This was a long Facebook post I made about a year ago, going point-by-point through an old YouTube video by cdk007 on the problem of evil.
[NAME], since
this video seems to encapsulate the challenge you think the problem of evil levies against theism, I thought I'd do a point-by-point examination of the video, followed by some considerations regarding the definition of God's omni-attributes (which you often tend to bring up in the wake of objections to the PoE).
Ending at 2:07- This is where cdk007 paraphrases Epicurus, in saying that if God is unable to prevent evil, He is impotent, and if God is unwilling to prevent evil, He is malevolent. However, the problem with this kind of deductive argument that has led philosophers to abandon the logical problem of evil, is that
there are hidden premises that are being left out of the argument. The most controversial premise is that if God is unwilling to prevent an instance of evil, He is malevolent. The reason why this premise is controversial is because, in order to hold to it, one has to believe it is logically impossible for God to have a morally exonerating reason to prevent a given instance of evil.
This premise gives the atheist who runs the logical PoE a great burden of proof, which is extremely difficult (theists would argue impossible) to bear.
The problem for the atheist levying this argument is made greater when theodicies are proposed, which seek to offer a "story" which makes it more clear how God could exist alongside evil. Such a theodicy is offered in
my own video on the topic. In essence, the theodicy states that
the reason for God's non-prevention of evil is that for God to prevent a given instance of evil, it would logically require Him to perform an act of evil, in the form of withholding His self-gift in some way (either by negating the maximal delegation of His powers, or by negating the maximal importance of a given individual).
It is therefore because God is perfectly good that He doesn't prevent evil.
Ending at 3:13- Cdk responds to the claim that evil is required for the good. His responses to this "version" of the claim is pretty good, but at least among theists who are significantly aware of these kinds of questions, I rarely see such a position argued. I more often see it argued that there are
specific goods (such as courage, bravery, etc.) that couldn't exist without evil, or that somehow our perception or appreciation of the good is enhanced given the presence of evil. While I wouldn't defend these other claims as theodicies, the fact that Cdk responds to the much less sophisticated "version" of the response suggests that he isn't very familiar with theistic objections to the PoE.
Ending at 3:33- Cdk responds to the claim that evil and good have to be "balanced out". Similar to the previous claim he responded to (but even more so), I really don't see this said in Christian circles. The closest thing to it is the idea put forth by someone like Dr. William Lane Craig, that perhaps the amount of good in the world (including good in the earthly/temporal realm, as well as the good that results from souls attaining knowledge of God) is only possible (or only possible given the "counterfactuals of creaturely freedom", a fancy term for "what free creatures would do in given circumstances"), given the amount of evil we see in the world. Cdk says that this doesn't explain how evil is "imbalanced" in the world, but that doesn't seem to counter WLC's claim (which is the only Christian claim I really know of that's similar to what he responded to) at all.
Again, I wouldn't espouse WLC's claim, even if true, as a theodicy (I don't think God's non-prevention of evil has to do with any kind of judgement about the evil being "worth it" in view of some greater good), but cdk's response is quite sub-par.
Ending at 4:35- Finally, cdk gets to a more popular Christian response to the PoE, namely that evils make the world better in certain ways (that salvation is only possible given sin, etc.). He makes three separate responses, which each should be responded to separately.
[As a preliminary note, again, I don't actually use this theodicy. I would actually argue that all evils are gratuitous (in the sense that they don't serve any greater good, apart from God's redemptive work to "re-integrate" them into justice). These notes are given for the sake of thorough-ness, and also in order to demonstrate that cdk appears to have only a superficial familiarity with theistic responses to the problem of evil.]
1. Cdk argues that if a world with evil is better than a world without one, then this world is inferior to Heaven. The problem with this counter, though, is that a person's heavenly existence would be "based off-of" what their earthly existence was. When apologists talk about "worlds" with or without evil, they're more accurately talking about "possible realities", or something similar. In other words, they'd be talking about possible realities that encapsulate both what life is like for people on Earth, as well as in the afterlife. So the objection based on Heaven is based on a misunderstanding in that way. [If the further counter is that "well God could have just created us directly in Heaven", that kind of objection will be addressed later.]
2. Cdk argues that if God created us with the need to experience evil to experience certain goods, He is either evil in doing so, or impotent in the sense of not having power over "the nature of good and evil". This isn't necessarily true, however, if the idea is that the goods proposed by the apologist are
logically impossible without their corresponding evils. As I'll discuss after the examination of the video,
a logically-impossible action isn't in the ambit of omnipotence, on any sober definition of the term (or any definition of the term that would allow the atheist to run a PoE argument in any form).
3. Cdk argues that there are evils that serve no effects whatsoever, and therefore serve no greater good. However, the common response to this retort (that someone like Dr. Craig frequently uses) is that the atheist can't meet their burden of proof in order to claim something like this. The "butterfly effect", for instance, entails that events can have causal effects that are perplexing, and would be impossible to discern to somebody witnessing the event.
Ending at 5:25- Cdk responds to the idea that evil is the absence of God, just as darkness is the absence of light. He brings up that this negates God's omnipresence, and goes on a tangent regarding how God doesn't "go" where instances of evil happen.
While I admit that some theists do have this kind of superficial understanding of "privatio boni",
it's important to put the idea of privatio boni in context, and to look at other possible ways of understanding such an idea.
There are some forms of the problem of evil that don't so much ask why God doesn't
prevent evil, but how evil could metaphysically even exist given certain claims about God (that God is "being itself", created everything, is the ground of all being), etc. [This may be a subtle distinction to make, but an important one.] I've seen this called the
"problem of imperfection".
What "privatio boni" attempts to show is that evil isn't some kind of separate metaphysical, or ontological category, from good, but that it is somehow a "privation" of good. Now, if one sees this privation as merely a matter of "lack", objections such as cdk's could perhaps be viable. However, a more common understanding of privatio boni, and one that I would hold, is that
evil is a privation of the good of the matter of ordering. In other words, there is a good "ordering" of things, in which created persons' needs and desires correspond perfectly with both reality, as well as other persons' needs and desires.
Evil is what occurs when such an ordering is "dislocated", and where there is a lack of said correspondence.
To use an analogy (that I believe came from Johanan Raatz), a porcelain plate is "good" when it is whole, and usable for eating (or decoration, or whatever purposes). When such a plate breaks, however, the pieces become "evil". Not because the substance of the plate has fundamentally changed, but because the plate is no longer able to function according to its intended purpose, and because
the now "pieces" no longer work together to achieve such a purpose.
Ending at 7:39- Cdk responds to the concept of the free will theodicy with four objections to it.
The theodicy of divine chastity, which is what I hold to, is different from the free will theodicy in important ways, but some of his objections would seemingly apply to TDC, so it's important to respond to them. I'll respond to these objections point-by-point (Note that he gets his numberings confused here. In the video, 3 is a response to 2. I ordered the points with respect to the points he responded to. So "4" in the video will correspond to "3" in this listing, and "5" in the video will correspond to "4" in this listing.
1. Cdk argues that if God is all-knowing, He knew what we would do with our freedom, and thus He would have to be held responsible, at least in part, for the evil that then occurs. This is a worthy objection, but it is responded to in my video. Essentially, if God were to fail to create a person, fail to give them the same importance, or coerce them to act in certain ways, knowing that otherwise said created person would act evilly and cause a great evil to occur,
God would be compromising His nature in a key way. God would no longer be acting in perfect self-gift to each person, giving them goods for their own sake.
Instead, God's "modus operandi" would become self-restraint to manipulate outcomes/prevent certain outcomes from occurring. But in that case, the perfect self-gift aforementioned, and thus perfect goodness itself, would cease to exist. In this way, the reason why God doesn't create/give differently in light of what will happen is because doing so would contradict His perfectly-good nature.
It would be a matter of doing evil to prevent evil, which a perfectly-good being will never do.
[As a side note, the illustration cdk gives is an epic fail. With reference to a theodicy pertaining to free will, he gives an illustration pertaining to... a robot. There aren't any natural examples of people creating free agents (apart from reproduction), though, so perhaps some slack can be cut here.]
2. Cdk responds to the claim that free will is such a great good that it "compensates" for the evil that exists in our world. [It's important to note, here, that there's a distinction between the free will theodicy he's replying to on this point, and the theodicy of divine chastity. TDC isn't consequentialist in nature, where God would "weigh" the good of free will on one side of the scale, and the evils we see on the other, and give the verdict "Well, I suppose it's worth it!". Such a view implicitly diminishes the significance of evil, and posits that God's opposition to it is finite. Instead, the idea of TDC is that
God being perfectly good, can't do evil to prevent evil, even though the second "evil" is in fact infinitely offensive to Him.]
His response is that there's no reason why God could have created us with the ability to make choices, but for us to always air on the side of good. The example he gives is Heaven, where presumably our freedom remains, but where evil is impossible.
This retort is also addressed in my video.
Essentially, freedom as it pertains to creatures would entail the ability to give oneself away in service of others, of one's own accord. The reason persons in Heaven are incapable of sin is because they have fully given themselves away, such that said gift is irrevocable. The next natural question would be why God couldn't create somebody in such a "fully-given-away" state. Put simply, the answer is that the "given away" would be in scare-quotes, here.
Gift would have to do with a person choosing on their own accord to give themselves away, and God would in essence be making the decision for the creature by simply creating them in the "fully-given-away" state.
3. Cdk claims that free will is a "cop-out", which claims that our choices are detached from the causal chains of the universe, where, in fact, neuroscience has shown that decisions are purely the result of neural activity in the brain. Let's break this into two components:
a)
Free will can't be true because our choices can't be disconnected from the causal chains of the universe. This implicitly assumes physicalism (that the mind is physical/a part of "the causal chains of the universe"), which is a controversial premise that needs to be supported. It also assumes that the natural world is actually deterministic (in terms of physical things causing physical things), which is also controversial. Modern findings pertinent to quantum mechanics (and other fields) at least open up the possibility that
conscious agents are actually what constructs the physical world, or at least have the ability to cause effects in the physical world. [For further exploration of this, I'd suggest several videos by the YouTuber
Inspiring Philosophy. His
videos on the "case for the soul", as well as "
Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism" and "
How Free Will Works".]
Both of these possibilities would lend doubt to this hidden assumption.
b)
Modern neuroscience has shown that decisions are the result of neural activity in the brain. It is difficult to ascertain exactly what findings he is referring to (he displays a graphic, but I'm unsure what it's referring to), but 8:20 to 12:03 of
this video addresses the Libet experiments, which may be what he is referring to.
4. Cdk claims that even if free will lets God "off the hook", there's still the question of why God doesn't prevent certain moral evils, or at least "limit" them in some way. That's potentially a useful distinction, but it is addressed by divine chastity in aforementioned ways.
God fails to prevent given instances of moral evil, either because it would take away the importance/delegated power of said agent, or because it would take away the importance/delegated power of some other agent tasked with preventing said evil in some way.
To the end of the video: Cdk concludes by restating his previous points, that have been refuted above.
----------
NOTES ON THE DEFINITION OF GOD'S ATTRIBUTES
-------
Now, often you answer critiques of the PoE by saying they are strawmen; the PoE, you argue, critiques the idea of an omnipotent God, whereas these responses posit a God Who isn't actually omnipotent, because an omnipotent being would be able to do something that these critiques posit that God is unable to do.
However, such an argument is difficult to defend on close inspection, as in nearly every case of a theodicy, there is some case made that
if God were to bring it about that evil (or a given kind of evil) didn't exist, it would logically necessitate something undesirable for a perfectly-good being. As such, the retort you would have to make would be along the lines of "An omnipotent being would be able to make it such that [said undesirable thing(s)] wasn't so, and such that [the instance(s) of evil the theodicy seeks to explain] wasn't so." However, such a claim would have to be collapsed into one of two categories:
a) It wouldn't, in fact, be logically impossible for God to prevent the given instance of evil without said undesirable thing(s) being entailed.
b) Even though it would be logically impossible for God to prevent the given instance(s) of evil without said undesirable thing(s) being entailed, an omnipotent being should still be able to do so.
If you claim that a) is true, then you must give an argument for why it actually would be logically possible for God to prevent the evil(s) without the undesirable thing(s) being entailed (as well as interact with any arguments presented for the opposite conclusion).
Remember, the problem of evil is an argument levied by the atheist, and it is thus on the atheist to substantiate the premises of said argument.
If you claim that b) is true, then as Dr. Craig mentions, any argument from evil loses any leg it could have to stand on, because it suddenly is in the ambit of omnipotence to "make it so God is good and God is not good", or to "make it so that evil exists and evil doesn't exist". Indeed,
it comes into the ambit of omnipotence to "make it such that God exists and evil exists", even if the atheist running the logical PoE is right, and God's and evil's existence really are logically mutually exclusive.
As such, in nearly all contexts relevant to theodicy,
the claim that "if God were omnipotent, He could do X" either amounts to an assertion which then needs support, or undermines any attempt at an argument against the existence of God from evil to begin with.
