? All the knowledge in the world is not worth that child's tearful prayers to ‘Dear Father God.’ I'm not talking about the suffering of adults, they have eaten of the apple, they can go to the devil and suffer all the fires of hell, but the little ones, the children!'
While this is a story taken from a work of fiction, no one can deny that things equally awful are done to children all the time.
What Ivan Karamazov has done, in essence, is to put a human face on suffering. He is daring his brother to say that such suffering – not suffering in the abstract but the concrete and horrific suffering of a particular little girl – can be explained away with a syllogism. The attempt to do so, again, seems incredibly callous. Could not God have intervened in some way? Were his hands completely tied for the sake of free will? Could he not have at least made the weather warmer so that the poor girl didn't shiver all night in the privy? Could he, perhaps, have caused her to awake in time to relieve herself?
A bit later, Ivan goes on to ask his brother:
‘Tell me honestly, I challenge you – answer me: imagine that you are charged with building the edifice of human destiny, whose ultimate aim is to bring people happiness, to give them peace and contentment at last, but that in order to achieve this it is essential and unavoidable to torture just one little speck of creation, that same little child beating her breast with her little fists, and imagine that this edifice had to be erected on her unexpiated tears. Would you agree to be the architect under those conditions? Tell me honestly!’Footnote 1
Alyosha indicates that he would not accept such terms. Indeed, what human being capable of feeling compassion would?
While a great writer like Dostoevsky was able to put the issue in human terms, a similar point has been made more formally by John Leslie Mackie in his notable book The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God. Mackie grants the theist's proposition that perhaps some evils are necessary in order to bring about some greater good; he refers to these as ‘absorbed evils.’ But then he observes:
‘…the vital question is this: can the theist maintain that the only evils that occur in the world are absorbed evils? When this question is squarely put [as it was so effectively by Dostoevsky], it is surely plain that he cannot. On the one hand there are surplus… evils, suffering and the like which are not actually used in any good organic whole, and on the other hand there are… evils… [that] will not be incorporated in second-order goods, but will contrast with them: malevolence, cruelty, callousness, cowardice, and states of affairs in which there is not progress but decline, where things get worse rather than better. The problem, therefore, now recurs as the problem of unabsorbed evils, and we have as yet no way of reconciling their existence with that of a god of the traditional sort.’Footnote 2
Mackie makes an additional point which argues strongly against ‘a god of the traditional sort’. He points out that a great deal of suffering results from the action of well-intentioned individuals. One of his examples is the Vietnam War. There were surely enormous numbers of young Americans who enlisted in the US military thinking that they were fighting for something good and just. Yet, what good was achieved in that war? How many lives were needlessly lost? Does the restriction on God's intervention with respect to free will mean that he cannot let us know in advance that a war will be fruitless? Must he allow a horrific ‘free will’ decision to be made due to ignorance? Would providing information needed to make a wise decision interfere with free will?
Consider the following scenario. Let us imagine that during the Cold War, a technological glitch caused a report to reach the American president that the Soviet Union had just launched all of its nuclear missiles. Of course, it is possible to question the worthiness of making the decision to strike back in any case – why must the whole world be destroyed rather than just half – but according to the policy of ‘Mutual Assured Destruction’ (MAD), the US president probably would have ordered American missiles to be launched based on an erroneous report. If that situation had actually occurred, would it have violated free will for God to somehow inform the president that the reports of a Soviet attack were false? Yet, the old adage that ‘the road to Hell is paved with good intentions’ is certainly correct.
For those unimpressed with hypotheticals, perhaps a real-life example will prove more convincing. Consider the women who were treated with the drug thalidomide. In the 1950s and 1960s, tens of thousands of pregnant women were treated with the drug for morning sickness – certainly a good intention. But as it turned out, thalidomide is responsible for horrid birth defects. Could God have tipped us off?
But there is another challenge to the Free Will Theodicy that is often ignored. Obviously, for the Free Will Theodicy to work, we must have free will. But what does it mean to say we have free will? To what extent do we have it?
First, we cannot ignore the power of culture with respect to the choices humans make. A child born in Saudi Arabia will almost certainly become a Muslim; one born to an Amish family in Pennsylvania will adopt that religion, while a Thai child will be raised as a Buddhist.
It is not only religion that is largely a factor of culture. The same is true of many aspects of life – what we eat, the clothes we wear, the kind of person we marry, how many children we will have – all of these things are at the very least heavily influenced by culture. To the extent most humans have free will, it consists of a freedom to choose from a series of options presented to them by the culture in which they find themselves. It may sound elitist, but it is probably the case that only the highly educated are able to see beyond the confines of their culture, though to what extent even they can do so is a matter of some debate.
Of course, it is not only culture that influences, drives, or constrains us. The same is true of genetics (and I will leave the whole ‘meme’ discussion to others). Every so often, we are reminded of the influences our genes have not only on our looks and physical characteristics, but on our behavior.
Such was the case with respect to an interesting, if frightening, article which appeared relatively recently in the New Yorker magazine which seriously calls into question the degree to which humans have free will. In the August 13, 2007 issue of that publication, Richard Preston, in an article titled ‘An Error in the Code,’ wrote about his encounters with two men who suffered from a rare brain disorder known as Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. The abstract of the article states:
‘[The] writer describes a case from 1962, in which a four-and-a-half-year-old boy named Matthew was brought to Johns Hopkins Hospital. Matthew was spastic, and as an infant, had been diagnosed as having cerebral palsy and developmental retardation. His older brother was also spastic and retarded. Matthew was wearing mittens, even though it was a warm day. William L. Nyhan, a pediatrician and research scientist, along with a medical student named Michael Lesch, discovered that Matthew had bitten off parts of his fingers, and parts of his lips. They met with his older brother, who had bitten his fingers even more severely, and had chewed off his lower lip. Two years after meeting Matthew, Nyhan and Lesch published the first paper describing the disease, which came to be known as Lesch-Nyhan syndrome… Nyhan coined the term ‘behavioral phenotype’ to describe diseases like Lesch-Nyhan, in which someone displays a pattern of characteristic actions that can be linked to genetic code [italics added]. [The article] describes progression of a person with Lesch-Nyhan. He will scream in terror and pain during bouts of self-mutilation… [The article] describes the DNA and genetic mutation of those with Lesch-Nyhan. In 1999, the writer met James Elrod and Jim Murphy, two men living with Lesch-Nyhan. (Murphy died in 2004; Elrod, who is now forty-nine, is one of the oldest living people with Lesch-Nyhan.) Jim Murphy explains to the writer what the disease is like. ‘You try to tick everybody off, and then you feel bad when you do it.’ In 2000, a neurosurgeon in Tokyo performed a procedure called deep-brain stimulation on a Lesch-Nyhan patient. Deep-brain stimulation, developed for treating people with Parkinson's, involves implanting wires in the brain and batteries in the chest, to send a faint, pulsed current of electricity through the patient. After the surgery, the boy's dystonic movements disappeared, and several months later, he had stopped biting himself.'Footnote 3
This article is profound in its implications. First, it demonstrates a hard-wired, genetic component to behavior, which in the tragic cases of those afflicted with Lesch-Nyhan shows up even in infancy. Second, those suffering from the malady are powerless to control it. In the full-length article, Preston describes how Lesch-Nyhan sufferers can feel an episode coming on, and will often beg to be tied so that they are unable to mutilate themselves. Clearly, at least in the case of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, free will is not operative.
It is not only sufferers of Lesch-Nyhan whose free will is impacted by genetics. Certainly, our emotional state has a great deal to do with the decisions we make. According to a Reuters news report by Michael Kahn, in a recent study led by Dr. Tim Bates of the University of Edinburgh, one thousand samples of twins, both identical and fraternal, were surveyed. Based on their findings, Bates and his team concluded that approximately half of the personality traits that tend to make people happy are determined by genetics, with the remainder determined by a variety of external circumstances, such as healthy relationships.
To what extent, then, do we have free will? And to the extent that we have it, to what extent can a traditional Deity, if one were to exist, be bound by it?
It seems that at the very least the onus is on the theist making the argument from free will to provide clear answers to these questions. And until this is done, the Free Will Theodicy can hardly be taken seriously in light of what we know positively about how the world actually is.
