One of the problems – probably the most important problem in that it turns so many away from God – which has to be faced fair and square by the believer is: Why has a good God permitted so much evil to happen? Why do the wicked flourish and the just suffer? How account for the diseased, mis-shapen lives of so many, particularly in the Third World – the slums, mass starvation, the wars around the world, the despair to which suffering and wrong have driven countless numbers?
- It has to be stated at the outset that there is no simple, single answer to the Problem of Evil – at least no-one has so far come up with it!
- By way of partial answer it might be said that the common theme of fiction and epic is victory won through trial and suffering and life without some suffering would be the play of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.
- Many of the virtues are developed by conflict with pain and vice: endurance, courage, temperance etc..
- There are mysterious sufferings that are not caused by human beings Really, in the world to-day, it is suggested that, perhaps, 80-90% of our pain and suffering is caused by other human beings. We could wipe out so many diseases if we wanted to. We already have done so but more needs to be done,
- But this raises the question: why do these diseases exist in the first place? This is part of the 10-20% of the mysterious suffering of which we have no answer at present.
- The most wicked example of one people inflicting pain and death on another is the Holocaust. This surely adds enormous weight to the case against God. Yet, many of the survivors of the death camps emerged as virtual saints (although it has to be conceded that many also emerged broken).
- One survivor was Rabbi Hugo Gryn. He says: “ In a certain sense Auschwitz destroyed my childish notions. But it was in Auschwitz and some of the other camps I was in, in my teens, that my faith was forged. I understood then, and I understand it even better to-day, that Auschwitz was revelation, too. It was revelation of what happens when an evil principle is harnessed to up-to-date technology…..What you cannot say is that God did it. It isn’t true. People did it – godless people”.
- There is a further conclusion which emanated from Rabbi Hugo Gryn, and it is one which has become widespread among the churches since World War II: that God Himself is “in the mess”, suffering with His creation and that we, like Job, may get no real answer out of the whirlwind but God is there transforming the situation so that we turn from cursing to worship.
- A Christian viewpoint on WW II comes from Stuart Blanch, the Anglican Archbishop of York in the Eighties: “Actually the experience of being involved in the military where people you knew were dying around you had the effect on me that it had on many aircrew: that it gave them perhaps awareness of the realities which they had never experienced before or never thought about. There was a disproportionately large number of men in the Air Force who, as a result of their experience, were later ordained”.
- God is holding the whole universe in being and enabling each tiny part of it to go on being itself. Is it likely, therefore, that He is not in the pain of the universe?
- The purpose of God cannot finally be defeated. We see this in the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
- We see from the above that, whatever intellectual objections remain, people in great danger and stress find that God brings good out of evil.
- In the New Testament we see Christ suffering at the end of His life and especially on the Cross. But the Cross is not the end of the story; in the Resurrection death and suffering are transcended. Christians and others believe that in the after-life things will appear quite differently. Speculation will be subsumed in a new reality.
- Christ does not explicitly argue the goodness of God in creating this particular world and in permitting evil nor prevail over adversaries with philosophical arguments. He gives a more significant answer in the portraying of God as the Father and Himself as the suffering Redeemer. Before this vision the hard surface of the Problem of Evil begins to crumble.
- We are surrounded by mystery. We are asking for an explanation of God’s inner counsels. Again, we are asking for an explanation of the purpose of this world before that purpose has been fully accomplished; we want to turn to the end of the story when we are only half-way through; to stand outside time and space when we re still in time and space; we are aattempting to get Heaven into our heads instead our heads into Heaven!
- As St. Augustine says: “God Almighty would in no way permit evil in His works were He not so omnipotent and good that even out of evil He could work good”.
- The explanation of the phenomena of the natural world does not lie within the natural world and Science which describes these phenomena, telling how they occur, cannot tell us why they occur as they do. These are familiar considerations. So, too, must the explanation of the facts of moral experience lie beyond this world.
- An article appeared in “The Times” (London) in January, 1995, which points to forces beyond the human. A prison chaplain called at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London. He was shaking with shock. He had just witnessed a possession in a prison of which he was chaplain; he had just come from the cell of a 22-year old Asian man where he had witnessed the man being possessed by a ghost. Writing about the case in “The British Journal of Psychiatry” Dr. Anthony Hale, senior lecturer in Psychiatry at St. Thomas’ Hospital, compared the young man’s power to that of the small girl in the film, “The Exorcist”. What startled the psychiatrists was the description the chaplain gave of the incident he had witnessed. He had seen a cloud bearing thee image of an old woman descend on the man’s chest. According to Dr. Hale, this sort of condition may occur in an otherwise well-adjusted person in a culture with strong beliefs in possession and is normally dealt wwith by exorcism. Dr. Hale treated the man with an anti-psychotic drug which succeded where exorcism had failed. The possessions ceased but recurred when the man failed to take his drugs. Dr. Hale stated :”In a multi-ethnic psychiatric service, possession by a ghost must be considered as a possible diagnosis”.
- It is rarely stated by theists the the Problem of Evil exists for atheists. For God substitute unaided Evolution and the same agonising difficulties remain. Why did Evolution bring about evil? Surely, it could have arranged things differently? If it had the power to produce Leonardo, Newton,Lister, Curie, Pasteur, Keynes, Einstein, F.D.Roosevelt, Mandela etc.,. would it not have the power to replicate these over and over again so that solutions to the world’s problems might have been solved very much earlier? The difference between the theist and the atheist approach is that in the one there is a n after-life, in the other there isn’t.
- Evil is not a thing, an entity, a being. It is a wrong choice or damage done by a wrong choice. It is no more positive than blindness.
- Who’s to say that we know all God’s reasons?
- The after-life: a different way of viewing things.
- The degree of suffering (as opposed to the extent) is confined to that of the person who suffers most.
- No perfect solution intellectually.
- Satan the agent of evil in Nature.
- Since love must be chosen, love cannot exist without freewill so with evil.
- Fall of humankind leadss to corruption of world: “Everything is connected to everything else”.
- Evil is the absence of good.
- Concepts such as yin and yang argue that evil and good are complimentary.
- The case for Evil being deeper than human shortcomings is argued by Dr. CEM Joad in his book, “The Recovery of Belief (1951): “For am I really to believe that the passions, the rages, the callous indifference to human suffering, the unbridled lust for domination and display exhibited by the men of restless energy and dominating will who have fought their way to power during the last forty years, are adequately to be explained as the by-product of a feeling of inferiority engendered by neglect in school?”.