The Problem of Evil

“The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.” – Sam Harris

For me the ‘problem of evil’ has always been, to borrow a quote from Winston Churchill, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Recently I came across the book 50 philosophy ideas you really need to know by Ben Dupre. He sets aside two chapters to deal with this problem.

What is the ‘problem of evil’?

The most recent face of pure evil was that of one-armed Govindachami, who has been condemned to death for kicking a helpless young woman from a moving train on to the tracks and raping and killing her as she lay badly injured. What is more evil is the mind-set of the mafia behind this monster that has arranged for his legal support.

Earlier this year the shocking report of a ‘murder’ appeared in the media. Advocate Jose Kurian, 36 and his wife Sindhu Nair, 37 a management professional were arrested for torturing and starving their domestic help – Dhanalakshmian 11 year old minor girl from Tamilnadu– to death in Ernakulam district of Kerala. Sindhu confessed that they used to burn the girl with cigarettes, pour hot water on her and poke her with burning firewood. What was even more bizarre and cruel was that they sought the help of a veterinarian to treat the girl. The provocation for the torture was that the girl could not perform all the backbreaking domestic tasks, although she was bought by the couple for Rs.15,000 just for looking after their child.

History is full of evil men and their cruel ways. Religions and their sadistic leadership have taken the lead in man’s inhumanity to man.

Six million Jews are believed to have been killed in the gas chambers of the concentration camps set up by Hitler. Idi Amin, the mad ruler of Uganda, Pol Pot of Cambodia, and Stalin of Russia are some of the sadists who made millions of innocent people disappear in the name of ideology and/or for maintaining absolute power.

The 1984-5 drought and famine in Ethiopia caused over one million people to starve agonisingly to death. The images of thousands swallowed up by angry tsunami waves are still fresh in our minds. 9/11 of New York was an instance of pain and suffering caused in the name of religion. Another case was that of the Catholic Church whose popes were instrumental in the torture and killing of thousands during the period of inquisition in the name of putting down heresy. Christ came to earth as a saviour. He taught his followers to ‘love thy neighbour’ and be compassionate and helpful to the needy. But his successors, in their hot pursuit of temporal power and spiritual control, forced their faithful to spy and accuse each other of heresy. Even thinking heresy was to be punished. Very cruel modes of torture were invented; after torture they were burned at stake.

Torture techniques included water torture “when a funnel would be forced down the victim’s throat. Five litres of water was considered ‘ordinary’ and that amount of water could burst blood vessels. In the ordeal of fire the prisoners were manacled before a fire, fat or grease was spread over their feet, and that part of them cooked until a confession was obtained.” All this was done by the inquisitor generalis who invariably was a priest, monk or bishop. Very few are aware that it was St. Francis Xavier who requested for the Goa inquisition in which 16,202 persons were affected.

For me personally, one of the more evil acts is to bring a child into this world and then abandon/kill the little one who never asked to be born in the first place.

We see pain and suffering everywhere. They are due to both human and natural causes. It is usual to distinguish between ‘moral evil’ (e.g. murder) caused by humans and ‘natural evil’ (e.g. tsunami) brought about by factors outside human control.

“Famine, murder, earthquake, disease – these cause suffering and death to millions. If you could click your finger and stop all this misery, you would be considered a heartless monster not to do so. Yet, there is a being with unlimited power that can do that – God. Why doesn’t he do that? That is the core of the problem of evil.”

The problem of evil is a direct consequence of the qualities that are attributed to God by the Judeo-Christian theology. These qualities define the concept of God; if we subtract even one, the very concept of God disappears.

According to Christian tradition, God is omnipresent (present everywhere), omniscient (knows everything), omnipotent (can do everything) and omnibenevolent (desires to do good). As an omniscient being, he is aware of the evils of this world; being omnipotent, he is capable of preventing them and being omnibenevolent, he wants to prevent all this evil.  Yet we see an immense amount of pain and misery around us. In this case we can only conclude logically that God doesn’t know what is going on or he doesn’t care about the pain and suffering or he can’t do anything about it or he does not exist!

It is here that Christian theologians have conjectured up some rope tricks to make the existence of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God compatible with the existence of evil.

The easiest trick is to deny the very existence of evil as the Christian Scientists have done. However, the vast majority of theists do not buy this claim. They try to qualify God’s omnibenevolent attribute by claiming that there are ‘morally sufficient reasons’ why God might not always desire to eliminate pain and suffering. They, in fact, believe that occurrence of evil in this world is, in the long run, good. This might sound weird to many. But they justify their claim saying that the suffering on earth is the price we pay for ‘free-will’ – the freedom to have choices about our actions. “Human freewill is a divine gift of enormous value, but God could not have made this gift to us without the risk of our abusing it.” Again it is argued that only through suffering and adversity one’s moral character and virtue are forged.

The theists are, however, unable to explain either the arbitrariness or the sheer scale of human suffering. More often than not, the blameless suffer, while the culprits go unpunished. In many situations the quantum of suffering is totally disproportionate to the requirements of character building. Even if we accept the gift of free will to compensate for moral evil, what possible sense can we make of natural evil? The response to this question is rather laughable: it is the work of the devil or that such evils are God’s just punishment for Adam and Eve’s original sin!! When driven to a corner, the theists claim that God works in mysterious ways.

The ‘freewill defence’ itself runs into difficulties when dealing with the ‘problem of freewill.’  The question is: are we genuinely free in our capacity to make choices?

When thinking of the problem of evil and the Christian response to the same, I am reminded of what Bertrand Russell wrote in the essay “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish”:

“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”