The problem of evil in relation to God’s goodness is too vast a topic to treat fully in this short article. Therefore, I shall offer just a few relevant observations on this widely known objection to God’s goodness and existence.

In classical metaphysics, proving God’s goodness starts with defining what is meant by the good. The good is that which all things desire.¹ But a thing is desirable because it is perfect, which implies that it is as actual as its nature permits. Since a thing has being as it has actuality, the good is equivalent to being.² Since God is infinite being, he must also be infinite goodness.

Moreover, since the proofs for God’s existence argue from finite effects to God as the First Cause of all creatures, he must be the cause of the goodness found in all things. Since a cause cannot give what it does not have, God must possess goodness. But the divine simplicity entails that God is identical to any quality he possesses. Hence, God is pure goodness. Since moral goodness is a genuine form of goodness, God must possess and, in fact, be moral goodness itself.

Once it is demonstrated that God is morally good, the solution to the problem of evil requires only that one understand how evil can exist in spite of God’s goodness. In other words, since the problem of evil does not arise until we already know that God exists and is infinitely good, it is therefore a given that the problem of evil can be rationally resolved.

On the other hand, for atheists or agnostics who approach the problem of evil without knowing that God exists, it is the existence and goodness of God that are in jeopardy, since they are certain that evil exists and appears a vexing problem. So, they are in serious doubt that an all-good God can possibly exist.

Clearly, it makes enormous difference as to how one approaches the problem of evil. For the theist, it is merely a problem to be solved. For the atheist, it is a massive obstacle to belief in a good God. It all depends where one starts his enquiry.

Since classical metaphysics does demonstrate the existence of an all-good God – and since I have published defenses of such arguments, mine is the former task. It is merely a matter of seeing why the world’s evil is compatible with the all-good God already known to exist. From this perspective, atheists and agnostics simply approach the problem from the wrong end.

Since the good is equivalent to being and good and evil are diametrically opposed, it would appear that evil must be simply non-being. But, evil is not simply non-being. Rather, evil is the lack of being or perfection that should belong to a given nature.³

Physical evil is the privation of a natural physical good, as when a horse has a broken or missing leg. For many, evil is viewed as pain and suffering. These, too, represent a lack of well-being in sensation or feeling. Moral evil is the lack of rectitude in the acts of a free agent—a sin.

Why Does God Permit, Or Even Cause, Evil?

It is often argued that, if God is all good, all powerful, and all knowing, he has no excuse even for permitting evil to exist. It appears that either he is not all good, or he is powerless to prevent evil, or he does not know what is going on. None of this is compatible with the classical conception of God.

Nonetheless, it is morally licit to permit evil—when that permission allows a greater good to result. For instance, I might allow a youngster to smoke a cigar, knowing it will make him sick, but for the greater good of teaching him not to smoke at all. Now, this is not the immoral act of causing an evil means so as to attain a good end, since I am not making the youngster smoke the cigar. That is his act, not mine. So, too, since God gave us the perfection of a free will, he can allow us to misuse that will and sin, while knowing and willing that a greater good may be forthcoming.

Since God is infinitely good and powerful, it necessarily follows that any evil that God permits in this world must have a greater good that results from it. Being infinitely powerful and knowing all future events, God’s goodness could not permit that evil should occur unless greater good is foreseen to ensue from it.⁴ The fact that we cannot conceive of such a greater good in many cases does not demonstrate that God is evil, but rather that our finite minds cannot understand the inscrutable nature of God’s providential plans.⁵

Still, the question arises as to whether God, not only permits evil, but directly causes it in some instances. Clearly, when God exercises his divine prerogative over creatures, as in the matters of life and death and punishment, he acts in ways that entail physical evil for his creatures. How then does God remain free of moral evil when he directly causes such physical evils? Many argue that when God directly takes human life or administers other punishments, he is acting immorally—even manifesting brutality.

But God is the Creator and Sustainer of all life—life, which is given to us as a gratuitous gift. What is freely given may be freely withdrawn at any time—with no resulting injustice. Moreover, as the divine lawgiver and judge of natural law, God is perfectly right to punish directly its violators—so as to restore the balance of justice. No mere creature has that prerogative.

Now, no one would say that it is illicit to remove surgically a cancerous organ, even though the necessary first step is to cause the physical evil of making an incision, which can be painful and damages skin—for it is clear that the total act involved is that of removing a threat to human life. So, too, when God imposes licit sanctions on evil men that entail pain and suffering, the total act is that of imposing the sanction or punishment, while the good end or purpose of that act is the restoration of the balance of justice. Sanctions themselves are a social good needed for the upholding of laws. The pain and suffering (or even death) are simply an essential part of imposing the sanction, which cannot be separated from the act itself. The somewhat incidental nature of the form of the sanction is evinced by the fact that differing crimes receive differing penalties, whereas what is constant and common is the concept of the sanction itself.

In any case, it must be emphasized that God would never will physical evil (either directly or indirectly) for its own sake, that is, as an end in and of itself. He always wills it within the framework of the good of the whole of the created order. We must also remember that what is morally evil for man may not be morally evil for God, since he alone is the Creator of all things and the Legislator of natural law as well as the just Judge of those who violate its ordinances. For example, humans can never licitly take an innocent life, but God can do so—given his position as Creator and Sustainer of all finite living things.

It is self-evident that the infinitely-good God could never directly will moral evil for the sake of any end whatever—however good.

Because some, such as Luther, Ockham, and Descartes, embraced classical positivism with respect to God’s will, they thought he could make adultery licit—or even make two plus two equal five. Natural law never allows such absurdity, because God respects the nature of his own plan of creation. Thus, God could never make adultery or odium dei licit or, for that matter, make two plus two equal five.

This general explanation dealing with God both permitting and causing evil completely resolves the problem of evil in all its many forms, since whatever evil occurs in the world can only happen because God foresees and wills a greater good coming from it.

This solution follows necessarily from the facts that God’s existence can be demonstrated, as can his infinite goodness, power, and knowledge.

But what of the atheist’s or agnostic’s perspective, since he does not accept these metaphysical conclusions about God and his goodness? Coming from a given starting point of the existence of massive evil in the world, it would seem that the hypothesis of an all-good God is a priori excluded.

Quite to the contrary, it is the atheist’s or agnostic’s burden of proof to show that such evil is incompatible with an all-good God. For, if God does exist as classically depicted, then it follows that the problem of evil dissolves as explained above. For the atheist or agnostic to prevail, he must show that such a good God does not exist. He argues from the existence of evil to his conclusion that an all-good God cannot exist. But that is begging the question, for he is assuming what he purports to prove. As we have already shown above, if the God of classical tradition does exist, then evil is no problem.

Thus, the problem of evil is resolved no matter which end of the question is addressed first—be it the existence of evil or the existence of an all-good God.

This means that in principle this analysis and solution of the classical problem of evil could end at this point with no further discussion. Nonetheless, I shall consider some further aspects.

The Problem of Pain

If the problem of evil were a purely rational objection to God, it would seem that every kind of evil should be concerning. Yet, I have never heard anyone proclaim his atheism because of the carnage taking place against lettuce when a chef prepares a salad. Still, there is concern about the pain and suffering that animals endure. Human animals are well aware of the agony that pain can cause. Even so, concern is selective. I have never heard anyone proclaim his atheism because of the treatment of bugs in a Raid commercial.

Animals naturally experience sense pain and pleasure. The sense appetites move them to seek the pleasurable good. They also move them to avoid sensible evil: displeasure or pain. Animals seek goods that keep the individual alive and the species reproducing. Animals need to experience and to fear pain in order to survive against threats to their lives and those of their offspring.

One might ask why God didn’t make animals so that they did not experience pain. The answer is that, in this natural world, pain plays so central a role in animal life that the only way to avoid the problem of pain for animals would be to eliminate the animals themselves. But this is absurd, since (1) it would limit God’s power to create life and (2) it would solve a problem by eliminating the very beings it seeks to benefit. Better for animals is that they live with some pain at times, rather than not live at all.

On the other hand, pain in human experience must be considered in the broader context of man’s intellectual and spiritual life and its role in helping him attain his last end.

Evil as Part of God's Plan for Man

The problem of physical evil and pain in human existence must be subordinated to a proper understanding of his last end and the role of free will in his attaining that end.

When we look at this world, so filled with evil and suffering, the question naturally arises, “How could a good God make such a world?” But this presumes that God is totally responsible for the world as it now exists. Perhaps, God made a world without evil, but he also created free beings who made evil choices that might have corrupted all creation. If evil’s existence before man’s coming be objected, one must then consider the possibility that God created other free beings, such as angels, prior to human creation, and those free beings introduced evil into the world.

Other possibilities include: (1) that the reward of heaven might not be justly given without man earning it. (2) that an earned reward is more perfect than an unearned one. (3) that pain and suffering are key elements in progress toward moral perfection.

God could have made his own existence so evident that no free creature would dare misuse his freedom, and thereby, fail to attain his last end: heaven. Instead, God created an evolving natural world that permits the possibility of naturalistic explanations for everything. In a word, God made a world perfect for atheists and agnostics – since they can argue plausibly (but, not correctly!) that God is a useless myth.

We live on a wonderful planet that rotates so that human life is possible, but whose resulting weather patterns cause death-dealing hurricanes. Humans thrive, but physical evils abound. Could God provide countless miracles to save endangered lives? Could God have made the cosmos differently? Perhaps. But, would the world still be best suited to allow maximum human freedom in reaching our last end?

While right reason can lead the human intellect to affirm God’s existence, man’s spiritual destiny, and the force of natural law, no one is virtually coerced into this awareness as he would be if God’s existence were undeniably evident. Unfortunately, this scenario also entails the possibility of man readily misusing his free will so as not to attain his last end. Why would God permit such a self-destructive use of human freedom?

We might prefer “forced” salvation, but God respects his creature’s freedom so much that he allows us meaningfully to freely earn our eternal reward—even at the price of possible deserved failure. A free agent’s greatest qualitative perfection is most perfectly achieved when he freely chooses a life of moral virtue, even when aan evil alternative deceptively beckons—as in the modern secular world, which seems to offer paradise on earth with no difficult moral constraints, such as sexual self-control.

This world, in which evolutionary naturalism appears to be a real alternative to God’s presence and plan, turns out to be the perfect world for the building of the greatest of saints.⁶ This world necessarily entails the presence of great evils—the worst of them being of human making. Still, the fact remains that God has good reason to create this world exactly as he has, since its evils exist only because God foresees far greater good forthcoming as a result, that is, a heaven filled with creatures who freely merited their eternal reward.

Natural evil consists of any deformity within the natural world that leads to suffering such as: natural disasters, diseases, predatorial animals, and bodily weaknesses.  This article will argue that natural evil can be plausibly explained by appealing to the free will of angels.

According to traditional Judeo-Christian thought, God created angels and gave them the freedom to choose between good and evil.  Furthermore, it is possible that the angels’ freedom could extend to choosing what the laws of physics would be for the universe.¹

So some of the bad angels could have chosen laws of physics that the angels would know would result in natural evil. 

Of course, traditional monotheistic theology teaches that God is the only creator.  However, this explanation is not suggesting that there are other creators in the same sense that God is the creator (since only God gives things their existence and God is still the one creating the laws).  Rather it is suggesting that God did not entirely decide what the laws of physics would be, rather God put in place laws that were decided upon at least in part by the angels.²

One may wonder why God would allow this, but perhaps God wanted to allow the angels to help Him create the world (by helping decide the laws of physics) similar to how God wants to allow humans to co-create through procreation.  Co-creation allows creatures to participate in being like God.  In fact, it is part of God’s love to allow His creatures to participate in co-creating with Him, even though creatures may misuse that gift.

Of course, God could have limited the number of laws that the angels affected, but perhaps due to His love, God did not withhold His gift of co-creation from the angels, but rather He allowed the angels to help decide laws for throughout the universe.

Now the Judeo-Christian tradition does believe that God performs miracles that violate the laws of physics but if God worked miracles that violate the laws of physics all the time then God would simply be abrogating the laws that the angels decided upon.  Yet if the angels were truly given decision over what the laws would be and God were to choose to always override the harmful tendencies, then those tendencies would not have truly been put in place.  God would not have truly allowed the angels to co-create with Him. 

However God can sometimes choose to override the laws, but those are rare exceptions.  Perhaps God can only justify working a limited number of miracles in order to strengthen peoples’ faith and help them attain salvation³, but He cannot justify working miracles all the time, without overriding the tendencies that were put in place.⁴

One may still wonder why God did not just create everyone (humans and angels included) in heaven without the freedom to ever choose evil.  Yet, as has been argued by others, it would be unjust for God to force His creatures (human or angel) to conform their will to His without first giving them some chance at using their will as they choose.  So due to God’s justice, the first round of creation is where humans and (at least for some amount of time) angels can choose between good and evil.⁵

In conclusion, I think it is very reasonable to explain natural evil by appealing to some of the angels’ poorly choosing how to arrange the laws of physics.

So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. […] I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish." - Genesis 6:13, 17

“This flood is from God. It’s a judgment on America.” - Jim Bakker

Harvey. Irma. Katia. Jose. This is turning out to be an active hurricane season. And predictably it gives rise to those would-be prophets like Jim Bakker who boldly proclaim that these severe weather events should be interpreted as God’s judgment.

One may question such pronouncements both for their pastoral wisdom and accuracy. But they do force us to ask: how do we know Bakker is wrong?

After all, the Bible regularly describes God as rendering judgment with the hammer of severe weather events: storms, floods, and droughts are all described in punitive terms. And with no clear Biblical evidence that God has declared a moratorium on the practice, the question inevitably presents itself: does God punish people through the weather in our day? In short, while Jim Bakker may be wrong, could he possibly be right?

In this article I will briefly outline three considerations that support the conclusion that God would not punish people by way of severe weather events and thus that Bakker could not be right.

Definitions

First, let’s begin with definitions for three key terms: God, severe weather events, and punishment.

When I refer to “God” I mean a being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.

When I refer to “severe weather events” I am thinking not of limited events that have discrete effects like a single lightning bolt striking a particular individual. Instead, I am thinking of complex and expansive systems and processes that affect potentially hundreds, thousands, or even millions of human beings and other sentient creatures: for example, a devastating flood or a scorching heat wave.

Finally, when I refer to “punishment” I mean the act of imparting a penalty to an individual for an offense committed.

Thus, my core claim is that God would not inflict punishment by way of severe weather events. To support this claim I will identify three characteristics of severe weather events which make them unbefitting as modes of punishment.

Discriminate Punishment

To begin with, God would employ modes of punishment that discriminate the guilty from the innocent while restricting punishment to the former. Furthermore, God would employ modes of punishment that adjust the intensity of punishment relative to the culpability of the individuals being punished.

By contrast, severe weather events are indiscriminate in their effects. In other words, the very complex and random nature of these events is such that they do not distinguish the culpable from the innocent or the more culpable from the less culpable. Instead, they destroy homes, wreak carnage, and inflict injuries and grave emotional suffering seemingly at random.

Consider the recent flooding that resulted from Hurricane Harvey. That flooding did not discriminate the morally wicked. Nor was the experience of flooding proportional to the guilt of individuals who suffered.

For example, one of the first and most horrifying tragedies resulting from the flood occurred when four children and their great-grandparents drowned after their van plunged into a raging torrent while trying to escape the flood. At the same time, the children’s great uncle escaped the van. Should we conclude that the children (including a six year old) and their great-grandparents were justly drowned as punishment for some actions while the great uncle was properly spared?

To be sure, it is logically possible that God could employ a severe weather event which discriminates in the way we expect of proper punishment. For example, picture a severe thunderstorm which pelts only the guilty with hail and which hits those who are most guilty with the largest hail pellets.

While this is a logical possibility, it is not how (punitive) severe weather events are described in the Bible. Nor is it how severe weather events seem to occur today.

Unambiguous Punishment

Second, God would employ modes of punishment that unambiguously link the punishment to the offense. Doing so is important for deterrence, reformation, and punition.

Imagine, for example, that Billy steals a cookie from the cookie jar. His parents observe his deceptive action but they say nothing. Then, six months later, Billy’s parents suddenly inform him that he cannot watch any television or play video games for the day. Billy’s parents intend this prohibition as punishment for Billy’s deception six months earlier, but they never tell him their actions are punishment for his deception. 

This seems quite improper. It would be wrong for Billy’s parents to punish him without explaining what the punishment was for. Proper punishment requires the one being punished understand the link between his/her indiscretion and the resulting punishment.

Needless to say, natural disasters like hurricanes and floods lack the interpretive context necessary for proper punishment. Apart from the occasional alleged prophet who typically addresses a relatively small subset of the affected population, there is no clear link between a specific severe weather event and some particular indiscretion.

Proportional Punishment

Finally, punishment ought to be proportional to the offense and thus should not be cruel and unusual.

By contrast, if the suffering that is produced by natural disasters were classified as punishment, much of it would surely be categorized as cruel and unusual. Consider the recent flooding in Houston as a result of Hurricane Harvey as an example. From elderly people in a retirement home slumped over in their wheelchairs, waist-deep in fetid, sewage-laced water to terrified children being pulled to their watery grave in a raging current, the suffering produced by the floods in Texas is anything but a proportional response to an offense.

To drive the point home, we should reflect in particular on the horror of drowning. A decade ago at the height of the controversy over water-boarding as a means of interrogation, Christopher Hitchens submitted himself to be water-boarded — a process that simulates drowning — to see if it really qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment. The memorable title of the article he wrote of his experience was titled “Believe Me, It’s Torture.” It is worth quoting his account at some length:

“In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.”

Now, if you dare, try to imagine the experience of four small children and their great-grandparents being pulled under those swift-moving floodwaters. Is there any condition under which such deaths could be considered just punishment?

Conclusion

If I am correct that God would only exercise punishment that is discriminate, unambiguous, and proportional, and severe weather events have none of these properties, then it follows that God would not punish by way of severe weather events. From this it follows not only that Jim Bakker is probably wrong, but that he must be wrong.

While this is a reassuring conclusion, it does stand in tension with the straightforward Biblical accounts of God utilizing severe weather events for the purposes of punishment. So one must choose. Should one reject the three hallmarks of punishment listed in this article? Or should one find another way to read the Biblical texts in question?

If God is a God of miracles as theists claim, then why doesn’t he perform more to stop evil?

I must admit this is one question I’ve wrestled with in solidarity with my atheist friends.

My initial response is to recall the words of the prophet Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD” (Is. 55:8). While I acknowledge this as true, it leaves me dissatisfied.

As a Christian I believe, with St. Paul, that God “works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28), but I’m still often left wondering if there is any sense in God not performing more miracles to stop evil.

Though this is a mystery, I think we can make some sense out of it.

Is God Really Idle?

Let’s begin by distinguishing between moral evil and physical evil. Moral evil is evil caused by the abuse of human freedom, i.e., sin. Physical evil refers to any sort of suffering, decay, or corruption caused by nature.

Now, if speaking of evil in general  (moral and physical), one response is to wrongly assume God hasn’t done anything. It may well be that God has already prevented and is preventing horrendous crimes or natural catastrophes that could wipe out the entire human race. There is simply no way, given our spatial and temporal limitations, to know he hasn’t already done this. As Norris Clarke says, “Our ignorance cannot be a basis for blaming God for what he is already doing” (The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics, 288).

Let’s Not Obscure Things

If the question concerns physical evil in particular, one possible answer is that an overwhelming presence of miracles might obscure the supernatural character of the miraculous.

Consider a scenario where miracles are as common as rain. In such a scenario, it would be difficult (though not impossible) to distinguish between the supernatural and the natural, since we can only know the supernatural by contrast with the natural.

As philosopher Edward Feser points out in his lecture for the symposium “God, Reason, and Reality,” such difficulty lends itself to either of two extremes. One extreme is an occasionalist view of the world, a view that holds that God does everything directly without the cooperation of any natural causes. The other extreme is the view that there is no order to the universe at all, which has the potential to lead to an extreme David Hume–like skepticism, or even atheism, since causal regularity is needed to reason to God’s existence as manifested in St. Thomas Aquinas’s five ways.

So, one may conclude that God doesn’t will a more overwhelming presence of miracles to stop physical evil for the sake of not obscuring the distinction between the natural and supernatural orders of reality.

God Values Choice

What about moral evil? Why wouldn’t God perform more miracles to stop moral atrocities in the world?

One response is that it would violate his divine wisdom. Why would God make man with the capacity to choose good or evil in order to merit man’s eternal reward and then rob him of that capacity the second he chooses to exercise it? It doesn’t make sense.

This would be analogous to someone installing an air conditioning system in his or her home and then turning the system off every time it turns on to cool the house. (Having lived in Southern Louisiana the majority of my life, I can affirm this would be a stupid thing to do.) One might be inclined to ask, “Why did you install the air conditioning system in the first place?”

Similarly, it seems contrary to reason for God to create human beings with the capacity to choose for him or against him and then take away that capacity every time they choose to exercise it against him.

“But,” you may say, “perhaps God doesn’t have to take away man’s capacity to choose evil but could stop the evil effects of man’s bad choices—like changing a fired bullet into butter.”

The answer to this question is that God values the power of choice with which he created man. If God never allowed the choices of man to have bad effects, there would be no real value in man’s ability to do good or evil.  In this case the alternative of a bad choice would never be a real alternative. Why give humans the capacity to choose evil if there would never be any real effects from that choice? One might summarize the argument as follows:

If no real effects are possible from man’s choice, then there is no value in man’s power to choose good or evil.

But God values man’s power to choose good or evil.

Therefore, there must be real effects that arise from man’s power to choose good or evil.

It’s reasonable to conclude God doesn’t ordinarily perform miracles to stop bad effects caused by bad choices because he values the power of choice he desires man to have.

Conclusion

These answers by no means fully dispel the darkness of the mystery of why God doesn’t perform more miracles to stop evil. However, they do shed a bit of light that may help one navigate the darkness.

Editor's Note: There has been rising interest in the "problem of evil" in our comment boxes, and many atheist commenters requested a stronger engagement with the so-called "evidential" version of that argument. So on Wednesday we featured a defense of the "evidential" version from atheist Brian Green Adams. Today, Catholic author Trent Horn offers a critique.

Once my wife and I attended a baseball game where our home team was ahead by eight runs in the top of the ninth inning. We then decided to leave so we wouldn’t get stuck in the parking lot during the mass exodus after the game. When my wife’s mother called and asked if our team had won, we said it had but we didn’t know the final score, since we had left early. She then asked, “Well, how do you know for certain they won?”

She had a point. It was possible that the opposing team had come back to win the game, or that the players on the home team had suffered a freak dugout accident that had forced them to forfeit. It was possible, but extremely improbable. Since it was so improbable, we felt that it was a safe bet to say our team had won.¹

Atheists advance a similar argument from evil against the existence of God. This argument rests its case on the extreme unlikeliness that God exists in the face of tremendous evil or suffering.

The Evidential Argument from Evil

The philosopher William Rowe—who incidentally passed away this week—admits, “There is a fairly compelling argument for the view that the existence of evil is logically consistent with the existence of the theistic God.”² However, Rowe claims that while it is logically possible God has good reasons for permitting evil in the world, it seems incredibly unlikely there exist reasons that justify the huge amount of suffering we observe.

As a result, this suffering seems more compatible with an absent God than a purposefully inactive one. Rowe calls this the “evidential argument from evil,” because, rather than the mere presence of evil making it impossible that God exists (i.e. the logical argument from evil), the evidence of large amounts of evil makes it unlikely God exists. Rowe’s version of the problem of evil proceeds as follows:

• P1. If pointless evils exist, then God does not exist
• P2. Pointless evils do exist
• C. Therefore, God does not exist

According to Rowe, although God may tolerate some evils because they serve a greater good (like allowing humans to have free will), there are other evils that seem to serve no greater good. Some of these are called natural evils, and they include things not caused by humans, such as hurricanes and cancer, that kill millions of creatures every year. Rowe provides one specific example of such a natural evil:

"In some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering."

Rowe argues that evils like this serve no greater good and are therefore more compatible with the non-existence of God. Even though Rowe cannot prove these evils are pointless with the same certainty we can prove 1+1=2, he maintains that the evidence makes it highly probable the evils are pointless, and therefore it is extremely unlikely that God exists.

How Could a Theist Respond to this Argument?

There are several ways a theist could respond to this argument. One less-popular approach is to deny P1, or claim that there is no contradiction between the existence of God and the existence of evils that serve no greater good (i.e. pointless or gratuitous evils). The philosopher Peter van Inwagen defends this approach and argues that the concept of “gratuitous evil” is a fuzzy one. He writes:

“[God] cannot remove all the horrors from the world, for that would frustrate his plan for reuniting human beings with himself. And if he prevents only some horrors, how shall he decide which ones to prevent? Where shall he draw the line?—the line between threatened horrors that are prevented and threatened horrors that are allowed to occur? I suggest that wherever he draws the line, it will be an arbitrary line.”³

So, according to van Inwagen, just as a judge must draw a line and impose a sentence that is not necessary for carrying out a goal like “effective deterrence” (e.g. a prison sentence of 9 years and 364 days would be just as effective as a ten year prison sentence when it comes to deterring crime), God has to “draw a line” and allow some evils that are not strictly necessary for attaining a greater good.

Is There Pointless Evil?

In contrast to van Inwagen, most theistic philosophers prefer to challenge P2, or the claim that pointless evils exist. They ask, “How do we know there are some evils that don’t serve a good end?” After all, we can at least conceive of some good reasons God would have for allowing natural evil to exist.

Natural evils may, for example, serve to build our character and help us develop virtue (this is also called a “soul-making” theodicy). Think of the people who selflessly donate time, money, and even things like blood to help with disaster relief projects. We recognize that such acts of compassion are intrinsically good, and when humans freely choose to perform such acts, their choices gradually change their characters and can lead to the great good of their becoming virtuous people. In fact, many of the virtues that make the world a better place are practiced in response to some evil. Consider:

• Courage: Doing what is right in the face of danger.
• Compassion: Suffering alongside someone.
• Love: Putting another person’s needs ahead of your own.

Moreover, natural evils may be an acceptable consequence of living in a world governed by natural laws that lacks gratuitous miraculous interventions (e.g. the fire that warms us can also kill us unless God always intervenes miraculously when fire gets out of hand). Such a world may be an ideal place for embodied, moral agents to live, grow in virtue, and ultimately come to know their creator. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it this way:

“But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better.But with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world "in a state of journeying" towards its ultimate perfection. In God's plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.”⁴

Skeptical Theism and “No-see-ums”

Of course, an atheist could say that even if good reasons exist to justify natural evil in general, that is not the same as proving God has good reasons for allowing specific instances of natural or allegedly pointless evil (e.g. the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Holocaust, etc.). The problem with this approach, however, is that it concludes that there are no good reasons for these evils just because those reasons are not immediately apparent to us.

But consider the phenomena of “no-see-ums,” which is a term used by the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. It refers to insects you can’t see with the naked eye but have painful bites. The lesson to be learned from no-see-ums is that just because you can’t see something that does not mean the thing in question does not exist.⁵

Granted, when I stand in my backyard and don’t see any elephants I am justified in saying, “There are no elephants in my backyard.” But if I say that “I don’t see any fleas in my backyard,” I am not justified in saying, “There are no fleas in my backyard.” After all, there might be fleas in my backyard, but because they are so small, I am not able to see them. When it comes to the good reasons God has for allowing particular evils to exist we must ask, “Should those reasons be as obvious as elephants, or be as imperceptible as fleas?"

This approach to the evidential problem of evil is also called skeptical theism. It argues that since human beings are limited by time and space, we are no more in a good position to see how seemingly pointless evil can lead to greater goods in the future than we are in a good position to see fleas in a yard from the seats on a typical backyard porch. The sheer number of possibilities that can be generated by seemingly inconsequential events is simply “beyond our ken.”

For example, I sometimes ponder in astonishment the effect my wife’s great-grandmother had when she refused to let her daughter travel on the Titanic. It’s amazing to think of all the effects in the future (such as the birth of my son) that could have been drastically different were she to not have made such a simple choice. And this is just one example, but it is enough to show that an evil that exists in the present can have good effects hundreds or thousands of years from now that we are unable to fathom or predict.

To summarize, the evidential argument from evil relies on the atheist being able to prove that it is very unlikely there are “good reasons that justify serious evils." But human beings are not in a good epistemic (or knowledge-gaining) position to know those reasons do not exist. Therefore, the evidential argument from evil can’t prove that God probably does not exist.

The Reversal Approach

Finally, a theist could reverse Rowe’s argument in the following way:

• If pointless evils exist, then God does not exist.
• God does exist.
• Therefore, pointless evils do not exist.

Because the evidential argument from evil only tries to show that God’s existence is improbable (and not impossible), then it is only fair that the evidence for the existence of God be factored into the discussion. One important piece of evidence would be the very concepts of objective evils, objective goods, and the moral truth that one may only allow evil in order to obtain a greater good or prevent a greater evil (a premise that lies at the heart of the evidential argument from evil). A successful moral argument for the existence of God could show that the very moral framework that the evidential argument from evil relies on in order to make its case is only consistent within a theistic framework.

Conclusion

In closing, please consider this to be a general introduction to this topic from a theistic perspective. The space required for a short article does not permit me to address objections raised by atheistic philosophers like Paul Draper and Erik Wielenberg, which I hope to address in a future post. For now, if you want to learn more about this argument I recommend the following resources:

Overview of the Argument

• Nick Trakakis – “The Evidential Problem of Evil”
• Daniel Howard Snyder Ed. – The Evidential Argument from Evil

Defenses of the Evidential Problem of Evil

• William Rowe – “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism”
• Paul Draper – “God and Evil: A Philosophical Inquiry”
• Nick Trakakis – The God Beyond Belief: In Defence of William Rowe’s Evidential Argument from Evil

Critiques of the Evidential Problem of Evil

• William Lane Craig – “The Problem of Evil”
• Stephen J. Wykstra – “The Humean Obstacle To Evidential Arguments From Suffering: On Avoiding The Evils Of 'Appearance'”
• Michael Bergmann and Michael Rea – “In Defense of Skeptical Theism: A Reply to Almeida and Oppy”

Debates

• Craig vs. Grayling – “Belief in God Makes Sense in Light of Tsunamis”

This post was adapted from chapter seven of Trent Horn's book, Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity (Catholic Answers, 2013).
 
 
(Image credit: DavidLaw.com)

Editor's Note: There has been rising interest in the "problem of evil" in our comment boxes, and many atheist commenters requested a stronger engagement with the so-called "evidential" version of that argument. So today, atheist commenter Brian Green Adams offers a defense of that version. On Friday, Catholic writer Trent Horn will offer a critique.

Among the most popular reasons cited for atheism is the “Problem of Evil”. Like most positive atheist arguments it is not a complete argument for believing there are no gods. Rather, it is an argument against the essential attributes of some definition of a god. The problem of evil argues that there are inherent contradictions between the attributes of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and the evil and or suffering we seem to observe. Christians typically believe God possesses these attributes, so if he could not, then the God they believe in could not exist. Another kind of god might, but it could not be all-good AND all-powerful.

In its basic, strong and logical form it goes like this:

1) if a god exists, it would be all-good, and would want to stop any unnecessary suffering or evil he could

2) if a god exists he would be powerful enough to stop all unnecessary evil and suffering

3) there is unnecessary evil and suffering

5) therefore no such God exists

There are only a few counters to this argument, the strongest being the skeptical theist response that all the suffering and evil observed is necessary in some way. In others words, god has perfectly good reasons for not stopping evil and suffering from occurring.

For example, a theist might argue that much evil and suffering are due to our own immoral and sinful conduct- wars, crimes, torture, and so on. That allowing humans the freedom to act this way and for the consequences to really manifest, is a greater good than preventing the evil, since it allows for a sensible moral creation with humans having to make meaningful moral choices. I don’t agree with this, but let us grant it for the sake of argument.

This is only a partial response , since not all human suffering is due to human actions. Disease and natural disaster are responsible for a great part, if not the majority of human suffering. Our free will is irrelevant to whether these events occur. So what reason could a god have for not intervening to prevent this suffering? Why do the prayers of most of the parents with children dying of disease go unheeded? I cannot imagine any legitimate reason.

The best reason for theists to propose is “I don’t know, but that doesn’t mean the reasons aren’t there.” This may be true, but it seems out of keeping with the idea that we are born equipped, even partially equipped, to understand and apply objective morality. It would seem to mean that we are ignorant of many important moral facts about the cosmos, in fact we would be ignorant as to why or how some of the worst and seemingly gratuitous suffering is not stopped by one who can stop it, and does not want us to suffer. We should be able to speculate somehow as to why god might not intervene, if indeed there are perfectly good and intelligible reasons not to. This might even result in moral paralysis. Should we intervene to prevent or alleviate suffering? How could we know if doing so prevents this mysterious greater good?

After this analysis the argument survives quite well in its weaker form:

1) if god exists he would be powerful enough to eliminate all evil and suffering.

2) if god exists he would eliminate all evil and suffering unless there were moral reasons not to. Or, if god exists the would be no gratuitous suffering or evil.

3) much suffering and evil appears gratuitous. We can not imagine any reason why god would not intervene to eliminate it.

4) so much suffering and evil seems gratuitous because at least some of it is. If we are created by God with a divinely instituted moral sensibility, we should be able to come up with reasons why God would not intervene even if we can’t verify them.

5) therefore it is unlikely that god exists.

There are a few other, less persuasive counters, such as the speculation that all suffering, even disease and natural disasters, are caused by human sin. This seems to be an incredibly unfair and torturous cosmos, where young children are somehow responsible for their cancer, or worse, they suffer and die because of the wrongs of their ancestors.

Another weak response, in my view, is that the reason god doesn’t intervene is that he doesn’t want to deprive us of the opportunity to do good works of charity and healing in the face of disease and disaster. I don’t think the opportunity for good here outweighs the harm caused by natural disasters like the Haitian earthquake, or the Indonesian Tsunami. Even so, there are plenty of wars and human caused disasters for us to rally together and express these good intentions of relief and healing. We don’t need Altzheimer’s disease to have the opportunity to be good.
 
 
(Image credit: Skeptical OB)

The British writer, actor, and comedian Stephen Fry is featured in a YouTube video which has gone viral: over 5 million views as of this moment.
 

 
As you may know, Fry is, like his British counterparts Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, a fairly ferocious atheist, who has made a name for himself in recent years as a very public debunker of all things religious. In the video in question, he articulates precisely what he would say to God if, upon arriving at the pearly gates, he discovered that he was mistaken in his atheism. Fry says that he would ask God why he made a universe in which children get bone cancer, a universe in which human beings suffer horrifically and without justification. If such a monstrous, self-absorbed, and stupid God exists, Fry insists, he would decidedly not want to spend eternity with him. Now there is much more to Fry’s rant—it goes on for several minutes—but you get the drift.

To those who feel that Stephen Fry has delivered a devastating blow to religious belief, let me say simply this: this objection is nothing new to Christians. St. Paul, Origen, Augustine, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and many, many other Christian theologians up and down the centuries have dealt with it. In fact, one of the pithiest expressions of the problem was formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. The great Catholic philosopher argued that if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. Yet God is called infinitely good. Therefore, if God exists, there should be no evil. But there is evil. Thus it certainly seems to follow that God does not exist. Thomas thereby conveys all of the power of Fry’s observations without the histrionics. And of course, all of this subtle theological wrestling with the problem of suffering is grounded, finally, in the most devastating rant ever uttered against God, a rant found not in an essay of some disgruntled atheist philosopher but rather in the pages of the Bible. I’m talking about the book of Job.

According to the familiar story, Job is an innocent man, but he is nevertheless compelled to endure every type of suffering. In one fell swoop, he loses his wealth, his livelihood, his family, and his health. A group of friends console him and then attempt to offer theological explanations for his pain. But Job dismisses them all and, with all the fury of Stephen Fry, calls out God, summoning him, as it were, into the dock to explain himself. Out of the desert whirlwind God then speaks—and it is the longest speech by God in the Scriptures: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know….Who shut within doors the sea…when I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling bands? Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning and shown the dawn its place” (Job 38: 4, 8-10)? God goes on, taking Job on a lengthy tour of the mysteries, conundrums, and wonders of the universe, introducing him to ever wider contexts, situating his suffering within frameworks of meaning that he had never before considered. In light of God’s speech, I would first suggest to Stephen Fry that the true God is the providential Lord of all of space and all of time.

Secondly, I would observe that none of us can see more than a tiny swatch of that immense canvas on which God works. And therefore I would urge him to reconsider his confident assertion that the suffering of the world—even the most horrific and seemingly unjustified—is necessarily without meaning. Imagine that one page of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was torn away and allowed to drift on the wind. Imagine further that that page became, in the course of several months, further ripped and tattered so that only one paragraph of it remained legible. And finally imagine that someone who had never heard of Tolkien’s rich and multi-layered story came, by chance, upon that single paragraph. Would it not be the height of arrogance and presumption for that person to declare that those words made not a lick of sense? Would it not be akin to someone, utterly ignorant of higher mathematics, declaring that a complex algebraic formula, coherent in itself but opaque to him, is nothing but gibberish? Given our impossibly narrow point of view, how could any of us ever presume to pronounce on the “meaninglessness” of what happens in the world?

A third basic observation I would make to Mr. Fry is this: once we grant that God exists, we hold to the very real possibility of a life beyond this one. But this implies that no evil in this world, even death itself, is of final significance. Is it terrible that innocent children die of wasting diseases? Well of course. But is it finally and irreversibly terrible? Is it nothing but terrible? By no means! It might in fact be construed as an avenue to something unsurpassably good.

In the last analysis, the best rejoinder to Fry’s objection is a distinctively Christian one, for Christians refer to the day on which Jesus was unjustly condemned, abandoned by his friends, brutally scourged, paraded like an animal through the streets, nailed to an instrument of torture and left to die as “Good Friday.” To understand that is to have the ultimate answer to Job—and to Stephen Fry.
 
 
(Image credit: Sneaky Mag)

A lot has been said about the “problem of pain.” Why, if God is both loving and all-powerful, is there still suffering in the world? The question is a challenge for Christians, as for all theists.Christians have some sense of why a loving God would permit suffering. It's easy enough to see that love is a good (the highest good, even), and that love requires free will. And it's just a small step from there to see how that free will could be used in some dastardly ways. Likewise, it's clear enough that a loving God might permit His creatures to suffer, in certain cases, for their (our) own good.

This answer to the problem of pain is sensible, but not satisfying. There's no shaking that there's still something out of whack, something not quite right about this world. Christianity hasn't been shy about this point. The whole doctrine of the Fall is that things aren't how they ought to be, and how we're the ones who screwed them up. You can read that story in Genesis, or watch it on the nightly news.

And there's no shaking the sense that we don't have a full explanation. But again, Christianity acknowledges this from the outset: when Job complains about his problem to God, he's not given an answer; rather, he's basically told that there are things going on that he can't begin to comprehend. In the Cross, we get a fuller picture: God doesn't just acknowledge suffering, He takes it on, and we're given a tiny glimpse into the mysterious relationship between love, vulnerability, and pain. But there's still so much that we don't understand. And the Christian answer seems to be: that's the way it's going to be, this side of heaven. The answer is unsatisfying, but it seems to me that it's meant to be. This ground is well-tread, and others have addressed the problem of pain much more eloquently and exhaustively.

But today I want to look at another problem that doesn't get much attention: the “problem of beauty.” It's a problem, not for believers, but for non-believers: if there isn't a God, how can we account for all of the joy and beauty in the world? More specifically, how can we account for all the joy and beauty that doesn't have any evolutionary benefit? I really like the description of the problem given by Joanna Newsom, in a discussion about an album that she wrote shortly after the death of her best friend:

“The thing that I was experiencing and dwelling on the entire time is that there are so many things that are not OK and that will never be OK again,” says Newsom. “But there’s also so many things that are OK and good that sometimes it makes you crumple over with being alive. We are allowed such an insane depth of beauty and enjoyment in this lifetime.
 
It’s what my dad talks about sometimes. He says the only way that he knows there’s a God is that there’s so much gratuitous joy in this life. And that’s his only proof. There’s so many joys that do not assist in the propagation of the race or self-preservation. There’s no point whatsoever. They are so excessively, mind-bogglingly joy-producing that they distract from the very functions that are supposed to promote human life. They can leave you stupefied, monastic, not productive in any way, shape or form.
 
Those joys are there and they are unflagging and they are ever-growing. And still there are these things that you will never be able to feel OK about–unbearably awful, sad, ugly, unfair things.”

This captures the problem so well, because it anticipates the easy answer: that joy and our love of beauty is some sort of evolutionary benefit bequeathed to us by natural selection.

That answer might sound good at first, but there's no real evidence for it. Moreover, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. After all, we're moved to awe at the grandeur of the heavens: how does that aid the survival or propagation of our species? Often, as Newsom points out, the sensation of beauty draws us away from working and reproducing, leaving us “stupefied, monastic, not productive in any way, shape or form.” Without God, it's hard to give a good account of why we experience this kind of joy at beauty.

At first, it seems like we're dealing with two equal-and-opposite problems: believers struggle to account for all of the bad bits of life, and non-believers struggle to account for all of the good bits. Both of us are placing our trust somewhere. The Christian trusts in the goodness of God and the promise that someday, all of this will be clear; the atheist trusts in the idea that science will somehow solve the problem of beauty, and that someday, all of this will be clear. But these two problems aren't really equal. I think that we can see this inequality in a few ways.

First, they're not equal in size and scope: despite all of the awful bits, life is beautiful. Indeed, one of the very reasons many of the awful bits (like death) are so awful are because they deprive us of life. Thomas Hobbes famously claimed that the life of man in “the state of nature” was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But if life is really as awful as all that, why complain that it's short? It's like the Woody Allen line that “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.” The very fact that we lament the fleetingness of life (our own and others) points to a recognition that life is beautiful. Evil is noticeable precisely because it sticks out: it sharply contrasts with the beautiful background of life that we so often overlook or take for granted.

Second, evil is metaphysically dependent upon good. This is a concept that deserves more attention than I can give it here, and I hope to return to it soon. But I think that I can give at least a sense of what I mean by using a couple of analogies.

We often speak of light and darkness in a dualistic way, as if they're equal and opposite. But they're not: light actually exists in a way that darkness doesn't. In a world without darkness, we could still analyze light and its wavelike and particle-like properties. In a world without light, the very term darkness would be meaningless. We can only understand what darkness is by reference to light, but we can understand light without reference to darkness. The same holds true for  heat and cold. Heat actually exists: it's molecular energy. Cold is just the relative or absolute absence of heat. It's why we can talk about absolute zero: it's an absolute absence of heat. But there's not some maximum temperature where all of the “cold particles” are wiped out.

Something similar holds in discussing good and evil. Much of our concept of evil is tied up in the idea of “something that shouldn't have happened.” But for that concept to make any sense, you have to have at least an inkling of an idea of should, even if only an intuitive one. Evil is a perversion or an absence of good.

One of the clearest ways that we explore this is to understand why intentional evils are done. Invariably - as in, without a single exception - evil acts are done in the pursuit of some real or perceived good. We're always chasing after the good: after pleasure, honor, love, etc. (That doesn't excuse evil actions, obviously: you can't justify torturing the cat for pleasure simply because you did it for pleasure.) This shows that every evil act pays homage, no matter how unwittingly, to good. That's why you can't understand evil without understanding good. But none of this is true in reverse. We don't do good things because we're seeking evil, and we don't need a concept of evil to understand why something is good.

Third, there's a difference in explanatory power. Here, I want to conclude by refocusing on the two specific problems, the problem of pain and the problem of beauty, because it's here that we see the final inequality. The Christian explanation for pain leaves us unsatisfied, and I think that's an appropriate response. For starters, it's not a thorough explanation, nor a specific one: it doesn't explain why this evil thing happened to that person. But despite this, it offers a colorable explanation of the problem. It's clear that there's no logical incompatibility between permitting evil and being good, and this corresponds to our experience of life. We live in societies built on the idea of freedom-expansion, even if that entails the annoyance of people misusing that freedom for stupid or evil ends.

The atheist explanation of the problem of beauty is similarly unsatisfying. But here's the rub: unlike the Christian account of pain, the atheist account of beauty doesn't even advance any colorable explanation. The generally proffered solution, natural selection, just doesn't work here. Nor does it correspond with our experience of life: we don't see a clear correlation (at least, not a positive one) between “I cry at museums” and “I am adept at surviving and mating.”

At the end of a court case, even a well-argued one, there are often questions left lingering: if X is at fault, how do we explain this or that piece of evidence? On the other hand, if X isn't at fault, what about all of these other pieces of evidence? And if God is in the dock, so to speak, these are some of the critical arguments we should expect to see brought up - both in regards to his existence, and his goodness. That's why I think it's important to hold the problem of beauty up, side-by-side, with the problem of pain, weighing them, as if in a balance.

I think Joanna Newsom and her dad are right. While the argument from beauty isn't the only proof for the existence of God, I think it's conceptually sound, and hard to answer. The universe is full of endless delights, joys that we have no right to by nature, and which are presented before us everyday, all the same.
 
 
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In his dark 1977 novel Lancelot, novelist Walker Percy brings us into the walls of a mental institution to hear a man named Lancelot tell his life story, a tale of empty commercialism, salacious self-destruction, and one murderous act of vengeance. Now confined by the four walls of an asylum, he confides in his old friend, a priest and psychiatrist, about the “quest” that led him there and the truth of the world outside:

“In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil. You should be interested! Such a quest serves God’s cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God…but suppose you could show me one ‘sin,’ one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt…‘evil’ is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone’s either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.”

Like Chekov’s “Ward No. 6”, Percy’s story is meant to invert our normal understandings of the patient and the doctor, the madman and the well-adjusted citizen. Lancelot—despite evoking the reader’s just suspicion—hits a nerve with his diagnosis of modern America, especially in his central question: is there such a thing as an evil act, pure and simple? One that evades sociological or biological reduction? In short: does sin exist?

I thought about Lancelot as I started watching Guillermo del Toro ("Pan’s Labyrinth", "The Devil’s Backbone") and Carlton Cuse’s new vampire series "The Strain". (Interestingly enough, a character is seen reading Percy’s Lancelot in Cuse’s hit series "Lost".) The series is a new spin on vampirism at least insofar as it brings a sci-fi thriller element, complete with a panicky CDC, high-profile quarantines, and revolting autopsies. The first episode plays most like "The Andromeda Strain" than "Dracula"...
 

 
...that is, until we actually meet the creature behind all the mayhem. Soon it becomes abundantly clear that this “strain” is a tad worse than a viral outbreak, as victims begin losing their genitals, shooting elongated killer tongues out of their mouth, and feasting on the blood of their family members. Clearly, this is not Ebola—it’s something supernatural, a kind of force…something truly evil.

The lead character, the drowsy epidemiologist Ephraim Goodweather, eventually agrees to hear out an elderly Armenian man who insists that he knows what this is all about and how to stop it:

“This scourge we are now witnessing has existed for millennia. It is a corruption of both flesh and spirit. It ravages what is human in its victim and instills the raging thirst. That is his goal: to destroy humanity…I suppose you might call him patient zero. He spreads his virus through the parasites in his blood, driven by his horrible will...The Master excels at manipulation and disinformation, which is why they created a scapegoat…Take away the cape, the fangs, the accent. He’s a predator, a leech, a blemish.”

Abraham then describes seeing this “devil,” this “disease” with “an intelligence,” with his own eyes in one of the extermination camps during World War II. Late at night, Abraham watches the “strigoi”—which has that supernatural-yet-natural look and feel of del Toro’s creations—sneak into their cabin to feast. The next morning, Abraham tells his brother Jacob, who dismissed it as a nightmare. “Stop looking for monsters,” Jacob snaps. “We’re already surrounded by them.”

In this key scene, the gross-out, occasionally ridiculous tenor of The Strain transcends itself, and we can begin to read “the strain” as a metaphor for human evil—for sin.

First, there is the biological nature of the strain. It’s a purely negative force—a leeching privation of the good—that passes from person to person like an infection. Father Robert Barron, in his review of "World War Z<", explains the connection:

“Original sin is passed on from generation to generation, ‘propagatione et non imitatione’ (by propagation and not by imitation)…sin is not so much a bad habit that we pick up by watching other people behave, rather, it is like a disease that we inherit or a contagion that we catch…addressed only through the intervention of some medicine or antidote that comes from the outside.”

Also, there is the origin of the strain. It’s fitting that a mysterious Jewish character (Abraham, of all names) is the one to explain this origin, as Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus read like an epidemiological traceback of sin. (The mention of a “scapegoat” is striking too, given the role the scapegoat played in ancient Jewish rites of atonement.) Moreover, Abraham’s description of “the Master”—a manipulator and deceiver driven by an inflated will to infect and destroy humanity—rings a bell or two.

Lastly, there is the effect of the strain on its hosts. Again, Father Barron’s review of "World War Z" is fitting:

“If sin were just a bad habit, then it wouldn’t reach very deeply into the structure of the self; but were it more like a contagion, it would insinuate itself into all the interrelated systems that make up the person…sin causes a falling-apart of the self, a disintegration of mind, will, emotions, and the body, so that the sinner consistently operates at cross-purposes to himself.”

Likewise, the strain causes a corruption of both “flesh and spirit” in its hosts: their internal organs shrivel up; their eyes become cold and lizard-like; their rational mind vanishes; their will is squelched, driving them only to use and discard their next victim; and most strikingly, they are driven to hurt the ones they love first.

This corruption of love is an especially horrifying—and apparently central—element of the story, one that perhaps calls sin to mind the most. The first recited words of the first episode touch on the subject:

“Hunger is the most important thing we know, the first lesson we learn. But hunger can be easily quieted down, easily satiated. There is another force, a different type of hunger, an unquenchable thirst that cannot be extinguished. Its very existence is what defines us, what makes us human. That force is love.”

If love is what makes us most human, than the corruption of love by the strain is what makes us most inhuman. To the Master’s scheming assistant, Thomas Eichorst, it’s the other way around—love corrupts, and the strain liberates. “What I find fascinating is how love is considered a gift, a blessing,” he says as he tortures one of his victims, “with no acceptance to the fact that it also binds, chokes, and strangles.”

With all of this in mind, it’s no surprise to learn that Carlton Cuse and Guillermo del Toro are both Catholic. In fact, the explicit Catholic references in the show are numerous: holy water, a rosary, a Roman collar, a Mary candle, and the sign of the Cross are all seen or mentioned, most often as a kind of weaponry vis-à-vis the strain.

In an interview with Busted Halo, Cuse confesses that his Catholic faith is “very important” to him, describing the interaction of faith and storytelling in this way:

“I think religion becomes most meaningful in people’s lives when it’s told in the form of stories where people can connect…in a lot of ways the Bible is a great story, and you find the meaning underneath that, but I think its relevance is not just because of the embedded meaning, it’s also because the stories are so good.”

Del Toro also discussed his own religious background in the Wall Street Journal:

“My basic substance is Catholic…It was very much intertwined with the way I wrote the book. It is an incredibly powerful way of mythologizing about good and evil…One of my favorite books, and one of the most mysterious books in the Bible, is the Book of Job. I thought it would be great for the character of [Ephraim Goodweather] to be sort of the chosen one, but to be taken apart by destiny, point by point, until he finds the voice of God in ways that are very subtle.”

Of course, the attitude toward sin reflected in "The Strain" has its critics. On one reading held by many atheists today, malevolent acts are a holdover from millennia of animal ancestry; these are not “evil” so much as “defective” behaviors that, countered with reason, science, and education, will sizzle and shrivel under the hot light of progress like del Toro’s vampires. Like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, they proclaim that there can be no redemption from sin, because there was never any sin to begin with.

But has history borne this out? In the mid-nineteenth century, Dostoevsky was already countering this dream of an Enlightenment “utopia” with his “Underground Man” who, as William Barrett explains:

“…Might die of boredom, or out of the violent need to escape this boredom start sticking pins in his neighbor – for no reason at all, just to assert his freedom. If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine.”

Dostoevsky, it turns out, was something of a prophet. Just when we hoped to see the dawn of universal brotherhood, we saw instead a torrent of bloodshed and mass murder unparalleled in recorded history. In the horror of World War II, the raging waters of the irrational rose up once again; and through the evolutionary ethos of Nazism, Abraham met the Master face to face. Man, one Roman playwright wrote, is man’s wolf—and nowhere is this more evident than in the twentieth century.

Today, our digital age only magnifies the increasingly random horrors at home and abroad. Love, peace, “coexist!”—these are the catchphrases we hear (and say) over and over. But is there anything in such short supply? As anthropologist René Girard puts it in his new book: “Why is there so much violence in our midst? No question is more debated today. And none produces more disappointing answers.”

The “human strain” is self-evident down through the centuries. But the question remains: is it sin? The term seems to presuppose an objective moral order grounded by God. But as Lancelot saw it, the quest for sin has precious little to do with these things. Instead, it’s about observing the world as it is, openly and without prejudice, to see whether pure, irreducible evil—whatever you want to call it—is a fiction. Unfortunately, we don’t have to travel very far in this quest. We don’t even have to take a single step.

Many will be tempted to write off "The Strain" as a mindless entertainment. But I think it does something more: it paints a picture of the evil that really and truly infects the world, the kind that—once exposed within—impels its host to don sackcloth and ashes, and whisper with that underground dweller, to no one in particular: “I am a sick man…I am a wicked man…”
 

 
 
(Image credit: Movie Pilot)

NOTE: This is the last in our four-part series by philosopher Fr. Robert Spitzer addressing the question, "Why Would God Allow Suffering Caused by Nature?" Instead of focusing on the existence of moral evil, or suffering caused by the free choice of humans, he examines why an apparently good God would create an imperfect world replete with natural disasters, physical disabilities, and unavoidable heartache. Find the other parts of the series here.
 

 
We now move from an individual and personal perspective on suffering to a social and cultural perspective. We saw in the previous three sub-sections how God uses an imperfect world (and the challenge/suffering it can cause) to call and lead individuals toward life-transformations, courage, self-discipline, empathy, humility, love’s vulnerability, and compassion. However, the value of an imperfect world and suffering is not limited to this. God can also use suffering to advance the collective human spirit, particularly in culture and society. There are three evident manifestations of this collective-cultural-societal benefit of an imperfect world and suffering: (1) interdependence, (2) room to make a better world, and (3) the development of progressively better social and cultural ideals and systems. Each will be discussed in turn.

Interdependence

 
We cannot be completely autonomous – we need each other not only to advance but also to survive. Our imperfect world has literally compelled us to seek help from one another, to open ourselves to others’ strengths, to make up for one another’s weaknesses, and to organize ourselves to form a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. We could say that our imperfect world is the condition necessary for the possibility of interdependence, and that interdependence provides an almost indispensable impetus to organize societies for mutual benefit.

The reader might respond that this is a somewhat cynical view of human nature because we probably would have formed societies simply to express empathy and love. I do not doubt this for a moment. However, I also believe that necessity is not only the mother of invention, but also the mother of social organizations for mutual benefit and specialization of labor. An imperfect world complements the human desire for empathy and love. While empathy and love allow us to enjoy one another, the imperfect world challenges us to extend that love to meeting others’ needs and making up for others’ weaknesses. Challenges (arising out of an imperfect world) induce us to extend our empathy, friendship, and enjoyment of one another into the domain of meeting one another’s needs, organizing ourselves for optimal mutual benefit, and creating societies which take on a life of their own beyond any specific individual or group of individuals. Yet an imperfect world does far more than this. It calls us to make a better world, to the discovery of the deepest meaning of justice and love, and even to create better cultures and systems of world organization.

Room to Make a Better World

 
An imperfect world reveals that God did not do everything for us. He has left room for us to overcome the seeming imperfections of nature through our creativity, ideals, and loves – not merely individual creativity, ideals, and loves, but also through collective creativity, ideals, and loves. As noted above, individuals can receive a tremendous sense of purpose and fulfillment by meeting challenges and overcoming adversity. Yet we can experience an even greater purpose and fulfillment by collectively meeting challenges which are far too great for any individual; challenges which allow us to be a small part of a much larger purpose and destiny within human history.

It would have been noble indeed, and a fulfillment of both individual and collective purpose to have played a small part in the history of irrigation, the synthesis of metals, the building of roads, the discovery of herbs and medicines, the development of elementary technologies, the development of initial legal codes, the initial formulation of the great ideas (such as justice and love), the discoveries of modern chemistry, modern biology, modern medicine, modern particle physics, contemporary astronomy and astrophysics, the development of justice theory, inalienable rights theory, political rights theory, economic rights theory, contemporary structures of governments, the development of psychology, sociology, literature, history, indeed, all the humanities, arts, and social sciences; to have played a small part in the great engineering and technological feats which have enabled us to meet our resource needs amidst growing population, to be part of the communication and transportation revolutions that have brought our world so much closer together; to have been a small part of the commerce which not only ennobled human work, but also generated the resources necessary to build a better world; to have been a small part in these monumental creative efforts meeting tremendous collective challenges and needs in the course of human history.

Yet, none of these achievements (and the individual and collective purpose and fulfillment coming from them) would have been possible without an imperfect world. If God had done everything for us, life would have been much less interesting (to say the least) and would have been devoid of the great purpose and achievement of the collective human spirit. Thank God for an imperfect world and the challenges and suffering arising out of it. We were not created to be self-sufficient, overly-protected “babies,” but rather to rise to the challenge of collective nobility and love – to build a better world.

The Development of Progressively Better Social Ideals

 
We not only have the capacity to meet tremendous challenges collectively, we can also build culture – the animating ethos arising out of our collective heart which impels us not only toward a deeper and broader vision of individuals, but also of groups, communities, societies, and the world. This broader and deeper vision includes a deeper appreciation of individual and collective potential and therefore a deeper respect for the individual and collective human spirit. Thus, we have the capacity not only to build a legal system, but also to infuse it with an ideal of justice and rights, a scrupulous concern for accuracy and evidence, and a presumption of innocence and care for the individual. We have the ability not only to make tremendous scientific discoveries, but also to use them for the common good rather than the good of just a privileged class. We have the ability not only to build great structures, but also to use our architecture to reflect the beauty and goodness of the human spirit. We have the capacity not only to do great research but also to impart the knowledge and wisdom gained by it in a humane and altruistic educational system. And the list goes on.

Perhaps more importantly, we have the capacity to build these more beneficent cultural ideals and systems out of the lessons of our collective tragedy and suffering. One of the greatest ironies of human history, it seems to me, is the virtual inevitability of the greatest human cultural achievements arising out of the greatest moments of human suffering and tragedy (whether these be caused by natural calamities like the plague or more frequently out of humanly induced tragedies such as slavery, persecution of groups, world wars, and genocide):

• Roman coliseums (butchering millions for mere entertainment) seem eventually to produce Constantinian conversions (taking an entire empire toward an appreciation of Christian love)
• Manifestations of slavery seem to lead eventually to an abolitionist movement and an Emancipation Proclamation
• Outbreaks of plague seem to lead eventually to advances in medicine and public health, as well as a deeper appreciation of individual life and personhood
• Manifestations of human cruelty and injustice seem to lead eventually to inalienable rights and political rights theories (and to systems of human rights)
• Large-scale economic marginalization and injustice seem to lead eventually to economic rights theories (and to systems of economic rights)
• World wars seem to lead eventually to institutions of world justice and peace

There seems to be something in collective tragedy and suffering that awakens the human spirit, awakens a prophet or a visionary (such as Jesus Christ, St. Francis of Assisi, William Wilberforce, Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr.), which then awakens a collective movement of the human heart (such as the abolitionist movement), which then has to endure suffering and hardship in order to persist, but when it does persist, brings us to a greater awareness of what is humane.

Out of the ashes of collective tragedy seems almost inevitably to arise a collective advancement in the common good and human culture; and more than this – a collective resolve, a determination of the collective human spirit which proclaims, “never again;” and still more – a political-legal system to shepherd this collective resolve into the future.

As may now be evident, the greatest collective human achievements in science, law, government, philosophy, politics and human ideals (to mention but a few areas) seem to have at their base not just an imperfect world, not just individual suffering, not just collective suffering, but epic and even monumental collective suffering.

Was an imperfect world necessary for these greatest human achievements? It would seem so (at least partially); otherwise there would have been no room to grow, no challenges to overcome (either individually or collectively), and no ideals to be formulated by meeting these challenges. God would have done them all for us.

Nothing could be worse for a child’s development and capacity for socialization than an overprotective parents who think they are doing the child a favor by doing her homework for her, constructing her project for her, thinking for her. To remove all imperfections from a child’s living conditions; to take away all challenges and opportunities to meet adversity, all opportunities to rise above imperfect conditions; to take away all opportunities to create and invent a better future; and to remove the opportunity to exemplify courage and love in the midst of this creativity would be tantamount to a decapitation. God would no more decapitate the collective human spirit than a parent would a child; and so, God not only allowed an imperfect world filled with challenge and adversity, He created it.

We must remember at this juncture that God’s perspective is eternal. From the Catholic perspective, God intends to redeem every scintilla of our suffering and to transform it into the symphony of eternal love which is His kingdom. Therefore, a person who suffered in a Nazi concentration camp (which eventually led to the U.N. Charter of Human Rights and to the current system of international courts) did not suffer for the progress of this world alone, as if he were merely a pawn in the progress of the world. Rather, his suffering is destined for eternal redemption by an unconditionally loving and providential God who will bring courage, self-discipline, empathy, humility, love’s vulnerability, compassion, and agape to its fullest unique expression for all eternity. At the moment of what seems to be senseless suffering and death, God takes the individual into the fullness of His love, light, and life while initiating a momentum toward a greater common good within the course of human history. That means we must continually take precautions against reducing ourselves to mere immanentists, for the God of love redeems each person’s suffering individually and eternally while using it to induce and engender progress toward His own ideal for world culture and the human community.

The above points only answer part of our question about the necessity of suffering to advance the common good; for even if an imperfect world were truly necessary for such advancement, it does not seem that something as monstrous as a world war would be so necessary. Perhaps. But here is where moral evil and human freedom exacerbate the conditions of an imperfect world. Unlike natural laws, which blindly follow the pre-patterned sequences of cause and effect, human evil has embedded in it injustice, egocentrism, hatred, and cruelty which are all truly unnecessary. Nevertheless, even in the midst of the unnecessary and gratuitous suffering arising out of moral evil, the human spirit (galvanized by the Holy Spirit, according to my faith) rises above this suffering and seems eventually to produce advancements in culture and the common good in proportion to the degree of suffering.

In conclusion, the annals of human history are replete with examples of how tremendous moments of collective human suffering (whether caused by human depravity or the imperfections and indifference of nature, or both) induced, engendered, accelerated, and in many other ways helped to create the greatest human ideals and cultural achievements. If one has faith one will likely attribute this “phoenix out of the ashes” phenomenon to the Holy Spirit working within the collective human spirit. If one does not have faith, one will simply have to marvel at the incredible goodness of the collective human spirit. (And ask, was it possible for us to do this by ourselves?)

In any case, the imperfect world and the history of human suffering have given rise to a concrete reality of remarkable beauty and goodness in the areas of justice, rights, legal systems, governance systems, medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology, and every other discipline which has as its noble end the advancement of the common good.

Without an imperfect world, without some suffering in the world, I find it very difficult to believe that any of this would have arisen out of the collective human spirit in the course of history.

It would seem that the price paid in pain has been at least partially offset by the gains made in culture, society, the individual spirit, and the collective human spirit. I do not mean to trivialize the history of human suffering and tragedy nor the lives of individuals ruined by human injustice and an imperfect natural order. Yet we should not fail to find some hope in light emerging from darkness, and goodness emerging from evil. Inasmuch as God is all-powerful and all-loving, He can seize upon this goodness and light to reinforce its historical momentum, and more importantly to transform it into an unconditionally loving eternity. An imperfect world shaped by an imperfect, yet transcendently good human spirit brought to fulfillment by an unconditionally loving God, may well equate to an eternal symphony of love.
 
 
(Image credit: Talib Karim)