Relation to the world· Philosophy of religiondifficulty
The problem of evil
Is evil compatible with a good and all-powerful God?
The suffering of the innocent is the harshest test for anyone who believes in a good and all-powerful God. Before it, four paths part ways: justifying evil, giving up divine omnipotence, refusing all justification, or concluding that no such God exists. To take a position is to say whether faith can stand before misfortune, and at what cost.
Evil has its reasons
7A good and all-powerful God can permit evil: for the good of the whole, for the freedom of his creatures, to let souls mature, or for reasons beyond our understanding. Faith holds: even when opaque, evil has a meaning.
Explore this position →Leibnizexplicit
Evil is not a positive reality that God would have produced, but a privation, a limitation inherent in every finite creature (metaphysical evil), from which follow suffering (physical evil) and fault (moral evil). God does not will evil, he only permits it when it is the condition of a greater good in the economy of the whole. This is the theodicy, the word Leibniz coins to justify God against the argument from evil: he turns the objection around by showing that a world with no evil at all would be less perfect than ours, and so unworthy of a wise creator. The position is resolutely justificatory rather than tragic or rebellious.
Theodicy
Thomas Aquinasexplicit
How can a good God allow evil to exist? Thomas takes from the thesis that evil is not a thing nor a substance created by God, but a privation, a lack of being or of good that ought to be there, as blindness is the absence of sight. God therefore does not create evil; he permits physical evil for the sake of a greater good in the order of the whole, and moral evil out of respect for free will, without which there would be neither virtue nor merit. The profile thus blends theodicy (evil ordered to the good of the whole) and the free-will defence inherited from Augustine.
Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 48-49 · Summa contra Gentiles, III, 71
Hegelexplicit
The philosophy of history is a theodicy: it justifies reason at work in the world, not by denying evil but by passing through it. History is a slaughter-bench on which the happiness of peoples and the virtue of individuals are sacrificed, and yet nothing great is done there without passion: the negative is the motor by which spirit fulfills itself. It is a theodicy without external providence, immanent to the process.
Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction (Lectures) · Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface (the power of the negative)
Stoicismexplicit
The world is governed by a providential divine reason: what appears as evil has its place in the rational order of the whole, or serves as a trial for virtue. Nothing happens that is not in accord with universal nature.
Seneca, On Providence; Epictetus, Discourses; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Plotinusexplicit
If all things proceed from a perfectly good principle, whence comes evil? Plotinus refuses to make it a positive principle, a power rivaling the Good: evil has no being of its own, it is , a lack of good, a defect of being at the lowest degree of the procession. He identifies it with matter as the ultimate limit where the light of the One fades out, not as a force but as an absence. Moral evil is then merely a soul turning away from the higher toward the lower. This dissolution of evil into non-being, which saves the goodness of the whole without denying the reality of our ordeal, is a form of theodicy; it will bequeath to the idea of evil as .
Enneads, I, 8 (On What Evils Are and Whence They Come) · Enneads, III, 2-3 (On Providence)
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Marcus Aureliusexplicit
What seems an evil has its place in the providential order or serves as a trial of virtue: nothing befalls a man that he is not, by nature, fitted to bear. A Stoic , rounded out by charging moral evil to ignorance rather than malice.
Meditations, II, 11 · Meditations, IV, 8 · Meditations, V, 18
Senecaexplicit
In On Providence, Seneca asks why misfortunes strike good men if the world is governed by providence: they are not evils but trials the divine reason sends to exercise and strengthen virtue. Apparent evil serves the order of the whole.
On Providence
A limited God
0God's goodness is saved by limiting his power: a God who withdraws or limits himself so that the world may be, and who suffers with it more than he governs it. Evil is not willed by God: it is what he cannot prevent.
Explore this position →No figure stands here, in this slice.
Unjustifiable evil
1To justify evil is itself a moral failing: no final harmony redeems the suffering of a single innocent child. Before evil there is no acceptable explanation, but revolt or silence.
Explore this position →Camusexplicit
In The Plague, before a child's agony, Rieux refuses to love a creation in which children are tortured. No harmony, no salvation justifies this suffering: a flat refusal of all theodicy, the revolt against an order that would demand it.
The Plague, IV; The Rebel
Evil refutes God
5The existence of massive, gratuitous evil is incompatible with a God at once good, all-powerful and all-knowing: either he cannot prevent it, or he will not. Evil is the strongest argument against God.
Explore this position →Humeexplicit
In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Philo revives Epicurus's old questions: faced with the world's mass of suffering, divine goodness and omnipotence cannot be inferred from nature. Evil is the reef on which natural theology runs aground.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, X-XI
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Epicurusinferable
The so-called Epicurean dilemma, transmitted by Lactantius, concludes that a God at once good and all-powerful is incompatible with the existence of evil: either he wishes to prevent it and cannot, or he can and will not. For Epicurus, the blessed gods do not meddle with the world.
Lactantius, On the Anger of God, 13 (attributed dilemma); Letter to Menoeceus
Epicureanisminferable
The gods, perfectly blessed, do not meddle with the world: there is no providence. The dilemma transmitted under Epicurus's name concludes that the world's evil is incompatible with a god at once good and all-powerful.
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus; Lactantius, On the Anger of God, 13
Lucretiusinferable
Lucretius does not reason about a good and all-powerful God, but turns the argument from design on its head: if the world had been made for us by gods, it would not be so gravely flawed. Yet the greater part of the globe is devoured by mountains, forests and seas, the climate afflicts men, the soil resists their toil, wild beasts and diseases strike them, and the newborn is cast naked and wailing on the shore of life. So many defects prove that nature is the work of no providence: this is less a theodicy than a of the absence of divine design.
On the Nature of Things, V, 195-234 (a world so flawed cannot be the work of the gods)
Schopenhauerexplicit
A reversal of : this world is not the best but the worst of all possible worlds, for a world even slightly worse could no longer subsist. Evil is not a deficiency of being to be excused but the positive substance of existence, a decisive proof against any good creator; every theodicy is thereby an indecency.
The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 46, 'On the Vanity and Suffering of Life'
See the problem map in the Atlas →
- Descriptive QuestionEpicurus's riddle
Can God prevent evil but not want to, or want to but not be able? One of the three, his power, his goodness, or the reality of evil, must give way: which one?
evil and the attributes of God
Sub-problems to deepen this axis's discussion
- DescriptiveEvil with no culprit
Free will excuses the evil humans do; but the earthquake, disease, the pain of animals are no one's fault: what then remains to absolve the creator?
a natural disaster - DescriptiveOne evil too many
Even without a strict contradiction, does the mass of apparently pointless suffering, a fawn dying alone in a forest fire, not make a good God who watches over all highly improbable?
the mass of suffering - PrescriptiveMoralTo justify evil?
Seeking a reason for the innocent's misfortune, is that not already a fault, an insult to their pain, and before some evils is the only fitting stance not revolt or silence?
the act of justifying evil - DescriptiveGod's hidden reasons
What if the ends that justify evil exceed all human understanding? To Job, who demands an accounting, God answers not with reasons but with the sheer vastness of his creation.
the one who calls God to account - DescriptiveWhat if God could not do everything?
One can save God's goodness by taking away his omnipotence: a God who withdraws and limits himself, or before whom evil is a rival principle he does not create.
the nature of God
Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- DescriptiveThe ordeal that raises us
Perhaps evil is permitted so that souls may mature, the world being "a vale of soul-making" rather than a paradise given ready-made.
a soul that matures - DescriptiveGod's silence
Alongside evil, another absence accuses: that of a God who, if he existed and loved us, would not let himself be sought in vain.
God and those who seek him - DescriptiveEvil against God
Would a God both all-powerful and good let the innocent suffer, or is the evil of the world compatible with his existence?
evil in the worldExistence of God - PrescriptiveExistential SituationThe ordeal that deepens
Does an ordeal lived through ripen us, deepen us, "what does not kill me makes me stronger"? Or is that only a consolation, so much pain doing nothing but crush, embitter, destroy?
an ordeal lived throughThe meaning of suffering - PrescriptiveMoralUseless suffering
There is a pain, that of the innocent, of the child, that nothing redeems and no meaning recovers: to claim to justify it, is that not already to insult it?
the innocent's painThe meaning of suffering - DescriptiveA meaning found, or lent?
Does suffering carry a meaning, set within an order that gives it a place, or do we lend it one after the fact, to make it bearable?
suffering's place in an orderThe meaning of suffering