Tag Archives: Omnibenevolence

Confronting the Problem of Evil

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The Greek philosopher Epicurus may have been the first to articulate it, but he was most definitely not the last.  For the past 2400 years, believers have been haunted by his trilemma: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.  Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”  Epicurus is putting forth the “Problem of Evil” which remains the most repeated argument against the existence of God.  Dressed in various forms, the conditions are always the same—the incompatibility of omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and the existence of evil.  Because of its longstanding quality, believers of every age, our own included, must be prepared to answer this challenge.

Navigating the gauntlet begins by defining our terms, the first of which is evil.  In our time there is a tendency to see evil as some positive force in the universe locked in a cosmic battle with good.  Viewed as something, it seems to have a power all its own.  But evil is no more of a thing than blindness is a thing.  It is not a something but a nothing.  Just as blindness is a lack of sight, evil is a lack of a good that should otherwise be there.  Both exist, but neither has any being of its own.  Instead it exists in the form of a deprivation.  In fact, blindness in the philosophical sense of the term is an evil; a lack of sight in a being that should otherwise see.  Evil only exists as a parasite to some good and has no existence of its own.

Whence cometh Evil?

This philosophical hair splitting is necessary because it addresses Epicurus’ question “whence cometh evil?” and demonstrates how God can be all good and there still be evil.  God, as Creator, gives being to all things.  He is, in an absolute sense, the cause of being.  God cannot create non-being, not because He isn’t omnipotent, but because “create non-being” is nonsense.  To create is to give being and to create something with no being is a contradiction.  God’s omnipotence does not suddenly make the intrinsically impossible, possible.  God could no more create evil than He can make a square with three sides, omnipotent or not.

If we are to take the world as it is, that is a material world with a multitude of creatures, we could see why a certain amount of evil might be logically necessary.  We call these evils physical evils or evils suffered.  These types of evils are not privations per se, even though they can be causes of privations.  They are simply incidences where two goods collide.  When the good of the lion’s preservation meets the good of the lamb’s, the lamb tends to get the short end of the stick.  Physical evils are always connected to a good directly.  The lion’s self-preservation is a good thing, even if the lamb’s demise is not. For God to remove such evils is not simply to make our world better, but to make an entirely different kind of world.  Whether that world would be better or not can be debated, but the presence of physical evil is no argument against God’s omnipotence or omnibenevolence because one could readily imagine that same God guiding all interactions such that they work out for the good of the whole.

Moral evils, that is, evils done by rational creatures, are by far the more difficult to explain.  There are no goods in conflict, only a failure to do what is good.  The moral agent deliberately introduces disorder into what should otherwise be good.  Exonerating God from responsibility for these evils is a bit more challenging. 

God is not just the Creator, but the sustainer of creation.  That means nothing happens without His somehow being a cause.  He is not only the cause of a man, but a cause of His free will activity.  Related to the topic at hand, God is not the cause of the man’s choice, only his power of choosing.  The man cannot choose without God, but what he chooses is up to him. 

Recall that God, through His omnipotence, can do anything that does not imply a logical contradiction.  God could have made a world in which a man might choose freely but always choose good because there is no contradiction.  But He did not.  Instead the world we inhabit allows for free choice that can include evil.  This is allowed because God’s will in creating is to create a world such that His goodness is most fully made manifest through the goods of His creatures.  One can readily see that there are a multitude of goods that would never be made known were it not for the ability to choose what is evil: courage, forgiveness, mercy, justice to name just a few.  If through the designs of divine Providence God wanted to make His creatures participate in these real goods, there must be some evil present; not just physical evil, but moral as well.  Eliminate all evil, and you drag goods with it.

Why the Argument Fails?

This is why the argument ultimately fails.  One may readily admit that there are a multitude of evils present in the world, but not without admitting that there are many cases in which goods that would not otherwise be created are made present.  So, the good trailing on evil is proof not of God’s non-existence or His weakness, but of His goodness and power.  As Aquinas puts it, “‘Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.’ This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good” (ST I, q.2, a.2, ad.2). 

Once we define evil for what it is metaphysically, that is a “no-thing”, we realize that it is only God Who is All-Good and All-Powerful that can create good ex nihilio.  The fact that good does come from evil shows that to be the work of God Himself.  So, the Problem of Evil, rather than leading us away from God, actually leads towards Him.   

God and the Gray Lady

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Just in time for the Feast of the Incarnation, the New York Times published an opinion piece written by Professor of Philosophy Peter Atterton that purposes to refute the idea of “deity most Westerners accept” because it is not coherent.  His approach is the same approach is the same tri-lemma that was the topic of a recent post: pitting God’s omnipotence, omnibenevolence and omniscience against each other.  It is worthwhile to examine his argument, well at least part of it, not because it is particularly compelling, but because it was featured in one of the country’s largest fish wraps.  In fact, his argument overall falls rather flat as we will see.

A Stone too Large, Really?

First he experiments with the “stone too large to lift argument” to attack God’s omnipotence.  This seems rather easy to resolve once we define what we mean when we say that God’s omnipotence allows Him to do any thing  and not anything.  Provided that the thing is an actual thing, that is something that could be done, then God can do it.  The rock too heavy to lift is a sophist word game because it is simply a logical contradiction akin to saying that God can also square a circle or make right left (which everyone knows only Lightning McQueen can do).  This is a classic attack (the author even cites Aquinas who addressed it) but it really stems from a misunderstanding of God’s nature.  Those who posit such a thing normally think of the voluntarist God of the Calvinists and Muslims rather than the God Who is Reason and has revealed Himself in the Logos or Word that became flesh.

Professor Atterton may have been trying to set up an attack on God’s omnibenevolence by even mentioning the ersatz dilemma of the stone that can’t be lifted.  He seems to think that a world in which evil does not exist, at least from the Christian point of view, is among those logical impossibilities.  That is certainly not something that Christians believe.  God could have made (and even possibly did) such a world, but for reasons we may not understand (because we are not God) He chose not to.  The point however is that He could have done otherwise, but had a reason for doing it the way He did.   

As far as this part of the tri-lemma, I will refer the reader to the aforementioned post that deals with God and the Problem of Evil.  The part of the argument that bears the most attention is the “conundrum” of omniscience.  In short, his argument is that “if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know. But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection… if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect…Therefore, God doesn’t know what it is like to be human. In that case He doesn’t know what we know. But if God doesn’t know what we know, God is not all knowing, and the concept of God is contradictory. God cannot be both omniscient and morally perfect. Hence, God could not exist.”

God’s Omniscience

One must first admit that this has a diabolical ring to it, “for you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (c.f. Gn 3:5) and so we should immediately intuit that it contains a falsehood.  The diabolical delusion is unmasked once we challenge the Professor’s contention that  “if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know.”

The problem is not that it is wrong, but that he is equivocating on the term “knows”.  The way we know things is vastly different  from the way God knows things.  In truth, God knows only one thing—Himself—and this knowledge of Himself embraces everything actual and possible.  Our knowledge comes piecemeal and only after discursion.  His knowledge embraces all things at once without any reasoning out all the possible details of each individual thing.  His knowledge is eternal and unchanging and thus He must come to know all things in light of their cause, Himself.  If this were not so, then there would be an imperfection in God, namely that His knowledge would depend on created things.

God’s knowledge is not determined and measured by things like ours, but is the cause of things.  God’s knowledge in relation to things then is a creative knowledge that gives existence to things.  Ours is an experiential or connatural knowledge.  This point seems to be missed when the Professor speaks of God having to know “lust and envy.”  This train of thought is important because it keeps the Professor’s moral argument from leaving the station.

Evil is foreign to God, but, according to St. Thomas, God can still know evil “through the good of which it is a privation, as darkness is known by light.”  His point is that evil, like darkness, can only be known in contrast to the thing that is lacking.  God is not the cause of the lack, but man is, even if God has permitted it.  In other words, God can know about evil, but only because it is affront to the good of which He has creative knowledge.  But St. Thomas goes even further when he says that “He would not know good things perfectly unless He also knew evil things” (ST I, q.14 a.10).   His point is that to speak of “full” knowledge is to imply degree.  In short, to have full knowledge means one must also be able to know when it is lacking. 

In recent years the New York Times has come under intense scrutiny for its lack of journalistic integrity and a decidedly partisan slant with little regard for truth.  They seem to now be setting their sights on Truth Himself.  Of course, if they are going to succeed in placing God in the Dock, they are going to have to find better arguments than Professor Atterton’s elementary attempt.  Maybe some news isn’t really fit to print.