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Why is the sky blue?
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Which came first: orange the color or orange
the fruit?
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And why is C3PO afraid of everything? Like, who decided it was a good idea to teach a droid to experience fear?
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There are some questions that we ask ourselves,
either as kids, or adults, or both.
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They’re questions about weird, everyday
things, and they’re weird because most of
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us don’t know the answers to them offhand.
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But most of the time, those questions turn
out to be pretty answerable.
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Like, for the ones I just mentioned, the short
answers are:
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Because of the way photons interact with the
molecules in the atmosphere.
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...the fruit;
And…uh…’cause that’s what George Lucas wanted.
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Maybe because 3PO’s a protocol droid, and
they need to be able to relate to humans.
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Though, he could stand to turn his fear settings
down a notch.
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Now, as you know, philosophers have a soft
spot for questions that can never be answered.
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Most of the time, these puzzles make for great thought experiments – tests of our skills in logic and argument.
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But there are some questions whose very lack
of an answer can be downright troubling.
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Unlike the occasional fluke of physics or bit of Star Wars trivia, there’s a part of us that really wants,
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or even needs to have an answer to these things.
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For the past month or so, we’ve been exploring
the philosophy of religion,
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and we’ve been doing it mainly from a theistic perspective, looking into arguments that justify belief in God.
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But one of the most persistent challenges to god’s existence is also the root of one of the most-asked,
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but least answerable, questions that we, as
thinking beings, face.
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Why is there evil?
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[Theme Music]
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Evil comes in many forms.
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And likewise, for philosophers, poses many problems, especially vis a vis the existence of god.
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First, there’s what’s known as the logical
problem of evil.
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Like all rational people, theists can’t help but acknowledge that the world is full of evil.
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And here, we’re understanding “evil” to be all manner of bad stuff – like, not just Hitler or Darth Vader or Moriarty.
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It’s everything that’s in the vast spectrum of badness, from stubbed toes to plagues and everything in between.
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Theists and atheists both agree that evil exists in this way. But they disagree about the next part.
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Many theists believe in an omniscient, omnipotent,
omnibenevolent God.
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But atheists argue that this creates a contradiction – a set of beliefs that can’t all be true at the same time.
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Because, evil is bad, right – whether it’s stubbed toes or genocide or paper cuts or epidemics?
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So, if there’s really an all-knowing God
out there, he knows about all the evil.
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He might even know about it before it happens.
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And if he’s all-powerful, he could stop
it.
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And if he’s all-good, then he would want
to stop it.
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And yet he doesn’t. The evil continues.
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Philosophically rational people shouldn’t
hold inconsistent beliefs,
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so atheists argue that you’re going to have to give something up – and the thing to give up is God.
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Some theists, however, take a different route.
They choose to give up one or more divine attributes.
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They argue that maybe God isn’t powerful
enough to stop evil,
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or maybe he’s not knowledgeable enough to
know about it,
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or maybe he’s not even good enough to care
about stopping it.
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That might sound weird to some of you,
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but if you’ve ever heard someone say that
God is envious, or petty, or jealous,
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that’s basically what they’re doing –
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they’re acknowledging the possibility that
God is not actually good.
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If you’ve ever checked out the Old Testament, there is a God there who has some anger issues –
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one who’s not at all opposed to wiping out entire populations just because of some bad behavior.
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Still, despite this scriptural evidence, many
theists are committed to God’s omni-attributes,
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and are thus stuck with a problem. They
have to resolve the logical problem of evil
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and find some way to explain why God would
allow evil into the world.
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And if you can do that, then you are presenting
what is known as a theodicy.
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A theodicy is an attempt to show that the existence of evil doesn’t rule out the possibility of God’s existence.
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Yes, this is such a big deal that there’s
a word for it.
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And the most popular theodicy is called The
Free Will Defense.
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This argument holds that God maximized the
goodness in the world by creating free beings.
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And being free means that we have the choice to do evil things – a choice that some of us exercise.
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This theodicy says that God doesn’t create evil, but evil can’t be avoided without depriving us of our freedom.
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And a world without freedom would be a worse
place overall.
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This explanation preserves God’s goodness,
because he created the best possible world,
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and also preserves his omnipotence and omniscience,
because,
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although he does know about evil and could stop it, he has a good reason not to – to ensure our freedom.
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The problem is, the free will defense really only really addresses what’s known as moral evil –
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or the evil committed, on purpose, by humans.
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Now, we’re certainly responsible for a lot of bad stuff, but you can’t blame us for everything.
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We can’t be held responsible for the fact
that the plates of the earth sometimes shift,
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causing destructive earthquakes, or that a storm might knock a tree over that falls onto someone’s house.
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This type of evil – the stuff we’re not
responsible for – is called natural evil,
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and the free will defense can’t resolve
natural evil.
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Religion is one of those philosophical issues that can make it hard for us to consider anything objectively.
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That’s where fiction comes in handy because
fictional stories can let us see how hypothetical
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people deal with hypothetical situations.
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And with that in mind, let’s go to the Thought
Bubble for some Flash Philosophy!
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Let’s consider the case of Ivan, a good
Russian who decides to break up with God.
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In the novel The Brothers Karamozov, 19th century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky presents us with Ivan,
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a man who claims to believe in God.
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But Ivan finds the fact that God allows evil
to exist to be so unforgivable,
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that he decides worshipping such a god would
be, just, unconscionable.
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Ivan goes so far as to declare that he is
“returning his ticket” to heaven.
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If the same God who allows evil – particularly
the suffering and death of children –
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is also saving a cozy place in paradise for
Ivan, well, Ivan wants nothing to do with it.
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So, his way out of the problem of evil is
to deny God’s goodness,
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and to conclude that a bad God is not only
unworthy of his worship,
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he’s also not someone Ivan wants to spend
eternity with.
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It’s like the ultimate un-friending.
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Now, some readers have found Ivan’s decision
to be noble, and full of integrity.
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After all, if you really think God is letting all of this bad stuff happen, why would you want to be on his team?
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But other people think Ivan is being irrational – why condemn yourself to eternity in hell on principle?
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For theists, it’s another question that
doesn’t have an easy answer.
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Thanks, Thought Bubble! Now, unlike Ivan, a lot of people aren’t willing to give up their ticket to heaven.
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So they need to work on a way to keeping believing in, and worshipping, God, even though evil is still a thing.
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One way to do that, is to argue that good
can’t exist without its opposite.
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The idea here is that you can’t understand
the concept of pleasure without pain.
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We don’t know what it feels like to be warm
if we haven’t been cold.
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We can’t understand the goodness of filling
our bellies if we’ve never been hungry.
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But there’s also another way, though it
involves a little more work on your part.
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20th century English philosopher of religion John Hick offered what’s known as the soul-making theodicy.
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Unlike the traditional view that God created
a perfect world,
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which we ruined through our own poor choices, Hick argued that God deliberately creates us “unfinished,”
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and our earthly lives are designed to toughen
us up, in a sense, kinda like boot camp.
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The harshness of life, Hick said, gives us
a robust texture and character that wouldn’t
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be possible without an imperfect world.
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Hick said that we’re not just God’s little
pets, and he’s not our benevolent owner,
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whose sole job is to keep us in a safe, comfortable
environment.
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Instead, he wants to build us, to train us,
into a particular kind of being.
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So we need an environment that’s suited
to the sort of growth that he wants –
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the sort that this world makes possible.
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A lot of people find these and other theodicies
to be pretty compelling.
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However, the problem of evil actually goes
a step deeper.
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What we’ve been talking about so far is
the logical problem of evil.
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This problem can be resolved, if we can explain
why there’s evil.
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But there’s also the evidential problem
of evil.
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This problem points out that we might be able
to explain why evil exists,
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but we still can’t explain why there’s
so much evil in the world.
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For instance, let’s say that it’s true that we really do need evil in order to understand goodness.
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In that case, why can’t we understand the
contrast through some sort of low-level evil –
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like paper cuts and head colds and having to work straight through our lunch hour every now and then?
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I mean, slow, painful deaths from cancer,
and city-destroying hurricanes…
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they don’t really add anything valuable
to our understanding of goodness. Do they?
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If God were truly good, and if a negative
contrast were really needed in order for us
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to understand the goodness of the world, then
why wouldn’t he give us just the very minimum
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dosage of necessary to achieve that goal?
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A counterargument might suggest that there’s always a good that corresponds to, and is proportionate to, any evil.
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But empirically, such goodness is really hard
to find.
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What good, for example, could possibly correspond
to the horrors of a genocide?
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In cases like this, Hick’s soul-making doesn’t
seem to cut it.
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You can’t really argue that “whatever
doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” because,
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sometimes, evil does kill us. A lot of us.
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And sometimes it kills us before we have a chance to grow and learn from the suffering we’ve endured.
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Despite these and other philosophical sticking points, a lot of people have found a theodicy that satisfies them –
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one that they believe reconciles the apparent
evil in the world with God’s existence.
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Others find all of these theodicies to be
flawed, and they reject God’s omni-nature,
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preserving their belief in God by finding him to be less than perfectly powerful, or knowledgeable, or good.
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Still others are convinced that the evil in the world is simply incompatible with the existence of a god,
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or at least any god worth worshipping.
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Wherever you end up, this is a problem that
needs to be grappled with.
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And you’ll probably be thinking about it
long after this lesson has ended.
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After all, today we have considered the biggest
problem in theism – the problem of evil.
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We’ve thought about different theodicies
– or ways that we might reconcile the existence
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of evil and the existence of god,
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and we’ve explored whether those responses
are sufficient.
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Next time, we’ll consider what kinds of justification we need to have for our religious beliefs.
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Crash Course Philosophy is produced in association
with PBS Digital Studios.
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You can head over to their channel to check out amazing shows like PBS Idea Channel, The Chatterbox, and PBS Space Time.
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This episode of Crash Course was filmed in
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with the help of these awesome people and our equally fantastic graphics team is Thought Cafe.
