For centuries certain theodicies have been accepted as valid explanations for the co-existence of God with evil and suffering. Two of these have been particularly popular and continue to be a part of the everyday “language of suffering.” Both find their most formal expressions in Augustine with a little help eight centuries later by Thomas Aquinas.
1) The Free Will Defense: The free will defense maintains that God is not responsible for evil and suffering but rather, humanity is. It is based on the idea that God created human beings and bestowed them with the “gift” of free will and through pride and disobedience humanity turned away from God thereby destroying the harmony that God had created. By doing so human beings brought about the emergence of evil, suffering and death. The mythical representation of this ideology is of course, the creation story in Genesis. It “explains and describes,” in narrative form, how first millennia Israelites understood themselves, their God and their place in the cosmos. Doire tangent #1: It is important to understand that in the Biblical traditions, as reflected in Genesis, the God of the Bible is Creator, and what this God creates is “good.” Since the story reflects why evil and suffering exist, it must end up badly for humanity. If Adam and Eve lived out eternity in perfect harmony and joy, the story would fail because it would not be reflective of human reality. Myths “work” and they are accepted because they succeed and gain approval as reflective of collective experience. And so, since it is a fact that human beings suffer and die (and bring about moral evil), the story has to have a bad ending. In the Christian tradition, God cannot “create” evil, so Adam and Eve are said not to turn towards evil (which cannot exist until they do!) but rather, away from God; in the act of turning away, death results. Of course, this begs the question of the presence of an evil temptation (the snake) in the Garden even before evil makes its appearance. Doire tangent #2: The creation story in Genesis is a reflection of the culture out of which it emerged. It tells us more about the Israelites of the 9th-6th centuries BCE, than it does about the universe, God or anything else. Abraham is dated at c. 1800 BCE, Moses in the 13th century BCE; the creation story was written (in its many parts) between the 9th-6th centuries BCE. This makes perfect sense. The people had to be a people before they could create a story. So, the Israelites became a self-identifying group first and then they created and told the stories that describe who they are. By way of analogy, I have to be a person before I can tell the stories of my childhood and adolescence. I have to be born before I can tell the story of my birth. I have to forge an identity before I can tell the stories of my life that I judge as defining moments in that life. There can be no creation story until there is a people to construct it and to tell it. Doire tangent #3: One must also remember that scholars estimate human religious history as extending as far back as 50,000-60,000 years ago. Human beings have been “religious” far longer than is contained within Biblical history. There was religion before the God of the Bible appeared on the religious historical scene less than 4,000 years ago. Indeed, there is NO evidence of the emergence of even a male image of God in human religious history before the 6th millennium BCE! Each of these “tangents” could occupy the space of this blog for many, many pages.
But, back to the Free Will Defense. So, the Free Will Defense maintains that human beings are responsible for evil, not God. There are many problems with this popular “resolution.”
1). It does not account for “natural evil,” i.e., the suffering that occurs as a result of natural disaster; earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, etc. Though some have argued that human interaction with the earth has resulted in a corruption of nature, realistically human beings cannot be held responsible for all the natural disasters that have occurred throughout time. Though humanity, through the Industrial Revolution is said to be responsible for global warming, acid rain, deforestation, etc., surely Neolithic peoples, Iron Age and Bronze Age cultures cannot be held responsible for flood, pestilence and sand storms in their time periods. Human beings cannot be held accountable for arbitrary meteorites that fall from the sky. Surely we have no effect on the movement or collision of astronomical bodies and their subsequent plummeting. And even still, we must echo the objections of Voltaire that surely the God who could part a sea and send the Plagues could also stem the tide of flood, change the course of mighty rivers and prevent the shifting of tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface. We don’t call them “acts of God” for nothing.
2). The Free Will Defense operates upon the premise that when God “bestowed” free will to humankind, God then exempted Godself from intervening in the results of free will. One would assume that human choice would be allowed to run its course and to reach the consequent conclusion; otherwise the “will” would not really be free. People pretty much walk around with this assumption. The Biblical tradition however does not support this self-imposed exemption by God. The traditions of the Bible affirm that the God of the Bible is a God who acts in history. Indeed, the Bible is resplendent with stories of events in which God most assuredly intervened and did NOT allow the course of human actions to develop on their own. According to the stories he parted the aforementioned Red Sea, sent manna from heaven to the hungry Israelites, created a pillar of fire to lead them out of Egypt, opened and closed women’s wombs all over the place, murdered the first born sons of the Egyptians and “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” against the Israelites. One just has to ask, upon what basis does God choose when to intervene in the consequences of human free will and when not? Surely, if God could harden Pharaoh’s heart it would not have taken much for an omnipotent God to soften Hitler’s. In the former instance God engaged in an act of commission in setting Pharaoh’s heart against the people with whom He [sic] had made the Covenant and in the latter, an act of omission by not acting at all (in defense of the very same people, I might add).
3). To propose the Free Will Defense as a resolution to The Problem of Evil is unjust in and of itself. It would be a just resolution if human beings reaped the consequences of their own actions, but this is not the case. The just suffer and the unjust prosper. Human beings are allowed to torture the innocent, abuse the powerless and inflict suffering upon children who are too young to exercise free wills of their own. The cosmic, eschatological announcement of justice in the afterlife is too late. The children have already suffered. I would echo the question asked by Ivan to his Christian brother Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; if YOU, my reader, were charged with constructing the edifice of the universe, the heavens and the earth, would you consent to your blissful reward on the foundation that this reward was won through the tears of even one tortured, suffering child? For myself, I repeat with Alyosha, “No, I would not consent.”
To be continued…
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