Invitation to the Study of Religion Chapter 5 -
Assuming God exists, why should we believe
He (or She or It) is good?
The Problem of Evil
Mystics consistently report that the God they perceive is a benign God. The three great western religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – insist that God is good. These same religions insist that God is also all powerful.
In response to this characterization, skeptics point out that the world is full of apparently-pointless misery and cruel injustice. There can’t possibly be a good and all powerful God, because if God were both good and all powerful, He wouldn’t allow evil to exist.
This difficulty, sometimes called “the problem of evil”, offers a powerful argument against the existence of God, at least against the existence of God as conceived by the great western religions. David Hume, the British philosopher mentioned in the last chapter, presents this argument persuasively in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. (If you want to fully understand the skeptics’ case against religion, Hume is a good place to start.)
People who believe in God have made various attempts to respond to this argument, some more persuasive and better thought out than others. None of the responses, to my way of thinking, is satisfactory.
I will, however, offer a partial response based on my own experience, which is, there are two different ways of looking at the problem of evil, and the conclusion one draws is different depending on which perspective one finds more compelling. One can pose the two alternative perspectives as questions:
1. Evil exists. Why would a good and all powerful God permit evil to exist?
2. Evil exists. What are we going to do about it?
____________
I am a lawyer and once, years ago, I was working on a murder case. A woman’s boyfriend abused, raped, and murdered the woman’s two year old daughter. In order to assist me in my work on the case, I was given the exhibits offered into evidence at trial, one of which was a photograph of the little girl taken approximately two weeks before her death. It was professional photograph, the kind of photograph that many families get once a year at Christmas, or on a child’s birthday.
This one was a Christmas portrait.
I propped the photograph on my desk where I could see it every day, because I wanted to think about it. I still remember it well. There she is, a pretty little girl in her red and green plaid taffeta Christmas dress. She is smiling slightly as she looks to her right, looking at someone we cannot see, but her eyes are sad. Anyone sensitive to children will realize that this is an unhappy child who has been coaxed to smile. Looking at the photograph with the wisdom of hindsight, it appears obvious that she is already being abused.
Why did no one save this child, whose suffering is so apparent that it shows in a Christmas photograph?
There was a person who was supposed to save her, but that person failed. The person was a social worker at the Department of Public Welfare. The way she failed was this.
At the beginning of December, the little girl’s grandparents contacted the state Department of Public Welfare to report that they had seen marks on the child’s body and the child seemed to be frightened of the mother’s boyfriend. They suspected abuse and asked for an investigation.
The case was assigned to this social worker. She investigated, and her preliminary investigation was inconclusive.
Two weeks later, the grandparents saw new marks on the child’s body and they called the Department a second time to report the new evidence of abuse. They asked that the investigation be treated as urgent, because they felt the child was in immediate danger.
The receptionist who took the phone call prepared a written summary of the grandparents’ report, used a stamp to mark it “URGENT” in large letters, and placed it in the inbox of the social worker who had been assigned to work on the case.
Usually, a second call on a case is provided to the social worker who took the first call. But a case marked “URGENT” is an exception to this rule. When a case is marked “URGENT” it must be investigated within 24 hours, so the file has to go to a social worker who is on duty. If the original social worker is on duty, it goes to the original social worker. But if the original social worker is not on duty for some reason – out sick or on vacation – it goes to someone who is on duty, someone who can investigate immediately.
In this case, the receptionist checked to see whether the original social worker was on duty. There was a flag system to show who was, and who was not, on duty. The flag system showed the original social worker was on duty, so the receptionist put the URGENT report in the box of the original social worker, expecting the original social worker to investigate within twenty four hours.
But the social worker did not investigate. The reason she did not investigate was, she did not receive the URGENT report because she was not really on duty. What happened was this.
The report came in on a Friday afternoon, the week before Christmas, and the social worker had taken the afternoon off to go Christmas shopping.
She didn’t want to use one of her scheduled vacation days to go Christmas shopping, so she didn’t take a vacation day. Instead, she simply sneaked out of the office a couple of hours early without telling anyone she was leaving.
If she had been officially scheduled as “off duty/on vacation/out of the office”, the report marked “URGENT” would have been given to someone who was on duty,
But the social worker didn’t take Friday afternoon as a scheduled vacation day because she didn’t want to use four hours of vacation time. She just took a late lunch and then didn’t come back to the office. She sneaked out.
So the lady at the call desk thought the social worker was on duty and would return to the office to check her inbox before leaving for the weekend. The lady at the call desk put the “URGENT” report into the social worker’s box, carefully flagged, instead of giving it to someone else.
The “URGENT” report was placed in the social worker’s box on Friday afternoon. The social worker found it when she returned to work on Monday morning, but it was too late. The child was murdered on Sunday.
The child died, but the social worker got her Christmas shopping done, without having to use any of her precious paid vacation to do it.
Merry Christmas.
The sadness in the little girl’s face in her Christmas picture is a sadness that appears in the faces of other abused children. They suffer, they show their suffering on their faces to anyone who is willing to see it, then they die, they are killed, at the age of two or three or six. This is a common story. It happens in every country in the world.
If God exists, if God is benign and all powerful as the three western religions insist, then why does He allow this to happen? Why does He not protect the children?
It is very difficult to look at a photograph of a murdered child and believe in the existence of God. The argument against the existence of God, the problem of evil, is a very powerful argument. Many philosophers and theologians have tried to answer this argument. I have never found the standard theists’ answers to be persuasive.
But, looking at that child’s picture day after day, and thinking hard about her situation, I realized that the problem of evil presented by the death of a child can be looked at from more than one perspective.
So let’s consider a different perspective.
Does evil exist? Anyone who has sat and looked at the photograph of a murdered child knows that evil exists. During my first three years practicing law, I worked as a court appointed criminal defense attorney and I, for one, saw plenty of evil. Anyone who has done this work has seen the darkest side of human nature. There are people who will tell you, “There is no such thing as evil.” This is a shallow piece of wishful thinking. Evil exists.
This presents a second question.
Is every person evil or potentially evil? Once one has seen the characteristics of cruelty, lack of empathy, selfishness, rage, dishonesty, carried to the extremes that lead to violent criminal actions, one learns to recognize these characteristics when displayed in milder form in ordinary people, “nice” people, the people next door, the person we see in the mirror. Evil, or at least the potential for evil, exists in every single person.
This brings us to a different way to look at the problem of evil, a different question to ask.
Evil exists. It exists within us and around us. So – what are we going to do about it?
How do we identify evil, escape evil, oppose evil?
All the major religions offer answers to these questions. The great religious leaders teach about evil, and their students, the brilliant and the ordinary, struggle with these teachings over a period of centuries. The conclusions that people reach through this struggle are taught from pulpits and written in books. For those who study religion, guidance is available.
But many people don’t study or practice any religion. These people, the secular, will find guidance harder to come by.
If I ask a secular person, “What are you doing to fight evil?” they will respond nervously, “I try to be a nice person” and they may express doubts about the existence of evil – it’s such a harsh word, it’s pretty judgmental to suggest that any person could be evil.
Hmm. We’ll talk more about “being a nice person” in the next chapter.
But for now, here is the rest of the story about the murdered child.
The killer was convicted of first degree murder. At the sentencing hearing, there was evidence that he, himself, had been an abused child. This didn’t sway the jury and he was sentenced to death and electrocuted.
So two people died, the child and the murderer. Two deaths. Were these deaths really the social worker’s fault? When she cheated – just a little bit – on her hours on the Friday before Christmas, she didn’t intend to hurt anyone, and she did what many of us might do in similar circumstances. She’d probably had a tough week. She might have worked late earlier in the week. She probably felt she deserved a couple of hours off.
What caused the two deaths?
My answer is, whole generations of people who acted like the social worker, that’s what.
When the murderer was an abused child, he wore the look of sorrow on his face that is common among abused children. But “good people” in the community looked away, they did not feel it was their responsibility to inquire about this boy’s welfare. Maybe a few people tried, but they couldn’t get support.
So the boy grew up to become a troubled adult, an abuser, and, ultimately, an evil person in his own right. And, once again, “good people” in the community looked away, they had better things to do. The final chance to derail this catastrophe occurred on the Friday before Christmas, when the social worker, who was probably a “nice person”, went Christmas shopping without signing herself out of the office.
That apparently minor decision, a decision made by a “nice person,” was the final decision in a long list of decisions that resulted in two horrible deaths.
And most of those wrongful decisions were acts carried out in violation of the direct, specific instructions of the personal God described by the three great western religions.
I thought a long time about this child’s death, and the conclusion I came to was, God did not allow this child’s death to occur, God prohibited it. The two deaths – the child’s death and the murderer’s death - occurred because human beings, over and over again, deliberately violated the commandments of God as recorded by the prophets of the three great western religions.
A death such as this child’s death presents us with two ways to look at the problem of evil. This death is an argument against belief in God, but it is also an argument for obedience to God’s commandments.
My thinking about this child’s death was, I’ve seen enough evil to know I want to play for the other team.
My search for the other team could have led me to Judaism or Islam, or perhaps to a non-western religion, but I eventually became a Christian. It seemed like the most practical choice.
________________________
But back to the original topic. The argument against the existence of God posed by “the problem of evil” is, there can’t possibly be an all powerful benevolent God because if there were such a God, He would not permit evil to exist.
But it could also be said, evil does not exist because God permits it, to the contrary, God has expressly prohibited it. Evil exists because people are disobedient to God.
This, however, is only a partial response to the argument against the existence of an all powerful benign God which follows from the problem of evil. This perspective – evil exists as the result of deliberate disobedience to God - deals with the type of evil that results from human failings - the desire to cheat a bit on one’s vacation time, for example.
What about natural disasters? What about ravaging diseases such as cancer or the neurological diseases that happen without any cause that we understand, and proceed in spite of our best efforts to prevent the damage that occurs?
In 1755, a terrible earthquake destroyed the city of Lisbon. The French philosopher Voltaire wrote a famous, and angry, poem in which he argued that the Lisbon earthquake, and the terrible suffering that resulted, could not be justified as somehow compatible with a benign divine will.
How can a horrible natural disaster which kills thousands of innocent people be reconciled with the idea that an all powerful benign divinity rules our universe?
Answer: I don’t have an answer.
But we are still faced with the practical problem. Evil exists. What are we going to do about it?
On to the next chapter.