Evil

The experiences of wickedness, suffering, and death are presumably universal, but they do not come to pose intellectual problems—let alone a single problem—until there are philosophical expectations with which they clash. For most of Western history, the problem of evil has been dismissed as beyond our ken. Philosophical engagement with it is the historical exception.

Antiquity.

Discussions of various kinds of evil appear in some of the oldest texts from antiquity.

Job.

The biblical Book of Job is often seen as an early response to the problem of evil, but it is both less and more than this. The Book of Job recounts the vindication of the innocence of a human sufferer by the very God who permitted the infliction of the suffering and—despite Job's pleas and accusations—never explains why. Appearing in a whirlwind, God rails at Job for the effrontery of his demand to understand what was going on. "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (38:4) But it is Job's friends, who interpreted Job's suffering as punishment, whom God condemns: "ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath" (42:7).

Is the Book of Job itself an answer to the problem of evil? Job's example shows that the faithful can live without knowing the reason for their suffering, but his story's power comes from its insistence that the problem of the suffering of the just is at once inescapable and insoluble.

Hellenistic debates.

In its philosophical form, the problem of evil seems to be one we inherit from Hellenistic philosophy. Stoics asserted the existence and intelligibility of providence. Epicureans argued that the way to achieve happiness was to accept that there is in fact no providence, to avoid such pains as can be avoided and stop thinking of the rest (like death) as evil. Skeptics argued that it was best to avoid strong views for or against providence, and poked holes in the arguments of both sides.

What made this the first real debate on the problem of evil was the overall agreement of the parties concerned on means—philosophical analysis of human experience—and ends—eudaimonia, happiness in this life. Both of these would be called in question by Christianity, leading to an eclipsing of this problem until the revival of the Hellenistic philosophies in the changed world of early modernity.

Religious views.

Religious traditions are important sources for thinking about evils.

Jewish views.

Jewish tradition does not offer systematic accounts of evil before the medieval period. Apparent injustices are either consequences of past or foreign sins or tests that will be redressed in the world to come, but the point is that God, who has bound himself to Israel despite its flaws, is perfect and perfectly in charge. "The Lord has made all things for Himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil" (Prov. 16:4).

While there may or may not be evil powers, there is an evil inclination in human nature itself, which the human individual is free to resist. This evil inclination, too, is part of a creation that the God of Genesis deemed "very good," however, so it is not to be rejected as alien but assimilated. In a widely quoted early rabbinic view, "had it not been for the Evil Inclination, no man would build a house or marry a woman or procreate children." Even when kabbalistic authors argued that evil came from the godhead or was a consequence of the flawed design of the Creation, the emphasis was always on the power of free human good deeds to repair the world.

Christian views.

An understanding of a God mercifully active in history shaped the way Christians, too, approached (or avoided) the problem of evil. Christian views were various, but John Hick has argued that Augustine was the father of all the most important elements. Alongside aesthetic views and the claim that God brings a greater good out of every evil, the central claims were the privative nature of evil and the Fall. The last were not explanations for woes of the world so much as reasons for the questioner not to get stuck in the question, however. The answer lies not in philosophy but in conversion and repentance.

This is not to say that philosophical reflection has no part to play. No less a figure than Thomas Aquinas mentioned the problem of evil as the first objection to the existence of God. Aquinas discussed evil in many places and even devoted a separate work to it, but his final view was that it was the special kind of nonproblem that privatio implies, pointing toward the good, and so toward God. The point was that philosophical reflection conducted without the acknowledgement of the differences between ourselves and God leads nowhere.

The problem of evil remained a challenge to natural theology. Theodicy became harder to avoid as physico-theology came to seem more and more important. Reformation theologians insisted the issue be faced head-on, albeit for a different reason. Martin Luther thought it necessary for philosophy to experience shipwreck over evil. And John Calvin insisted that while it was importunate to claim to be able to understand the fallen world, a view of God without providence was tantamount to atheism.

Theodicy and modernity.

The problem of evil as a philosophical challenge to the intelligibility of the world, with or without God, became a central concern of Western thinkers with the rise of the modern age.

The invention of theodicy.

The goodness and intelligibility of creation became a battlefield in the fight for religion as the world became increasingly disenchanted, as religious authority fractured, and as confidence in the capacity of human beings to make objective moral judgments grew. The problem of evil was presented as proof for the incompatibility of reason and faith by the skeptic Pierre Bayle in the 1690s. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz responded with the claim that this is "the best of all possible worlds," a view he traced back to Plato. His argument is entirely a priori, however, and designed precisely to prevent anyone's drawing conclusions like those of Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide (1759). Sounding more Stoic than he knew, Leibniz argued that if we knew all that God does, we would see why this was the world he chose.

The challenge of new Skeptics and Epicureans made this position seem weak, and a half century of nervous teleologizing ensued. Arguing that human beings can and should see the optimality of everything in the world, from bedbugs to avarice, these arguments were quickly conflated with arguments like Bernard Mandeville's linkage of "private vice" with "public virtue," and seemed to many to undermine not only religion but morality too. If the world, with all its horrors, cannot be improved upon, and for reasons we cannot hope (and perhaps do not need) to understand, why do anything at all?

Theodicy overturned.

Immanuel Kant presented theodicy as the enemy of piety and ethics. In a manner Luther would have appreciated, he argued that the experienced "failure of all philosophical efforts in theodicy" ensures the continued importance of moral struggle and makes religious faith both permissable and necessary. Kant commended the figure of Job for basing his religion on his morality and not his morality on his religion: both do better when the pretension to theodicy is abandoned. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer in their very different ways found this view premature, insisting that one needed either to find the meaning of suffering in history or to accept that there is and never will be one.

Friedrich Nietzsche dealt the decisive blows to theodicy. In the Genealogy of Morals (1887) he argues that "evil" is not merely a human category, but a bad one, developed by creatures of ressentiment chagrined by the excellence of other human beings. Arguing that the others must be evil because they themselves were good, "slaves" and their priests succeeded in upsetting an earlier and more noble set of values. The noble "free spirit" does not ask whether the world is good or meaningful (this question defines nihilism) but affirms it in all its joys and pains. Value is not found in the world but generated by the overflowing vitality of creative spirits. Nietzsche's historical relativization of value categories and his call for a transvaluation of contemporary values spelled the end of theodicy, at least in continental European thought.

Contemporary developments.

But the philosophical problem of evil has not gone away, in part because the twentieth century brought with it new and unprecedented horrors. Some religious thinkers have responded to the "logical problem of evil" (Is the existence of evil compatible with divine omnipotence and goodness?) by proposing views of a divinity in some way limited in power; the growing, suffering God of process thought is an example. Hick's "Irenaean" view of theodicy argues that God is doing as well as anyone could at the time-consuming task of getting human beings freely to love him.

Analytic philosophers of religion have largely moved beyond the logical to the "evidential problem of evil" supposedly inaugurated by Hume in his Dialogues. The question is no longer whether evil in the abstract is compatible with theism—that may even be true—but whether the quantity and variety of evils we find do not constitute an argument for the irrationality of theism. While still far from concrete, discussion now hangs on the existence of "horrendous" or "irredeemable" forms of evil.

But there are also strong religious movements rejecting the very enterprise of theodicy, in Christian thinkers like Karl Barth (building on the Lutheran Søren Kierkegaard) and Jewish thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas (building on the Neokantian Hermann Cohen). Especially in response to the Holocaust, thinkers have argued for the obsolescence of all traditional views and have urged reconceptualizations of God and his relation to human history and suffering.