Problems with the Problem of Evil

By Keith Tidman

  

Do we really reside in what German polymath Gottlieb Wilhelm Leibniz referred to as ‘the best of all possible worlds’, picked by God from among an infinite variety of world orders at God’s disposal, based on the greatest number of supposed perfections? (A claim that the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire satirised in his novella Candide.)

 

How do we safely arrive at Leibniz’s sweeping assessment of ‘best’ here, given the world’s harrowing circumstances, from widespread violence to epidemics to famine, of which we’re reminded every day? After all, the Augustinian faith-based explanation for the presence of evil has been punishment for Adam and Eve’s original sin and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. From this emerged Leibniz’s term ‘theodicy’, created from two Greek words for the expression ‘justifying God’ (Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, 1710).

No, there’s a problem … the ‘problem of evil’. If God is all powerful (omnipotent), all knowing (omniscient), all places (omnipresent), all good and loving (omnibenevolent), and all wise, then why is there evil in the very world that God is said to have designed and created? Not having averted or fixed the problem, instead permitting unrestrained reins and abiding by noninterventionism. There is not just one form of evil, but at least two: moral evil (volitionally wrongful human conduct) and natural evil (ranging from illnesses and other human suffering, to natural law causing ruinous and lethal calamities).

 

There are competitor explanations for evil, of course, like that developed by the first-century Greek bishop Saint Irenaeus, whose rationalisation was that evil presented the population with incentives and opportunities to learn, develop, and evolve toward ever-greater perfection. The shortcoming with this Irenaean description, however, is that it fails to account for the ubiquity and diversity of natural disasters, like tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, and many other manifestations of natural law taking its toll around the globe.

 

Yet, it has been argued that even harmful natural hazards like avalanches and lightning, not just moral indiscretions, are part of the plan for people’s moral, epistemic growth, spurring virtues like courage, charity, gratitude, patience, and compassion. It seems that both the Augustinian and Irenaean models of the universe adhere to the anthropic principle that cosmic constants are imperatively fine grained enough (balanced on a sharp edge) to allow for human life to exist at this location, at this point in time.

 

Meanwhile, although some people might conceivably respond to natural hazards and pressing moral hardships by honing their awareness, which some claim, other people are overcome by the devastating effects of the hazards. These outcomes point to another in the battery of explanations for evil, in the reassuring form of a spiritual life after death. Some people assert that such rewards may be expected to tower over mundane earthly challenges and suffering, and that the suffering that moral and natural evil evokes conditions people for the enlightenment of an afterlife. 

 

At this stage, the worldly reasons for natural hazards and moral torment (purportedly the intentions behind a god’s strategy) become apparent. Meanwhile, others argue that the searing realities of, say, the Holocaust or any other genocidal atrocities or savagery or warring in this world are not even remotely mitigated, let alone vindicated, by the anticipated jubilation of life after death, no matter the form that the latter might take.

 

Still another contending explanation is that what we label evil in terms of human conduct is not a separate ‘thing’ that happens to be negative, but rather is the absence of a particular good, such as the absence of hope, integrity, forbearance, friendship, altruism, prudence, principle, and generosity, among other virtues. In short, evil isn’t the opposite of good, but is the nonattendance of good. Not so simple to resolve in this model, however, is the following: Would not a god, as original cause, have had to create the conditions for that absence of good to come to be?

 

Others have asserted that God’s design and the presence of evil are in fact compatible, not a contradiction or intrinsic failing, and not preparation either for development in the here and now or for post-death enlightenment. American philosopher Alvin Plantinga has supported this denial of a contradiction between the existence of an all-capable and all-benevolent (almighty) god and the existence of evil:

 

‘There are people who display a sort of creative moral heroism in the face of suffering and adversity — a heroism that inspires others and creates a good situation out of a bad one. In a situation like this the evil, of course, remains evil; but the total state of affairs — someone’s bearing pain magnificently, for example — may be good. If it is, then the good present must outweigh the evil; otherwise, the total situation would not be good’ (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1977).

 

Or then, as British philosopher John Hick imagines, perhaps evil exists only as a corruption of goodness. Here is Hick’s version of the common premises stated and conclusion drawn: ‘If God is omnipotent, God can prevent evil. If God is perfectly good, God must want to prevent all evil. Evil exists. Thus, God is either not omnipotent or perfectly good, or both’. It does appear that many arguments cycle back to those similarly couched observations about incidents of seeming discrepancy.

 

Yet others have taken an opposite view, seeing incompatibilities between a world designed by a god figure and the commonness of evil. Here, the word ‘design’ conveys similarities between the evidence of complex (intelligent) design behind the cosmos’s existence and complex (intelligent) design behind many things made by humans, from particle accelerators, quantum computers, and space-based telescopes, to cuneiform clay tablets and the carved code of Hammurabi law.

Unknowability matters, however, to this aspect of design and evil. For the presence, even prevalence, of evil does not necessarily contradict the logical or metaphysical possibility of a transcendental being as designer of our world. That being said, some people postulate that the very existence, as well as the categorical abstractness of qualities and intentions, of any such overarching designer are likely to remain incurably unknowable, beyond confirmation or falsifiability.

 

Although the argument by design has circulated for millennia, it was popularised by the English theologian William Paley early in the nineteenth century. Before him, the Scottish philosopher David Hume shaped his criticism of the design argument by paraphrasing Epicurus: ‘Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor will? Then why call him God?’ (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779).

 

Another in the catalog of explanations of moral evil is associated with itself a provocative claim, which is that we have free will. That is, we are presented with the possibility, not inevitability, of moral evil. Left to their own unconstrained devices, people are empowered either to freely reject or freely choose immoral decisions or actions. From among a large constellation, like venality, malice, and injustice. As such, free will is essential to human agency and by extension to moral evil (for obvious reasons, leaving natural evil out). Plantinga is among those who promote this free-will defense of the existence of moral evil. 

 

Leibniz was wrong about ours being ‘the best of all possible worlds’. Better worlds are indeed imaginable, where plausibly evil in its sundry guises pales in comparison. The gauntlet as to what those better worlds resemble, among myriad possibilities, idles provocatively on the ground. For us to dare to pick up, perhaps. However, reconciling evil, in the presence of theistic paradoxes like professed omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, remains problematic. As Candide asked, ‘If this is the best ... what are the others?’

 

The Limits of the ‘Unknowable’

In this image, the indeterminacy principle is here about the initial state of a particle. The colour (white, blue, green) indicates the phase, that is the position and direction of motion, of the particle. The position is initially determined with high precision, but the momentum is not. 

By Keith Tidman

 

We’re used to talking about the known and unknown. But rarely do we talk about the unknowable, which is a very different thing. The unknowable can make us uncomfortable, yet, the shadow of unknowability stretches across all disciplines, from the natural sciences to history and philosophy, as people encounter limits of their individual fields in the course of research. For this reason, unknowability invites a closer look.

 

Over the many years there has been a noteworthy shift. What I mean is this: Human intellectual endeavour has been steadily turning academic disciplines from the islands they had increasingly become over the centuries back into continents of shared interests, where specialized knowledge flows over one another’s boundaries in recognition of the interconnectedness of ideas and understanding of reality.

 

The result is fewer margins and gaps separating the assorted sciences and humanities. Interdependence has been regaining respectability. What we know benefits from these commonalities and this collaboration, allowing knowledge to profit: to expand and evolve across disciplines’ dimensions. And yet, despite this growing matrix of knowledge, unknowables still persist.

 

Consider some examples.

 

Forecasts of future outcomes characteristically fall into the unknowable, with outcomes often different from predictions. Such forecasts range widely, from the weather to political contests, economic conditions, vagaries of language, technology inventions, stock prices, occurrence of accidents, human behaviour, moment of death, demographics, wars and revolutions, roulette wheels, human development, and artificial intelligence, among many others. The longer the reach of a forecast, often the more unknowable the outcome. The ‘now’ and the short term come with improved certainty, but still not absolute. Reasons for many predictions’ dubiousness may include the following.

 

First, the initial conditions may be too many and indeterminate to acquire a coherent, comprehensive picture of starting points. 

Second, the untold, opaquely diverging and converging paths along which initial conditions travel may overwhelm: too many to trace. 

Third, how forces jostle those pathways in both subtle and large ways are impossible to model and take account of with precision and confidence. 

Fourth, chaos and complexity — along with volatility, temperamentality, and imperceptibly tiny fluctuations — may make deep understanding impossible to attain.

 

Ethics is another domain where unknowability persists. The subjectivity of societies’ norms, values, standards, and belief systems — derived from a society’s history, culture, language, traditions, lore, and religions, where change provides a backdraft to ‘moral truths’ — leaves objective ethics outside the realm of what is knowable. Contingencies and indefiniteness can interfere with moral decision-making. Accordingly, no matter how rational and informed individuals might be, there will remain unsettled moral disagreements.

On the level of ‘being’, why there is something rather than nothing is similarly unknowable. In principle,  ‘nothingness’ is just as possible as ‘something’, but for some unknown reason apart from the unlikelihood of spontaneous manifestation, ‘something’ demonstrably prevailed over its absence. Conspicuously, ‘nothingness’ would preclude the initial conditions required for ‘something’ to emerge from it. However, we and the universe of course exist; in its fine-tuned balance, the model of being is not just thinkable, it discernibly works. Yet, the reason why ‘something’ won out over ‘nothingness’ is not just unknown, it’s unknowable.

 

Anthropology arguably offers a narrower instance of unknowability, concerning our understanding of early hominids. The inevitable skimpiness of evidence and of fine-grained confirmatory records — compounded by uncertain interpretations stemming from the paucity of physical remains, and of their unvalidated connections and meaning in pre-historical context — suggests that the big picture of our more-distant predecessors will remain incomplete. A case of epistemic limits.

Another important instance of unknowability comes out of physics. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, at the foundation of quantum mechanics, famously tells us that the more precisely we know about a subatomic particle’s position, the less we know about its momentum, and vice versa. There is a fundamental limit, therefore, to what one can know about a quantum system.

 

To be clear, though, seemingly intractable intellectual problems may not ultimately be insoluble, that is, they need not join the ranks of the unknowable. There’s an important distinction. Let me briefly suggest three examples.

 

The first is ‘dark energy’ and ‘dark matter’, which together compose 95% of the universe. Remarkably, the tiny 5% left over constitutes the entire visible contents of the universe! Science is attempting to learn what dark energy and dark matter are, despite their prevalence compared with observable matter. The direct effects of dark energy and dark matter, such as on the universe’s known accelerating expansion, offer a glimpse. Someday, investigators will understand them; they are not unknowable.

 

Second is Fermat’s ‘last theorem’, the one that he teed up in the seventeenth century as a note in the margin of his copy of an ancient Greek text. He explained, to the dismay of generations of mathematicians, that the page’s margin was ‘too small to contain’ the proof. Fermat did suggest, however, that the proof is short and elegant. Four centuries passed before a twentieth-century British mathematician solved the theorem. The proof, shown to be long, turned out not to be unknowable as some had speculated, just terribly difficult.

 

A last instance that I’ll offer involves our understanding of consciousness. For millennia, we’ve been spellbound by the attributes that define our experience as persons, holding that ‘consciousness’ is the vital glue of mind and identity. Yet, a decisive explanation of consciousness, despite earnest attempts, has continued to elude us through the ages. Inventive hypotheses have abounded, though remained unsettled. Maybe that’s not surprising, in light of the human brain’s physiological and functional complexity.

 

But as the investigative tools that neuroscientists and philosophers of the mind yield in the course of collaboration become more powerful in dissecting the layers of the brain and mind, consciousness will probably yield its secrets. Such as why and how, through the physical processes of the brain, we have very personalised experiences. It’s likely that one day we will get a sounder handle on what makes us, us. Difficult, yes; unknowable, no.

 

Even as we might take some satisfaction in what we know and anticipate knowing, we are at the same time humbled by two epistemic factors. First is that much of what we presume to know will turn out wrong or at most partial right, subject to revised models of reality. But the second humbling factor is a paradox: that the full extent of what is unknowable is itself unknowable.