I have a number of aims in this essay, but my overall project is to defend the rationality of belief in an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God, given the fact of evil. My aim is not just to show how the existence of some form of God can be compatible with some evil, but rather to show how the existence of the Christian God is compatible with the actual amount and nature of the evil in this world. Therefore it is important before embarking on my project to define all the terms that I will be dealing with. By 'omnipotent', I mean that God has the power to do anything that is logically possible, but it is worth bearing in mind that I also believe that God can and does choose to limit his own power in some cases. I also take God to be wholly good, by which I mean that he only does what is morally admirable and I will be seeking to show that God did not 'create' evil, and therefore should not be held responsible for it. When I use the term 'theist', I shall mean anyone who believes in an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God, although not necessarily the Christian God (as opposed to 'atheist' which I take to mean someone who believes that God does not exist, in this context someone who thinks that the fact of evil makes belief in God irrational, or that the existence of evil makes the existence of God highly improbable).
My essay can be divided into two main parts: I will begin by examining what has often been called the 'logical' problem of evil, and I will especially be responding to criticisms made by Mackie. I will argue that the theist, as I have defined him above, is not involved in a contradiction in holding both that God (being omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent) exists and that evil exists. The second part of my essay will concern the 'evidential' problem of evil, and I will examine the idea of evil as punishment; look at ways of explaining natural evil; examine the 'greater good' argument of Helm; and discuss the free-will theodicies of Hick and Davis before reaching my own conclusion that, although the fact of evil is difficult for a theist to explain to an atheist, significant progress can be made. I will attempt to give a plausible explanation as to why God might allow evil of the nature and extent found in the world, based on the idea that evil arises from our free will. However, ultimately, a theist cannot persuade an atheist to believe in God as belief itself must be initiated by God. But, as Davis argues,
"They [theists] can point out that this person's inability to believe does not in itself constitute a good reason for the theist to give up his belief"
I think it is very important for a theist, and specifically a Christian, to be able to admit that there are things that we do not know. Since philosophy is, after all, ultimately trying to arrive at the truth, it seems that the usefulness of speculative theodicy is limited. Far more sensible would be to find out as much as we can about the nature of God and his purposes so as to show that belief in him is not irrational, but ultimately to admit that our knowledge of God's purposes is necessarily limited.
To sum up then, I shall argue that, although it seems as though no explanation of the amount of evil in this world has been put forward that appears satisfactory and complete to the atheist, this does not mean that there is no justification for the evil that exists in the world. One cannot conclude that the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good God.
Firstly, then I will consider the logical problem of evil, which holds that it is irrational to believe in God because theism involves simultaneously holding contradictory beliefs. Hume very concisely summarises the logical problem of evil in a much-quoted passage from his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:
"Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"
This dilemma can be presented as a series of propositions which appear to be inconsistent:
(1) God is omnipotent
(2) God is omniscient
(3) God is wholly good
(4) Evil exists
I shall be referring to this set of propositions (1) to (4) as set A.
As Plantinga points out, clearly the contradiction here is not an explicit or formal one. It is not possible to arrive at a proposition and its denial in set A. So the contradiction, if there is one, must be implicit and the atheist must provide additional propositions which are necessarily true and make set A formally inconsistent. Mackie and McCloskey both assert that set A is inconsistent and McCloskey thinks that,
"There is a clear prima facie case that evil and God are incompatible-both cannot exist."
Mackie's assertion rests on the principle that 'a good omnipotent thing eliminates evil completely' But he seems to rely on the intuitive appeal of this assertion rather than make any attempt to argue in support of it. In order for his argument to work, the added principle would have to be necessarily true, and Mackie cannot show that this is. We can split it up into two separate principles which would both have to be necessarily true to yield a formal contradiction of set A:
(i) A good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can
(ii) There are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do
I would argue that the second needs qualifying, because, as I made clear in my introduction, I hold that even an omnipotent being cannot do the logically impossible. So premise (ii) would now read 'There are no nonlogical limits to what an omnipotent thing can do'.The theist needs to deny the truth of one or more of the propositions (1), (2), (3), (4), (i) or (ii) in order to defeat Mackie's argument. Obviously, given my beliefs about the nature of God that I outlined in the introduction, I do not find it acceptable to deny (1), (2), (3) or the modified version of (ii), and so the only other options would be to deny (4) or (i). It is possible to deny the reality of evil, as the Christian Scientists do, but it seems to me to be a very unsatisfactory way of dealing with the problem of evil. We only have to switch on the news to see reports of murders, road accidents, political scandals and earthquakes, and it is even made very clear in the Bible that there is a large amount of real evil in the world. Therefore it is the first of Mackie's propositions, (i), that I would argue is not necessarily true. A number of theists, notably Plantinga, have gone on to try and prove that it was not logically possible for God to create a world containing significantly free beings, but no evil. He argues in favour of a free-will defence, in that a world containing significantly free beings and some evil is better than a world containing automata and no evil. I will return to a discussion of the success and limitations of the free-will theodicy later in my essay. For the purposes of defeating the logical problem of evil it is sufficient that the free-will theodicy is possibly true. As Davis makes clear, all we have to do in order to defeat the logical problem of evil is to provide a statement which is possibly true, is consistent with (1) - (3) and entails (4). This would be enough to overthrow the charge of inconsistency. Davis puts forward a suggestion:
"All the evil that exists in the world is due to the choices of free moral agents whom God created, and no other world which God could have created would have a better balance of good over evil than the actual world will have."
There are three objections to this proposition that can be made, the first being that if people were created morally good then sin would never have come about. However, it can be replied to this that the free-will defence is not committed to the view that people were created morally good and it is a possibility that they were created spiritually immature or neutral, which is all that is needed here. The second objection is a point that Mackie makes, that surely humans could have been created so that they always freely chose the good. Davis claims that, although it is not logically impossible for humans to freely choose the good every time, it was logically impossible for God to create moral agents so that they always freely chose the good. Again, I will return to a more detailed discussion later on when I examine the plausibility of the free-will theodicy. The third objection is that natural evils cannot be attributed to the wrong-doings of humans, but Davis argues that, because Augustine's theory that Satan is the cause of all the natural evil in the world is possible, then his proposition is still possibly true, which is all we need to show in order to defeat the logical problem of evil.
It is worth adding that Mackie, in arguing that the problem of evil shows:
"not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another"
seems to be ignoring the empirical evidence that there is against his view. Since he thinks that it is irrational to believe in a wholly good, powerful and all-knowing God, he has a significant problem in explaining how millions of people all over the world with enormously varying life-experience do believe in such a God whilst also being fully aware of the evil in the world. Mackie would have to argue that these millions of people base their whole lives on irrational beliefs. However, this seems highly implausible. It is true that they may be mistaken (as were the millions of people who once believed that the world was flat), but claiming that they may be wrong is not the same as claiming that they hold their beliefs irrationally. As far as I am aware, there are no instances of extremely widespread irrational belief.
Having hopefully dispensed with the charge that the theist is involved in a contradiction, I will now turn to the claim that the fact of evil constitutes good evidence against God. I do not believe that any theist would deny that the fact of evil presents practical problems for faith. So the challenge to the theist is to explain how and why an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good God permits evil. The task that theists face can be split up into two parts. They have to show firstly why God permits any evil at all, and secondly why he permits the actual amount and nature of evil that there is in the world. It is also important to make the distinction between moral evil (being evil due to human actions, such as murder, jealousy, hatred and deceit) and natural, or physical, evil (being evil not originating from human actions, such as natural disasters and disease). Of course, the two very often overlap, such as in the case of lung cancer, which is a natural evil in as much as it is a disease, but is also at least partly caused by the human decision to smoke. It is also important to realise that it is not necessary to have one single explanation that covers all evils. For instance we might account for moral evil and natural evil in different ways, or we might argue that there are a combination of reasons why moral evil is permitted. This is especially so in the first case that I wish to discuss, namely the idea that evil is a justified punishment by God. It is obvious that not all evil can be accounted for in this way because punishment implies the existence of evil (one cannot be punished unless one has done something wrong, so it is clear that evil did not originate as a punishment). It also seems as though much of the evil we see around us now is not punishment, for instance it is hard to see how a baby born with a disease such as Down's Syndrome deserves such a condition. In other cases, for example natural disasters, the distribution of suffering seems to bear no relation to the unrighteousness of the sufferers. As Davies points out,
"Disease and other misfortunes do not seem to be obviously distributed in accordance with desert."
But can some of the evil in the world be due to punishment by God? It certainly seems plausible that some good is rewarded in this life and likewise some evil is punished, and indeed the Bible alludes to this:
"My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves"
However, the Bible also makes it clear that it is only in the life after this that all moral inequities will be put right, and it is plain to see that in this life often good people suffer badly and evil people seem to prosper.
Before discussing what I consider to be the two most plausible explanations of moral evil, namely the greater good theodicy and the free-will theodicy, I will briefly consider two approaches to the problem of natural evil. The first is developed by Hick, who argues that natural evil may be justified because God has created the world with fixed and general laws of nature which are essential to the spiritual development of human beings, which is obviously good. It is argued that it is worthwhile bringing about this good, even if it means that through the natural operations of these laws, some evil will come about. Hick makes it clear that he does not believe that a 'hedonistic paradise' would be conducive to our spiritual development or 'soul-making'. I will discuss Hicks 'soul-making' theodicy in further detail shortly.
The second aligns more with a free-will defence and is argued for principally by St. Augustine and Plantinga. Their argument maintains that natural evil is caused by the free will of the Devil, since we know from the Bible that angels have free will, and it was this that enabled the Devil to rebel against God. This idea no doubt will seem implausible to many, but that in itself does not prove its falsity. However, even if we have to admit that we do not know God's justification for allowing natural evil to occur, this does not mean that God is not justified.
I will now consider the first of the two main theodicies developed in response to the problem of evil, namely the greater good theodicy. Advocates of this approach maintain that evil is a necessary means to a greater good, ie that it is not logically possible to bring the good about without the evil (notice that theists holding this view do not have to limit God's power because it has already been maintained that God cannot do the logically impossible). Defenders of this view argue that the good consequences of permitting evil morally justify this permission. However, critics of this view argue the exact opposite, that the good result is not worth having considering the amount of evil that is involved in bringing it about. Firstly, we need to show that there are goods that cannot be had without evil, for example sympathy and forgiveness. It is not possible to have sympathy for someone unless they are suffering, and likewise it is not possible to forgive someone unless they have done something wrong. Another example is that of the surgeon performing a life saving operation. This will necessarily bring about pain and suffering, but the resultant good (the patient's restoration to health) is good enough to justify the pain and suffering caused to achieve it. So it is possible to show that evil is logically necessary for some goods.
Helm rejects the view that humans have indeterministic freedom because he wants to argue for a 'no-risk' view of Divine Providence. Unlike Davis, who's view I will discuss later, Helm does not believe that God took a risk in creating free human beings because he believes that,
"men and women are free in a way which is distinctively human but which is nevertheless not indeterministic."
Consequently, he rejects the free-will defence since it claims that if human's actions are really free, then God cannot ensure that anything they do is morally right (although later he confusingly states:
"While Hick...is himself committed to indeterminism, indeterminism is not a necessary or intrinsic part of such an approach." ) So Helm has to give a reason why God chose to create this world with all its evil, and the crux of his argument is that out of evil a greater good comes. Helm needs to show that having the combination of the evil and the good is more valuable than having neither, but the nearest he seems to come is the rather vague statement that:
"Without the permission of moral evil, and the atonement of Christ, God's own character would not be fully manifest."
He seems to justify the existence of evil in terms of the life to come and makes an essential connection between suffering and glory. It is true that these two things are indeed intimately connected (for instance see Romans 8:18), but Helm seems to have a problem in showing how God is justified in allowing some people to suffer in this life and then go to hell and suffer yet again. Helm argues that his justification is not a case of the end justifying the means, because that would only be the case if God was the author of sin, and therefore sinful himself. However, Helm's account seems to run into problems in that, on the one hand he argues that human freedom is deterministic and therefore the evil that humans do is 'ordained' by God, and on the other hand he wants to say that God is not responsible for the sin of humans. I agree with Helm that it is logically consistent to hold that:
"Some moral evils are a punishment; some moral evils are disciplinary; some moral evils are perhaps both. But moral evils whether considered as punishments or as disciplines presuppose moral evils which are neither."
However, it seems as though Helm's view still leaves a number of questions unanswered, not least how suffering is supposed to be for the greater good of non-believers in God (perhaps no theodicy can adequately show this, but some proponents of the free-will defence would argue that free will itself is the greater good which justifies evil).
I will now discuss two differing versions of the second of the main attempts to justify and explain God's permission of evil in the world, namely the free-will defence. The argument central to all versions of the free-will defence is that God gave us real freedom to choose whether to do right or wrong, which is extremely valuable, but that the price to pay for this freedom was that moral evil inevitably came into the world through our wrong choices. Its essence is that freedom is intrinsically valuable and in order for people to be truly free they must have the capacity to produce moral evil as well as moral good:
"If the agents were really free no-one could have caused or coerced them to behave as they did."
All advocates of theories of free-will argue that God was justified in allowing evil because the value of freedom itself and/or the goods that it achieves for us outweigh the evil in the world. However, there is much scope for difference within theories of free-will, and I will be discussing the strengths and limitations of two such theodicies here, namely those of Hick and Davis.
Hick rightly states that the whole question of evil very much depends on what one's view is of God's purpose in creating human life. If God just wanted to maximise human happiness, then this world indeed does testify strongly against his existence. But if God wanted to create a world which was conducive to "soul-making", that is to say the spiritual growth of human beings by way of overcoming trials and difficulties and coming freely to a meaningful relationship with God, then this world would seem to testify to the truth of God's existence. Hick states,
"It would seem, then, that an environment intended to make possible the growth in free beings of the finest characteristics of personal life must have a great deal in common with our present world. It must operate according to general and dependable laws; and it must involve real dangers."
Hick argues that God wants people to love him freely and this love is more valuable by being freely given than it would be by being forced. It is essential to Hick's argument that there is a life after this one which makes all the hardship suffered in the 'soul-making' process worth it. Moral and religious virtue is the aim of each person's life and this cannot be attained, Hick argues, without freedom. It is also crucial to the soul-making process that there is an 'epistemic distance' between us and God, that is to say we do not see God directly until the process in concluded. However, it can be objected that we have been distanced too far from God and that,
"We need to know why we inhabit this particular world, which is not optimal for Hick's purposes."
Another objection to Hick's view is that, as Hick himself admits, his view is not wholly adequate in dealing with the amount of evil in the world. Surely the horrendous evils of the Holocaust cannot be conducive to soul-making?
An objection to Hick's view that Griffin makes is that it cannot adequately account for the suffering to animals. Hick responds to this criticism by relying on his justification of natural evil, which was discussed earlier, and arguing that animal suffering is a consequence of the necessity in having fixed natural laws. A reply that Hick rejects, although it seems to me to be a better response, is that the natural order in the world has been perverted by the fall. This brings me to the first of two objections that I wish to raise which I consider to expose serious flaws in Hick's theodicy because he departs from a Biblical point of view. The first is that he denies the doctrine of the fall, maintaining instead that God actually created evil to be part of the soul-making process. If God created evil then it would seem that he is not wholly good at all, and indeed the Bible makes it clear that everything that God created was good:
"God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."
The second is that he holds the doctrine of universalism, which maintains that everyone will be saved and therefore no-one will suffer eternal punishment. What is more, there is no way for him to be able to abandon the notion of universalism, but preserve his theory in tact, because he has to assume that the soul-making process is going to work. It is clear from the Bible that God wants everyone to be saved ("This is good, and pleases God our Saviour, who wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth" ) but this does not imply the truth of universalism. Indeed there are many passages of the Bible which warn about the serious consequences of not accepting Jesus as Saviour:
"It is better for you to lose one part of your body that for your whole body to go into hell."
As Davis rightly makes clear:
"If hell is inconsistent with God's love, then our salvation is not a matter of grace: it becomes a matter of our justly being freed from a penalty we don't really deserve."
I will now consider Davis' free-will theory and I will argue that he solves a number of the problems that were raised in objection to Hick's "soul-making' thesis. Davis' approach seems to me to unite the best aspects of Helm's and Hick's views, and he holds fast to Biblical teaching. Davis argues that God created a world with no evil in it, and humans were given the capability of rational choice. Unlike Helm, who holds a 'no-risk' view of divine providence, Davis argues that:
"God ran the risk that they would choose evil rather than good"
So he makes it quite clear that we are to be blamed for moral evil and not God, since the non-existence of evil was compatible with what God created. God was justified in allowing evil to come into the world because the resultant good (ie our being free moral creatures) will outweigh the evil. One advantage that Davis' argument has over Hick's is that he does not have to claim that this is the best possible world (which Davis regards as an incoherent notion similar to that of the 'tallest conceivable man'. Even if Davis is wrong and the notion is coherent, it is fortunate that Davis' arguments do not rely on a proof that this is the best possible world). Another advantage over Hick is that he preserves the Biblical doctrine of the fall. He argues that people were not created perfectly morally good, but rather were spiritually immature or neutral and the fall happened because we were left on our own and rebelled against God. (This is similar to the claim that Calvin makes that, although God's creation was very good, mankind's original condition was 'weak, frail and liable to fall' )
The problem of the amount of evil in the world really depends on whether freedom is 'cost-effective' or not. Davis does not attempt to prove that freedom is cost-effective because he argues firstly that that is something which only God knows, and secondly that the cost-effectiveness cannot be calculated since we do not know what is going to happen in the future. This could be construed as a weak point in Davis' argument, and it certainly would not convince an atheist, but I would argue that there are certain questions that it is unfair to expect a theist to be able to produce an answer to simply because they fall beyond the scope of human knowledge. Sontag raises the objection that:
"We cannot decide about Davis' theodicy until we know how he distinguishes what he can know about God from what he cannot."
It seems to me that it is fairly clear where the scope of our knowledge about God lies. What we can know about God is the answers we are given in the Bible; on top of that I believe that God speaks directly to people if it is appropriate, which does not mean that he will enlighten every Christian, since everyone's walk of faith is different. (Indeed, there are some things that we do not need to know: "Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker." ) However there is a stock of truths in the Bible that remain unchanged whatever we experience. Davis argues in his response to his critics that We can know what we can work out for ourselves and what has been revealed, but the rest we have to admit that we cannot know.
Davis goes on to consider what he terms the 'foreknowledge objection' to the free-will defence to which there are three parts:
(1) Why did God not foresee who would be morally good and who would not and only create the former?
(2) If morally imperfect people had to exist, why did God not create only those who would be saved?
(3) If some of the damned had to exist, why did God not refrain from creating those who would perform horrendous evils?
In answer to the first part, Davis argues that a weakened form of transworld depravity is true for all free moral agents who live long enough to make a fair number of moral choices and live in a world relevantly similar to this one. That is to say that, given these conditions, they would do at least one morally wrong action in every possible world. In response to the second part, Davis argues that if, for instance, your son is one of the elect and you are not, it seems as though you have to be created in order for your son to exist. Davis has to admit that he cannot think of an answer to the third point, but that is not to say that one does not exist. It is worth mentioning that even if God did only create those who would be saved (point two), this would not rule out the possibility of horrendous evil, as many people who commit atrocities become Christians later in their lives.
Griffin criticises that fact that Davis uses the Bible to defend his belief that not everyone is saved, but then says that when the Bible talks about hell as a place of suffering it is using 'metaphors'. I agree that this is a fair criticism of Davis, although it does not have disastrous consequences for his overall theodicy.
One of the most notable arguments against the free-will defence comes, perhaps unsurprisingly, from Mackie. He maintains that,
"If there is no logical impossibility in a man's freely choosing the good on one, or on several occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion."
Mackie argues that there is a middle way between God creating automata who always act rightly, and free agents who sometimes do wrong. He holds that God could have created free agents who always do right. In order to defeat Mackie's objection, a free-will defender would have to show that it was logically impossible for God to create a world containing significantly free beings but no evil. We can respond by saying that if we mean by a 'free' action one that is not externally compelled, then being free beings in relation to God contradicts with God making us so that we will necessarily act in a certain way. I touched earlier on Davis' response to criticisms such as Mackie's and I think it is important to recognise the distinction that he makes. Whilst it is logically possible for a human to always perform morally right actions, it is not logically possible for God to ensure that all humans always perform morally admirable actions. Davis maintains that,
"There is a logical tension between an agent's being free vis-a-vis certain acts and the agent's somehow being influenced by God always to behave in a certain way regarding those acts."
So it is possible that God exists, with the nature that Christians and classical theists ascribe to him, and that evil exists. However, a Christian would need to use other arguments and appeal to supplementary evidence to show that it is more probable that God exists than does not (for instance the argument from design and the evidence for the Resurrection, which I will not be able to discuss here, but feel are important to mention). If one believes beyond all doubt in an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good God, on the evidence of the Resurrection say, then it is a foregone conclusion that evil is justified, even if it is not possible to give all God's reasons why. A Christian does not assume that we need to know what all God's justifications are in order to believe that God is justified. It is possible to admit that we cannot know everything about God and there are some things that we do not need to know in order to wholeheartedly accept Jesus as Saviour. There are suggestions in the Bible as to why there is evil in the world, however. God has given us the gift of free will which does not compromise his omnipotence because he could still control our wills, it is just that he does not. He could force all his creatures to love him, but the reason why he does not is because he wants his creatures to come to him by faith. As Barclay points out,
"Love ceases to be love if it is merely a forced response."
As to the question of evil, I would argue that moral evil is a result of God's gift of free will to us. It is very clear in the Bible that evil is really evil and that God is totally opposed to evil, as Christians should be as well. It is not unfair that innocent people suffer, because God sent his own son Jesus to conquer death and take the punishment for all moral wrongdoings on our behalf. So not only has he given us the valuable gift of free will, which we have abused, he has also come to our rescue and taken the punishment for our wrongdoings on himself. This enables us to have free will, and eternal life. We all have the invitation to have our relationship with God freely restored through Jesus, but of course we are not forced into accepting this invitation. If we do not accept the invitation then we must pay the consequences of our decision. As John chapter 14 verse 6 shows:
"Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me'"
So as a Christian, my approach to the problem of evil is from a different angle to that of the non-believer. The important thing is all my other knowledge about God. Given what I know about him, I know that there must be a valid explanation of evil (and therefore it is a foregone conclusion that evil is justified). The problem of evil only ceases to be a problem for each individual when he comes to have knowledge of God's character through revelation. Without background beliefs about the nature of God it is hard, or maybe even impossible, to explain the existence of God along with the evil in the world. An example which Young gives will illustrate this. He asks us to imagine two men, named Mr. Brown and M. Defarge, in the war working for the French resistance. They become firm friends and get to know each other very well. Brown knows that Defarge is wholly committed to the cause, to the extent that he does not even prevent his own son from volunteering to sacrifice his life for it. One day Defarge tells Brown that they have to change tactics and asks Brown to trust him, even if Defarge seems to be acting strangely. Sure enough, Brown watches Defarge standing by while some of his own men are handed over to the Nazis. He even sees Defarge dressed in a Nazi uniform. People begin to accuse Defarge of being a traitor, but Brown never doubts his friend because he knows that Defarge allowed his son to be sacrificed for the cause. Years later, when the war is over, Defarge is able to explain to Brown why he behaved as he did. This example of Young's shows that when making a judgement we must weigh all the facts (he calls this the 'balance principle'). An atheist only looks at part of the evidence - the fact of suffering. However, a Christian looks at all the evidence - the fact of suffering and the fact of Christ and any Christian will maintain that the fact of Christ is enough to tip the scales in God's favour.
To conclude, I hope that I have shown that the logical problem of evil can be effectively defeated, since no atheist has come up with a necessarily true premise which would make set A formally contradictory, and also that significant inroads can be made into the evidential problem of evil. I would argue that atheists seem to go about the problem of evil the wrong way, asserting that God does not exist on the grounds that none of the efforts to explain how his existence is compatible with the existence of evil seem wholly satisfactory to them. Therefore, at worst the fact of evil presents a challenge to any believer in an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good God as it does not seem to be something that can easily be explained away, but, as we have seen, the fact of evil does not make belief in such a God irrational. Other considerations need to be taken into account to support a belief in God and I would argue that these are enough to outweigh the fact that maybe the justification for the existence or evil will never be fully explained by theists. I would like to conclude my paper by arguing that I do not believe the absence of an explanation of evil makes belief in an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good God impossible, or indeed irrational, given the other strong evidence for God's existence.
As a postscript I would like to defend my approach to the evidential problem of evil by adding that it is more conducive to the pursuit of truth to admit when we do not know or cannot know something, rather than make guesses in order to provide an answer at all costs and therefore risk deceiving ourselves and others. It is certainly worth finding out as much as we can, empirically or rationally, but the very nature of the issue we have been discussing makes it probable that we cannot know all the answers. To illustrate this point more clearly, imagine if someone were to ask you directions to Manchester and you did not know, it would be much more helpful to them to admit that you did not know, rather than making a guess to save yourself from embarrassment. As Davis says:
"I agree...that there is evil in the world which we cannot now explain. I only want to insist it does not follow from this that it cannot be explained."
© Anne Witton 1998. No part of this article may be copied without my permission.
