The problem of evil
This, of course, really answers the vexed "problem of evil" which has so plagued philosophy for so long. This is the only really serious argument against God's existence (as opposed to arguments that either say, "You haven't proved that God does exist" or "There's no effect, and so no need for a God"). It is called the Problem of Evil. It isn't necessarily of itself an argument against the existence of something infinite, but of a being which is (a) all-powerful, (b) all-knowing, and (c) all-good. The argument goes,
In itself, the argument is simple. It says, "If God is all-knowing, he knows that there is evil in this world of ours (harm, immorality, suffering); if he is all-powerful, he can prevent it if he doesn't want it to happen; and if he's all-good, then he doesn't want it to happen. So if God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, there is no evil in the world.
"Therefore, given that there is evil in the world, then there is no God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good."
Now of course, this argument can be easily "refuted" if God doesn't have at least one of these properties, or has one only in a limited way. If, for instance, he doesn't know about the evil in the world, he wouldn't try to stop it; or if he's not all-powerful, he might not be able to stop it even if he knows about it and wants to; and if he's not all-good, he might not care.
But that's just a debater's way of getting out of the question, since the infinite being we argued to turns out to know what's going on in the world, and he is certainly powerful enough to stop any act in the world that he doesn't want to find there; and he is in some sense infinitely good and loving.
Obviously, I think my notion of "good" and "bad" solves the problem. I should, however, mention that there are "refutations" of God's existence that rest on "How could a being with Property X be the cause of something with Property Y"-type arguments, which deal with the causality of the cause, which in general is a mystery to us, no matter what the cause.(1) "Refutations," therefore based on "I can't see how" are invalid provided you have conclusively proved that there must be a being with Property X, and you know that its effect does in fact have Property Y. The fact that you don't know how the X-being can manage the explanation of Y-beings is no argument of itself that there is no X-being. If so, then the Y-beings remain a contradiction (an effect without a cause), which is absurd.
But that way out doesn't look terribly promising. The argument at least looks as if you can predict from the properties of the infinite being that the world would have to be different from what it actually is. And what that means is that it's not just a question of how God can cause a world with evil in it, it's that he wouldn't. And of course, what that means is that there's something wrong with the argument for the existence of such a being; such a being couldn't exist.
Let me here give some other "refutations" of the Problem of Evil that don't really refute it.
First, there is the argument that God only allows evil for the sake of a greater good that comes from it. The idea is that if God created another world without evil in it, it would be worse than the one he created; and so he's good, because this, while not a perfect world, is the best possible world. A better world than this couldn't actually exist.
But that's nonsense. Supposing God to be infinite, then God + the world is no greater than God alone (just as the set of numbers {1, 2, 3, ... n, n+1 ...} is not greater if you add 0 to the set). So if God wanted a world with no evil in it, all he had to do was not create anything and be alone. Then what exists would be better than God + a world with evil; and so what actually exists (God + a world with evil) is not the best possible situation. So this doesn't have to be the "best possible world" based on something that is true of God.
There's the argument that, since evil is just a lack of something, God didn't create evil. But that doesn't solve the problem, because we're supposing that an all-good God doesn't want "lacks" in things when the "lacks" are against their nature (as blindness or maiming is). So even if blindness is the inability to see, it is the inability to see in something reason says can in some sense see (how else would it be curable?); and so a good God, it would seem, would be positively unwilling to see his creatures deprived of what is due them.
There's the notion that suffering and so on are a punishment for human sins. But this has several defects. First of all, why were animals punished before ever there were any human beings to sin? If you say that the dinosaurs didn't suffer, then what do you mean, if they sank into quicksand and drowned? You have to stretch things to say that this fate was good for them--and what sense would it make to say that this was a "punishment" unless it was in some sense bad? But then you have a punishment (a) before the crime was committed (b) on something that had no part in the commission of the crime. In what sense could a good God justify this?(2)
Second, why weren't human beings created incapable of sinning? "Because then they wouldn't be free." But our freedom even now is not totally unrestricted (you can't transform yourself into an alligator), and so why not make beings free to choose only among legitimate options? They'd still be free, but not absolutely free. But we're not absolutely free now.
"Well, but God saw that it was better this way." But that's the "best of all possible worlds" argument again; and that argument is invalid.
Finally, there's the argument, "Yes, but God's goodness is not the same as human goodness." But it sure looks as if God's goodness is not only not the same as human goodness, in many cases it would have to be the same as what we would call horrendous evil. That is, we wouldn't simply say that a man who blew up a building and killed a hundred people in it was just "less good than we'd like him to be," we'd say that he was a positively evil man. He'd be evil even if he knew the building was going to blow up and could stop it (or warn the people) and chose simply to let it happen. But God either causes volcanoes to blow up hundreds of his beloved creatures, or allows it to happen when he could prevent it. Does it mean anything to say that somebody like that is good in any sense?
Now we can see that God has to be "infinitely powerful," and that he can in fact prevent from happening anything that he doesn't want to happen. But if my view of goodness and badness is true, God is only "infinitely good" if God acts as you expect him to act.
Obviously, the person who finds evil in the world an argument against God has expectations of God's behavior that God doesn't "measure up to"; and so for him God is evil. So there is a God, but he is not infinitely good.
But this doesn't argue to a "defect" in God; it simply means that the evaluator's standards are not realistic. So what? No standards are realistic, really, because they are ideals that are subjectively created.(3) That is, when you are talking about good and bad, you are not just describing how things are, you are relating them to a standard. And where do we get this standard? It comes from the fact that we can imagine situations as different from the way they are, and can the compare the actual state of affairs (the facts as perceived and understood) with the situation as we imagine it; and based on this comparison we can say that the actual state of affairs is good if it matches the imagined one (the ideal) and bad if it falls short of the imagined one.
So our ability to evaluate and to think in terms of good and bad is part of our ability to understand. But in ordinary understanding, (which gives us truth and mistakes), the facts are taken as the "independent variable," as it were, and understanding is what has to "bring itself into conformity with" the facts in order for understanding not to be mistaken and truth to occur.
Here, however, as, I said, we have the same relation, only we are considering it the opposite way round. We have formed a pre-conceived judgment about things (this ideal we have constructed in our imagination), and we expect the facts to live up to (to match) it. If they do, then this (which would be the same as "truth," since the understanding and the facts match), is what we call "good"; and when they don't (i.e. when the relation corresponds to a mistake), instead of "blaming" our understanding and trying to correct it, we hold on to our preconceived idea and "blame" the facts and call them "bad."
That is, in both evil and a mistake, there is a discrepancy between the idea I have of the way the world is and the way the world actually is. When I consider the facts as the standard, I consider that I have made a mistake; but when I am in the evaluative mode of thinking, I hang on to the ideal as the way I think "things ought to be," and I then say that the situation is bad and "ought not to be that way."
So, for instance, I make the generalization that human beings can see just because they are human beings. I see a blind man. Now I don't want to give up the generalization that "all human beings can see," and so I say, "That's a defective case of a human being," or "There's something wrong with him," or "He ought to be able to see." There is a kind of contradiction in him: he's a human being, and all human beings can see (and therefore he can see), but he can't see--so he's a kind of sub-human human.
It is this apparently contradictory situation that is what evil consists in. Notice that this apparent contradiction isn't an effect exactly, because if you say, "Well, he can't see because his optic nerve is atrophied," you've given the cause of his blindness; but you haven't satisfied the person who's making the evaluative judgment, because he simply counters with, "What difference does it make why he can't see? Humans ought to have functioning optic nerves. Why have them at all, if they don't work?" That is, even if you explain why the evil situation exists, this doesn't alter the fact that according to the evaluation it ought not to exist.
The first thing to remember here is that the standard (the ideal) as such has no factual basis. You got it from using your imagination and just manipulating what was stored there into a form that satisfied you, for some reason. Now granted, you might have reasons for formulating the ideal; for instance, in the case of blindness, not only can "practically every" human being see, it also doesn't make sense to have eyes that are not functional, since "practically every" organ of "practically every" living thing has a function; and the function of the eyes in "practically everyone" is to see.
But the point is that the fact that "practically every" human being can see is no reason for saying that "therefore, absolutely every human being can see." But that's what the ideal is actually saying. Because practically every human being can see, then you make the leap and say that every human being ought to be able to see. You now set this up, in other words as your idea of the "real true" human being, whether that being exists or not.
And in doing so, what have you done? You form an ideal by mentally removing limitations from the limited cases you observe. That is, each human being (because he is an energy-bundle) is a limited case of "what it is to be human" (that form of existence); and so the ideal human being is the human being who doesn't have any of these particular limitations that some people have and other people don't.
But it's not quite that. Not everyone can play basketball like Michael Jordan; in fact, very, very few can. So these extraordinary talents don't (generally) form part of the ideal human being that most of us formulate for evaluating whether something is a good example of a human being or "there's something wrong with him." The evaluative ideal generally excludes the limitations that only a few have, and so it becomes a kind of "zero" at the bottom of "normality"; and we say that any limitation below this is too great a limitation, and ought not to be there.
In the same way, we say that any temperature below freezing is "badness" as far as heat is concerned, and we don't call it "very little heat," (which it is) we call it the opposite of heat, cold. That is, we (arbitrarily) set the zero of heat at the freezing point, and then call temperatures below that (which are still objectively cases of heat) "too limited," and therefore "negative heat."
Therefore,
Ontological evil is limitation greater than the lowest limitation that we consider "normal."
But the point I am stressing is twofold: (a) Where you place the zero is arbitrary, and has no objective basis--as can be seen from the fact that the freezing point of water is zero on the Celsius scale, but that same temperature is 32 above zero on the Fahrenheit scale. And neither is "right," objectively; it all depends on how you want to look at things.
Now then, there is nothing in a (limited) being itself which says that it can't be limited in any way or to any degree that this being can be limited in. Obviously. That is, we say that human beings ought to be able to live at least seventy years; but we see that in fact human beings can live as short a time as a year and still be human beings (or ten minutes, for that matter). We see that human beings ought to be able to see, but we also see that there are human being who can't see, and they are human in spite of this extra limitation they have. And so on.
So what can we conclude from this?
Since evil is always a comparison of the real situation with an ideal that does not exist, and since that ideal was subjectively created, there is no objective reason why the ideal "ought" to exist. Therefore, evil is a "problem" only for those who choose to look on things in this way.
Now this is not to deny that things can "be" evil. They are in fact evil when in fact they do not live up to your preconceived expectations. That relation of discrepancy is a fact, but the ideal isn't. That is, evil has an objective and a subjective "pole" to the relation; you set up the subjective pole as the "real true" one (which it isn't, but you want reality to conform to it); and it is this that makes evil basically subjective. Things "become" evil or good simply by your changing your expectations, without their changing at all.
For instance, you doubtless don't consider it bad that you can't play basketball like Michael Jordan--because almost nobody can play basketball that well, and probably you're not interested in having that talent. But notice that Scotty Pippin might consider it bad that he isn't quite that talented (because, one supposes, he wants to be the world's greatest basketball player). Similarly, if you're blind, you can either say, "How terrible!" and complain about all the things you can't do that sighted people can do, or you can say, "Who cares what they can do? I can read braille, I can hear, I can do this, that, and the other, and I'm just not interested in doing those other things." And suddenly, being sighted becomes a kind of "talent" that other people have, like the ability to play basketball, and you don't any longer consider that there's "something wrong" with you, or that it's "bad" to be the way you are. Now I don't say that this sort of shift of the ideal is easy, but in fact it's what makes successful blind people successful; they don't "dwell on" their limitations.
The point is that you're free to make your ideal whatever you want it to be; there's nothing in reality that forces it on you. Hence evil exists or doesn't exist depending on how you choose to look at things, not because of something you discover "out there." In essence, evil is limitation, taken from the point of view of the fact that the limitation is "too great."
But it follows from this that, since God is absolutely unlimited existence, then it is impossible to form an ideal about him, conceiving the Infinite as "less limited" than he is, which would allow you to say that "there is something wrong" with him. Hence, God is absolute ontological goodness.
Notice that God's intrinsic or ontological goodness says absolutely nothing about the "fact" that evil "ought" not to exist in the world; because evil "ought" not to exist simply because of our arbitrarily set ideals by which we consider some limitations as "too great." But they are always and only subjectively "too great," and there's no sense in which the Infinite should cause finite beings to be less limited than they actually are. Just as, if your son wants you to take him to the amusement park and you don't want to, he says you're bad; but you're bad only according to his standards, and why should you conform to his standards? Similarly, if you say that I am wracking your brain with this book, and I "ought" to make it simple, why should I conform to your standards? I'm making it (believe it or not) clear and intelligible; you work at trying to understand it.
The point of this, of course, is that the (ontological) goodness of God is quite compatible with evil in the world. The ontological goodness of God just means that there's no way of conceiving him as "falling short" of a greatness he "ought" to have; but that's perfectly compatible with finite beings' falling short of some ideal you set for them; it just happens to be a contradiction in terms to set an ideal for God higher than infinite existence.
But it's not quite that simple, is it? I've been talking about ontological evil, the sense of "badness" in which the thing doesn't conform to your expectations of what it is. But there's also moral evil, which deals with the behavior of persons. A given person might be an extremely talented human being, but if he rapes other people, we consider his behavior wrong and call him an "evil" person.
A person is morally evil when he acts inconsistently with the reality which he is.
A rapist, for instance, is using a cooperative act against the other person's will (i.e. uncooperatively); a thief is saying "What's mine is mine (because I'm a human being) and what's yours is mine (because I want it to be)."--and this is in effect saying either "I'm superhuman" or "You're subhuman" by his actions, and neither is true. So in moral evil, you are pretending that you aren't what you really are; you are acting as if you were greater than you really are.
And, of course, that's why moral evil is bad. You are, as it were, trying to act as if a subjective ideal of yourself (as, for example, superior to others) is the reality of yourself, when in fact it isn't. So you are not simply evaluating things according to the ideal, you are pretending that the ideal actually exists when it doesn't, because unless it actually exists, your action contradicts your reality.
But of course, since the ideal doesn't exist, the act does contradict your reality;(4) and so everyone else, looking at what the reality is, calls this "morally wrong," and then says that you are morally bad.
The point, of course, is that you can't be morally bad unless you are in some sense or other acting as if you are greater than what you really are, or (if you want to put it that way) you are refusing to accept the limitation you have as human, and acting as if you didn't have it.
But it immediately follows from this that God cannot be morally bad. No matter what God does to any finite reality, no matter what limitations he imposes on any finite being, (a) the being is capable of being limited in this way and to this degree (or it couldn't exist), and (b) God is perfectly capable of doing this. So if a meteor falls down out of the sky and hits you in the head and splatters your brains all over Cincinnati, and if this is in "the providence of God," as they say, what objective complaint do you have? As Isaiah said, "Can the clay talk back to the potter?" You may not like the fact that you are the "earthen dish" St. Paul talks about which was made just to be smashed; but it is perfectly possible for you to exist this way; and so it is perfectly consistent with God to cause you to exist this way.
Notice that we don't even attribute moral evil to ourselves when we step on cockroaches or break sticks or uproot plants or crush rocks--because these things have no rights against us (or in other words, it isn't inconsistent with our reality to destroy them). Well obviously, it's not inconsistent with the reality of the One who causes us to be the finite being which we are to limit us in whatever way he pleases; It doesn't have to conform to our idea of what It "ought" to do to us. So the infinite moral goodness of God is perfectly compatible with evil in the world.
Of course, the upshot of this is that God can be said in a meaningful sense to be absolutely good, and still be a complete monster from our point of view. I don't imagine the cockroach you stepped on looks on you with grateful eyes from its place in cockroach-heaven either.
And this is what I was getting at when I said that God can be looked on as evil. If you have as your standard, "A being which causes destruction to another is evil," then it automatically follows that God is (to you) evil. The point is that this evaluation has no real objective basis; he is "evil" because he in fact is different from the way you expect.
But the upshot of this discussion is that, philosophically speaking, there's no real problem with there being evil in the world. And insofar as it is a problem, a denial of God's existence doesn't make it go away. Insofar as you say that certain things ought not to exist the way they do, then they ought not to exist that way whether there's a God or not; and if the "ought" is objective, then the world contradicts itself, and nothing makes sense. How is this a more reasonable position than theism--however unpalatable the theism we've come up with looks to our evaluative judgment?
I think I should point out here that this definition of "goodness" and "badness" is not something concocted ad hoc to make the world compatible with the Infinite. It is based, like our definition of "existence," on the conditions under which we use the terms, and the impossibility of our actually having objective knowledge of an ideal (since the ideal would have to be something like the sideways 8 [], a limited being without the limits). The definition also explains the empirical fact that no one has ever been able to come up with a notion of "good" that everyone agrees on. Why not, if it's something objective that can be discovered?
As to St. Augustine's definition of evil as "the privation of a due good," how do you know that the good is due, except that, for some reason or another, you expect it to be in the being in question. And that rests on a subjectively created ideal; it is not something discovered by examining the facts.
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Notes
1. For example, even in something as simple as one billiard ball hitting another and moving it, we don't really know how it does it (though we can put a name to it: force); you don't even know how you manage to make your arm move when you decide to move it
2. Actually, if you take into account God's eternity, then there is a possibility that, for a believer, this might be valid. If we assume that the first man (the first animal that evolved to have a spiritual soul) had, not only the choice of what his body would be like (his genetics), but also the choice of what the world he was capable of affecting would be like (because he was created to change the world as he saw fit). Supposing also that there were limits put on his choices by God (such as he had to be a mammal, and so on), and he chose to reject those limits and try to make himself over into an impossibility, then God might punish him by letting his own body be out of his control to some extent, and eventually die. And, consistent with this, the world "retroactively" would have been created to evolve in such a way that there was harm and suffering in it also. Since God is, as we will see, not in time, and as prophesy shows, future events can be the causes of past ones, then this is consistent with what we know (and will find out) about God. So all destruction and harm depend on the first man's sin, and evolution would have occurred differently (i.e. without the harm) if he hadn't sinned.
There's no contradiction here; but it's a lot to swallow. I personally think it's true, and I will give evidence that could lead to that conclusion later--though this treatise is not really the place to develop it, since it mainly deals with a "loving" God as Christianity teaches, not the philosophical, abstract God that we have argued to. They are the same God, of course; but the point is that the believer holds that God has attributes that are beyond what reason can argue to from God's effects in the world. If we are to know these attributes, God has to tell us, somehow.
3. I realize that it goes against the grain to say that God can be evil; but in fact many people don't believe in God because "a good God couldn't have done this to me! What have I done to deserve it?" That is, if in fact there is a God, and if he did this to me (i.e. caused it to happen to me or didn't prevent it), then God is an evil God. But this rests on the expectation that God would not limit a creature to an extent beyond what the creature wanted to be limited as; but my discussion here establishes, I think, that this expectation has no solid objective foundation. So yes, God can be evil, if he doesn't live up to your expectations of him. To correct this, of course, you have to see that "the clay can't talk back to the potter" and anything God does to you is something he can do, and so this is not inconsistent with his reality. You have no objective claim on God. Thus, your expectations are not realistic.
4. This is not in the sense that you can't do it, but that the goal you set for the action can't in practice be made real. The thief can't make the stolen object belong to him by the mere act of taking it; but he wants it to belong to him by that act--or he wants to use it as if it belonged to him when he knows that it doesn't. That's why theft is wrong. The contradiction lies, not in reality, but in the self-contradictory goal of the act.