What About Evil? by Scott Christensen

 

Full disclosure: The following is a review of What About Evil? by Scott Christensen.  I am friends with Christensen on Facebook, although I cannot remember precisely the details of how we became Facebook friends. I suspect it’s either because of Triablogue or because of Steve Hays directly. I also received a review copy for free.  However, the following views are my own and are an honest assessment of Christensen’s book.

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Christensen’s writing style is one that definitely connected with me.  When reading some authors, you can get the sense of overwhelming intellect. They use large words and technical phrases with skill, and you learn a lot from them but it also takes a lot of extra thinking to parse out those sentences.  Christensen’s style is the opposite.  It’s not that his writing is simplistic—far from it—but rather that he writes in such a manner that it is effortless to take in what he is writing about.  In other words, his meaning is plain, not convoluted. His metaphors are obvious, not strained.  And the end result is that reading a paragraph from his book is effortless.  Unlike reading a massive tome where it is a chore to grind out every sentence, Christensen’s style lends to quick, and enjoyable, reading.

Where this becomes a bit unusual is in instances where Christensen lists examples of what he is referring to.  For instance, when giving a list of natural disasters in his introduction (page 2), he includes “...the European Black Death (1347–51), Chilean earthquakes (1647), Krakatoan volcanoes (1883), Spanish flu pandemics (1918), Indonesian tsunamis (2004), Chinese coronavirus pandemics (2020), and endless twisters in Tornado Alley.” Because I am used to reading many technical treatises, my mind immediately asked “why do tornadoes not have any dates listed?  And why did he suddenly move from specific examples to the general example of tornados?  And why only tornadoes and not, say, hurricanes?” 

But of course, Christensen wasn’t trying to make any extra point by including tornadoes there.  He’s simply listing some common examples of natural evils, and the “oddity” of having tornados at the end, not fitting the format of the other items in the list, fits into Christensen’s folksy style.  This is the sort of list someone would make if they were talking extemporaneously in a conversation.

I hope none of that is taken as a criticism. In fact, I think the style of the book helps make it easier for a lay person to read.  And by pointing out the style is “folksy” that in no way means that the arguments Christensen puts forth have no weight.  Instead, it means that (in my opinion) more people will be able to benefit from this writing than if Christensen had used a more academic style.

Christensen quickly gets to the point in the book. He is looking into the various theodicies presented to oppose those who question the existence of God based on the existence of evil.  He looks at some of the more common theodicies, such as the “Free-Will Defense”, “The Natural-Law Defense”, and the “Greater-Good Theodicy” (among many others), concluding that while there are some good things in most defenses, for a Biblically-minded Christian, the view that is most faithful to Scripture is a version of the “greater-good theodicy” with “the best-of-all-possible-worlds defense.”  He dubs his own view the “Greater-glory theodicy”, in his words, “because it seeks to resolve the problem by examining what brings God the greatest glory” (p. 7).

The reason I like Christensen’s method is because he is geared so closely to holding to what the Bible teaches, and using that as the foundation for all else.  It places Christ, and His work in defeating evil, at the center of the entire context of evil in the first place.  As he writes, “[…]Christ is no conventional hero, and the cross is no conventional weapon. We do not naturally associate a hero’s victory with his death. … Yet surprisingly, in the cross, Jesus defeats evil.  Jesus defeats death by dying…. He becomes our hero by being treated as a villain” (pp. 8-9).

If you feel I’m giving away too much of the book, perhaps the low value of those page numbers will assuage you.  Christensen fully tells us all of this within the very introduction of his book!  This isn’t something he’s trying to hold off for later, to bait you in before revealing where he’s going.  As is keeping with Christensen’s “folksy” language, he has no reason to obscure anything with rhetoric and seems almost excited to get through the background information to get to the main point: the glorification of Christ.

Honestly, as someone who’s read a lot of philosophy on theodicies—and many of them quite well reasoned and argued—it’s nice to have one where the focus is so clearly on the majesty of Christ.

This is why I especially enjoyed that while Christensen took several chapters to discuss evil from a historical and philosophical standpoint, including discussing how the term can even be defined, he so quickly delves into what would even constitute a theodicy that honors God, especially in light of how secular the world is in modern days.  He examines the strengths and weaknesses of the common arguments in Chapters 5 and 6, (the weaknesses being where they lack Biblical support, and the strengths being where they have sufficient Biblical support), and then spends chapters 7 and 8 discussing the nature of God Himself and how the Bible discusses evil.  It is that Biblically-centered focus that I very much appreciated, and that’s not even getting into the section that Christensen himself identifies as the “heart” of his book: Chapters 10 – 13, where the redemptive theme of Scripture is seen as a monomyth—“one universal storyline that evokes a human longing for redemption.”  And if you’re looking for shortcuts, first of all I suggest not doing so.  But if you really want to get to the main argument, Chapter 12 of the book (specifically, beginning on page 281) presents the “greater-good theodicy” in detail.

Much more could, and should, be said about this work by Christensen.  There is a treasure of introductory-level Reformed theology throughout all its pages, and his defense being grounded in Scripture is definitely a breath of fresh air.  The Bible is the strength of the Reformed position, and Christensen does a wonderful job pulling together the various threads to support his view: philosophical, historical, and most of all theological.  While I am more intellectually driven and love the logic of the Reformed view, Chapters 10 and 11 (where Christensen spends time talking about the entire story of the Bible) was a nice change of pace.  As a dabbler in fiction, the purpose and intent of stories also speaks to me, and it’s nice for someone to remind me that God is an Author, just as much as He is an Architect or Mathematician.

My only regret is that when I read the majority of this book, it was during an unexpected foot surgery I had, and as a result the experience was not as physically pleasant as I wish it could have been.  I hope in another couple of months to re-read the book, from a new (unmedicated and pain-free) point of view to get another take on it.  It will be well worth reading again, and I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to increase their theodicy arsenal.  I rate this a solid A+, or 5 stars if we go by the Amazon scale, because it is well written, well researched, well informed, and, most of all, Biblically grounded.

Jumping from a burning building

Freewill theists often contend that allowing evil is distinct from causing evil. Suppose someone must jump from the fifth story of an apartment building to the parking lot below. Suppose there's a bystander underneath who's watching. Suppose there's a trampoline which the jumper will just miss, and the bystander can see that. Suppose the bystander can push the trampoline over so that the jumper will fall into the trampoline, but the bystander does nothing. Is there no sense in which the bystander caused the death of the jumper? Sure, freewill theists can resort to a stipulative definition of causation to deny that implication, but that's an ad hoc definition.

Causing and Not Causing Not to Occur

This is germane, both to the freewill defense as well as the oft-repeated claim that freewill theism avoids the moral liabilities of Calvinism:

One natural suggestion is that the agent who does harm causes it to occur; whereas the agent who allows harm doesn’t cause it, but simply fails to prevent it where she could have done so.[9]This suggestion has immediate moral implications. It seems true by definition (almost) that you can be causally responsible only for upshots that you cause. And it is arguably true that you can be morally responsible only for what you are causally responsible for. So, if you cause a bad state of affairs, you’ve probably done wrong; whereas if you don’t cause a bad state of affairs, you haven’t. In choosing between killing and letting die, you are choosing between doing wrong and not doing wrong. (Of course, this doesn’t apply to non-harmful cases of killing, such as, arguably, some cases of active euthanasia.) The question of what you ought to do is then tautologously easy.

This argument begins to get into trouble when we reflect on the fact that we are often responsible for upshots we allow: the death of the houseplants or the child’s illiteracy. When we notice that, in these cases, the plants die or the child remains uneducated because of some failure on the agent’s part, it becomes clear that the agent does, in some sense, cause the upshots. Moreover, most widely accepted contemporary accounts of causation imply that some event or fact involving these agents causes the deaths or illiteracy. For example, the counterfactual account of causation—according to which (very roughly) event E causes F if and only if had E not occurredF would not have occurred either—implies that it was the agent’s failure to water the plants that caused the deaths.[10] John Mackie’s INUS condition[11]—according to which E causes F if and only if E is a(n insufficient but) necessary part of a(n unnecessary but) sufficient condition for F—implies that the fact that the agent failed to water the plants causes the plants to die.[12]

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doing-allowing/#CausNotCausNotOccu

A severe mercy

Pain relief is an obsession of western medicine because that's something patients demand. And the availability of painkillers is often a blessing. Not to mention anesthesia. 

However, there are worse things than pain. Sometimes a painless sensation can be worse than a painful sensation. But sharp pain of a certain intensity blocks the mind from processing other sensations that may be even more unpleasant. 

So there's a way in which pain can be almost merciful, a kind of unexpected blessing, in that respect. Ironically, sometimes the preferred alternative isn't less pain but more pain. Pain of the right kind and intensity. There are different kinds of pain. But pain of a certain kind, at a certain level, can be distracting in a good way. A "severe mercy". That sheds neglected light on the problem of pain. 

Another advantage is that pain can be controlled in a way that worse sensations can't. Pain can be induced–like taking a cold bath. The chilling effect will make the worse sensation tolerable by blocking it from consciousness. There's a natural fear of death that Christians try to overcome. But this is a reminder that some things are more naturally fearsome than the natural fear of death, which makes that easier to face if handled the right way. It can take the mind off death. And it can be inspiring to take charge of a situation rather than be helplessly passive at its mercy. 

Camus, The Plague, and God

http://wincorduan.bravejournal.com/?fbclid=IwAR1GxehodxIPB1KDFCTMEaIv3C5x8LqfsC1Ouh3XzhEZUxq2gqT3yw2gH7w

Does Evolution disprove Christianity?

One of those Bambi meets Godzilla debates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idyy8p4lShc&t=4616s

In addition to Jonathan's performance, a few observations of my own:

1. Jonathan McLatchie is well-qualified to discuss the issue. That said, the title is ambiguous. It could mean does evolution, if true, disprove Christianity. Or it could mean evolution fails to disprove Christianity because evolution is false.

2. A couple of issues:

i) Lim thinks disease is incompatible with God's existence, but diseases perform a necessary function in maintaining that balance of nature. In addition, most organisms were never designed to be immortal. 

ii) Lim fails to understand that there are constraints on what an omnipotent God can do by natural means. In many cases, God can bypass natural processes to produce a result directly, but if God is creating a cause/effect world, and God is using a physical medium, then that's a self-imposed limitation on God's field of action.

3. We also need to distinguish between Christianity and generic theism or perfect being theology. Even if we posit that disease is incompatible with an abstract concept of God that's a philosophical construct, the existence of disease in no way disproves the existence of the Biblical God. In Scripture, God coexists with disease. So disease in no way counts as evidence against the existence of Christian theism, but is entirely consistent with the God of the Bible.

4. Lim acts like the Genesis creation account indicates that God made all the species from the outset. But Gen 1 doesn't detail the species. Gen 1 doesn't preclude adaptation. Gen 1 refers to a few general taxonomies based on their natural habitat (land animals, freshwater or marine organisms).

5.  Since the issue of how best to interpret Genesis came up, here's a free, recent book: https://frame-poythress.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/PoythressVernInterpretingEdenAGuideToFaithfullyReadingAndUnderstandingGenesis1-3.pdf 

6. Lim constantly raises hypothetical objections to Christianity, but ignores al the evidence. He mentions prayer, but there are countless examples of answered prayer. The fact that many prayers go unanswered doesn't cancel out the evidence for the prayer requests that God does grant.

7. Lim then trots out Sai Babba, but from what I've read, there's lots of evidence that he's a fraud.

8. There are multiple problems with Lim's appeal to alleged pagan parallels between Jesus and hero archetypes:

i) You can't legitimately compare a well-documented historical figure with fictional characters in pagan mythology. Jesus is a historical figure. We have 1C historical sources documenting his life. 1C sources about a 1C individual. 

ii) You also have to take into account the chronological gap between a historical figure like, say, Buddha, and the dates of our earliest sources. 

iii) In addition, you have to take into account the Jewish worldview of the NT, which precludes pagan syncretism.

iv) Did the NT writers even have access to the pagan sources? 

v) How specific are the alleged parallels?

Is God sending us a message?

Thus far I haven't offered a theological interpretation of the pandemic. That's because I don't have the answer. It can bring discredit on the Christian faith when spiritual leaders presume to interpret providential disasters. Unbelievers, not without reason, don't think spiritual leaders are privy to God's rationale, even if there was a God, so they think spiritual leaders are just exploiting the situation. Despite the fact that they don't know what they're talking about, they take advantage of tragedy to score theological points. Not that I'm a spiritual leader. I'm not that high on the pecking order. But I'm just stating a general principle. The exercise can fuel the cynicism of unbelievers–or even believers.

That said, there's value in running through a list of potential explanations, and assessing their pros and cons. We just need to avoid dogmatism. 

A . Provoking questions

Just being forced to stop and ask if God sending us/me a message is a useful exercise–especially for the spiritually indifferent. Shakes them out of their complacency. 

B. A sign

1. A prima facie difficulty with saying the pandemic is a divine sign is that, in general, there needs to be agreement on what a sign means for it to be a sign. How can it send a message unless we understand the significance of the sign? Yet one problem with the pandemic is that it's open to more than one theological interpretation.  So the whole notion ambiguous signaling seems to contradict to the purpose of a sign. (Mind you, these needn't all be mutually exclusive explanations.)

2. Perhaps, though, that's prematurely dismissive. Suppose I drive to a park. When I return to my car, after jogging, there's a handwritten sign on my windshield which says "I saw what you did Friday!"

Now that's ambiguous on different levels: 

i) Maybe it's just a prank by somebody who picked out my car at random. He never saw me do anything on Friday.

ii) Or the sign might be a veiled threat. Perhaps he did see me do something wrong or illegal. Maybe he's going to turn me in! Or more sinister yet, maybe he's coming after me!

iii) Perhaps I don't remember doing anything wrong on Friday. But the sign forces me to jog my memory. Maybe I unwittingly did something to tick him off. 

iv) Or maybe I don't remember, not because I did nothing wrong, but because I'm a dishonest person for whom wrongdoing is so routine that's all a blur. Yes, I did something wrong on Friday, and the day before, and the day after.

I'm used to getting away with it. But this time I ticked off the wrong person. Someone who will exact revenge. This time my dishonesty caught up with me. 

v) Or maybe I'm generally honest, but Friday was the exception. I did something wrong or illegal. Unbeknownst to me, there was a witness. 

Now the sign can be ambiguous by design. The ominous sign is intended to instill fear and anxiety. Make me uncertain about what the future holds for me. Throw me off balance. 

C. Judgment

1. In Scripture, some natural evils are divine judgments. Yet in Scripture, some natural evils have a different purpose. They're not punitive.

2. A problem with the judicial interpretation is that the pandemic is so indiscriminate. When it falls on the righteous and wicked alike, that makes it harder to recognize as divine judgment rather than some morally random event. 

Mind you, collective guilt isn't a necessary condition for collective punishment. As I often say, due to fact that human beings are social creatures, the innocent are often collateral damage in collective punishment. They aren't the targets. 

3. But another problem with the judicial interpretation is the message it sends. Divine judgment can have deterrent value when recognized as divine judgment. But unbelievers don't think God exists, and for them, the pandemic is just one more item in the problem of evil.

4. Another problem with the judicial interpretation is the timing. Why now? Is the human race wickeder than it was 5 or 10 or 15 years ago? 

Perhaps, though, God needs to bring judgment on the human race every so often because, if he never he punishes evil prior to the Final Judgment, then evil will spiral out of control. So even if the timing is somewhat arbitrary, periodic judgment is necessary to keep evil from getting completely out of hand. 

But if that's the reason, it raises the question of how natural disasters like the pandemic are a check on evil. Will that make the wicked mend their ways? 

D. Warning

A problem with this interpretation is that given all the kinds of natural disasters and causes of death, what makes the pandemic a distinctive divine warning? Of course, we could treat them all as warnings and in sense we should, but practical speaking, the impact is diluted by their range and frequency. Like the judicial interpretation, it seems to be too indiscriminate to function as a clear-cut warning rather than a morally random event. 

E. Reminder

The pandemic is undoubtedly a reminder of our vulnerability. Despite the fact that human technology becomes exponentially more powerful, nature is incomparably more powerful than human technology. Our technology can't protect us from many natural disasters. We're at the mercy of natural disasters beyond our ken or control. Nature will always be more powerful than technology because technology depends on natural forces and natural processes. 

That's a salutary reminder to people who avoid thinking about death or the meaning of life. It shakes them up. 

F. Disruption

The pandemic is very disruptive to the status quo. While that's bad in some ways, it's good in other ways. Over time, power naturally concentrates in the hands of evil. The disruptive impact of the pandemic forces the wicked to fall back, regroup, and rebuild. They may not be able to restore the status quo. So it slows them down. Impedes their dominance. Buys the righteous some breathing room. 

If so, that's not a case of God sending a message, but has a different purpose. 

Is it fair to be born lost?

1. In Christian theology, there's a sense in which human beings are born lost. By that I mean, absent God's gracious intervention, we're already lost the moment we step into existence. 

Now God can intervene at any stage in our existence, so God can intervene between conception and birth. When I say born lost I don't mean that maybe we lost our way at some point during gestation. I don't mean we became lost in the womb. It's just concrete way of expressing the fact that we don't have to do anything to be in a lost condition. We don't become lost. Rather, we find ourselves in that condition. 

2. This is a doctrine that Christians accept on authority. One question is whether it's something we can explain, defend, or understand by reason. 

Intuition is paradoxical in the sense that on the one hand we depend on intuition for many things, but on the other hand, intuition isn't consistently reliable. It can lead us astray. Sometimes the problem is due to overgeneralizing from certain examples or illustrations. Or sometimes what we call intuition is just our social conditioning, and what's intuitive or counterintuitive is culturally variable. 

We need to make allowance of the live possibility that there are things we're just not smart enough to figure out, like the necessary conditions for moral responsibility or blame. 

3. Wesleyan Aminianism tries to relieve the tension by positing universal sufficient/prevenient grace. Sounds nice, but is it true? Or is it just an ad hoc solution to wish it away? Universalism is another way to evade the issue. 

4. In theory there are three different ways we might view the human condition:

i) We find ourselves born on a road. The road isn't going in the right direction or the wrong direction. But there's a fork in the road up ahead. That's the point at which we can lose our way, by taking the wrong turn. 

ii) We are born beyond the fork in the road. We are going in the right direction. But the road splits up further down the line. Depending one which turn we take at the second fork in the road, we will continue going in the right direction or else we will become lost. 

iii) We are born beyond the fork in the road. We are going in the wrong direction. But the road splits up further down the line. Depending one which turn we take at the second fork in the road, we will continue going in the wrong direction or else we will escape and finally get on the right path. 

(iii) represents the biblical view of the human plight. 

5. However, that raises the question of whether it's fair to be born lost. Let's consider another illustration. Suppose a rich man squanders his fortune in gambling debts. When he was rich he had a very luxurious lifestyle. But his children were born after he lost his fortune.

Although they suffer the consequences of their father's compulsive gambling, it's not unfair that they weren't born rich. It wasn't their money to begin with. They didn't make a fortune, then lose it. It was never theirs to lose. They weren't entitled to be born rich. 

6. An objection or limitation to that comparison is that the situation of his kids isn't punitive. Not to be born rich isn't punishment for their dad's gambling debts. But damnation is punitive. 

Here I'd introduce another consideration. The metaphor of lostness is, in itself, morally neutral. Indeed, we're apt to think of it as a kind of innocent, hapless misfortune. Mind you, it's possible to lose your way through reckless disregard of warning signs. 

But there's a glaring sense in which the lost condition of humanity isn't innocuous. Take the capacity for wanton human cruelty. And this manifests itself at a very early age. It's startling to see how cruel kids can be to each other. So something already went wrong. And not just because some kids are neglected or emotionally abused. Kids with loving parents can be gratuitously cruel to each other. 

7. In addition, while this is a doctrine which Christians accept on authority, it's also the case that human beings really do act like they're in a lost condition. We see that all the time. So it's not something we just take on faith, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. 

8. There's also the nature of salvation and damnation. What are human beings entitled to? How much good are they entitled to? How much deprivation do they have a right to be spared? The children of the man who lost is fortune don't deserved to be tortured for his behavior. But they don't deserve to be rewarded, either.

Do human beings deserve not to be lost? What does it mean to be lost forever? Does it mean to miss out on certain opportunities and certain goods? If so, is that unfair? Is that wrong? 

There's something tragic about that, but an element of tragedy makes life weightier. We don't take the good for granted. 

Of course, we're used to thinking of hell in much worse terms, but that's in large part because the wicked behave in much worse terms. 

9. A very popular storyline is a story about how somebody or some group got rescued. One variation is rescuing somebody who is lost. A lost child. A lost hiker. A lost sailor. Or a castaway who's stranded and forgotten on a desert island. But in stories like that, you must be lost before you can be rescued. 

Much of the appeal of the Gospel lies in the two-sided character of salvation. Salvation is only meaningful and thrilling because sinners are lost apart from salvation. That's why they have to be rescued. 

And there are different ways to be lost and rescued. You can be rescued from the bondage of a self-destructive addiction. You can be rescued from depression and self-loathing. 

10. In my view, human beings originate as divine ideas, like fictional characters in the mind of a storyteller. We initially exist in God's imagination. And God's imagination has alternate plots for every human life. In God's imagination, there's no one thing we were going to do or not do. Rather, there are endless plot variations. At this stage they're all just possibilities. Coequal possibilities. There is no one right plot. Each storyline will have unique points of interest and insight. 

When God creates us, he takes one of these plots and makes it real. In this case, he chooses a plot in which I'm born lost. He could choose a different plot. But it's not as if there's one way the story was supposed to begin or end. Because there's no one story to choose from. There are many different storylines. Did God wrong a human being by selecting one plot rather than another? 

What good is a virus?

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2020/04/ask-creationist-about-viruses.html

Leviticus, Leprosy, and Lent—in the Light of the Coronavirus Crisis

http://www.therecapitulator.com/leviticus-leprosy-and-lent-in-the-light-of-the-coronavirus-crisis-part-2/

Do all theodicies fail?

I'll comment on part of a thread by atheist Jeff Lowder:

@SecularOutpost

Likewise, when atheists argue that facts about evil, pain, suffering, imperfection are evidence against God's existence, it's a complete nonstarter to talk about how God is logically compatible with those facts. 

i) That depends. Mere logical compatibility might be a makeshift explanation. That's not sufficient. If, however, logical compatibility means evil, pain, and suffering are not surprising given the overall tenets of Christian theism, then that's a legitimate explanation. If that fails to satisfy the evidential argument from evil, the failure is not in the explanation but in the way the evidential argument is formulated. 

ii) It's unclear what Jeff means by "imperfections". For instance, it's not a design flaw that I don't have fireproof fingers. If I accidentally burn my fingers, that's not an imperfection. Fingers need to be sensitive to perform many functions. Fireproof fingers would be numb. 

For parallel reasons, all known theodicies for the arguments from evil fail. They provide a possible explanation for which we have no independent reason to believe is true and/or the explanation is not probable on the assumption theism is true.

i) That's ambiguous. We often resort to explanations that are reasonable even though we lack independent evidence that they are true. Why is someone late for work? Maybe they had a flat tire, accident, or family emergency. We don't require corroboration for that conjecture to make it a legitimate conjecture. We know that those kinds of things happen. We know he's a responsible employee. 

ii) It's often rational to provide a possible explanation when we have no independent evidence that it's true, because it's not necessarily about having direct evidence for the explanation, but indirect evidence given the character of the agent, as a competent and benevolent agent who has good reasons for what he does.

iii) On the assumption that Christianity is true, it's not merely probable but inevitable that some of God's actions will be inscrutable given the complexities of historical causation. Normally it's wrong to inflict pain on a young child. The child doesn't understand why the doctor is performing a painful procedure. He doesn't understand why his dad is standing by, allowing that to happen. 

(Aside: I also forgot to mention another requirement: the theodicy or atheodicy has to make the fact to be explained probable. Many theodicies and atheodicies also fail this requirement.) 

Probable in relation to whom or what frame of reference? An atheist? 

Once again, an explanation needn't be probable to be legitimate. To recur to my previous example, an employee may be late for work because they had a flat tire, accident, or family emergency. Since I don't know for a fact why they are late for work, I can't say which explanation is probably the correct explanation. And it may be an explanation I didn't consider. 

But we could put this in reverse: it's improbable that he decided to play hooky, given his track-record as a responsible employee. 

For example, the pain a terminally ill patient feels in the hours or days before death does not aid in survival or reproduction. Now, if theism is true, then God must have a morally sufficient reason for allowing all pain, including pain which does not aid in survival or reproduction. 

i) Because the human nervous system is fairly coarse-grained. It wasn't designed to be that discriminating. But that cuts both ways. It wasn't designed for us to enjoy chocolate gelato. That doesn't aid in survival or reproduction. But why is that the only justification? 

ii) Because Jeff is locked into attacking generic theism, he overlooks distinctive assumptions, resources, and explanations provided by Christian theism. He acts like all pain must be a design flaw, as created. But in Christian theology, the natural world always contained dangers and potential sources of pain. The difference is that in an unfallen world, humans might expect special providential protection from certain kinds of harms. 

The basic idea of UPD is that God exists, and God may have a morally sufficient reason for allowing pain, suffering, imperfection, or evil, and that reason is unknown to (or unknowable by) humans. 

That reply is good as far it goes, but it doesn't go far enough to defeat the atheistic arguments from pain, suffering, imperfection, and evil. Yes, God may have unknown reasons for allowing such things, but he might also have unknown reasons for preventing such things. 

There is no antecedent reason why God-permitting reasons are more likely than God-preventing reasons, and so both of those reasons cancel out. What we're left with is what we do know. 

i) Those aren't mutually exclusive explanations. It's not a choice between God permitting every evil and God preventing every evil. Some evils are necessary sources of second-order goods, but too much evil swamps the good. There is no general principle that God-permitting reasons are more likely that God-preventing reasons, or vice versa. God-permitting reasons ought to be more likely that God-preventing reasons. That assessment involves striking a balance between competing goods that humans lack the information and intelligence to appreciate.  

ii) In addition, the preemption of evil is invisible. A nonevent leaves no trace evidence. So we can't do a comparative assessment of how often God permits evil in relation to how often God prevents evil. We only have one side of the comparison.

iii) However, both divine permission and divine prevention of evil have a disruptive impact on the future. So these represent alternate world histories. A world where God prevents more evil will have a different history than a world in which God permits more evil. 

iv) That, however, doesn't mean a world with less evil is a world with more good. Some evils are necessary evils insofar as some evils provide the necessary conditions for certain kinds of goods. 

Spinning in the dark

I'm going to comment on this exposition of the evidential problem of evil:

https://www.iep.utm.edu/evil-evi/

The entry was written by a philosopher who specializes in the problem of evil (Nick Trakakis).

The evidential problem of evil is the problem of determining whether and, if so, to what extent the existence of evil (or certain instances, kinds, quantities, or distributions of evil) constitutes evidence against the existence of God, that is to say, a being perfect in power, knowledge and goodness. Evidential arguments from evil attempt to show that, once we put aside any evidence there might be in support of the existence of God, it becomes unlikely, if not highly unlikely, that the world was created and is governed by an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good being. Such arguments are not to be confused with logical arguments from evil, which have the more ambitious aim of showing that, in a world in which there is evil, it is logically impossible—and not just unlikely—that God exists.

i) If that's a requirement for the evidential problem of evil, then I reject how the issue is framed. How is it reasonable set aside evidence in support of God's existence when considering whether the world was made and governed by an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God? For instance, what if the evidence for God's existence includes evidence of divine benevolence? Surely evidence of divine benevolence is directly germane to whether the existence of evil counts as evidence against the existence of God? At the very least, those have to be weighed against each other. 

ii) Moreover, it's unreasonable to consider the likelihood or not of God's existence in insolation to all the available evidence. Perhaps, though, Trakakis has in mind a kind of cumulative case against God's existence, where you assess each type of evidence individually, then combine them. Even so, that has to be counterbalanced by considering the positive evidence, if any, for God's existence. 

iii) Likewise, if there's evidence for God's omniscience and omnipotence, then that's directly germane to whether God might have a good reason not to prevent evil, even if the reason is inscrutable to humans. 

iv) I agree that more than sheer consistently is demanded, since an ad hoc explanation might be logically consistent. Rather, it should be consistent with the nature of God and his modus operandi. Not out of character. Not detached from theology. 

A theodicy may be thought of as a story told by the theist explaining why God permits evil. Such a story, however, must be plausible or reasonable in the sense that it conforms to all of the following:

a. commonsensical views about the world (for example, that there exist other people, that there exists a mind-independent world, that much evil exists);

b. widely accepted scientific and historical views (for example, evolutionary theory), and

c. intuitively plausible moral principles (for example, generally, punishment should not be significantly disproportional to the offence committed).

Judged by these criteria, the story of the Fall (understood in a literalist fashion) could not be offered as a theodicy. For given the doubtful historicity of Adam and Eve, and given the problem of harmonizing the Fall with evolutionary theory, such an account of the origin of evil cannot reasonably held to be plausible. 

i) From a secular standpoint, it's not a given that evil exists. If that reflects the viewpoint of the atheist, then he needs to justify moral realism on secular grounds. In principle, it's possible for him to address the problem of evil for the sake of argument, by attempting to show that Christian theism is self-contradictory in the regard. But those two approaches need to be disambiguated. 

ii) Ironically, metaphysical idealism is becoming an academic fad.

iii) A Christian may well disagree with the moral intuitions of an atheist. 

iv) Unless we're dealing with the evolutionary argument from animal suffering, or the Fall, I don't see that the status of evolution is generally relevant to the evidential argument from evil. 

v) The Fall, whether human or angelic, can't be an ultimate explanation for evil since that only pushes the question back a step to the origin of their moral defection. 

A similar point could be made about stories that attempt to explain evil as the work of Satan and his cohorts.

i) But demonic and diabolical evil are fixtures of Christian supernaturalism. So that can't be eliminated from a Christian theodicy. Although that falls short of an ultimate explanation for the origin of evil, yet given the existence of fallen angels, many particular evils are the result of demoniacal and diabolical agency. 

ii) Admittedly, Christian theism isn't the explicit target of the argument as formulated by Trakakis, but for a Christian, the evidential argument from evil must engage Christian theism. In that context, you can't just strip away angelic evil, as if that's piece of tape to peel off. That's part of the deep structure of Christian theology. 

iii) And besides the witness of biblical revelation, there's a lot of empirical evidence for demonic agency. It's just anti-intellectual prejudice and ignorance that brushes that aside. 

That may not plausible or reasonable to the atheist, but it begs the question to make his plausibility structure the benchmark. Here we may rapidly reach an impasse because both sides don't share the same plausibility structure. That doesn't mean no further progress is possible–inasmuch as each side can attempt to defend its own plausibility structure and critique the plausibility structure of the opposing side, but that will require a digression from the immediate bone of contention since both sides will have to take step back several paces and hash out some preliminary issues. And that, too, may lead to stalemate–so that they never return to the immediate bone of contention. An atheist is not entitled to simulate his plausibility structure as the privileged frame of reference. 

An important distinction is often made between a defence and a theodicy. A theodicy is intended to be a plausible or reasonable explanation as to why God permits evil. A defence, by contrast, is only intended as a possible explanation as to why God permits evil. A theodicy, moreover, is offered as a solution to the evidential problem of evil, whereas a defence is offered as a solution to the logical problem of evil. 

The basic problem I have with this approach is that once we bracket God , I no longer have a framework for what's plausible or reasonable. I'm at sea. I have no compass points. I'm intellectually lost. 

So I find the argument from evil tp be quite artificial and self-defeating. It's atheism, not Christianity, that must resort to ad hoc postulates. Without God I have nothing to work with. I can't get the argument started. Nothing is a given. There are no criteria. Nothing to lend the argument from evil any traction or foothold. You can't evaluate anything if you have no norms. The argument from evil has what little plausibility it enjoys by taking for granted many key assumptions that fade away once God removed from consideration. We left spinning in the dark. 

Welty on evil

"The Problem of Evil" (Greg Welty)

Plague and providence

1. Thus far I haven't commented on the pandemic from a theodical standpoint. One reason is that I've written so much about theodicy in general that anything I have to say about the pandemic is apt to be repetitious to some degree, and repetition is boring.

2. In addition, there are atheists who act like every time there's some new natural disaster, such as the Christmas Day tsunami (2004) or the Japanese tsunami (2011), this is supposed to shake the faith of Christians. That every natural disaster ought to send us back to the drawing board. But in Christian theology, moral and natural evils are to be expected. And we have a number of preexisting theodical strategies to deal with these events. Natural and moral evil aren't something new, and theodicies aren't generally new, although they undergo refinement.

3. There's a sense in which I agree with unbelievers that evil can call into question God's existence. By that I mean, many people labor under a faulty concept of God, and evil may expose their faulty concept of God. In that regard, evil can have a winnowing effect on theology.

4. It's common to ask why God allows evil. When a Calvinist uses that terminology, some freewill theists object that it's deceptive for a Calvinist to characterize evil in terms of divine permission. According to Calvinism, God predestined evil.

That's true, but when I say God allows evil, I simply mean that God did not prevent a particular evil. You allow something you were in a position to prevent. That's a coherent concept. To say "allow"/"didn't prevent" are stylistic variations on the same idea.

5. Moral and natural evils are not unplanned events. They happen for a purpose. I'd add that even according to influential models of freewill theism like Molinism and simple foreknowledge, these aren't unplanned events.

In open theism, God doesn't have a master plan for the world, but a set of contingency plans.

6. A basic function of theodicy is not to explain why God allowed a particular evil, but to show how that's consistent with God's existence. There may be different reasons God had for allowing the evil in question. Even if we lack the information to narrow it down to one "correct" explanation, we can offer a number of potential reasons showing that the evil is consistent with God's existence.

7. Some Christians deny that natural evils or natural disasters preexisted the Fall. I disagree. I think they serve a necessary purpose to maintain the balance of nature.

I think one effect of the fall is to expose humans to natural dangers that always existed, from the time of creation. In an unfallen world, humans would be divinely shielded from certain natural hazards, but due to the fall, God withdrew his providential protection.

8. This doesn't mean God directly created a pathogen like the coronavirus. God created a world in which natural organisms adapt and mutate.

9. Although Christian theologians tend to focus on the punitive aspect of death, as divine punishment for original or personal sin, that's one-sided. Human mortality has other spiritual purposes. Nothing exposes human vulnerability and helplessness like death. So death provides an opportunity for humans to renounce their feigned autonomy and admit their total dependence on God's mercy and provision.

10. We like to be in control. An unnerving aspect of the coronavirus is the element of uncertainty in terms of scale, lethality, and distribution. It's so unpredictable. Who will it strike next? For unbelievers and nominal believers who live in denial regarding the inevitability of death, who shove the prospect of death into the back of their minds or only think of death in abstract terms, the coronavirus forces them to confront their mortality and lack of control.

11. It exposes the ineptitude of many public officials. It chastens blind faith in the cult of expertise. It's a test of moral character, revealing what people are really like when altruism is costly. Does ruthless self-interest dominate?

12. It raises questions about the importance and relevance, or unimportance and irrelevance, of public worship. By the same token, it raises questions about how we prioritize risk assessment. Is a supermarket an essential business but a church service is inessential?

13. Several standard theodicies are germane to the pandemic. For instance:

i) The soul-building theodicy, where suffering is an opportunity to tap into compassion and cultivate sacrificial virtues.

ii) Second-order goods. There are certain kinds of goods whose existence is contingent on the existence of evil. If you eliminate the evil, you eliminate the resultant or compensatory good. So there are tradeoffs. Some evils a necessary evils, in the sense of conditional necessity. They don't have to exist, but they're a necessary source of certain otherwise unobtainable goods.

In that respect, there are tradeoffs. It's easy to imagine ways the world might be a better place, yet that mental exercise involves freezing the goods in place while changing some variables to eliminate the evils. Yet in a cause/effect world, that's artificially compartmentalized.

iii) Events in a cause/effect world have a domino effect. Like time-travel stories, changing a variable in the past changes the future. And the change is more far-reaching the farther it extends into the future. When we think about improving the world, we artificially isolate or insulate causes and effects. But it's not possible to strike an optimal balance where a single world history or timeline contains all the distinctive goods, devoid of evil.

iv) Apropos (ii-iii), housebound couples will result in a baby boom a few months from now. Although many people will die as a result of the pandemic, many new lives will come into being as a result of the pandemic. Individuals who'd never experience the gift of life had it not been for the pandemic. The dying already had an opportunity to live. The tragic death of some creates a situation where others will now have the same opportunity.

v) Human life is brief. What ultimately matters is the world to come (i.e. the New Eden). But you can't participate in the world to come unless you participate in the lifecycle. You must be brought into existence, and you must die, before you can step into eternity. Of course, many humans fail to take advantage of that. They live for what this world has to offer, so the world lets them down. They lose what they had while missing out on what they might have had by squandering their opportunities.

Bishop Wright's response to the pandemic

No doubt the usual silly suspects will tell us why God is doing this to us. A punishment? A warning? A sign? These are knee-jerk would-be Christian reactions in a culture which, generations back, embraced rationalism: everything must have an explanation. But supposing it doesn’t? 

The point of lament, woven thus into the fabric of the biblical tradition, is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow, loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments. Some Christians like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the picture we get in the Bible.

God was grieved to his heart, Genesis declares, over the violent wickedness of his human creatures. He was devastated when his own bride, the people of Israel, turned away from him. And when God came back to his people in person—the story of Jesus is meaningless unless that’s what it’s about—he wept at the tomb of his friend. St. Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit “groaning” within us, as we ourselves groan within the pain of the whole creation. The ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to recognize the One God in the tears of Jesus and the anguish of the Spirit.

It is no part of the Christian vocation, then, to be able to explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain—and to lament instead.

https://time.com/5808495/coronavirus-christianity/

1. N. T. Wright has always been a mixed bag. As I recall, he developed a conservative reputation by debating Jesus Seminar types, and he was pretty good on his side of the debate. He also wrote a classic defense of the Resurrection. But in addition he churns out hasty, forgettable potboilers. He spreads himself way too thin. He's overrated and overexposed. He's become an oracle who's expected to have something wise to say about everything.

Is God malevolent?

Atheist philosopher Stephen Law has been hawking this argument for years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiufsmxiUiU

i) There's empirical evidence for angels, demons, and ghosts. 

ii) Is good the price a malevolent deity pays for evil? Why would a malevolent deity give human beings freewill? To make them morally responsible? But why would he care if humans are morally responsible? He just likes to see people suffer for his sadistic pleasure. It isn't necessary that they deserve to suffer. In fact, being evil, he'd take greater pleasure if they suffer for no good reason. If they suffer unfairly. 

iii) Law's basic argument, from what I can tell, is that the mix of good and evil in our world is equally consistent with a benevolent God or malevolent God. 

One problem with that argument is that moral good and evil are asymmetrical. It's arguable that moral good cannot exist unless it's grounded in a benevolent God. And it's arguable that moral evil can coexist with a benevolent God. 

But if that's the case, then moral good cannot exist if God is evil. By the same token, God can't be morally evil if moral evil can't exist without moral good as the standard of comparison. 

So Law's argument can't include moral good and evil. At best, he means good and evil in terms of pain and pleasure, happiness, misery, and cruelty.

v) Suppose we try to improve on his argument. Just as certain goods are contingent on certain evils, certain evils are contingent on certain goods. For instance, much suffering is the result of losing something you care about. It maybe something you used to have, or it may be a lost opportunity. Suppose we rehabilitate his argument by saying the malevolent deity gives humans experiences of happiness to make them miserable by when he deprives them of what made them happy? Does the argument go through on those terms?

A problem with that argument is that some human lives are much happier than others. In their case, the pleasant experiences greatly outweigh the unpleasant experiences. 

vi) Suppose we grant for discussion purposes that the mix of good and evil is equally consistent with the existence of a benevolent God or a malevolent God. It doesn't follow that if we can't rule out one, that rules out both candidates. Law's conclusion is fallacious. 

vii) There's also the question of why a malevolent God would take any interest in human beings. We're so inferior to him, why would he find it enjoyable to torment us? By contrast, it's not mysterious why a benevolent God would take an interest in human beings.