Today, Joe asks Jamie about the problem of evil -- a concept many struggle with. Jamie looks at an an overview of the arguments for and against.
Jamie Dew: Hi everybody just Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And I'm Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: Welcome back to our podcast, The Towel and Basin.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah, and so today, my question for Jamie, for you Jamie is, this question about the problem of evil. This is a question that I think not everybody always knows that the label for this question, the problem of evil. But it's a question that when you dive into it kind of comes up a lot.
Jamie Dew: Right.
Joe Fontenot: So maybe first of all, if you can just like tell us, and I'm sure some people mistake the problem of evil. So maybe you could just tell us what is the problem of evil.
Jamie Dew: Mm-mm (negative) yeah. So yeah, you're right, I mean, I think that this is historically speaking. This has clearly been the big challenge to the Christian faith that folks have had to deal with throughout Christian history. I mean, you can go all the way back to the ancient world, in the early Christian era they're, Saint Augustan and his writings, they're trying to answer this question in some detail in their writings.
And so this is sort of in the perennial challenge or one of the major ones, at least in Christianity faces. I don't think acknowledging that should trouble us too much because every worldview has some kind of challenge or another, including our own. And then which is just simply say people throw out objections and so... And I think when you dive into it, you start to get a sense of why this is going to resonate so deeply. I think it resonates amongst religious people and also amongst non-religious people. So for the non-religious person, oftentimes it is the encounter with difficulty, suffering, evil, danger, sickness, and such that causes them not to believe.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: And then even for the Christian, there are times and places where, because we suffer, we have difficulty hanging on to our faith. I mean, throughout my ministry, I can remember multiple times in various crises that I found myself in ministering to people, or maybe someone just lost their life or [inaudible 00:02:05] just passed or some terrible thing was just discovered.
I can remember multiple times as a pastor, some of my parishioners looking at me just very honestly and very sincerely just saying, Jamie, I don't know. I don't know I believe this stuff anymore and a lot of what's happening. So, whether they call it the problem of evil or not, essentially what you're dealing with is the fact that we experience difficulties and sorrows in this world that seem out of place, given what we believe about God. So another kind of different way you could say, given what we believe about God, I think for many people you just wouldn't expect to experience the kind of things that we sometimes experience in the world. And so that seeming disconnect between it, we thought it would be like because of God's existence and the nature of God and such, and by the fact that we experienced something very different, that causes some tension for a lot of folks.
And so in one way or another, that's what we're dealing with here. Those take intellectual forms, those take very existential forms, but it's those kinds of experiences and realities, I think that caused people to be unsettled with questions about God and evil.
Joe Fontenot: Okay. So okay so, can you talk about some of those forms like that, we might see these places? You gave one example of how it affects people in the church.
Jamie Dew: Right.
Joe Fontenot: What are some of these other forms that the problem of evil might take?
Jamie Dew: Yeah, so I think, let me just say this. I think that the kinds of existential struggles that one would experience are the real issue here. I'll save that one for last though. Maybe we even do a podcast on that one.
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: But generally speaking, you can point to three major, like kinds of struggle where this comes up. There's the first two are more intellectual and philosophical or apologetic, maybe even theological.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: But they take logical forms, evidential forms, and then even the existential forms and that existential talked about in various ways. Okay, so logically speaking, this is definitely more of a philosophical version of the problem that we're going to encounter. And it's interesting, kind of like we saw when we were dealing with the arguments for God's existence, where there's really not just one thing called the cosmological argument. Rather, there are families of argument or there's a family called cosmological arguments. It's the same thing with these different brands of the problem of evil, okay?
So for example, throughout history, what that would mean is, you may very well have had dozens of atheist philosophers that gave us logical problems of the evil or for God, but they would articulate those arguments in different structures with different premises and things like that. So let me give you two kinds of examples of logical arguments.
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: So one argument comes all the way back. I mean, you could really trace this all the way back to the ancient world in the Greek philosophers, but David Hume was a big advocate of this kind of argument and it would go something like this. It's a premise one, God is all good. Premise two, God is all powerful. Premise three, evil exists. And essentially the implication of that Hume argued was that there is a logical contradiction in that set of beliefs, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Now we obviously need to unpack that. So we talk about a logic... Let me explain what we mean by a logical problem first, okay? A logical problem if this argument succeeds, then what that's going to mean is it's not just unlikely that God exists. So this isn't a probabilistic argument. This is an argument with absolute certainty. So in other words, if this argument succeeds, then it would demonstrate with absolute certainty that there is no God. So atheism would necessarily be true if this argument's going to work. That's what we mean by a logical argument. Now you may be wondering, as I say, God is all good, God is all powerful, evil exists. Where is the so-called logical problem? And that's a good question because in those first three statements, you really don't hear it. Let me explain what it would sound like if you found a logical problem, okay? And then I'll flesh that argument out a little bit, just to help you see where it comes from.
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: So a logical contradiction would sound like this. God is good, god is not good. And the argument doesn't say that, right? A logical contradiction could sound like this. God is all powerful, God has no power. Those two statements are logically, are mutually exclusive, they can't both be true, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Here's another one, evil exists, evil does not exist, right? That would be, if your statement or your set of beliefs are from both of those, and you'd have a logical contradiction on your hands. So we hear the set of beliefs. God is all good, God is all powerful, evil exists. Where's the contradiction? It's not there.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Well, essentially what you have to do is you have to add some other statements to this based off of the first two, okay. So for example, if you commit to the idea that God is all powerful, well, then it seems Hume argues and others do, that an all powerful God could actually eliminate all the evil, right?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: And so if that statement is true, then it seems to follow that he could in fact eliminate all the evil, okay? Another premise you could add is, well, if God is all good, then it would seem to follow that he would eliminate all the evil. So now the argument sounds like this, God is all good, therefore he would eliminate evil. God is all powerful, therefore he could eliminate the evil, but if that's true, then God would in fact eliminate all the evil, there would be no evil. And there's your contradiction right there. There's no evil, there is evil, that's contradictory.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: So, essentially what the atheist would argue along those arguments is that there's an implied logical contradiction in the set of beliefs. God is all good, or God is good. God is powerful and evil exists. Now that's an example of a logical problem. Let me again, emphasize, if that argument were to succeed, it would seem to provide a certainty for atheism, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Fortunately, that argument doesn't seem very plausible to us, for these reasons. The argument has to add those additional statements. If God is all good, he would eliminate the evil. And if God is all powerful, he could eliminate the evil. The problem is, it seems like we actually have good reasons for thinking those additional statements are not true, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: And this is where we could get into logical things about possible worlds about how, they don't have to just be false here. They have to be false everywhere and stuff like that. I won't do that right now, okay? I just would say, we have reason to think that those two statements are not true. So, how about this one pf, if God was all good, he would eliminate the evil, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Well look, it may seem to us on the surface of things that he would eliminate all the evil, but what if God actually had good reasons for allowing evil to exist? Well, if he had good reasons, then it wouldn't follow that just because he's good, he would eliminate the evil, right? So it would be possible that God has good reasons, then that additional statement that God would eliminate evil is not true. And that right there would eliminate the contradiction, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: The other thing is, well, if God is all powerful, he could eliminate the evil. Well, what if God chose for us to have freedom? The kind where we could choose contrary things. And if that's the case, then it doesn't actually seem logically possible that he can make us free and eliminate all the evil actions of the history of the world. So that's not necessarily true either. So you're back with those types of critiques. You're back with the original set of beliefs that God is good. God is powerful, evil exists, and there is no contradiction there. So those logical problems, so to speak, don't really actually produce a genuine contradictions, does that make sense?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative) yeah okay.
Jamie Dew: I mean, it gets a little tricky and all those things. So all that to say, those kinds of arguments have just been deemed failures by not just Christian philosophers, but even by a lot of secular atheistic philosophers, but that's probably not... Now this doesn't mean that the problem goes away. It just simply means that, that particular form of the problem is not generally speaking, and you can always find an outlier in philosophy. But generally speaking, that kind of argument is not deemed a successful argument today, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: Now there's one other kind of argument that is also kind of a logical type of argument. And it's an argument from our lack of knowledge of what God's reasons are for doing something. And there's the same kind of response that we could offer, okay? So some atheist could argue something like this, that if God exists, he would have good reasons for allowing evil. Second, they would argue that, if God had good reasons for allowing evil, we would know what those reasons are. Third, we don't know what those reasons are. Therefore, there are no good reasons. And therefore there is no God. This is an argument that basically requires that, basically say as you and I would in fact know what those reasons are if there were, and since we don't, that must mean that there's no, God, now--
Joe Fontenot: It seems a little pretentious, I guess.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, I mean, so there's a school of response in response to this called skeptical theism, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Now skeptical theism want to clarify, 'cause everybody probably freaks out a little bit, when I say that. The skeptical theist is not skeptical about God's existence. The skeptical theist is actually a believer in God. He believes that there is a God generally speaking, the God of Christian theism. What the skeptical theist is skeptical about, is our ability to know what God's reasons are, right? So that premise that if God had good reasons, we would know what they are, the skeptical theist says, hogwash.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Why would you think that we would necessarily know what God's reasons are for allowing evil? He could actually have really good reasons for allowing evil that none of us have any access to knowing at all. That's entirely possible, so that premise is a faulty premise and therefore the entire argument falls apart, okay? All that to say, these are the kinds of arguments that atheists to put forward here. And in short, the logical brand of arguments don't generally seem to be counted as plausible arguments.
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: There's, some people out there that have not given up hope that they can make a logical argument against Christian theism. But generally speaking, while these kinds of arguments would've been really popular decades ago with atheists, they are not generally very popular today because for the most part, everybody sees these to be, these kinds of arguments to be failures.
Joe Fontenot: Interesting.
Jamie Dew: So that doesn't mean the problem given goes away though, just because [inaudible 00:13:18].
Joe Fontenot: That was my next question.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, it doesn't mean that they go away because this particular brand or family of arguments is not seen as being all that successful. By the way, just be on alert though, because not everybody... I mean, you can always find an outlier. That is to say, I remember years ago when my first book, God and Evil came out with Chad Meister that we edited. I wrote an article in there on the logical problem of evil, outlining what I just described. And I remember an atheist that reviewed the book. He went through every single chapter and he critiqued our chapters one by one.
And I remember when he critiqued mine, I basically made the comment that all atheists agree that this argument is dead and he was very quick and he was right, I should add to know that's not true. There's still a few atheists that think these logical arguments can work and he's right about that. And all let's say to that now is, so you found a few outliers. I feel very certain that the general consensus amongst philosophers of religion, Christian and non-Christian today, is that these kinds of arguments don't work, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Yeah.
Jamie Dew: So that takes us to evidential arguments and essentially, whereas logical arguments try to prove with certainty there's no, God. Evidential arguments, just simply try to argue that in all probability, there is no God. So these are probabilistic arguments. And essentially what they're going to argue is that the evidence against God's existence outweighs the evidence for God's existence.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Hence why they call these evidential types of arguments.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Sometimes you can hear the first, you'll hear the first kind of argument that I presented to you, the logical kind as deductive arguments.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: And sometimes you'll hear this kind of argument offered as an inductive argument or as an empirical argument, but generally speaking, we all call them evidential arguments, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: Now, essentially, and here, especially let me emphasize what I said a minute ago. It's just like the arguments for God's existence in that there's not just one cosmological, teleological or moral argument. There's rather those are families, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: So I trembled that even venture an example argument here of what evidential arguments are going to look like, because they all will, depending on the philosopher, making them, they're going to take such a wide variety of different forms on how they'll flesh that out, okay? But against my better judgment, let me just offer this one, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: Essentially the evidentialist atheist philosopher would say something like this, that there is abundant evidence of evil, which the premise as that counts against God, right? So, and they point to the diverseness of it's all over the world. They point to the perverseness of it. It's so brutal. They pointed the fact that it attacks the innocent people, children in particular. And look, they're not short on ammunition here.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: And the people say, I don't know if it's that bad, dude, just watch the news. Any given night. Just watch the news even prior to 2020, man, you just pay half attention to the world we live in. And constantly we are bombarded with tragic, awful gut-wrenching things. And what they're going to argue is, hey, listen, all of this abundance of evil that we're seeing this all counts against God's existence because surely it wouldn't be this way, if there were a loving God.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Gracious and kind, and he cared for the little children and stuff like that. And then they'd say, I don't know... So that's one brand of evidence that they'd look at. And then they'd say, hey, here's a second brand of evidence. So we need to look at, and that is, there doesn't seem to be any good evidence to support God's existence. You can't prove him empirically. You can't prove him logically. You can't prove him in all these different ways. And so there you have it, lots of evidence that counts against God's existence. Very little, if any evidence accounts for God's existence and therefore most probably therefore, most likely there is no God, is how evidential kinds of arguments are going to essentially work, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Now, I think that there's any number of ways that we can respond to that. I think number one, whatever you do, don't deny the perverseness, the intensity, the widespread nature of evil in our world, don't do that, 'cause it's there, right? Again, they have plenty of ammunition to point to in that. I think the insistence however, is to make the point that, well, sure it is that way as you described. All but by the way, it is exactly the way the Bible describes it too. So in other words, this doesn't seem to surprise Christian theism. In fact, Christian theism seems to anticipate this and account for it in various ways. And so I could argue, I think therefore, sure, you're right. There is all this evil that you're talking about, but evidently that's not at odds with the very perspective of Christian theism. There's work to do there in defending that further, but that's essentially the direction and trajectory I would go and response to that kind of thing.
Joe Fontenot: And so it's kind of this idea of saying, if I could say this back to you for this latest one. This is not a problem for Christianity because Christianity encompasses it. Christianity explains it. And Christianity, essentially the narrative of Christianity overcomes it.
Jamie Dew: Partially yes, what I would say is actually a second thing as well. I would argue, and again, there's work to be done here philosophically to and theologically to make these points. But what I would argue is as that A, the evil that exists, I'm not denying that evil is there. But A, the evil that exists is consistent with the God of Christian theism one.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: And two, is even predicted by the Bible of Christian theism.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: So all of that to say the premise that, that whole moved Marshall, when they're marshaling all this evidence as supposedly counts against God, the entire move I'm making back in response to say, no, it actually doesn't count against God.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Because it's consistent with what he's done and who he is. But it's also consistent with the story of scripture that we would have... Maybe in the next podcast, we can get into a Christian account as to why there's evil and suffering in the world.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah.
Jamie Dew: So, the second move that they make to say, well, there's no evidence for God. Now look, I really don't like to be snarky in response, but man I must say, hogwash.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah.
Jamie Dew: Look, you could have pulled that off years ago, decades ago when natural theology was seen as being dead in the water and a non-starter. Yes, you could say things back then of, you can't make any arguments for God's existence. But if some... When atheist tries to say that today, that is just... We must call foul. That is incredibly disingenuous, because natural theology and the arguments for God's existence, made a roaring comeback in recent decades, as we've talked about in some of our other podcasts. And if you're interested in some of those arguments, then go back through some of those other podcasts, is just sort of a starting point for where you can go to start thinking those through.
But man today philosopher, theistic philosophers have done phenomenal work over the last few decades in marshaling some very strong arguments that support theistic conclusions. And so I just don't think that they can actually say the evidence is stacked against Christian theism, the way they say it is 'cause it's not.,
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: There's tremendous amounts of evidence that you can point to that supports theism. And so the argument from... The evidential arguments, I just don't tend to see is, they're serious issues that we have to think through their varsity level questions, as I like to say. But also think there's some varsity level answers to those as well.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah.
Jamie Dew: And Christianity is yet again, proving itself to be far more robust than its critics would like to pretend it is.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: It's more resilient in that because reality itself is on our side. As we talk some of these other podcasts, when we talked about arguments for God's existence, there's just too much evidence that something is out there and or someone is out there. And so anyway, evidentially speaking, I don't know that those arguments can be all that successful. Now let me just say this, those are the two big ways that in apologetics and in philosophy of religion, we see arguments from evil being put forward against Christian theism.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: They're important arguments. They should be taken seriously by Christian intellectuals, but I'm convinced that none of these are the actual problem of evil. And I [inaudible 00:21:43] say that because I don't... I like to say this in every class I teach, evil is not a problem because you've got a couple of nerds in an ivory tower somewhere, debating it, philosophically. Evil is a problem because it jumps up off the street and it punches you in the gut.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah.
Jamie Dew: And when it does that, it has for non-Christians and frankly sometimes even for some Christians, it has the ability to unsettle you and rock you in such a way that you find it very hard to hang on believing God. And it's ironic that it does that because that's the very moment that you actually need God the most. So all that to say, I don't think either the logical or the evidential arguments are really the big problem. I think the real big problem is what I've called earlier. The existential argument, or sometimes called the religious argument.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Or the experiential problem, but we need to circle back on another podcast to do that.
Joe Fontenot: Well, that sounds good. This has been, this has been really helpful to just sort of break down these different sides and see that, it could feel like it hits you in the gut, like you said, but at the same time, there's a lot of force on the other side as well.
Jamie Dew: That's right, that's right.
Joe Fontenot: All right well, thanks Jamie.
Jamie Dew: Good man.
Joe Fontenot: Let's do this again.
Jamie Dew: Alrighty. Hey everybody this is Jamie and Joe again. If you liked this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it. And if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way. And we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.