Relation to the world· Philosophy of religion
Evil has its reasons
Axis: The problem of evil — Is evil compatible with a good and all-powerful God?
A 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.
Movements 1
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
Philosophers 6
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
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
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)
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
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)
- 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 - 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 - 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