The Problem of Evil

The problem of evil has played an important role in my changing attitudes towards God. Without actually thinking about it in the necessary depth, it became a catalyst for my own realization that I lacked faith, and I saw it as a basic contradiction about the notion of God. Since then, I've thought about the problem quite a bit, and several lines of reasoning lead me to believe that it's not the problem that many make it out to be.

One reasoning against the problem goes thus: God has no motivation to change our world, because we are living in the best of all possible worlds. But how can the best of all possible worlds contain evil? That is because a world with free will is better than a world without it (or a world with reduced free will), and free will and evil an inseparable.

This line of reasoning is quite powerful, but it depends on a particular attitude towards free will, and it isn't quite convincing to me. My favorite reasoning against the problem of evil is this: God might well have no motivation to change our world, because we are living in the best of all worlds. More specifically, our universe exists alongside all possible universes, and so to change it in any way would reduce the variety of existence, and merely yield another copy of an existing universe.

I find this line of reasoning compelling because it changes the stakes a bit. It some sense, it argues that the good in our universe makes it worth existence alongside other universes, despite the evil that comes with it. It turns scenarios where the evil is eliminated into merely scenarios where variety is eliminated.To my mind, it's much more difficult to argue that "a multiverse where only the very best universe(s) exist is better than one where every universe with some good in it exists" than to argue that "the best universe(s) is/are better than all others." Here I've addressed one problem as well, namely that existing within a continuum of all possible universes presumably means that purely evil universes exist. Depending on how you value variety relative to good and evil, though, you can change the thought experiment such that purely evil universes don't exist, or such that only universes above a certain good:evil ratio exist. You might also deny the possibility of purely good or purely evil universes.

An extension of this argument for people who argue that an infinite number of purely good universes makes a better multiverse than the multiverse containing every possible universe just changes the composition of the multiverse so that it contains an infinite number of each possible universe. In this new multiverse, changing any universe by making it better or worse has, in some sense, no effect on the overall amount of good or evil in the multiverse. Of course, if you're a maths person, you can start to argue about different infinities, but the problem has become sufficiently academic at this point (in the sense that it's no longer clearly wrong to be on one side or the other) that I stop caring and consider the problem of evil defused.

Of course, this argument is far from perfect. For example, when I say "all possible universes," what constraints are implied by 'possible'? However, for me, this argument defuses the problem of evil by showing that there's at least one perfectly reasonable way that things could be such that the problem of evil is not a contradiction. Of course, the very best argument against the problem of evil (and against any argument about God in general) is simply that the Bible itself says that humans cannot comprehend God. That statement at some level precludes any philosophical conclusions about such an entity.

The problem of evil is a philosophical quandary that intrigues me. It's also one of the few areas of philosophy where I have my own (to my knowledge) arguments to make. If you're interested in discussing this with me, or especially if you see an error in my argument or have some reading to recommend, just email me at pmawhorter@gmail.com.