Apologetics 6 - The Problem of Evil

We’ve spent the better part of the last three weeks talking through what is surely the most significant challenge to Christian belief and undoubtedly one of the questions that casts a shadow over all of human existence. The problem of evil has occupied the brightest philosophical and theological minds for most of recorded history so there is not much point in trying to come up with an original angle. But what follows is a brief summary of the approach that seems best to me.

At the outset it is important to note that while evil is undoubtedly a theological/philosophical problem it is first and foremost an existential problem. All of us are far more interested in coping with actual experiences of suffering than we are in whether or not the problem is ’soluble’ intellectually or spiritually. Evil is above all something that is suffered and only secondarily something that can be explained. Jurgen Moltmann puts it well:

[Evil] is not really a question at all, in the sense of something we can ask or not ask, like other questions. It is the open wound of life in this world. It is the real task of faith and theology to make it possible for us to survive, to go on living with this open wound (The Trinity and the Kingdom, 47,49)

Nevertheless, we have to make some kind of attempt at an answer (and that is all that can be offered, in my opinion), especially those of us who hold to belief in the providence of a good God. My own approach to the problem is based on two key convictions that have shaped many historical Christian responses to evil.

The first is that the world was originally created in freedom and that human freedom is part of what it means to bear the image of God. This is not freedom for its own sake but freedom as the prerequisite for genuine love. Christians believe that God is love. God does not happen to be loving (as compared to some other standard), God defines love and is the source of all human love as a result. This freedom to love defines God and this freedom to love has defined what he has created out of the overflow of that love.

The second conviction is that evil has resulted from a corruption of that freedom to love. While the origins of evil will always remain a speculative and mysterious subject, a Christian view holds that it originates in a corrupted will, a will that has misused the freedom to love. This is the view depicted in the Genesis 3 account of the fall of humanity, a fall away from original goodness. It is from within this ’space’ created for free creatures that the possibility of evil must have emerged.

So evil, in the Christian understanding, must always be described as corrupted goodness. C.S. Lewis famously remarked in Mere Christianity that there is no such thing as being bad for the sake of ‘badness’ but there is the distinct possibility of doing good for its own sake. What he calls badness always emerges from the right goals pursued through the wrong means.

Having said all of this, Christians are still open to the question, “Was the price of human freedom worth paying? Should God have not seen the misery that would come with the gift of freedom and decided against it?” This is an argument that has a certain force. Who, after all, can look honestly at some of the horrors of history and not wonder whether such a terrible gift was worth the price.

At the end of the day, however, it is a profoundly moral argument. And an argument against God that depends on a moral foundation like this seems doomed to fail. How, after all, can you argue against God’s existence based on what kind of a world God should have made when the word ’should’ itself implies a moral standard that must be accounted for.

As a Christian, I confess to an ongoing sense of bewilderment and grief at the extent of innocent suffering and senseless violence that plagues our world. I am forced to admit, however, that the choice to make this kind of a world was not mine and that my vision is very small and very limited. This compels me to think that the possibility of goodness and love, however partially realized, is itself a ‘problem‘ that demands an explanation because, like our revolt against evil, our attachment to goodness, love and beauty points to a memory of a world and of people better than what we see around us.