The argument from evil is the most powerful reason to deny the existence of God. It comes in two versions: The first is the logical problem of evil, and the second is the evidential problem of evil. In another essay, I explored the logical version—the claim that any evil at all, even a single hangover, disproves God’s existence.
The other approach—the evidential version—to the problem of evil can be formulated in two premises. (1) If there are pointless (or gratuitous) evils in the world, then God does not exist. (2) There are pointless evils in the world. Therefore, God does not exist.
What is meant here by “pointless” or “gratuitous” evil? Pointless evils are evils that are not justified by some higher good or by the avoidance of some greater evil.
How do we know that there are pointless evils? We might answer that question by considering its opposite. How do we know when a particular evil is not pointless?
It is not pointless for a man to die successfully defending his family from an attacker; it is better for the man to die and save his family than for all to die. It is not pointless for a kidnapper to suffer the loss of freedom in prison. If kidnappers were not punished, people tempted to kidnap might not be deterred. So, a just punishment, though evil for the one punished, is justified in part as a deterrent to potential wrongdoers. Moreover, if kidnappers were not caught and punished, they could continue their kidnapping, endangering and terrifying people in the community. Thus, defense of the community is another justification for punishment. And, in some cases, getting caught and convicted actually helps the wrongdoer himself. Some people stop doing evil only if someone else stops them; some people only begin to reform when punished for their wrongdoing. Moreover, there is good intrinsically in a just punishment. A just punishment deprives the wrongdoer of a good that he or she is no longer worthy of enjoying. So, it is good that a robber has to return stolen goods, even though this may cause suffering for the robber.
Humility acknowledges both the limitations of our current knowledge and the possibility of greater knowledge.
How do we know a particular evil has a point rather than being pointless? Sometimes we can see the point ourselves. We often choose to bring about suffering because we can see that it will secure a greater good or help us avoid a greater evil. For example, it is worth the suffering of going to the dentist to fill a cavity and prevent an infection.
But in other cases, we only see the purpose of our suffering in hindsight. Almost everyone can recall times in their lives when something bad happened but it led to something good. The story of the Chinese farmer illustrates that unforeseen good can come out of suffering.
Yet, it is undoubtedly true that we can go through suffering and not see the point. But if I cannot see the point of my suffering, it hardly follows that there is no point. After all, I’ve experienced many times what seemed like pointless suffering but later realized that good—indeed, great good—came out of that suffering.
Here’s another way to express the idea. Let’s say you cannot see the point of E=mc2. Someone then tries to clarify it for you: “The energy E of a particle in its rest frame is the product of mass (m) with the speed of light squared (c2).” Even with this clarification, you might still not see the point, the meaning, the purpose of this scientific sentence. Does it follow that there is no point if you or I cannot understand E=mc2 right now? Perhaps you or I could come to understand its meaning if we took a university physics course, but for now we cannot. But that hardly shows that there is no purpose to the scientific formula.
Likewise, it hardly follows that there is no point to suffering simply because someone does not see the purpose of a particular bit of suffering. Human understanding is limited. There are countless things that we collectively do not know—how to cure all forms of cancer, for example—but it does not follow that there is no cure or that we will never know the cure. Our current ignorance is no reason to believe that an answer is impossible. Humility acknowledges both the limitations of our current knowledge and the possibility of greater knowledge.
As the philosopher Justin P. McBrayer points out,
Skeptical theism is the view that God exists but that we should be skeptical of our ability to discern God’s reasons for acting or refraining from acting in any particular instance. In particular, says the skeptical theist, we should not grant that our inability to think of a good reason for doing or allowing something is indicative of whether or not God might have a good reason for doing or allowing something. If there is a God, he knows much more than we do about the relevant facts, and thus it would not be surprising at all if he has reasons for doing or allowing something that we cannot fathom.
Just because we may not know right now why God allows a particular evil, it does not follow that the evil in question is pointless. It is a fallacy to reason that “I don’t know why X happened” and conclude “therefore X is pointless.”
As the missionary and author Elisabeth Elliot said, “God is God. If He is God, He is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere but in His will, and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what He is up to.” Or, as the pastor Tim Keller put it, “Just because you can’t see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one.”