A student was challenged by his professor. ‘Did God create everything?’ ‘Yes’ the student answered. The professor replied, ‘if God created everything then he created evil and according to the principal that our work defines who we are God must be evil.’ The student fell silent. Another student raised his hand ‘can I ask you a question professor?’ ‘Yes of course’ he replied. ‘Does cold exist?’ asked the student ‘Of course it exists, have you never been cold?’ The other students snickered. The student replied, ‘in fact sir cold does not exist. According to the laws of physics what we consider as cold is the absence of heat. Every-body is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy or heat. Absolute zero is the absence of heat. Matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at that temperature. Cold does not exist. We have invented the word to describe how we feel if we have no heat.’
‘Professor, does darkness exist?’ The professor responded, ‘of course it does’. The student replied, ‘once again you are wrong sir, darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light. Light we can study, but not darkness. We can use Newton’s prism to break light into colours and study the various wavelengths of each colour. You cannot measure darkness. A ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you know how dark a certain space is? You measure the amount of light in the space. Darkness is a term used by man to describe what happens when there is no light.’
Finally the young man asked the professor, ‘sir, does evil exist?’ Now uncertain the professor responded ‘of course, we see it every day, it is the daily example of man’s inhumanity to man, it is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil’. To this the student replied, ‘evil is not like light and heat but it’s like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light’. The professor fell silent.
Many theists believe evil is the absence of good and conclude that God cannot be blamed for creating it. But this account does not do enough to resolve the problem of evil because there is still a tension between the absence of good and the existence of an omnipotent benevolent God who should have preferred to create all things good.
The whole point of morality and the reason why genetic determinism is not an adequate model is because humans have taken an evolutionary path in which simple determinism would be fatal.
In Dennett’s words we humans cannot afford to be sphexish. We raise too few and put too much effort into raising children to risk losing them if something goes awry – instead we have to adapt to unpredictable inputs, and this, as we know is where morality comes in[1]. So regardless of how we choose to define morality, as either altruistic norm or divine absolute, a tension persists between the existence of evil and a benevolent omniscient omnipotent God who should have created a world other than this one;
1. God is omnipotent
2. God is omniscient
3. God is perfectly good.
4. Evil [however that is defined] exists.
5. If God is omnipotent, he would be able to prevent all of the evil and suffering in the world.
6. If God is omniscient, he would know about all of the evil and suffering in the world and would know how to eliminate or prevent it.
7. If God is perfectly good, he would want to prevent all of the evil and suffering in the world.
8. If God knows about all of the evil and suffering in the world, knows how to eliminate or prevent it, is powerful enough to prevent it, and yet does not prevent it, he must not be perfectly good.
9. If God knows about all of the evil and suffering, knows how to eliminate or prevent it, wants to prevent it, and yet does not do so, he must not be all- powerful.
10. If God is powerful enough to prevent all of the evil and suffering, wants to do so, and yet does not, he must not know about all of the suffering or know how to eliminate or prevent it—that is, he must not be all-knowing.
From (7) through (10) we can infer:
11. If evil and suffering exist, then God is not omnipotent, not omniscient, or not perfectly good.
According to the coherence theory of truth a set of statements is logically inconsistent if and only if that set includes a direct contradiction or a direct contradiction can be deduced from that set. Therefore a set of statements is logically consistent if and only if all propositions are true. It should be noted that no matter how improbable the incoherent proposition contained in the set, its possibility is enough to disprove any logical argument. Our task then is to attack the key of this particular argument which is developed through the statements (1) to (4) which can be summarised as;
12. It is not possible for an omnipotent benevolent God to co-exist with evil.
12. It is not possible for an omnipotent benevolent God to co-exist with evil.
Plantinga[2] argues on face value statement (12) is not an explicit contradiction. If someone thinks the statement contradictory then the burden of proof lies with them to establish the premise that serves to make the contradiction explicit. The proposition needed to bolster (12) would need to be something like;
13 If God is omnipotent, then He can create any world he desires and so would create a world without evil for He would prefer that world.
But Plantinga argues it is not possible for an omnipotent benevolent God to create the world He most prefers for omnipotence does not demand God do logically impossible tasks. God cannot hear silence, he cannot make square circles and he cannot make rocks he cannot lift. Similarly if creatures are free then God logically cannot create a world in which free creatures cannot freely choose to do contrary to what God created good. God may have faced a choice; either he created a deterministic world where free will is illusory or a world that is truly free.
C. S. Lewis[3] asks ‘why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other…. And for that they must be free. Of course, God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.’
Since this line of reasoning provides a possible if not actualised defence of (12) it is widely conceded that the logical argument of evil does not bring a forceful argument against Christianity; but what of the problem of natural evil that does not depend on human agency at all?
Man…trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law –
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrek’d against His creed
We know that physical processes do not suddenly and spontaneously bring about adaptive complexity. The only sudden changes are those that destroy or degrade; they never create. Boeing 747’s crash in an instant but they never reassemble in the junk yard. In the case of life, there is no known rival to the slow gradual complexity forming process of natural selection – ‘however diverse evolutionary mechanisms may be, if there is no other generalization that can be made about life all around the universe, I am betting it will always be recognizable as Darwinian Life. The Darwinian Law….may be as universal as the great laws of physics[4]’.
Theologian's can use Darwin’s thesis to side step the theological quagmire that gruesome creatures such as Ichneumonidae present; for they can simply argue that the freedom afforded by evolution effectively absolves God of direct design responsibility. This is convincing enough for as Giberson[5] points out ‘nearly everyone accepts that small scale micro evolution is an uncontroversial fact. We know of nobody who challenges this because there are so many examples, like bacteria constantly evolving new defences against antibiotics. But bacteria’s capacity to evolve defences against penicillin, while certainly a big deal for the bacteria and the pharmaceutical industry, hardly compels us to accept that this process can turn a reptile into a bird or a land animal into a whale……..scientists however, make the confident claim that macroevolution is simply microevolution writ large; add up enough small changes and we get a large change.’
The distinction between the type of evolution needed to theologically defend the rise of gruesome species and naturalistic evolution that seeks to replace God is arbitrary for every evolutionary change along the path of life is essentially a micro change. Nonetheless we can still ask whether a near infinite number of micro changes can accumulate without limit and what, if any, are the theological consequences if there is limitless change?
From an objective standpoint it has been conclusively demonstrated that the morphological and genetic categorisations are in high statistical agreement (twin nested hierarchy). These categorisations overwhelmingly point toward biological relatedness. For example most mammals do not need dietary sources of vitamin C since they can synthesise their own.
But primates have a degenerate copy of the gene that makes the enzyme necessary for synthesising vitamin C. To avoid scurvy primates must get vitamin C from their diet. Relatedness thus provides an elegant explanation of the data; namely all descendants of a common primate ancestor inherited the degenerate gene which is not found in mammals whose branching nodes reach further into the past.
But the evidence exposes more than biological relatedness; the fossil record also shows that there is a discrete biological arrow. But why should such an arrow exist? If the driving force of nature is ‘survival of the fittest’ then would not fecundity at least sometimes be beneficial?
An arms race may superimpose directionality but would an arms race always be sufficiently dominant, or sufficiently widespread to always produce the unanimous steps toward complexity seen in the fossil record? Many biologists suspect not.
Furthermore, if evolution is steady paced and smooth why is the fossil record abrupt, discrete? Can we still argue the record is incomplete and will be filled in time (a convenient argument one hundred years ago) or have the millions of fossils that time and again pile up on the same old points prove that the process is inherently jumpy (at least on a geological time-scale). It is here, within the unambiguous biological arrow and the discrete nature of the record that Polkinghorne sees the signature of the divine;
‘It is from this inter-relationship [between chance and certainty that order rises out of chaos, as we see exemplified in the behaviour of dissipative systems which converge on to predictable limit cycles, approached along contingent paths.... To acknowledge a role for tame chance is not in the least to deny the possibility that there is a divinely ordained general direction in which the process of the world is moving, however contingent detailed aspects of that progression (such as the number of human toes) might be…………..The scientific recognition of the evolutionary character of the universe has encouraged theological recognition of the immanent presence of God to creation and of the need to complement the concept of creation ex nihilo by the concept of creation continua………no longer can God be held to be totally and directly responsible for all that happens. An evolutionary world is inevitably one in which there are raggednesses and blind alleys. Death is the necessary cost of new life; environmental change can lead to extinctions; genetic mutations sometimes produce new forms of life, oftentimes malignancies. There is an unavoidable cost attached to a world allowed to make itself. Creatures will behave in accordance with their natures; lions will kill their prey; earthquakes will happen; volcanoes will erupt and rivers flood….These defences do not by any means solve all the problems of theodicy, but they temper them somewhat by removing a suspicion of divine incompetence or indifference[6]’.
Many Christians object to Polkinghorne’s thesis because it depends upon the creative power of death and decay. These Christians see God as a creator of a perfect garden, without death, without decay, where every action was timelessly decreed by an all powerful, all knowing, all loving God.
To unpack their objection we first need to understand how the western framework emerged.It is not too surprising that the second generation of gentile Christian writers aligned themselves with the 'superior' Greco-Roman framework rather than the 'barbaric'' Jewish framework. We know, for example, that Athenagoras (127-190 CE) was tinged with the Platonic brush[8].
His ‘main premise was that God’s purpose in creating man was that he should live – that the divine purpose of man’s existence is existence itself. And God’s purpose, he contended, cannot be defeated. It must be accomplished. It is therefore impossible for man to cease to exist’[9]. Thus through his writings Athenagoras interweaved the Greco-Roman conception of soulish immortality into the Jewish tradition of wholeness and future bodily resurrection.
Tertullian of Carthage (160-240 CE), compelled by Athenagoras' immortal soul, argued the torments of the lost must therefore co-exist with the happiness of the saved. To be consistent Tertullian re-interpreted ‘death’ as eternal misery, and destruction as eternal pain and anguish. For Tertullian hell was therefore not a place of death (since souls are immortal and cannot die) but a place of perpetual dying. Cyprian, Ambrose, and Jerome all followed suit.
But it was Augustine who articulated this emerging philosophy as theology by re-framing the good Jewish garden Eden as a perfect Platonic Greco-Roman garden.
He argued that because any change must produce imperfection the perfect Eden must have been timeless - for God, being perfect, would not have created an Aristotelian changeable, therefore imperfect, therefore decaying world.
For Augustine, Adam’s sin was not simply a fall from innocence to experience but was an utter transformation of the world; from Plato’s perfect and timeless state (that God would create) into Aristotle’s imperfect and changeable story.
The Jewish framework, in contrast, sees Eden as good; not perfect. From the opening verse creation exhibits change – the universe begins, light floods over the earth, the waters are separated, land emerges from the sea, vegetation covers the land and animals move in. This creation story is not reflective of an immutably perfect and statically populated creation. Instead it describes an evolving, changing world where new things, even malignant things might and do happen.
By the Jewish understanding Adam’s sin did not inextricably transform the perfect state of Eden into Aristotle’s imperfect material world; rather the narrative simply describes man's loss of innocence. Adam’s fall meant banishment but it also meant Adam became an agriculturalist. Likewise Cain’s murder meant banishment but it also gave Cain the opportunity to establish a city (Genesis 4:18). Therefore according to the Jewish framework the Genesis story is more about the movement of humanity out of the garden toward godless Babylon; which amounts to humanities journey toward self-sufficiency[10].
In contrast to the Greco-Roman framework, the Jewish framework is entirely compatible with Polkinghorne’s description of how God might have used evolution to shape the world so that freedom would emerge in higher creatures. Of central import to the defence of evil then, is the Hebrew idea that because God prizes freedom He choses to act as a cause among causes.
By this view God chooses to bring good out of evil – ‘as for you, you meant to harm me, but God intended it for a good purpose, so that he could preserve the lives of many people, as you can see this day (Genesis 50:20)’. Innocent Joseph endured suffering because of the evil actions of his brothers yet God straighten his crooked path (Proverbs 3:6).
Similarly Paul proclaims ‘we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28)’. God treasures freedom and so refrains from over-riding indiscriminate action but when people do great evil God will be there to help others do great good – that is the price of freedom that we must pay in a mimetic society.
Quite apart from the influence God exercises in the world scripture also affirms that ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ influence the world. The contribution of divine influence superimposed over the contingent influence of principalities superimposed over human agency then builds a kaleidoscope of possibility that contributes to the future state of the world.
To accuse God of capriciousness, then, is to deny this self-evident haphazard superposition of causality in favour of a divine caricature who sits upon a Greco-Roman throne pre-decreeing every event from before the foundation of the world.
This is not the portrait of God that emerges in the biblical library - for it is not the sum of God’s capricious acts that determines every new state of the world but rather it is God’s choice to be a cause among causes that in haphazard combination with all other deterministic and contingent influences constitutes the way the world is; and will be.
This is not the portrait of God that emerges in the biblical library - for it is not the sum of God’s capricious acts that determines every new state of the world but rather it is God’s choice to be a cause among causes that in haphazard combination with all other deterministic and contingent influences constitutes the way the world is; and will be.
[1] Ruse M Can a Darwinian be a Christian Cambridge Press
[2] God Freedom and Evil Plantinga A 1977 Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans
[3] Mere Christianity Lewis C.S., P 47-48
[4] Universal Darwinism 1983 Cambridge Press
[5] The Language of Science and Faith Giberson K, Collins F S 2011 IVP Books - Biologos
[6] Science and Providence Polkinghorne JC 1989 Shambhala Publications
[7] A New Kind of Christianity McLaren B 2010 Hodder &Stoughton
[8] Athenagoras Encyclopedia Brittannica, 11th ed., p. 831
[9] The Conditionalist Faith of our Fathers Froom L Washington, D.C. Review and Herald Publishing., 1965], vol.1, p. 931
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