Even though one might not be able to establish that God should have created the best possible world, this does not do away with his possible obligation to have brought into existence a world that is better than our present world. The critics who object to the existence of a good and omnipotent God often claim that the amount of evil in the world is too great. They question how such a world of waste, suffering and immorality could be the product of such a God. David Hume thought that there was so much evil in the world that we would have to say that God botched the task of creation. Hume, however, would settle for a world in which man was more industrious, used his mind more, and applied himself with greater diligence.1

H. J. McCloskey thinks that God could have drastically reduced the amount of moral evil or eliminated it entirely. McCloskey doubts the possibility that the number of people who practice virtue is sufficient to outweigh the number of those who bring about evil, the evilness of their eternal damnation and the physical evil they cause to others. He claims that relatively few persons attain higher virtue. A very large number of persons are destined to be damned. There is no balance.2 

Nicolas Berdyaev gives us a possible reason for the tendency to overestimate the amount of evil. He claims that there is a "spark of the infinite" in man; in our unrevealed depths we are a "being who is infinite and who is straining towards infinity." We are open to the infinite. Man is foreordained to eternity which he seeks, but he is also finite, temporal and mortal. This is the painful contradiction in man, the cause of human suffering. Man crashes against an insurmountable wall. In the depth of human suffering is the experience of unsurmountability, inevitability and irrevocability.3 It is the thirst for the infinite in us that leads us to the judgment that no matter how much good there is in the world, there is still too much evil.

No doubt, the judgment of what is good or evil and their respective amounts in the world is a complex and difficult question. We know of the possibility that in judging a particular action good or evil we can be tragically wrong; a fortiori the same should be said concerning general judgments. The trouble that Sartre’s fictional protagonist, Goetz, had in determining what is long-run good or evil,4 is repeated by a real life tragedy: the Christian Olga Lengyel’s terrible mistake when, at the selection platform in the death camp, she asked that her teen age son be sent to the left with her aged parents, not knowing that the aged would be put to death in the gas chambers that day.5 

As we have seen in the previous chapter, Leibniz’s doubt concerning the ability of humans to judge the extent of evil was well-founded. We might sincerely question whether human beings are really in a proper position to make the judgment that there is too much evil, too little or just the right amount of evil in the world. Leibniz underlines human limitations in knowing the actual instances of good and evil. He reminds us of what the lawyers say about judging: It is not proper to judge unless one has examined the whole law. Humans have available to them the record of only a few thousand years of an immeasurable eternity, and yet they are so rash as to judge. We are like men in the underground salt mines who think that there is no light in the world other than the small lamp that guides them. Or, we are like someone who sees only a small part of a covered painting and judges it to be ugly, confused and distasteful. When the painting is uncovered, however, that part will be seen as being of the highest artistry.6 We should be hesitant in judging evil that has no purpose as far as we can see. We see only a small part of reality and would be in a proper position to judge only when we see the whole law or the whole dispensation of things.

A contemporary philosopher, M. B. Ahern, focusses on our lack of the factual knowledge needed to express all of the concrete problems concerning evil or to express the goods that might justify evil in those cases. The problems of evil arise with the actual instances of evil, past, present and future. In each case, there are many instances that we do not and cannot know. Especially in regard to future evils, we know neither what evils will occur nor what goods might justify them. In order to be able to give a definitive answer when arguing from concrete instances, we would need divine omniscience, a God’s eye view of the past, present and future. Since humans obviously do not have this, our attempts to obtain a final answer to the problem of evil by concentrating on particular cases will of necessity be futile. Especially misguided is the attempt to prove a negative fact, namely, that no good that justifies a particular evil will ever exist.7 Such difficulties overwhelm the human capacity. Ahern claims that the consequences of all of this are that the possible and not the actual justification of evil in the whole problem takes on an added importance. Our very imperfect knowledge of the possible prevents us from seeing what God might intend by allowing a concrete evil.8 

Another fact also has to be taken into consideration: that "risktakers" are also found among us--courageous persons who do not shrink from danger and the presence of evil in the world, but to a degree, actually seek it out. They don’t think there is too much evil in the world. The "risktakers" would consider a world in which God intervened and saved men from any danger as a rather dull place in which to live.9 They are partly motivated by the pleasure one feels when one does something that should be done, as when a war photographer would exit running from a plane on a Vietnam landing strip, snapping pictures of death and destruction all around him because he felt a duty to show the war as it really was. The mountain climber thought he had an important lesson to teach man: that there is no limit to the effort that man can demand of himself. Such persons can also be motivated by the fantastic pleasure experienced in the face of a possible loss of one’s life, as when the bullfighter is engaged in controlling an enraged bull or a race-car driver handles a super-hot machine. This pleasure is enhanced when one realizes that one is dominating something that would overwhelm any other person. Even if one’s performance is in private, without an audience, the risktaker is aware that he is distinguishing himself, becoming a very particular and singular person. The possibility of his death puts his action on a singularly significant level.

Most of us very probably accept a view such as this, that the amount of good in the world by far overshadows the evil. John Dewey bore witness to this idea when he remarked that the hazardous, uncertain character of the world, its precarious nature, can be more deeply appreciated by focussing our attention on evil rather than on good. The good presents no problem. It is what we expect. "Goods we take for granted; they are as they should be; they are natural and proper." Goods are evidence of how the real world regularly operates and allows us to do things and gain our just deserts. Even though there is such a thing as "good luck," the goods of the world happen so regularly and repeatedly that they are not as convincing evidence of the uncertain character of the world as are evils. Evils are more "accidental" than goods, and we are faced with a problem, as we try to insulate ourselves from them. But there’s no real problem of the good--we take it for granted. 10 

Leibniz reminds us that if we were usually sick, we would be less sensible to evils and very sensitive to good health. But, really, it’s much better that health is usual and the norm, while sickness is the exception.11 It is an error to think that evils are great and many in comparison to the amount of good. We don’t pay enough attention to the good in our lives, perhaps because it is always mixed with some evil.

Leibniz was convinced that we should give the benefit of the doubt to the good God. Those who think that God could have made a better world set themselves up as ridiculous critics of God. While they have seen little of the world and see scarcely farther than their nose, they criticize the world, but when they come to know more about it, they will see that the world is beautiful and complex, but that it was not made for man alone. Although this results in man having to endure unpleasant things, if he is truly wise, he will see to it that the world serves him. He will be happy in the world as long as he wants to be.12 Leibniz thinks that there is incomparably more good than evil in the life of men, "as there are incomparably more houses than prisons." He thinks that historians are at fault because they keep their mind on the evil in man’s life, rather than on the good.13 

Apparent Gratuitous Evil. A more powerful objection is made by those who shift their criticism from the amount to the type of evil. They would allow some evil in the world in order to build character and for understanding or appreciating the good.14 But they still have a problem which arises from gratuitous evil, that evil for which no immediately obvious explanation exists to account for its necessity. Gratuitous evil is prima facie unwarranted.15 This should not be too much of a problem, if we take gratuitous evil as apparently unwarranted. For in such a difficult context, we should not expect explanations to be "immediately obvious," and prima facie matters always give way to the results of further considerations.

If we take "gratuitous" as freely given or without reason, the matter becomes more serious. We would be saying that there is no reason for such and such an evil. William Rowe calls it "pointless" in his fawn example. In a forest fire, a horribly burned fawn lies in agony for several days before it dies. Rowe believes that an omnipotent omniscient being could easily have prevented it from getting burned or seen to it that it died quickly. And yet, Rowe does not claim that we can prove the existence of intense sufferings which an omnipotent and omniscient being could have prevented without preventing the occurrence of a greater good. For he sees the possibility of the fawn’s suffering as leading to a familiar greater good or a good that we do not know. This forces us to work in the context of what it would be rational to believe rather than to know. Rowe’s objection: it is unreasonable to believe that all similar instances of intense agony are necessary for a greater good. God should be able to bring about that greater good without some particular suffering.16 

There are problems here. The first, and I believe the fatal objection to Rowe, is the limited character of human knowledge. What we have said concerning the difficult position humans are in when trying to judge the concrete instances of evil applies here. After seeing so little of the record of an immeasurable eternity, we should be hesitant to judge that out of a present evil a greater good cannot come, or that there is no reason for such an evil. If there is a reason for apparently pointless evil, should we be expected to detect it, and if not, then should we believe that it is really pointless?17 I do not see how or why we should be expected to see the necessity of every necessary and not pointless evil. The complexity of the universe and the feebleness of human knowledge are the driving factors here.

Fourth, there are problems with the concept of animal suffering. Although many of us believe that animals suffer, there are some disturbing issues that muddy the waters. We believe that animals suffer, because we suffer when our bodies are injured or ill. The structure of humans and animals are similar, and we are aware of the evolutionary development of humans. Painful stimuli are tissue-destructive, escape-provoking, emotion-changing.18 In an animal under stress, blood pressure rises, violent muscular contractions and hyperventilation occur, metabolic rate and temperature increase. Up to 300 percent of normal readings are detected.19 There is good reason to think that humans and animals react in similar ways to such stimuli. When we are tortured or injured, we suffer, and we easily conclude that animals do likewise. Monkeys that are inflicted with pain stimuli cry out, try to escape and to fight off the offender. Humans do likewise. But the matter is not clear.

That the physiologies are remarkably similar leads advocates such as Peter Singer to claim that, since we have no doubt that our best friends feel pain as we do at times, we should be convinced that animals have similar feelings in similar circumstances.20 The expressions of fear, anger, love, joy, surprise and sexual arousal are not specific to our own species.21 In this speculative area, such thinkers are strongly inclined to attribute a suffering to animals which is comparable to that suffered by humans. According to these thinkers, the fawn undergoes genuine suffering.

Keele and Smith claim that animals might suffer even more intensely than humans insofar as all their pain is serious and significant, accompanied by a fear and anxiety that cannot be overcome. This would be like the pain we call "pathological" in humans. When a person suffers from cancer, for example, his pain can be accompanied by fear and anxiety which is treated by sedation, a sedation that is all the more needed in animals.22 This suggests the possibility that although humans have the capacity to rise above their pain by mental means, an animal that lacks such power might suffer even to a greater extent. It would be like a person who lives in fear and anxiety because his pain cannot be controlled and whose only alternative, other than death, is sedation.

The above concerns point to a serious matter in animal and human suffering, namely, the role of consciousness as a necessary condition for suffering. There are "levels of awareness," a "marked gradation" of awareness in mammals, and little in frogs and fish, for example.23 There is a reluctance to expect a high level of affective experience in some species, even though the "animal may react vigorously and adaptively as a spinal frog can do." Ordinarily we do not consider single-celled organisms and insects as being conscious, even though they react to stimuli. The venus fly trap acts as if it knows the fly is there, but we do not attribute consciousness to it. A robot can be programmed to manifest pain behavior and to defend itself, but this does not give us reason to consider it as conscious.

Central to this problem is the distinction between perception and consciousness. From the fact that we perceive something, we cannot infer that we were conscious when we did so. For we know that we perceive things unconsciously, as when, while daydreaming, we drive our car unconsciously, directing it around obstacles and keeping it on the road. If we did not in some way perceive the safe way, we would not reach our destination. We apparently have a perceptual experience of the safe way but are unconscious of it. In the case of "blind sight" behavior, it appears possible to have visual experiences of which we are unaware, unconscious. A person who claimed to be blind in his left field of view was able to identify shapes of objects that he could not see. There seem to be non-conscious experiences to which we behaviorally respond.24

The import of all this is that behavioral responses could indicate a pain of which the subject is unaware. As far as we can tell, however, without consciousness a being cannot suffer. This is why we deny that robots, single-celled organisms and insects suffer. Behavioral evidence alone might show that we experience pain, but it cannot establish that we suffer that pain. Some parent birds will show pain behavior as they feign injury to lure predators from their young, even though they are not suffering due to physical pain.25 Michael McQuillen, writing in Issues in Law and Medicine, acknowledges that the biological and behavioral data do not preclude the possibility that a person in the persistent vegetative state perceives pain.26 However, whether the person is suffering is still a question. This leads us to distinguish between pain as a physical sensation and pain as consciously suffered.

The distinction between perceiving pain and experiencing suffering has been underscored by Norman Swartz. He thinks that the empirical data are forcing the two concepts of sensing pain and experiencing hurt to come apart. He found in the neuroscience literature that lobotomized patients felt the painful pressure of a tumor but were not disturbed by it, that there was a chasm between the hurting of pain and the sensation of pain. Certain tranquilizers allow patients to report certain stimuli as being excruciatingly painful, but the patients do not seem to care. The sense aspects of pain exist, but the emotional aspects are suppressed.27 Also, against pain experience as a sufficient or necessary condition for suffering is that psychotic patients in an acute medical condition, like a perforated ulcer or appendicitis, are reported to experience pain without suffering.28 Daniel Dennett in his Brainchildren brands as ludicrous the following tacit assumptions that seem to appear in many discussions of pain: that suffering and pain are the same thing, that all pain is "experienced pain," and that we can determine the "amount of suffering" by just adding up all the pains.29 

The human mind or the emotions can be the deciding factor of whether or not a person experiences suffering. Sri Aurobindo tells us how men, when they are highly excited or exalted are physically indifferent to pain in situations that would ordinarily inflict severe torture or suffering. Suffering occurs only when the nerves are able to reassert themselves and remind the person of the habitual obligation to suffer under such conditions.30 E. E. Harris remarks that humans, in a stressful condition such as battle, become aware of their injury only when things quiet down and they have a chance to reflect on what has happened. 31 

At times soldiers have been said to experience the yoga response and the euphoric experience of being wounded but still alive and consequently safe from the further horrors of the war.32 Henry Beecher observed how, among the seriously wounded men on the Anzio beachhead of World War II, two thirds of those who had grievous but not fatal wounds refused medication. They were happy, for their having been wounded was their ticket out of the war. The war was over for them--they would no longer have to fear imminent death. Beecher compared these men to patients with similar wounds in a civilian hospital who complained and demanded large quantities of painkilling drugs. 33 We can safely say that the soldiers were not experiencing pain or were experiencing pain, but were not suffering from it.

Medical people consider as highly questionable whether a person in a persistent vegetative state (one who is awake but unconscious) suffers pain. When nutrition and hydration are withdrawn from such a person, they claim that suffering, such as the burning of urine, hunger and thirst, are not experienced.34 The American Academy of Neurology, in a brief filed in the Brophy case, took an unequivocal position that the PVS patient cannot experience suffering.35

Considering the matter from the structural aspect, we still cannot conclude that pain behavior indicates suffering. We would expect the agents spoken of above to experience suffering, for they would have the structural configuration and modifications consonant with those who truly suffer. And yet, this does not always occur. The use of placebos and hypnosis or suggestion are among the aspects of the psychology of pain showing that brain structure and sensory input are not sufficient conditions for the experience of suffering.36 Nor is structure a necessary condition for sensation. We are sure that birds see, but the structure of their brains contains no visual cortex.37 In the blind-sight phenomenon, the individual suffers from damage to his striate or visual cortex and is expected to lose sight in that part of the visual field. And yet, he responds as if he can see.38 In the phantom limb phenomenon also we see suffering without the presence of the structural source of the pain.39 Then, too, suffering without a structural basis is the mark of depression.40 One can suffer pain without the relevant bodily structure, as we see occurring in a depressed person. Structure is not a necessary condition for the experience of suffering.

It is possible, as Keele and Smith have claimed above, that an animal might suffer even more intensely than humans, as in fear it is confronted by a danger to its life. For thinkers of this inclination an animal has a sense of its own body and a sense of self. They downplay the distinction between perceptual and reflective consciousness, noting that perceptual consciousness in an animal easily leads into a reflective consciousness, as it pursues or flees from another. 41 To some degree many animals have a sense of the past and the future. Chimpanzees not only can sometimes recognize mirror images as representing their own bodies, but also, according to some, show signs of planning and cooperation.42 It appears that such reasons have led thinkers like Peter Carruthers to hesitate to argue against the moral standing of animals on the basis of the quality or the lack of their consciousness; he thinks that the matter is too speculative.43

Others, however, think that animals are wholly absorbed in instinctive behavior and are unconscious of present pain. According to E. E. Harris, they do not, as far as we know, look backward to what might have been and forward to what might come, actions that humans do and which make human suffering so painful.44 Harris questions the capacity of animals to engage in relatively long range planning and its defense, an idea that is at the basis of Carruthers’s doubts about the moral standing of animals. This matter is complex. On the one hand, it is hard to see how one can say that an animal in danger has no knowledge of what might come about, no fear of its own demise. On the other, it is difficult to understand how even a primate can view his death as a human would, as the impossibility of attaining a rich life full of exciting possibilities and experiences.

We can talk to our neighbor who is in pain; he can tell us that when he was wounded in battle, he did not want morphine, that in the heat of battle he suffered no pain, as he badly burned his hand on the hot barrel of his gun.45 He can tell us why he reached his hand into a mass of flames and kept it there: because he knew that he must turn off a valve and stop the flow of fuel that would turn a whole neighborhood into an inferno.46 When he cannot communicate with us, we do not know if or to what degree he is suffering as in the case of the person in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Even though a higher animal is conscious and is likely suffering pain, we still do not know the quality of that suffering. We cannot discuss how it feels.

In the context of suffering then, it is possible that a person can perceive pain or give all the indications of pain but not suffer from it. This could be what happens in the case of animals.47 There remains the possibility that an animal’s experience of stimuli which we would find painful is non-painful or less painful due to a difference in consciousness. The pain behavior of animals even might not involve what we call suffering.48 Our knowledge of the intensity and quality of animal suffering leaves much to be desired.

Rowe also uses Bruce Russell’s example, that of the little girl who was beaten, raped and murdered by her mother’s boyfriend who was drinking and on drugs.49 The objector thinks that since any good person would have prevented such a disaster, God who knows all things and has the power should have protected the little girl. The issue is more complex than that suggested by the fawn example since it involves human freedom. One can ask "Why did the good God not stop such a cruel injustice?"

In responding we point to the powerful freedom that humans have which lays upon us a profound responsibility; we can be each other’s lover, helper and even savior, but we can also be each other’s murderer or torturer. History tells us that we have the power to abuse our freedom, to destroy ourselves and others in the most atrocious ways. We know that when someone abuses what he has been given, anyone might suffer, especially those closest to him. We will go into this in greater detail in Chapter X.50