I would also say your third premise is flawed in that it does not seem to allow for the possibility that God would only allow evil if a greater good came about than the good of removing evil altogether, which is in fact how it works. By giving us free will, He gave us the greater good of being able to choose to love Him back, to return His love (because true love is not forced, nor coerced but freely given and freely received) or to not love Him back even if that means that evil will exist. This greater good is also accomplished by the fact that in Heaven, those who experienced the consequences of evil (pain on earth) will count these earthly pains (no matter how horrible) as nothing compared to the unimaginable happiness that is given in Heaven by God Himself.

Hi Tucker,

The only other choice necessary in order for me to freely choose to love is an option to not love. This could be any range of attitudes. How does needing this choice logically require that innocent children die (from the second premise)?

You’re absolutely right, by being able to freely love, we’re equally able to freely not-love. Simply put, it is because of this ability to not-love that people get hurt, namely the children you mention. It doesn’t require innocent children die, but that is a consequence of choosing not to love. Now, this might stem directly from an action that you or I or anyone else might make, or it stems from when evil first entered the world (because I believe God created the world initially good, because He is good) but then people messed it all up by choosing to love themselves and not love God. This action brought all of the universe from a state of goodness into a state of chaos and disorder. Because of this evil that entered the world, we now have seemingly unnecessary or inconsequential evil/pain that we experience.

Tucker,

I have a difficult time believing you actually accept that. Do you think that because someone ate a piece of fruit that they weren’t supposed to once upon a time we now have children dying terrible deaths from diseases like AIDS? And further, you think the God who set all this up is still as loving and just as possible?

By the way, are you aware that you switched answers? First, you said the reason we have evil is because we have to have the ability to freely choose love. But of course evil isn’t required to freely choose love. So that answer is wrong. Now you’re giving a different answer. Now you say that the reason we have evil is because some human brought it into the world.

Which is it? One says that God brought evil into the world and we have to actively overcome it. The second says that we brought evil into the world. I have responses for either way, but I’d prefer to just respond to one consistent argument.

Mike,

I absolutely do believe this and I’ll try to explain why and how.

My two responses are two sides of the same coin. God created us with free will and afterwards, we freely rejected His love and allowed evil to enter into the world. I would like to define evil not as a being, thing, substance, or entity, but as disordered love, disordered will. All created things are good because God made them all. This is why evil can not be a being, because then either God made it and He is therefore not all-good, or He didn’t make it and He is thereby not all powerful. Evil is a broken relationship, a failure to conform our will to God’s will. This is what happened with the first sin, when the fruit was taken from the tree. It should have been reason enough for them to obey God even if He said “Don’t eat this fruit because I said so” but they chose to break that relationship with God even after He told them that they would die if they ate of it. To be human is to have free will. He couldn’t have made us human if He did not give us free will to accept or reject Him. Otherwise, we would be animals or machines. Because we didn’t choose Him, we are all affected by the broken relationship that stems from that action.

There also needs to be a distinction between moral evil and physical evil, sin and suffering (such as the child, or AIDS you mentioned previously), the evil we actively do and the evil we experience, the evil we are directly responsible for and the evil we aren’t. The origin of evil we are directly responsible for (or sin) is human free will; and the immediate origin of suffering is the relationship between us and nature. In Genesis 3, where it talks about the first sin, introducing evil into the world, it tells us that the sweat from our brow and labor pains in childbirth are all consequences of our sin. This shows how the origin of suffering is traced back to the first sin.

Psychology affirms the principle of psychosomatic unity, that we humans have a personality/psyche/soul connected with our bodies. Because of this, it isn’t a large leap to say that if the soul becomes alienated from God by sin, so does the body and will therefore experience pain and death as sin’s inevitable effects.

To summarize:

1. The nature of spiritual evil is sin, separating ourselves from God.
2. The origin of spiritual evil is human free will.
3. The end for which God allows spiritual evil is to preserve human free will, that is, human nature.
4. The nature of our physical evil is suffering.
5. The origin of our physical evil is spiritual evil. We suffer because we sin.
6. The end or use of physical evil is spiritual discipline and training for our own ultimate perfection and eternal joy. (It also is just punishment for sin and a deterrence from sin).

Tucker,

There are a lot of places we could go here. I think I’ll just ask a question and take it from there.

Let’s say there is an infant that dies from being born with AIDS. Does this infant go to Heaven? Was this infant guilty of sin?

Mike,

That is a great question that I imagine many people (including myself at one time) struggle with due to the nature of things like life, Heaven and justice and how all those are related so I’m glad you asked it. I’ll try to be brief without sacrificing clarity.

To be completely honest, the answer is we don’t know if this infant goes to Heaven or not. To address your question further, I must first address another question: ‘what does it take/require in order to get to Heaven?’

I’m Roman Catholic and as such, my beliefs stem from the teachings of the Catholic Church. The Church teaches that God has united grace necessary to gain entrance into Heaven to the Sacrament of Baptism. However, God Himself is not bound by His own sacraments. What this means is that someone who is Baptized can be assured they have received grace to become a ‘new creature in Christ’ and have become a son or daughter of God and can then get into Heaven (unless they turn their back on Him afterward). But because He is not bound by His own sacraments, He can grant someone entrance to Heaven who has not been Baptized, but this is not something we can have any knowledge of.

Now, I’m assuming your question would be directed to infants who are not Baptized, because I can tell you from my faith that infants who die after being Baptized do in fact go to Heaven.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church brings up this very question of infants who die before Baptism in paragraph 1283:

“With respect to children who have died without Baptism, the liturgy of the Church invites us to trust in God’s mercy and to pray for their salvation.”

The reason we don’t know is because they have not done anything out of their free will to choose to reject God simply because they’re infants. However, the Church also teaches that because of the “Original Sin” of ‘Adam and Eve’, everyone is born ‘guilty of sin’ by nature, not by choice. Even still, we trust in the mercy of God that He would look past this stain of the original sin and bring the child into His loving embrace regardless. One of my favorite quotes of Jesus in the Gospel is “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” This gives me even more hope that these children who die so young and innocently are gathered into Heaven.

Ok, so here’s my concern, Tucker.

Let’s say it is true that the infant goes to Heaven. We can say a few things:

- The physical suffering does not come as a result of any act of sin.
- The only connection then to sin is the idea of original sin.
- The idea of infants suffering when they will never sin themselves because they will die means they are punished solely on the basis of what others have done. We generally consider this to be injustice.
- So, saying ‘We suffer because we sin’ does not apply to the infant except in the indirect way above.
- This is also a case where the end use of the suffering does not further benefit the child, as you suggested in (6).

Feel free to respond to these thoughts, but I don’t plan to get into a drawn out discussion of the problem of evil because that’s not the point of this article. My point here was to say why an internal consistency argument does not require me to define evil above and beyond the Christian definition. If I were going to argue the problem of evil, I would do it using a very specific formulation to skip past some things that have already been accounted for in past theodicies and give it its own post.

I’ll leave the comment with these thoughts. The overwhelming majority of philosophers would agree with me that natural evil cannot be explained by free will. That’s because to say this thing about natural evil being a result of the free choice requires a literal interpretation of Genesis. And that is an incredibly difficult thing to defend. If you are satisfied with that, so be it, but I will not accept quoting the Bible as any matter of fact.

Mike

In regards to refraining from a discussion of Problem of Evil, that’s fine.

You said “The idea of infants suffering when they will never sin themselves because they will die means they are punished solely on the basis of what others have done. We generally consider this to be injustice.”

I agree with this, this is an injustice. In fact, so does the Church and God Himself. He viewed the ‘first sin’ as a great injustice to humanity for the very reason that it brings about, by nature, sin and suffering to others. Because of this, He had a plan to restore justice by freeing us from this pain and bondage. I’m not sure if this addresses your point though, please correct me if I’m missing something you’re getting at.

I do have a couple questions of my own for you. What do you mean when you say in your original post “atheists have no need of a definition of evil and we don’t even have to believe that evil is real?” Can you elaborate more on the argument of internal consistency and how it relates to your beliefs about evil or morality?

Sure thing, Tucker.

Basically, the idea is that you would claim x and I would say that not-x is the case. The not-x is not based on a definition of my own, but rather on whatever would negate your claim. An example might help.

Let’s say there is a group of people that worship the number one and also believe they live in the Matrix. One of their tenants is that there is only one of everything in the Matrix world (x). You can come along and point out that there is two of some particular thing (not-x) in the Matrix world. This does not require you to define anything other than what the negation of x would be. Also notice that you can do this even if you don’t believe the Matrix world is real.

That being said, there are cases where someone’s own definition matters. Imagine, for example, that someone says “Well that’s not the kind of God I want to worship.” That’s a different sort of claim than what I’m talking about and probably does require some conception by the speaker of what standard God should achieve. The first standard is just one of logical consistency, so not based on a belief in the same way.

Finally, we could go one step further and say that I myself live in a hopelessly contradictory fashion. Let’s say I also believe I live in the Matrix and I worship the number three because I claim that everything in M world comes in three. Notice what I can do here. I can still point out the original flaw for the one worshippers even though this shows my own worldview false. Simply saying “you too” to someone doesn’t alleviate the original worldview of the argument against it. This is called the tu quoque fallacy.

Hopefully that wasn’t a completely confusing way to explain this.

Mike,

But your not-x must lie within the confines of whoever defined X, correct? That’s what I gathered when you said “Well that’s not the kind of God I want to worship.” e.g. it doesn’t fall under how I defined X originally.

To be honest, I don’t think I completely followed it. I think I had a hold of it until you got to the tu quoque fallacy. I looked more into what it is and don’t see a connection. Perhaps you could elaborate by giving me a more concrete example within Christian or Atheistic morality?

Sure, Let me try to be more clear. I’ll give a concrete example, but try not to get hung up on whether you think God actually commits murder etc.

Let’s say you believe the following three things: God only does good, the bible is completely accurate, and murder is evil. I could come along and point to a story in the bible where God commits murder. That’s one way to do it that is only about another’s claims. This would have nothing to do with my beliefs.

Another way is to point to the allowance of acts that the theist agrees are evil and say that a perfectly good being wouldn’t allow it. That’s not about the objector’s definition of evil. It’s about the objector’s definition of what a perfectly good being would do, etc. This is how I see probably the majority of Problem of Evil cases. The disagreement is usually not about whether the thing is evil (becaue if you do it right you’ll pick things the theist believes are actually evil), but instead about whether God can, would, or should stop such things.

Here’s a concrete version of the second type:

1. Sin is evil (Christian premise)
2. God allows sin (Christian premise)
3. God allows evil (from 1 and 2)

You can see here that (3) simply follows from the two Christian premises. From (3) we can argue that a perfectly good, powerful, omniscient, etc. being would not allow evil. Thus, we would have a contradiction. Your reply here would not be to disagree with (1) or (2). Instead, you would want to add an additional premise that resolves the problem. You would want a premise to show that God has some reasons for allowing evil that do not conflict with his omni-properties.

So, there are two possible and popular ways to do this consistency argument. Neither of them are really about what I would say is evil or if I would even make such a claim.

I’ll throw out one more thing just for fun. I argue that the movie Back to the Future is inconsistent (at least with respect to a common view of time). Marty goes back to 1955 and actually changes things and the “present” is different when he returns. Now, if in 1985 Marty went back to 1955, then it would have already happened in the past of that timeline. To say that he could change things is ludicrous because they would have already been changed. Maybe that just makes matters worse, so I’ll leave it there. My point is that I can make a consistency argument about this movie even though I don’t believe the events are real or time travel in general is real (in the way it’s portrayed).

Mike,

Thank you for clearing it up; your examples did the trick so it makes sense to me now (I’m a big ‘Back to the Future’ fan).

So do you think evil exists?

Tucker,

My answer is it depends. I would need to know how we are defining evil. That gets pretty tricky and there really isn’t much agreement. I think, though, that even if we don’t have a complete understanding we can recognize there is something there. For example, our ancestors didn’t need to understand photons to recognize light and dark.

So, considering that, we might say that whatever evil is - command from God, pleasure/pain, etc. - it is clear that genocide or rape are examples of it.