Where does all of this leave us in the problematic of God and the challenge of evil?

One thing that appears quickly in our attempt to solve this problem is the importance of the subjective-objective dimension of good and evil. Our judgment of evil is based on our capacity to distinguish between what is and what should be. The way we look at things can influence to a considerable degree whether we see the problem of evil as a real or pseudo-problem, or a problem that is not solvable.

Our training, our personality, and our desires color our response to evil. The subjective way we look at things can strengthen or weaken the probability of our overcoming evil and can influence the possibility of controlling the impact of physical suffering and of dealing with the evil done to us by others. It can influence our response to unexpected evil and evildoers, and our judgment of the amount of evil in the world.

If we accept the judgment of good and evil as thoroughly subjective, then the problem of evil is so radically altered that it disappears. This is hard to accept, however. The subjective-objective complexities and difficulties do not prevent most people from designating some actions as really evil. That each person sees evil and good against the background of his own upbringing and culture should not dispose us to think that anything is morally permissible just as long as we believe it to be so. No matter how different cultures are from each other, the human need to live in a society with others places limits upon one’s conduct. There are some evils that most of us accept as objective; we cannot dissolve the problem of God and evil in a cloud of subjectivity.

No doubt, we have to acknowledge the importance of the nature of good, understood as the ideal and how well the Judeo-Christian God fulfills a notion of the ideal God. Since tradition has put strong emphasis on God as a person, in the problem of God and evil, we must try to gain an insight into the goodness of the divine person. Philosophically, the beginning of this process is an attempt to understand who is a good human person.

To what degree our good man or woman is different from someone in another culture is a major project in comparative morality which we cannot go into here. We find that our good person sees life with God as her destiny. She exercises a certain amount of self-discipline and rejects an extreme materialism. She has a respect for freedom and human dignity, a commitment to such virtues as truth, justice, courage, patience, and gratitude. She has an ear for the findings of science, a realization of how much she does not know, an openness to how advancement in virtue can be stimulated by unavoidable evils, and a respect for being put to the test. This results in a cautious attitude of mind that sees little or no reason for doubting the goodness or omnipotence of the Creator.

Our good person is not expected to bring about the impossible. Nor is she under an obligation to accomplish the greatest good in every task she undertakes. At times, she cannot avoid bringing about a genuine evil, as, e.g., when that evil is necessary for the achievement of a greater good. In like manner, we do not expect the Creator God to do the impossible, to bring about the absolutely greatest good, or to see to it that nobody suffers evil.

We must respect the difficulty of accepting God as a moral agent. Although God is not a moral agent and not a person in the same way humans are, some similarities must be acknowledged. God, who transcends the category of action, still can be imagined as having alternatives, as being able to create this world rather than some other, or not to create at all. We see God as having the kind of freedom a moral agent has when he is doing what he is supposed to do, or when one is in the presence of the proper object of his will, which in the case of God is himself. We can ask whether he should create the best possible world. In some sense, then, we can think of him as a moral agent, as having obligations and functioning as a person who, like a moral agent, can succeed or fail.

We cannot rationally accept God’s omnipotence as meaning that he can do anything and everything absolutely. To accept the claim that God should be able to do anything-- even the impossible--would be to give the impossible a respect and status that is rightfully rejected by human thinkers. We should not expect the omnipotent God to bring about contradictions (whose referent is nothing). A God who is absolutely unlimited in any and every sense could be identified with everything else. Moreover, if God could do anything and everything absolutely, then he would be able to reconcile his goodness and power with evil. We might see the problem of evil as genuine from our point of view, but we would know that even from our point of view it is solvable because contradictions have no standing with the Creator God. The problem would not be genuine, for no tension between evil and a good and omnipotent God could exist in the presence of such an absolute God. We would know that a contradiction in our eyes is something that can be easily overcome by him.

Expecting that God be able to bring about anything and everything--absolutely--moves us away from a reasoned view of God and into the mystical and mysterious. True, it has a definite advantage, for it acknowledges the transcendence and infinity of the Divine. From a rational point of view, however, it solves the problem of God and evil at too great a price, for it brings the mystical and mysterious into the project too early, its proper place being at the point where reason can take us no further.

Central to our view is that God’s goodness alone can move his will, and hence, nobody should criticize him for not bringing about conceivable or merely non-contradictory worlds other than our own, e.g., worlds with different natural laws. God is under no obligation to do so. We have more reason to complain if God does not bring about states of affairs that are really possible, those that are in accordance with the present natural laws.

It is possible that a person could live without doing anything morally wrong, if he or she received a special help or grace, a gift freely given by the Creator. But the existence of persons with genuine freedom and no special help or a help that is ignored or rejected forces us to the conclusion that there are some kinds of world that God cannot bring about. In exercising our freedom, we humans determine to some extent what kind of world is actualized. We cannot really fault the Creator for not bringing about a world without moral evil.

In our approach to the problem of God and evil, we are committed to both divine and human freedom. We do not see how good persons among us can be expected to produce the best possible action at any and every moment of time. This would be too burdensome; actions that are non-obligatory and freely performed exist and rightly so. In a similar way, we think that God, should have this kind of freedom; he does not have to create the best possible world. Even so, great difficulties face us if we should try to show that this world is or is not the best possible.

I do not see how one can establish that the amount of evil in the world far outweighs the amount of goodness. Despite the difficulties caused by selective perception, training, experience, culture and one’s outlook on life, I judge the amount of good relative to evil to be overwhelmingly great.

Nor can I see how the existence of genuinely pointless evil can be justified. Those who advocate such a position must answer the objection arising from limited human knowledge. Humans have seen so little of the record of their existence that it is not unlikely that many possible reasons for what happens elude us. Moreover, the large number of apparently pointless evils would require massive divine interventions to set them aright, with the result that we could never count on things occurring in a regular fashion.

To eliminate all gratuitous evil amounts to making a significantly different world. I do not think it sufficient to ask for the elimination of this or that evil without articulating in considerable detail its consequences, the systematic far-reaching changes in the new world. Moreover, even if such worlds could be laid out before us, we could not demand that a good and omnipotent God create them.

The complaint that God should make known to us why he allows us to suffer each evil cannot be justified. A world in which we knew the reason for every evil would not necessarily be a better world than our own world, for in it we would be inclined to do things mainly in order to gain a reward or to avoid a punishment. Compassion, warmth, and generosity would be less valued. There are numerous objections to a world in which God made his existence and desires more clearly known to us.

As long as God does not give humans a special help beyond our nature, it is impossible that God make humans with the present degree of freedom and see to it that they always do what is right. If we lessened human freedom we would lose the value of numerous good actions.

Nor should we complain that God has created a world in which humans can wage war. Although in many instances war cannot be justified, possible worlds in which human freedom was so limited that wars would be impossible are impractical and unrealistic. A world with no violence would do away with the powers of nature. One in which violence against humans was impossible would be strange and puzzling and effectively thwart all human action. Likewise unsatisfactory is a world in which humans could not be greedy, unfaithful, malicious, and the like, and a world in which, when things got too vicious, God would step in and stop the violence. There is also good reason to think that we humans, if we cared enough, have the power to put a stop to wars which devastate mankind. The different worlds which objectors might propose in an effort to eliminate war are at best highly questionable alternatives to the present world.

Persons need not be destroyed by suffering. Accepting the challenge of suffering can result in a deepening of self-knowledge and a growth in dignity. Unavoidable evils can be the occasion of the development of solid virtue. Suffering can stimulate an appreciation of what it means to be alive, help us to realize the value of the conquest of obstacles, and remind us of our true destiny. How we handle it can show us the extent to which we have developed virtue. That children suffer is a reflection of their physical humanity and their dependence on adults. Suffering as punishment is limited to the consequences of mistakes that we make in our interactions with the world of nature and our failure to avoid involvement with natural forces more powerful than we.

It is difficult to see how the virtue one can develop in the face of unavoidable natural evil can be comparable to that developed in a world without evil. The difference between the courage asked of a woman who has just lost her husband in a mine accident and the sprinter who is forbidden to take part in the Olympic games is profound. The possibility of suffering a real loss of some consequence forces us to live at a deeper level of existence.

Although the courage arising from freely chosen suffering is of greater value than that arising from unavoidable suffering, it is highly doubtful that humans would freely choose to suffer if it were not forced upon them. Most of us try to distance ourselves from conditions that call for the exercise of unusual courage, patience, compassion, and the like. We try to protect ourselves because we think that the value of a truly free life is great, that should suffering be important for our development, we alone should decide how much of it we should seek. If we had our say, we would want a world without the need to respond to such powerful challenges to virtue, but this would very likely result in a lesser development of virtue.

The evils that we suffer need not be considered God’s punishment for the evil that we humans have done. And yet, punishment can be the proper expression of what happens to us when we make mistakes in dealing with the natural world. When we abuse our body, nature has a way of punishing us; when we disregard the laws of nature we must pay the price. Or, we can say that we are being punished when our neighbor harms us unjustly; modern technical progress enables others to hurt us severely. When this happens, we or other humans, not God, are the source of our punishment. Of course, we rightly punish others when they disobey the laws necessary for the orderly existence of society. Finally, interior evils that are hidden from the rest of us, such as hate, envy, and wishing evil to others, should be punished by the Divinity. All of these shortcomings have consequences for our children and contribute to our understanding of why children suffer.

In these pages, I have tried to clarify the ideas of good and omnipotence as they can be applied to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God and to answer a number of the objections to His existence. Many of the objector’s proposed alternative worlds appear to fail as worlds that a good and omnipotent God should have created. This, in turn, should lead one to a more sophisticated understanding of the Creator, a better appreciation of the Divinity, the Source of a theist’s life and being.