Ian Boyne, Contributor
AN 80-YEAR-OLD defenceless woman is chopped to pieces and her head severed. Terrorists kill thousands of innocent people, burning them to a harrowing crisp. A promising Christian teenager travelling from a crusade which he has just conducted, slides off the road through exhaustion from Christian activity and plunges to his horrific death. Where is God in all this?
The ancient philosopher Epicurus posed the dilemma well: "Is He (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is He able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is He both willing and able? Whence then is evil?" The traditional Christian response has been the "Free Will Defence". That is, God did not want to create robots and therefore He gave humans freedom which inevitably includes the freedom to do evil. You can't give freedom with one hand and take it back with the other, the Christian apologist would say.
Okay, says the atheist, I understand. But why is there the immense and extensive level of evils which exist? Couldn't God have given man freedom and yet intervene to prevent the level and depth of the evil which exists? William Rowe, the most gifted and noted of the atheistic philosophers of evil, puts its thus: "There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting something equally bad or worse". Rowe is famous for his case of the fawn which is caught in a forest fire and dies a slow, horrifying death days after. What purpose does that serve? How does that poor animal benefit morally from that seemingly senseless suffering?
Then there is the case of Sue (which he developed later after critiques by Christian apologists) who at five years is beaten, raped and killed --- before she could draw any moral lessons and develop character or moral virtues from the suffering. The philosophers have been debating these issues intensely in the learned philosophical and theological journals and in full-length books.
But, thankfully, in one volume one can read the leading philosophers who have tackled this vexing issue. In the 337-page book titled The Evidential Arguments from Evil edited by the highly competent Christian philosopher, Daniel Howard-Snyder and published by Indiana University Press, we can read essays from the most brilliant atheistic and theistic philosophers: William Rowe, Richard Gale (atheists) as well as those from the Christian faith: Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston (the three most distinguished Christian philosophers alive), Stephen Wykstra, Daniel Howard-Synder, Eleonore Stump and Peter van Inwagen.
While the Christian philosophers have more essays, the atheists' views are well represented in the Christian essays and Rowe and Gale are formidable enough to deal with the competition! If you want a single volume which gives you the essence of the debate on evil, The Evidential Argument from Evil is the volume to have. The essays are tightly reasoned, pungent and focused. Howard-Synder did an excellent editing job.
Rowe undercuts the usual Christian response of free will by asking the usually unasked question: "The first question we need to ask is whether the possession of free will is something that is in itself of such great value as to merit God's permission of the horrendous moral evils in the world? I think the answer must be no."
Rowe quotes Christian philosopher William Alston as making this damning confession in response to his case of the five-year-old Sue is brutally raped and killed: "Presumably, a tiny constriction such as would be involved in God's preventing Sue's attackers from committing that atrocity would not render things radically different, free-will-wise from what they would have been without that. So God could have prevented this without losing the good emphasised by (Christian) theodicy."
But how can finite humans know all the possible reasons that an infinite God could have for allowing evil? Want more? Get the book!
Ian Boyne is a minister in the Church of God International.
