Problem of Evil and other worries

What is Religion?

???

People commit evil and atrocious acts in the name of God.

What does this mean?

  • Irishmen blow each other up

  • Arabs blow themselves up

  • Imams and ayatollahs oppress women

  • crusades

  • tortures

  • mass-murderers

Why does this happen?

“For most people the answer is s�ll some version of the ancient Argument from Design. We look about us at the beauty and intricacy of the world – at the aerodynamic sweep of a swallow’s wing, at the delicacy of �owers and of the bu�er�ies that fer�lize them, through a microscope at the teeming life in every drop of pond water, through a telescope at the crown of a giant redwood tree.” (kreidler, 2014, p. 1) (pdf)

“Philosophy of religion is the philosophical examination of the

  • themes and concepts involved in religious traditions as well as

  • the broader philosophical task of reflecting on matters of religious significance

  • including the nature of religion itself,

  • alternative concepts of God or

  • ultimate reality, and

  • the religious significance of general features of the cosmos (e.g., the laws of nature, the emergence of consciousness) and of

  • historical events (e.g., the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, the Holocaust).” (Taliaferro, 2023, p. 1)

  • “Philosophy of religion also includes the

  • investigation and assessment of worldviews (such as secular naturalism) that are alternatives to religious worldviews.” (Taliaferro, 2023, p. 1)

“A religion involves a communal, transmittable body of teachings and prescribed practices about an ultimate, sacred reality or state of being that calls for reverence or awe, a body which guides its practitioners into what it describes as a saving, illuminating or emancipatory relationship to this reality through a personally transformative life of prayer, ritualized meditation, and/or moral practices like repentance and personal regeneration. [This is a slightly modified definition of the one for “Religion” in the Dictionary of Philosophy of Religion, Taliaferro & Marty 2010: 196–197; 2018, 240.]” (Taliaferro, 2023, p. 2) (pdf)

  • “Hinduism,

  • Buddhism,

  • Daoism,

  • Confucianism,

  • Judaism,

  • Christianity,

  • Islam, and those traditions that are like them.” (Taliaferro, 2023, p. 3)

The Problem of Evil in the First and Last Things

  • Augustinian theodicy

  • Irenaean theodicy

  • beginning and end of salvation narrative

  • fall of man and angels, division into saved and damned

Fall is a myth of self-awareness

–

Expresses our sense of distance from the proper fulfillment of the God-given possibilities of our nature;

Myth of the double destiny

expresses our sense of the unqualified seriousness of the free choices and responses which are all the time inexorably forming our characters for good or ill

What is a Theodicy?

It is with reference to the nature, then, and not to the wickedness of the devil, that we are to understand these words, This is the beginning of God’s handiwork; for, without doubt, wickedness can be a flaw or vice only where the nature previously was not vitiated. Vice, too, is so contrary to nature, that it cannot but damage it. And therefore departure from God would be no vice, unless in a nature whose property it was to abide with God. So that even the wicked will is a strong proof of the goodness of the nature. But God, as He is the supremely good —

Creator of good natures, so is He of evil wills the most just Ruler; so that, while they make an ill use of good natures, He makes a good use even of evil wills. Accordingly, He caused the devil (good by God’s creation, wicked by his own will) to be cast down from his high position, and to become the mockery of His angels — that is, He caused his temptations to benefit those whom he wishes to injure by them. And because God, when He created him, was certainly not ignorant of his future malignity, and foresaw the good which He Himself would bring out of his evil, therefore says the psalm, This leviathan whom You have made to be a sport therein, that we may see that, even while God in His goodness created him good, He yet had already foreseen and arranged how He would make use of him when he became wicked.

–

theos = God

dike = righteous

   * Explain the righteousness of God in face of apparent contradiction
???
In regards to evil, a theodicy would be a defense of God in light of the objection from the existence of evil by explaining who God is etc. Theodicts never need to engage with counter arguments, but rather they may provide additional clarification of a particular religious concept.
However, a defense differs from a theodicy in that a defense may defend the existence of God by directly responding to other arguments.

Augustinian Account of the Fall

  1. non-augustinian account cannot explain how evil entered into creation

  2. augustian does explain, introduces fall of angels as the moment evil came into existence

Story of the Fall

“Adopting the traditional critique of this foundation stone of the Augustinian theodicy, a critique that was classically articulated by Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century, I had suggested that the doctrine of the spontaneous going wrong of finitely perfect beings involves an impossible self-creation of evil” (Hick, 1968, p. 592) (pdf)

And God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.” Sefaria, Genesis 1:26

And God created humankind in the divine image,
creating it in the image of God—
creating them male and female. v. 27

And God saw all that had been made, and found it very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. v. 30

???

God makes man in his divine image, and yet man has the capacity to sin.

Fall of the angels:

How are you fallen from heaven,
O Shining One, son of Dawn!
How are you felled to earth,
O vanquisher of nations! Isaiah 14:12

“For we can conceive of free beings with a nature such that although free to go wrong they are nevertheless under no temptation to do so; or, again, we can conceive of beings who are tempted to go wrong but whose moral nature is such that they always resist that temptation.” (Hick, 1968, p. 593)

Free being = nature free to sin but under no temptation

Free being = tempted to go wrong but always resist temptation

Therefore if the angels fell from grace, either they had been endowed by their Creator with a sin-prone nature, or else this was a case of evil creating itself ex nihilo.

  1. endowed by their Creator with a sin-prone nature

  2. evil creates itself ex nihilo

If 1, God is responsible for evil

If 2, evil creates itself ex nihilo

Further implications

Some angels fell, others did not.

  • some attached themselves to God, relying on the love God created in them to do so

However, this leaves us with a further impossible disjunctive:

  • the former received less of the grace of divine love than those who persevered

  • if both were created equally good, then,

    • one fell by their evil will

    • the others were more abundantly assisted, and attained to that pitch of blessedness at which they became certain that they should never fall from it

So the problem emerges of those with an evil will. Where does it come from?

  • ex nihilo out of nothing

Trethowan:

“We are responsible for it precisely to the extent to which we turn deliberately away from what we know to be good. It seems to be the fact, however baffling, that this does happen—and it is the first duty of a philosopher to accept the facts and then, if he can, to fit them together (p. 408).” (Hick, 1968, p. 593) (pdf)

It is up to the philosopher to figure out why we turn away from what is an obvious good.

Hick’s Response:

  • We are talking about angels and not people.

–

“The question was whether the holy angels, as they came forth in pristine perfection from God’s hand, can be conceived to have perversely and irrationally rejected the infinite Love which had made them.” (Hick, 1968, p. 594) (pdf)

“The ideal perfection of our human existence does not lie behind us in a long-lost past, but before us in the future completion of the divine creative purpose. We are indeed at the great distance from the fulfilment of God’s intention for us which the myth of the fall recognizes; and to this extent the myth truly depicts our situatio” (Hick, 1968, p. 596) (pdf)

“But it does not affect the original point that for God to create a human being (or an angel) is for him to create a being with a determinate structure or nature, involving de” (Hick, 1968, p. 594) (pdf)

“s: In creating finite persons for fellowship with himself God has given to them the only kind of freedom that can endow them with a genuine (though relative) autonomy in relation to himself, namely cognitive freedom, the freedom to be aware or unaware of their creator.” (Hick, 1968, p. 595)

“The ideal perfection of our human existence does not lie behind us in a long-lost past, but before us in the future completion of the divine creative purpose. We are indeed at the great distance from the fulfilment of God’s intention for us which the myth of the fall recognizes; and to this extent the myth truly depicts our situatio” (Hick, 1968, p. 596) (pdf)

“The fall was projected on to the blank of an unknown human prehistory. But today that blank has been partially filled in, and the new picture that has emerged has a shape of its own which clashes with the” (Hick, 1968, p. 597) (pdf)

“spheres was ousted by astronomy, and that of alchemy by chemistry. Once we are clear that the ‘fall of man’ does not refer to an actual earthly event which occurred some definite (even if not ascertainable) number of years ago, it becomes misleading to use language which assumes a pre-fallen state from wh” (Hick, 1968, p. 597) (pdf)

“Clearly God is not answerable to anyone. But he is responsible for his creation, including the evil within it, in the sense that his will is the primary necessary condition of its existence, and in the sense also that its character can be justified only by the successful fulfilment of the divine purpose for which it” (Hick, 1968, p. 597) (pdf)

“’. In the universe as well as in a state there has to be a point beyond which responsibility can no longer be pass” (Hick, 1968, p. 597) (pdf)

“as it has been, as it is, and as it will be. This ultimate divine responsibility for human existence does not remove our own perso” (Hick, 1968, p. 598) (pdf)

“the doctrine of eternal damnation. For this type of theodicy is eschatologically oriented, finding its clue to the meaning of evil in the hoped-for fulfilment of God’s purpose for his creation in an infinite, because eternal, good which is such as to justify all that has occurred o” (Hick, 1968, p. 598) (pdf)

Conclusion

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Questions? Hate mail? Stay out of my mentions @stevenvmiller