Questions Does God exist?The problem of evil

Does God exist?AtheismThe problem of evil

The problem of evil

David Hume 1711 · 1776Neither causation nor induction can be proved: custom guides us.

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What it claims

There is no God who is both all-powerful and perfectly good.

Why

An all-powerful God could prevent evil, a perfectly good God would want to; yet suffering is real and often extreme.

In short

"The problem of evil" is an argument by David Hume (Dialogues, X) on the question "Does God exist?" (answer: atheism). Its claim: There is no God who is both all-powerful and perfectly good. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P2). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Dialogues, X

Valid with an implicit premise

The oldest and most discussed atheist argument. Hume puts it in the mouth of Philo, the sceptic of his Dialogues, and attributes it to Epicurus.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P2, the computer finds a world where God is all-powerful and good, evil exists, and nothing forces him to prevent it: for instance if he has a good reason to allow it.

Valid with P2, which is rarely stated but always assumed. Almost all believers' answers (theodicies) attack exactly P2: God could have good reasons to permit evil (freedom, a greater good).

Analogy. A lifeguard can save a drowning child and wants to: we expect him to dive in. If he does not, either he cannot, or he will not, or he has a reason we do not know. The whole discussion turns on that third possibility.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Cleanthes (in the dialogue) attacks premise 3

The picture is exaggerated: health is more common than sickness, pleasure than pain. Evil is real but in the minority.

Hume replies

Hume Philo's reply (Hume's character)

Even if pain is less frequent than pleasure, it is infinitely more violent and durable. And a single evil is enough to raise the question.

Arthur Schopenhauer defender of the argument · 1844

Counting moments of pleasure and pain does not give an even balance. For Schopenhauer, only pain and want are felt positively: well-being is merely the absence of these evils. Pleasure, even when frequent, does not weigh as much as pain (The World as Will and Representation, II, chapter 46).

Where the debate stands (our summary)Cleanthes and Philo agree that suffering exists: they differ on how to weigh it, by the number of happy moments or by the intensity and duration of pains. Comparing pleasures and pains on a single scale remains disputed, and no widely accepted answer settles it.

Leibniz (theodicy) 1710 · attacks premise 2

God chose the best of all possible worlds: a world with evils can be better overall than any world without evil. Evil is permitted for the sake of a greater good.

Hume replies

Hume Philo's reply (Hume's character)

Philo does not name Leibniz, but he answers this defence: he grants that evil might be reconciled with a good and powerful God. What he refuses is to go from the world as we see it to such a God. The argument then becomes: evil may not be a proof against God, but the world is surely no proof for him.

Voltaire (poem on Lisbon) defender of the argument · 1756

After the Lisbon earthquake (1755), Voltaire rejects Leibniz's "all is well", which he calls an illusion. He asks what crime the children crushed on their mothers' breasts had committed, and whether the world would have been "the worse" without swallowing Lisbon. Yet he does not conclude that God does not exist: the poem says he does not rise against Providence and ends on the hope of a better day.

See the rest of the debate (9)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Letter to Voltaire) 1756

Rousseau answers Voltaire that it would be better to say "the whole is good", or "all is good for the whole", than "all is good". He also reproaches him with piling up the picture of our miseries instead of consoling. And he points out that most of our physical ills are our own work: nature had not gathered in Lisbon twenty thousand houses of six or seven storeys.

William Rowe (the fawn) defender of the argument · 1979

Rowe does not deny that a greater good might exist. He argues that for certain specific sufferings, such as that of a fawn trapped in a forest fire and lying in agony for several days, we can see no good that would justify them. He finds it reasonable to conclude that there probably is none, hence that God probably does not exist. He does not claim to prove it.

Stephen Wykstra (skeptical theism) 1984

We are entitled to say "it appears there is no reason" only if, were there one, we would be likely to see it (a rule Wykstra calls CORNEA). But if God exists, his wisdom exceeds ours at least as much as a parent's exceeds that of a one-month-old baby. Our not seeing his reasons is therefore what we should expect if he exists: it is no evidence against him.

William Rowe (reply to Wykstra) 1984

That God's mind grasps goods beyond our ken does not mean that the goods for which he permits our sufferings are beyond our ken. When these goods occur, they involve those who suffered: we should be able to know them. To suppose they will come only in another life, one must add particular religious beliefs to bare theism: contrary to what Wykstra says, this is not already contained in theism.

Michael Bergmann (skeptical theism without CORNEA) 2001

Bergmann defends skeptical theism without relying on the CORNEA rule. He argues that we know too little about the whole range of goods, evils and the links between them to move from "we see no good that justifies this suffering" to "there probably is none".

Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy (the moral cost) 2003

Almeida and Oppy object that this skepticism has a price: if we cannot judge that a suffering is without reason, it is no longer clear how to judge what we ought to prevent. Skeptical theism seems to spread to our moral judgements.

Michael Bergmann and Michael Rea 2005

Bergmann and Rea reply to Almeida and Oppy that skeptical theism does not lead to moral skepticism: doubting that we know God's reasons does not prevent us from knowing that we ought to help those who suffer.

William Rowe (on the parent comparison) 2006

The parent comparison turns against the believer. A sick child does not understand why it is left at the hospital, but loving parents comfort it and assure it of their love the whole time. No loving parents use their child's hospital stay to go on holiday. Yet many humans have gone through horrendous suffering with no sign of God's love.

Arthur Schopenhauer defender of the argument · 1844

Schopenhauer targets the calculation of the "greater good". That thousands of people lived in happiness does not cancel the anguish and torture of a single one, any more than my present happiness cancels my past suffering. For him the mere existence of evil settles the matter, since no good, simultaneous or later, can annul or balance it (The World as Will and Representation, II, chapter 46).

Where the debate stands (our summary)The core disagreement is whether a good we cannot see might justify specific sufferings. Rowe finds it reasonable to conclude it does not; skeptical theists answer that we are not in a position to judge; critics object that this would undermine our moral judgements too, which they deny. For Voltaire and Schopenhauer no overall good compensates an individual evil, which Leibnizians dispute: an open point, with no widely accepted answer.

Augustine (free will) 395 · attacks premise 2

Moral evil comes from the misuse of the freedom God gave humans. Real freedom, capable of evil, is worth more than mechanical obedience.

a defender replies

We have not yet found a direct reply by Hume in the texts.

J. L. Mackie defender of the argument · 1955

If a man can freely choose the good once, there is no logical impossibility in his freely choosing it every time. So God could create free beings who always do right. If he did not, he is not both all-powerful and wholly good.

Alvin Plantinga (transworld depravity) 1974

A world where everyone always freely chooses the good is possible in itself, but it does not depend on God alone: it also depends on what those beings would freely choose. Now it is possible that every person God could create would do wrong at least once ("transworld depravity"). In that case God could not create free beings without evil, and that remains compatible with his having created a very good world.

See the rest of the debate (6)

H. J. McCloskey and Antony Flew (natural evil) defender of the argument · 1960

Even if it succeeds, the free will defence explains only moral evil. Earthquakes, diseases, animal suffering come from no human choice: physical evil remains as hard as before.

Alvin Plantinga (Satan and natural evil) 1965

Traditional doctrine ascribes part of evil to Satan, a free non-human spirit created long before man. It is logically possible that all natural evil comes from the free choices of such spirits. Antony Flew saw this as a desperate expedient, lacking independent evidence. Plantinga answers that, to rebut the charge of contradiction, this hypothesis need not be probable or even true: it is enough that it does not contradict God's existence.

Robert M. Adams 1985

Fallen angels do not settle the moral question. If their sins caused cancer, an all-powerful God could have let them sin without sustaining the causal links by which their sins result in cancer.

Robert M. Adams ("counterfactuals of freedom") 1977

Transworld depravity assumes truths of the kind "if God created Peter in this situation, Peter would freely choose evil", true before Peter exists (what Molina called "middle knowledge"). Adams argues that such sentences cannot be true: if the choice is truly free, nothing settles in advance what it would be.

Alvin Plantinga (already in 1974) 1974

Plantinga had foreseen this case, according to Adams. Even without such truths, God, in creating free beings, could not be sure of the outcome: he was taking a risk. It remains possible that he tried to create a world without sin and that his creatures chose evil all the same.

J. L. Mackie (why does God not intervene?) defender of the argument · 1955

Even granting freedom, why would God not leave men free to will rightly, while intervening when he sees them beginning to will wrongly? If he can and does not, then a bad free choice would be worth more than no choice, which believers refuse to say elsewhere about sin.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Many philosophers, atheists such as Rowe included, judge that Plantinga's free will defence removes the logical contradiction between God and evil, if freedom is taken in the strong sense (not determined by causes). Adams, a critic of Plantinga, grants it himself (1985). The debate has moved to natural evil, to the value of such freedom against the worst crimes, and to probability rather than contradiction. The core disagreement remains the nature of freedom.

What today's voices say

Defend it

Stephen FryHis bone-cancer-in-children answer is the problem of evil in his own words.

Ricky GervaisSays 'mysterious ways' is not an explanation: it is what someone says who does not know the answer.