Theodicy

Theodicy is a specific branch of theology and philosophy that attempts to reconcile the observed existence of evil in the world with the assumption of the existence of a benevolent and powerful God. Any attempt to reconcile the co-existence of evil and God may thus be called "a theodicy". (See the article on the problem of evil for examples.)

Origin of the term

The term theodicy comes from the Greek θεός (theós, "god") and δίκη (díkē, "justice"), meaning literally "the justice of God". The term was coined in 1710 by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in a work entitled Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal ("essay of theodicy about the benevolence of God, the free will of man, and the origin of evil"). The purpose of the essay was to show that the evil in the world does not conflict with the goodness of God, and that notwithstanding its many evils, the world is the best of all possible worlds (see Panglossianism.)

Outline of the problem of theodicy

The problem of theodicy can be summarized in a set of statements or claims:

• (1) God exists.
• (2) God is fully good (or loving, or benign).
• (3) God is fully powerful (or omnipotent).
• (4) There is evil and suffering in the world.

It seems, intuitively at least, that not all those statements can be true together, i.e. that at least one of them must be false. If God exists and God is fully good, then that would seem to imply that God would have an interest in seeing that evil does not exist in the world. If that is true, and if God has the power to eliminate evil from the world, or to create a world in which evil does not occur — and the doctrine of creation seems to imply that God indeed does have the power to do many things (and perhaps anything that He desires to do) – then why does evil nevertheless exist and persist in the world?

All four statements are integral and central to most Christian understandings of God, as well as those of Judaism and Islam. In other words, fully devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims will have difficulty denying any of those four statements.

And yet the seeming contradiction persists. Thus nearly all efforts at theodicy can be understood as the attempt to reconcile those statements, and nearly all theodicies can be understood as attempts to show that at least one of those statements is false in some essential or important way, coupled with an attempt to show that the falsehood of that statement that is adjudged or argued to be false does not really go against the central religious dogma of whoever is creating the theodicy and that its falsehood does not really matter for an adequate theology and piety.

• A way out of the problem is to hold that one of the conflicting assumptions (one of the statements 1 through 4) is wrong: Drop either the assumption that God is omniscient, or omnipotent, or perfectly good. See the entry on the subject of God and omnipotence for more details on this point.

The problem of evil

The problem of evil has from earliest times engrossed the attention of philosophers. In his Dictionnaire historique et critique, the sceptic Pierre Bayle denied the goodness and omnipotence of God on account of the sufferings experienced in this earthly life. The Théodicée of Leibniz was directed mainly against Bayle. Imitating the example of Leibniz, other philosophers also called their treatises on the problem of evil theodicies. In a thorough treatment of the question, the (alleged) proofs both of the existence and of the attributes of God could not be disregarded, and (supposed) human knowledge of God was gradually brought within the domain of theodicy.

Some have argued that the predetermined goal of theodicy (that of justifying the existence of God with the existence of evil) tarnishes any aspirations it might have to be a serious philosophical discipline because an intellectual pursuit having a predefined goal and preassumed conclusions cannot be deemed in any reasonable way to be methodical, scientific, or rational. Should we respect an inquiry whose goal is not to find out the truth, but to prove by any means possible that a particular thing reasonably doubted (Bayle and all who follow him) is true? Proceeding from the proposition to be shown to find a proof of that proposition invites confirmation bias on the part of the theorist.

Others argue that theodicy begins with a hypothesis about God, God's nature, and the observable facts about the world, and then tests the hypothesis to see if the hypothesis can be reconciled with experience and reason. Theodicy, according to that view, is a reasonable attempt to reconcile the hypothesised existence of God with the perceived existence of evil. While theodicy cannot prove the existence of God, it can make belief in God reasonable by showing that the existence of God is not necessarily incompatible with the existence of evil. On the other hand, unlike in mathematics, in a philosophical project like a theodicy it is difficult to say what precisely constitutes a valid logical step, and though one proponent of a theodicy may be convinced of its rigour, another person may find it logically weak or reject some of its assumptions. For this reason, theodicies tend to be controversial, even among theists.

Received Theodicies

Theodicy investigates the question of God's nature and attributes. While many grant that all our cognition of God is incomplete, theodicy attempts to explain those traits of God of which we have some understanding. It includes, for instance, the classical problem of how God can be infinitely good and yet allow evil to occur.

Calvinistic Theodicy

• Calvinism asserts that all events are part of God's righteous plan, and therefore, though they may involve true evil in themselves, they are intended by God for morally justified purposes (which are not always apparent to humans). Calvinists see the duality of intentions indicated in Genesis 50:20[1] as the exemplar of this paradigm. Compare Augustine, Enchridion [On Faith, Hope and Love], 26:100.

John Calvin and other Reformed Christians have held to a form of theological determinism and compatibilism, and thus have denied that man possesses free will in the libertarian sense. So for them the problem of evil could not find resolution in appeals to such freedom. For them, the issue had to be resolved within the very nature of the compatibilistic relationship itself.

For God to hold man morally accountable, yet to predestine everything that man thinks or does, something other than the "freedom of contraries" must ground this accountability. Calvinists believe that this something is the capacity of man to choose and act according to his moral state of being, the "freedom of choice". But man's moral state of being is presently subject to sin, and this fact, itself, is part of the problem of evil. So one must inquire as to the cause of man's subjection to sin.

Reformed theology places the cause of this condition in the first man, Adam, whom they believe to be the legal representative of the entire human race. This doctrine, called Federal Headship, is also present in the doctrine of substitutionary atonement (and its corollary, Justification by Faith). As a representative of the race, when he sinned against God by eating the forbidden fruit, the entire race fell under the curse of God with him. Various explanations of the exact relationship of Adam to his posterity have been offered, but what concerns us at present is only the doctrine of Adam's legal representation of the race.

Here another question presents itself. How could Adam be held accountable (and with him the entire human race), if he was not free to do other than he did do—if God really intended for him to do exactly as he did? With this question we come to the heart of the Reformed Theodicy. The main points are, first, that no one has ever been held accountable for what they could have thought or done, only for what they have thought or done, and for their purposes in thinking or doing it; and, second, that though both Adam and God intended that evil should come about, their purposes were distinct, God's being ultimately good, Adam's being ultimately evil.

The Reformed Theodicy boils down to the distinction of purposes between the primary agent (God) and the secondary agents (humans). While it is true that God intends to bring about evil, God's purpose is not, of itself, evil (cf. Gen. 50:20). This idea can be expressed by analogy:

Picture a man holding down a child while other men stick pieces of metal into the child's eye, all the while the child is screaming in pain, crying out for them to stop. On the surface it seems like a horrible, cruel thing these men are doing to the child. But if we add the information that the child is bleeding to death from the nasal cavity, that there is no time for anesthetic, that the man holding him down is his loving father, and that the men sticking the metal into his eye are doctors trying to save his life, then the problem of evil disappears. The evil doesn't disappear, it is still there (just ask the child!), but the problem of evil is no longer present, because the intention is good.

In other words not all actions which bring about suffering or even evil acts are necessarily evil themselves. There is no problem of evil in the example with the father, and arguably no evil in the sense of moral failing, because his actions serve a greater good. Similarly one can serve a greater good even if you know that your choice will bring about some immoral action. In either case the Calvinist must still claim that God's choice to create a flawed man who would engage in sin or evil does serve a greater good. Thus it seems this position allows us no choice but to accept that some mysterious good is served by having a world filled with imperfect and sometimes evil men as opposed to a world where only those souls who will choose to be good and holy are born.

Opponents of this position have argued that it endorses an "ends justifies the means" system of ethics, but this charge is suspect since Reformed Christians claim that the means, of themselves, are truly evil, and therefore subject to punishment, not justified by the ends to which God intends them.

Proponents have argued that the Free Will Theodicy is actually, in principle, no different from the Reformed Theodicy, it simply places the bare possession of libertarian free will as the good that God intented to bring about by the existence of evil, and that the Reformed Theodicy does more justice to the Biblical account of God and man.

In Hyper-Calvinism, on the contrary, the parallel existence of the goodness of God, and evil, is not considered a paradox at all, and hence there is no acknowledgement of a theodicy within churches holding to such a theology. The idea here is that God is the active creator and instigator of all sin and evil, including the fall, using these as instruments to accomplish his plan. Satan, thus, is considered to have no power of his own but is merely God's puppet (citing e.g. the parallel Bible verses of 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1).

An important part of Hyper-Calvinism is the belief in the absolute predestination of all things by God, i.e., nothing happens unless God actively makes something happen. One consequence of this view is that human beings, albeit separate entities from God, do not have a will separate from God. Now, it is generally agreed upon that a person can be held responsible only when that person made an active decision to commit perhaps a fellony; Hyper-Calvinists, however, do not agree with that assertion, instead saying that while man has no free will, God will still hold that man responsible for whatever sins he commits because he (God) has decided to judge mankind by his laws.

Although they do not admit it, Calvinists really deny the truth of Statement 2 above: the claim that God is fully good. The Calvinist view of double predestination means that some people are predestined to damnation. That means that God has established and chosen evil for some people. The attempt to say that this is intended by God for morally justified purposes is incoherent.

The Free Will Defense (0f God)

• Open Theism asserts that God's goodness is displayed in the creation of beings with free will. The decision of a free will is not determined and therefore the decision and its consequences do not exist until the decision is made. Given free will, even an omniscient God would not claim to know that which God had determined not to be knowable. Therefore, free creatures may commit evil actions, but God's gift of freedom is still good.

This is usually called the “free will defense” of God, and is based on a denial of Statement 3; this defense of God says, in effect, that God is not fully powerful because He has voluntarily limited Himself by giving humans choice and by agreeing to abide by those human choices. According to this view, evil is the consequence of God permitting humans to have free will.

There are several additional versions of this view:

• God created perfect angels and perfect humans with a free will. Some of his creations chose independence and lost their perfection: they began to sin, which resulted in evil doing and death. For a while God will allow this to continue, so that it can be proven that his creations can not be happy while independent from God because this was the challenge which caused the rebellion in the first place. In due time God will restore the people who choose to depend on God to perfection and so bring an end to sin and with it an end to evil.

• God is a righteous judge; people get what they deserve. If someone suffers, that is because they committed a sin that merits such suffering. (This is also known as the just world hypothesis).

Response to the free will defense

Assume that both God and Man possess ultimate free will. This certainly entails the possibility of evil acts, making the free will theodicy plausible prima facie.

The central problem with this view is that it confuses freedom with causation. It may indeed be true that, if freedom exists for humans, then through the exercise of this freedom humans may choose evil. But this does not explain the origin of evil or the origin of the motivation to commit evil. Thus, this view does not address the causation problem, nor does it answer the question why, in a universe that is supposedly good because God is supposedly good, evil nevertheless emerges. It also does not absolve God of the charge that His universe somehow has evil in it inherently, which means that God’s work is not fully good. In other words, it does not really show how Statement 2 can nevertheless be true even though there is evil in the world.

Must free will necessarily lead to evil? How did evil come to be in the first place? One explanation is that humans are corrupt at heart; but that would assume a will that is evil rather than free. It would also mean that God created evil because God created human nature.

Another explanation is that to be free we must act differently from God, and if God is morally perfect, our free actions must then be evil; but this confuses free action itself, with a way that we might recognize free action. A simpler explanation is that it may merely be a contingent fact that humans happen to choose evil by their exercise of freedom. And evil, having once arisen even by chance, plausibly led to more evil.

The free will theodicy argues that if God were to 'get involved' and start influencing human actions for the better, then human actions wouldn't be free any longer. Human freedom means that God cannot guarantee human perfection (see incompatible-properties arguments).

This requires that free will be a good in itself, greater than the evil it costs to allow such freedom. Why should it be better for God to respect human freedom? What's so great about free will? The response is that free will is what makes us valuable moral agents, and that, if God were to deny us our freedom, human society would be in a deep sense, like an assemblage of robots: not only incapable of evil, but incapable of moral choice in general.... Though value would exist in such a world, the free moral agency possessed by God and actual humans is argued to be far greater. All the cruelty that we humans freely perform is indeed regrettable, but it is the price of freedom.

This argument can only explain evil traceable, however indirectly, to free will. It does not explain any catastrophic horror that has nothing to do with human choices, or possibly the choices of other free beings. Think of earthquakes, floods, and disease—so-called 'natural evil' or 'acts of God'. We cannot confront a paralyzed, intellectually disabled, and blind Tay-Sachs child and his despondent parents and then chalk up the entire wretched scenario directly to free will. No one chose it. Healing that child wouldn't obviously tread on anyone's freedom. Free will does not seem to account for all the evil we observe, but only certain evil such as that we humans freely create—so-called 'moral evil'.

In fact, many philosophers make a distinction between what is usually called "moral evil" and what is usually called "natural evil." Moral evil is evil that results from human action and agency, and includes such thigs as murder, war, theft, rape, fraud, lying, and adultery. Natural evil is evil that does not involve human agency or choice, but results from what are sometimes called "acts of God." This includes natural events such as tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, volcanos, hurricanes, and other natural events that kill thousands of children and other innocent people. It also includes plagues and diseases such as smallpox, typhus, malaria, polio, influenza and other sicknesses that also kill thousands of people. The free will defense, if successful, works only for moral evils; it does not work for natural evils. Thus those who favor the free will defense almost always deny that natural evils are truly evil. In other words, they adopt Statement 4 in dealing with natural evils.

Some instances of moral evil themselves involve violations of free will—e.g., murder or rape, and these present a more complex problem for those who favor the free will defense. For God to step in and deny the violator his freedom would also be to protect the victim's freedom. In such cases, whose free will is more valuable—which instance of coercion would be worse? It is morally implausible that, given that choice, the best thing to do is to respect a rapist's free choice to rape rather than the victim's free choice not to be raped.

So, for moral evil involving coercion—the value of free will may not justify God's inaction. However, all or nearly all evil involves people abridging each other's freedoms. But the problem the theodicy addresses is not whether the rapist abridges another's freedom (they do), but whether God will abridge anyone's freedom. For God to intervene on either side would abridge freedom. God's permitting a rape to occur is logically no different from God permitting any other moral evil to occur, making this criticism of free will theodicy circular.

Others attack this theodicy on other grounds. Some deny the existence of free will altogether, and so have no need for the proposal in the first place. Compatibilists sometimes attack the essential premise that God cannot influence our choices without thereby cancelling our freedom. After all, compatibilists believe that determinism is consistent with human freedom. And if determinism can allow for freedom, perhaps so can appropriate divine meddling with our decisions. Thus the question of exactly how God's intervention would undermine free moral agency is crucial. We need a reason to think that there are at least some, perhaps many, ways that God really couldn't override our choices without cancelling our freedom. The customary appeal is to a strong construal of free will.

Another challenge focuses on different ways to interfere with freedom. One way is to 'jump in' and take control of the agent, dictating its every movement and thought. This is the kind of coercion we envision in mad scientist stories. But it might also be the kind of coercion that motivates our above intuition that if God got involved, we'd all be 'robots'. But there are other, softer kinds of coercion. Look to policemen and jailers. They don't directly take control of an agent's decisions. They just threaten the agent with physical force and restraint, and carry out their threats if necessary. Policemen and jailers restrict our freedom, but not in the same way. If God were to get involved as a Divine Policeman, making threats and enforcing them, then would we be 'robots'? Perhaps not, or at least not in the same way. Instead, we'd be citizens of a divine nation-state, and a very safe and reliable nation-state at that. But then the moral claim that God should hold back must be more refined: To just what extent could God (consistently) intervene, without abridging free will?

Other challenges attack the idea that evil-eliminating divine interventions must cancel human freedom. These challenges suggest different ways for God to eliminate evil, all the while leaving our free will untouched—"innocent interventions". One proposal is for God to fortify humans as to render us less vulnerable to the sins of our fellows. We could be bullet-proof, invulnerable to poison, etc. That way, humans would retain the capacity for evil choices and activities; it's just that such evil behavior would be harmless to the 'victims' and futile for the evildoers. On the other hand, it is not obvious that such a system could be constructed. If people cannot do harm, then they are not free moral agents, though they may be free agents in some very restricted sense. Most supporters of a free will theodicy would argue that it is moral free agency, not a vacuous freedom that has no moral consequences, which is essential to making us truly different from automata.

A very similar proposal is that God could allow sinful acts, but stop their evil consequences. So if I fire a rifle at your head, God allows me to make the decision, but then makes the trigger stick, or the rifle misfire, or the bullet pop out of existence. Such interventions would, happily, divorce evil choices from the subsequent suffering. An objection to this solution is that without observing the evil consequences of our actions we would not truly be making moral choices at all. In other words it is not only important for us to have freedom to choose our actions but also to have freedom with consequences. Presumably, a world where guns only fired when aimed at just targets would not truly present us the option to choose evil since it would be apparent that no harm comes from our actions; and a world where all evil choices were grossly unattractive would likewise not leave us truly free moral agents.

Maltheistic Theodicy

Maltheism asserts that the "problem of evil" is not a problem at all because the initial question has a simple answer: there is no way that a benevolent omnipotent God would allow evil in the world. Therefore, they reason, God is either not benevolent or not omnipotent.

This view gets to the heart of what most devout theodicies need to deal with. Devout believers cannot deny Statement 1 (God exists), and no person can, without going through contortions of argument and denial of the obvious, really deny Statement 4 (Evil exists in the world). Thus devout theodicies are left with denying either Statement 2 or Statement 3 – such theodicies need to deny or curtail either the goodness (benevolence) or the power (omnipotence) of God. For that reason, theodicy is sometimes expressed as being about a conflict between the goodness and the power of God.

Religions such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism, and even some Christian groups, dispense with the issue by embracing various forms of dualism, in which God is opposed by an evil counterpart, and is therefore not omnipotent.

Maltheists go even further than the Gnostics, in a sense, by saying that God simply is evil himself. To them, the problem of evil is not a problem at all, and is neatly resolved by acknowledging that an omnipotent benevolent God would not create a world in which there was evil, concluding that God, assuming he exists, is either not omnipotent, not benevolent, or perhaps both. (They frequently add that if God is not omnipotent but claims that he is, he is thus lying, and consequently is also justifiably deemed evil in nature.)

Modified Dualism

"Modified Dualism" holds that, since the powers of good and evil are unequal, the evil power is merely tolerated by the good power, who turns all the acts of the evil power into eventual good. Classical Christianity, i.e, from the Apostolic Fathers to Augustine, has been characterized as "modified Dualism". Sts. Augustine and Basil the Great both explicitly mention this idea. St. John of Damascus proposed that God deliberately leaves some events "in our hands". In early modern times (1714) a modified Dualism was advocated by John of Tobolsk. Calvinism may be seen as a form of "modified Dualism" in the Augustinian tradition.

Denial of the existence of God

Some people have responded to the problem of evil by declaring that the existence of evil shown the non-existence of God. This is a denial of clause 1 (above). Many people have concluded, based on their observation of the evil in the world, that God does not exist. For obvious reasons, this tack is not available to anyone who believes in the existence of God.

The existence of God, however, does not imply the goodness of God, even though many people have assumed otherwise and thought that if God exists then God is wholly good. But it is entirely possible that even though God exists, He may not be fully good. Thus, in that view, the existence of evil traces back to some evil or deficiency in God.

Three additional variations on the denial of Statement 1:

• Atheists resolve the apparent contradiction by rejecting the hypothesized existence of God (possibly for reasons other than the problem of evil). Some atheists think that the problem of evil can be used to prove that no gods exist by the method of reductio ad absurdum. This method does not prove the non-existence of all gods, rather it is an argument that if such a god exists then he is not both omnipotent and benevolent.

• Agnostics believe that no answer to the question of religion will ever be found, so decide to ignore the problem altogether.

• Nontheists claim that statements about God are unimportant or meaningless.

Denial of the existence of evil

Some people have attempted to solve the problem of theodicy by denying Statement 4 by asserting that what humans consider evil or suffering is an illusion or is unimportant. Christian Science and some forms of Hinduism take that tack.

There are numerous ways that approach has been formulated. One is to hold that events thought to be evil are not really so (such as deaths by natural disaster). Another is to say that God's divine plan is good, so what we see as evil is not really evil; rather, it is part of a divine design that is actually good, and it is our limitations that prevent us from seeing the big picture.

An approach that is much like an outright denial of the existence of evil is to claim that suffering is merely an appearance, similar to the Buddhist teaching that suffering is illusion (for example, see this summary on BeliefNet). Presumably an omnipotent God could isolate each of us in a 'virtual' world where others appear to suffer but in reality are soulless, experience free imitations of life, i.e., each soul could inhabit its own matrix filled entirely with programs imitating human suffering but not actually experiencing it. Admittedly, nothing prevents one from believing this is actually the case and it does appear to solve the dilemma. However, a theology which rests on a huge deception orchestrated by the supreme being (namely, the false appearance that our acts can do evil), is unattractive to those concerned with knowledge of the deity, which requires revelation and the veracity of god.

There are numerous variations on this theme of denying the existence or permanence of evil, or of asserting that evil is some part of a larger divine plan that is inherently good:

• A perfect God is not only good but also evil, since perfection implies no lacking, including not lacking that which is evil. A lacking of evil would imply that there is something external to his all-encompassing perfection. This is related to monistic philosophies such as advaita, or pantheism.

• God may intend evil and suffering as a test for humanity. Without the possibility to choose to do good or evil acts humanity would be nothing but robots.

• Evil is the consequence, not cause, of people not observing God's revealed will. Universal reciprocated love would solve most of the problems that lead to the evils discussed here.

• God's ultimate purpose is to glorify Himself (which He alone is infinitely entitled to, without vanity). He allows evil to exist so that we will appreciate goodness all the more, in the same way that the blind man healed by Jesus appreciated his sight more so than those around him who had never experienced blindness.

• Evil is one way that God tests humanity, to see if we are worthy of His grace.

• Evil and pain exist in this world only. This world is only a prelude to the afterlife, where no pain will exist. The scales of justice are balanced in the afterlife.

• The world is corrupt and of itself shouldn't have been created, but the work of Christ (or some savior figure) redeems the world and thus God's creation of it.

• Absolute evil is not actually real. Rather, it is only the condition of lack of goodness. William Hatcher's explanation is an example of this approach.

• Evil is relative to good; neither good nor evil could exist without both existing simultaneously.

• Karma: Evil is caused by past bad deeds, either in one's current life or one's previous lives. It is only when this karmic chain of causation is broken that reincarnation ends. This explains why an infant may be born into misery, due to actions that may have been perpetrated in previous lives.

• Evolutionary theodicy, suggests that the plan that God has involves the elimination of all evil at the end of time, but that the means by which creation occurs always leads to the presence of evil in the interim. This theory is linked to the evolution of God himself as present in the cosmos.

Evidential arguments from evil seek to show that the existence of evil provides evidence for God's nonexistence, rather than implying the logical impossibility of God. Philosophers arguing against this point of view often believe that deductively valid arguments based on assumptions of evil will not succeed or must rest on "dead" hypotheses. Such philosophers frequently argue that it is simply impossible for one to know for sure which things are evil because of man's limited foresight. The theist may always postulate some unknown, distant good that cannot be seen, and this will always be possible since there will always theoretically be something that God can know that we cannot. For instance, although improbable, there could be some natural law in virtue of which any instance of suffering could cause some distant, unforseeable good to occur. Hence, such philosophers focus instead on whether evil provides evidence for or against the existence of God. Their line of argument is: the existence of God may be logically compatible with the existence of evil, but the logical possibility of his existence does not mean that we are justified in believing that He does in fact exist. For such a belief to be justified, evidence is needed, and in the balance of evidence for and against the existence of God, the facts about evil weigh heavily on the negative side of the scales. The classic proponent of this line of argument is William Rowe.

Relativity of goodness — evil is not absolute

A less well known approach has been that of the mathematical logician William Hatcher. He has written about the problem of evil from a relational logic point of view. Hatcher has argued that the problem may be resolved with a minimum of theological assumptions. This is quite appealing because it does not tie the traditional problem to any particular brand of theology. It is part of an approach to traditional philosophical problems that Hatcher calls Minimalism (not to be confused with the use of the same term in art and pop culture).

Briefly, Hatcher uses relational logic to show that very simple models of moral value that include a minimalist concept of "God" cannot be consistent with the premise of evil as an absolute, whereas goodness as an absolute is entirely consistent with the other postulates concerning moral value. In Hatcher's view one can only validly talk about an act A being "less good" than an act B, one cannot logically commit to saying that A is absolutely evil, unless one is prepared to abandon other more reasonable principles.

Human nature

Another, more subtle proposal is for God to alter human nature for the better. Now, talk of improving our nature immediately strikes us as coercive — surely, it would rob us our freedom as moral beings! But remember that we already have a nature, a bundle of tendencies that influences our choices. Now, the most ardent determinist must grant that human nature alone does not determine our choices. But the most ardent libertarian must in turn grant that our choices are significantly influenced by our natures. It is easier for a sociopath to kill a child than it is for the rest of us. It is easier for us to send money to help our children than to help complete strangers. This is true, even if ultimately we each have final say on our decisions. Now note that this human nature is flawed. We are disposed to be cruel and callous in many ways. The world might be a better place if humans shared a more virtuous and generous nature.

But would it violate our freedom for God to have given us a better nature? Perhaps not. We might choose a kinder nature, if, for example, virtue came in pill form. We might wish it were easier for us to do good. This suggests that an improved nature may be in accordance with our free will, and not contrary to it. Moreover, if God exists, then surely he had a large hand in crafting human nature. As long as he's giving us some nature or another, why not shoot for a virtuous nature? If it's wrong to make humans virtuous, then why should it be less wrong to make humans corrupt?

One salient theistic reply is that our corrupt nature is due to the Original Sin of the first human couple. Their free choice changed us for the worse, and for God to change us for the better would be to disrespect their free choice. But this reply raises too many troubling issues of its own. First, the wholesale corruption of mankind was, for Adam and Eve anyway, an unforeseeable consequence of Original Sin; one can no more allege that they truly chose human corruption than that Gavrilo Princip truly chose to plunge Europe into war. Big mistakes don't count as freely chosen outcomes. Second, even if Adam and Eve really did choose human nature for the rest of us, why should their choice count for so much? Don't the rest of us have a say? Invoking Original Sin only makes God look more and more morally confused.

God is not omnipotent or omniscient

The problem of theodicy exists only when one simultaneously holds that God is omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful) and benevolent (all good). The problem of evil does not exist if one gives up any of these three beliefs.

Some schools of the Kabbalah (esoteric Jewish mysticism) argue that the creation of the universe required a self-limitation on the part of God, and that evil is a consequence of God's self-imposed exile from the universe He created. In some readings of this theology, God has deliberately created an imperfect world. The question then arises as to why God would create such a world, and the standard response is to maximize human freedom and free will. Other readings of the same Kabbalistic texts one can hold that this is the best world that God could possibly create, and that God is not omnipotent. Given this reading, the problem of evil does not exist.

In some theistic Unitarian Universalism, in much of Conservative and Reform Judaism, and in some liberal wings of Protestant Christianity, God is said to be capable of acting in the world only through persuasion, and not by coercion. God makes Himself manifest in the world through inspiration and the creation of possibility, and not by miracles or violations of the laws of nature. God relinquishes his omnipotence, in order that humanity might have absolute free will. In this view, the problem of evil does not exist.

The idea of a non-omnipotent God was developed by philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, in the theological system known as process theology.

In the Evangelical movement of some Protestant churches, Open Theism (also called Free Will Theism), similarly asserts that God acts under His own power, but the future following truly free acts does not yet exist and therefore cannot be known even to an omniscient God.

Mackie and Plantinga

J. L. Mackie, in his now classic article "Evil and Omnipotence", argued that human freedom is consistent with human perfection, and that God should have opted for both. Mackie asserts that human misconduct is a contingent matter—we can choose to do good or evil, with both alternatives being possible. He then asks us to imagine a world in which everyone always chooses good and never chooses evil—a virtuous and sinless world. Finally, he notes that God could have chosen to bring about any possible world, from the one that is actual, to a world in which people choose more wickedly, to the good world Mackie just described. So why not go with the good world? The only reply can be that, in choosing to bring about that world, God would thereby deny humans their freedom. But that can't be true. For if it were, then God would have denied us our freedom by bringing about the actual world. Bringing about a world in which people make choices is not freedom-cancelling, and so God should have brought about a world in which people make better choices. This argument is the seed of contemporary discussions of the logical argument from evil, which aims to show that theism and evil are logically incompatible.

Alvin Plantinga, in a response that has also achieved 'classic' status, answers Mackie. Plantinga's view is a version of the "free will defense." He argues that evil is consistent with God's existence, because there are some possible worlds that God cannot bring about. This seems curious enough, if we assume that God is omnipotent. Shouldn't he be able to bring about any possible world he wants? But Plantinga reminds us that there are always trivial limits on omnipotence—God can't make 2+2=5 or create a married bachelor. Plantinga's work extends these trivial limits to very non-trivial results.

Step one: Plantinga proposes that there are logical truths—so-called "counterfactuals of freedom"—about our free choices in various possible situations, with one choice dictated for every situation. On Plantinga's example, where S is a situation in which Curley is free to take or refuse a bribe, it is either true that "If Curley were to be free in S, he would take the bribe" or "If Curley were to be free in S, he would refuse the bribe" (assume that exactly one can be true). These truths about what we would freely do in possible situations help make us what we are, and are timelessly and necessarily true—and so, crucially, out of God's hands. Consequently, if the first proposition is true (and Curley would take the bribe), then God cannot bring about the possible world in which Curley refuses the bribe. God can only bring about S and sadly watch Curley's freely chosen venality manifest itself, as timelessly reported by that unchangeable counterfactual of freedom.

Step two: Plantinga argues for the possibility of a person who will sin at least once, no matter what situation God puts him in. Such a person suffers from so-called "transworld depravity". Though he can choose to do good in each situation, though it is possible that he does good in each situation, it is nevertheless true that he will choose to sin, a sad fact reported by his counterfactuals of freedom. And God can do nothing to bring about the sinless possible worlds—that's up to the sinner, who will, as a matter of fact, choose otherwise.

We've arrived at the conclusion that perhaps even God cannot bring about Mackie's virtuous and sinless worlds. God may be omnipotent, but he can't change people's free decisions, and he can't change the fact that they will freely choose as they do. And if people will make nasty choices, then those possible worlds in which they choose good are beyond God's reach. Plantinga proposes that perhaps all persons suffer from transworld depravity, that perhaps the actual world, though not the best possible world, is the best one that God could bring about, if he is to respect the free choices of the creatures therein. Natural evil? Perhaps it's also the result of sinful actions—the actions of invisible, powerful moral agents like demons. And this scenario is one in which God's moral perfection is squared with having created a horrid world like our own.

Here another problem arises, related to God's claim (in many religions) that, after the end of the world, a paradise will be created where evil is defeated. The whole argument that God in his omnipotence could not create the "virtuous sinless world" described above seems to be contradicted by his own claim to plan to do this very thing! Heaven is the promised paradise of infinite bounty that fully matches the criteria of this virtuous sinless world. If such a world is not possible, then God is lying about the promise of Heaven. If such a world is possible, and God plans to make one world that way, why wasn't our world also made this way?

One recent, friendly response to Plantinga is from Daniel Howard-Snyder and John O'Leary-Hawthorne. They claim that, to show the compatibility of theism and evil, Plantinga needs to support the possibility of his sketched scenario — it mustn't be reasonable to doubt its possibility. And they claim that the possibility of all persons being transworld depraved is unsupported. After all, there is another prima facie possibility, that all persons are in fact transworld sanctified (and so would do no wrong). Both 'possibilities' seem equally possible, and since they rule each other out, only one of them can be possible. Thus it is reasonable to doubt the possibility of either, and it is reasonable to doubt that Plantinga's scenario is possible; so it is reasonable to doubt that God really is consistent with evil. The two critics take to repairing Plantinga's argument, by replacing the "it is possible that" propositions with similar "for all we reasonably believe, it is possible that" propositions. The conclusion is then not that theism and evil are compatible, but that, for all we reasonably believe, theism and evil are compatible. The compatibility is not proven, but the incompatibility isn't reasonable, either. Mackie is still rebutted.

Another, stronger challenge comes from Richard Gale. In Plantinga's scenario, God's decisions cause human behavior and the psychological makeup whence that behavior stems; consequently, Gale maintains, human freedom gets cancelled by God's decisions. Ironically, then, Plantinga's "free will defense" story is a story without human freedom. Now, as Gale notes, Plantinga's God can't change peoples' counterfactuals of freedom; the truth of these propositions is up to the relevant people. But, by Plantinga, God does decide which possible persons get actualized, knowing full well their counterfactuals of freedom; it's up to God who gets to exist and then do their stuff. Moreover, God crafts his creatures' psychological makeup, which in turn exercises significant influence over their decisions. This is freedom-cancelling, even if our psychology doesn't determine our decisions, for it makes God like a mad scientist who implants a test subject with new dispositions and preferences to make her more agreeable. And to decide who gets instantiated is to be a sufficient cause of what decisions get made, even if the persons themselves are sufficient causes in their own right. The result is that Plantinga's God is in charge of too much, robbing humans of their freedom. Or so Gale avers.

In his book The Problem of Pain the literary critic and popular theologian C. S. Lewis called pain "God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world".

General problems with all theodicies

An argument that has been raised against theodicies is that, if a theodicy were true, it would completely nullify morality. If a theodicy were true, then all evil events, including human actions, can be somehow rationalized as permitted or affected by God, and therefore there can no longer be such a thing as "evil" values, even for a murderer (indeed, this is the basis of the moral argument from evil, by Dean Stretton [2]).

Hindu answers to the problem of evil

Hindu philosophers, especially those from the Vedanta school, have also attempted to craft solutions to the problem of evil. The whole notions of karma and reincarnation were possible explanations - that is, bad things happen to good people because they have been reincarnated in a lesser place due to their misdeeds in previous incarnations (which they cannot remember). Shri Madhvacharya, with his beliefs of dualism, has crafted his own solutions to the problem of evil that persists in spite of an all-loving omnipotent supreme Being.

Anti-Theodicy and Ad Hominem Attacks

Some efforts to deal with the problem of theodicy amount to ad hominem attacks on those who attempt to raise and deal with the issue. Those attacks take some form of "Who are you, unworthy creature, to think that you have the ability or authority to challenge God and ask questions of or about Him in this way?" (Interestingly enough, the two places in the Bible where the problem of theodicy is dealt with directly, in Job 40 and 41, and in Romans 9: 14-21, the answers given are of that form, namely "You, human, are unworthy to question God and his ways; God is higher and more powerful than you and He can do as He pleases.")

The late Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder wrote an unfinished essay entitled "Trinity Versus Theodicy: Hebraic Realism And The Temptation To Judge God" (1996). This can be understood as a subtle version of the ad hominem approach to the problem of theodicy.

Yoder argues that "if God be God" then theodicy is an oxymoron and idolatry. Yoder is not opposed to attempts to reconcile the existence of a God with the existence of evil; rather, he is against a particular approach to the problem. He does not "deny that there are ways in which forms of discourse in the mode of theodicy may have a function, subject to the discipline of a wider setting."

Yoder was deeply concerned and engaged with the problem of evil; specifically, the evil of violence and war and how we resist it. Yoder's "case [is] against garden variety 'theodicy' "— in particular, theodicy as a judgment or defense of God.

Yoder asks:

• a) Where do you get the criteria by which you evaluate God? Why are the criteria you use the right ones?
• b) Why [do] you think you are qualified for the business of accrediting Gods?
• c) If you think you are qualified for that business, how does the adjudication proceed? [W]hat are the lexical rules?

Yoder's argument is against theodicy, strictly speaking. This is the narrow sense Zachary Braiterman mentions in (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (1998). He writes, "Theodicy is a familiar technical term, coined by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to mean 'the justification of God.' " In his book, Braiterman coins the term "antitheodicy" meaning "refusing to justify, explain, or accept" the relationship between "God (or some other form of ultimate reality), evil, and suffering."

Braiterman uses the term "in order to account for a particular religious sensibility, based (in part) on fragments selectively culled from classical Jewish texts, that dominates post-Holocaust Jewish thought." Braiterman asserts, "Although it often borders on blasphemy, antitheodicy does not constitute atheism; it might even express stubborn love that human persons have for God. After all, the author of a genuine antitheodic statement must believe that an actual relationship subsists between God and evil in order to reject it; and they must love God in order to be offended by that relationship."

Two of the Jewish post-Shoah thinkers that Braiterman cites as antitheodicists (Emil Fackenheim and Richard Rubinstein) are also cited by Yoder. Yoder describes their approach as "the Jewish complaint against God, dramatically updated (and philosophically unfolded) since Auschwitz ... The faithful under the pogrom proceed with their prayers, after denouncing JHWH/Adonai for what He has let happen." Yoder sees this as a valid form of discourse in the mode of theodicy but he claims it is "the opposite of theodicy."

Cacodaemony

An extension is cacodaemony- attempts to reconcile the existence of good in the world with the assumption of an onnimalevolent omnipotent Demon. This was a philosophical exercise by Steven M. Cahn in his essay entitled "Cacodaemony." which, through the weakness of the concept of cacodaemony, the weakness of theodicy is underlined.

External links

• Christian Cadre, Theodicy
• Stanford Encyclopedia: Problem of Evil
• Stanford Encyclopedia: Leibniz on the Problem of Evil
• Evidential Arguments from Evil
• Project Gutenburg: Leibniz, Theodicy (English translation)