The Problem of Evil, Part Two

Last week, I promised to explain my claim that God is not omnibenevolent, which, if true, would undermine the logical force of the problem of evil. Since “benevolence” means “good will,” I take it that omnibenevolent means an unlimited, complete willing of the good. Further, I proposed that by the word “good,” we typically mean “ethical.” That is to say, never harming someone if the person harmed will not benefit from the harm.

The Scriptures reveal a God that is not at all omnibenevolent. For example, in John 9, Jesus and some disciplines find a man who was born blind. The disciples are curious about why this man was born this way; they assumed that either the man sinned, or his parents did, and his punishment was blindness. Jesus, however, affirmed that “it was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (v. 3). This is quite a statement; it means that the man was stricken with blindness specifically so Jesus could restore his sight on that day and be praised for it.

To appreciate the extent to which this is outside ordinary moral boundaries, suppose one of us assumed the place of God in that example. Say I snuck into a hospital, and injected a newborn with a special poison that would render the child blind but have no other effect. Then, when the child was older, I would find him, inject him with the antidote, which I alone had, and proclaim my greatness for healing him. The catch, of course, is that it is a disease which I had originally afflicted. You would certainly have to call me unethical. But this is exactly what John claims happened.

I claimed that at the heart of most ethical traditions is the notion that you must not harm another, particularly when the other person will not ultimately benefit from that harm. Now, whether the former blind man ultimately benefited or not is irrelevant; Jesus is clear that he was not stricken with blindness for the man’s own benefit. In a real sense, he was used. God overrode the man’s autonomy and used him as an object lesson.

I do not claim to have solved the age-old problem, “Why do bad things happen to good/innocent people?” Since I am a religious believer, I am committed to the idea that there always is always some reason for suffering. But short of a proclamation from Jesus himself (as happened in John 9), we can’t look at a situation and say, “Oh, this tragedy happened for such and such a specific reason.” And anyone who believes they can is an arrogant ass. What I am saying is that the problem of evil, while still a problem on a certain level (I’ll explain next week), is not a logical problem. It would only be a logical problem if God were omnibenevolent; Scripture everywhere testifies that this is not the case.

Next week, I want to close by talking about what I think this implies, and what it doesn’t.

The Problem of Evil, Part One

I want to spend a couple of blogs on the problem of evil, which refreshes itself each time a large scale tragedy happens, as is the case with Haiti. The problem stems from the alleged incompatibility of four propositions (although many combine the first two): 1) God is omniscient, 2) God is omnipotent, 3) God is omnibenevolent, and 4) evil exists. The worry is that evil should not exist if an all-powerful, all-knowing being exists who wills good, always and completely. But, in fact, evil does exist. Therefore one of the first three premises must be false.

I want to focus on the third premise, that God is omnibenevolent. What, exactly, is omnibenevolence? The term itself does not seem to have much of a history; in fact, it is not unreasonable to believe that it was coined specifically to serve as a term in the problem of evil. Benevolence, of course, means good will, so omnibenevolence can mean something like unlimited good will.

But as soon as we break down the word, a new problem arises: what is goodness? That is, what is this good that is being willed always and completely? Most of us think of a good person as an ethical person; that is, one adhering to the basic standards of right conduct that are features of all moral traditions. This gets really complicated, so I will just state (but not argue for) my belief that what we mean by an ethical life is one that involves never causing harm or pain to someone when the person being harmed does not ultimately benefit from the harm.

If I am permitted that analysis of omnibenevolence, I will argue next week for this claim: God is not omnibenevolent. I am not disallowing us to say that God is good, but the goodness of God would not be equivalent to the omnibenevolence I just described. This is already too much for many – both religious believers and non-believers – to stomach. But stay tuned for next week.