In part two, Jamie discusses the emotional aspects of the problem of evil.
Jamie Dew: Hey, everybody. This is Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And I'm Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: And welcome back to our podcast Towel & Basin.
Joe Fontenot: That's right. And so this is part two of our last episode. We started looking at the problem of evil.
Jamie Dew: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe Fontenot: And you walked through the logical and evidential approaches to the problem of evil, and neither of them were really difficult for the Christian worldview. I mean, they have their own merits and so forth, but then you said something about the problem of evil, and you said, and I quote, "It just kind of jumps up and punches you in the gut sometimes."
Jamie Dew: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe Fontenot: If we can handle these from the logical side and we can handle these on the evidential side, why does the problem of evil still do this to us?
Jamie Dew: Yeah. And this is what we're getting at in the last one. I mean, there's really two different ways we could have a problem here with evil. One is whether or not evil presents some kind of intellectual incompatibility with Christianity or an intellectual unlikelihood of Christianity and that's what we saw in the last two problems. In logical problems, you supposedly have this logical contradiction entailed with the set of things that we believe. And we looked at the responses to that and those don't seem to be all that successful. And then you have these other kinds of intellectual problems of where it just makes it unlikely that there would be a God. I'm inclined to think that there are good responses to that. Then you got this whole other reason. Those first two that we dealt with really belong to the intellectual side of all of this.
And we do need to take that seriously and give it the proper attention. But the real issue, I don't argue with evil and why it causes trouble for people regarding belief in God is that evil hurts us in ways. And when that happens, it makes it really, really hard, existentially speaking, for people to hang on to belief in God. It just seems as though that God's existence doesn't square up with this and it causes an angst in heart and soul related to belief in God. And so I call this the existential problem of evil. There are other philosophers that call it that too. It is sometimes referenced as the experiential problem of evil or even the religious problem of evil, but no matter which of those three terms that you use, we're all referencing the same general thing and that is the emotional, psychological, and spiritual anxieties or concerns that arise from the presence of suffering and evil.
I think that those kinds of problems marshal different kinds of responses than what we talked about in the last podcast. And so I think there's two big questions underlying all of this. Number one, why did evil come about here in the first place if the God of the Bible exists and he's good and powerful and all these things and how did evil get here in the first place? That's one question. And then another big question is, "Okay, then why does God allow it to continue happening?" So maybe we'll try to tackle both of those two. Does that sound good?
Joe Fontenot: That sounds great.
Jamie Dew: Okay. So let's think first of all about, okay, why is it here in the first place? How did evil get here? Sorry, I never remember to turn my email off whenever. That's what that little beep or that ding is whenever it sounds. So question number one, why did evil get here? How did it get here in the first place? I think the Bible gives us a very straightforward answer to that question. So against the backdrop of both of these two questions we'll try to answer in this podcast of how did it get here in the first place and then why does God allow it?
I think underneath both of those questions is this sense or disposition that evil and God don't go together. That if Christian theism is true, we're kind of surprised that, in fact, we find such suffering and evil in the world that we have. But I think actually when we start to answer the question of, "Well, how did it get here in the first place?" I think we actually have a very straightforward, candid response from the Bible about where it came from and how it came into be.
And when we read that, as candid as it is, I think we actually are struck by how much the Bible anticipates, projects, prophesies, if you will, and announces that, in fact, the world will be exactly the way we find it to be. And I would argue from that, that because of that, the presence of evil in the world shouldn't count against God and Christian theism at that point as some kind of disconformation. In fact, I think its presence serves as a bit of a confirmation that the world is exactly the way the Bible says that it is. And so here's what we're told in the Bible.
We're given a very candid, straightforward account in the early chapters of Genesis. Genesis 1, you have the creation narrative told over the span of six days with God resting on the seventh. And during those days, as God would systematically go through and make things in the world and the universe, repeatedly throughout that chapter, the statement is made and it was good and it was good, and it was good. And so we would draw this inference from that data, that creation is the result of God, the creator, and that God is good, and that therefore, everything about the world that we see that he makes is good. So goodness and creation comes from God.
And I think this explains a lot about our world. And I like to point out to people it explains why it is that we fall in love. I think it explains why it is that we laugh at jokes, why there's humor. I think it explains why chocolate pie tastes so good. In other words, all the good things and all the good features of the world that we find. Well, it makes sense that the world would be filled with such goodness because God himself is good. So repeatedly through Genesis 1 when God's making, he says that it's good. Now, that's not the full story though. Genesis 2, creation retold again. And this time it's told with an eye towards the creation of human beings and there's an announcement to man and woman, "You can eat of everything I made in here. It's all for you, but don't eat of this one tree." And then there's a warning. "The day you eat of it, you shall surely die."
So the very thing, like what is the greatest example of evil in the world? It's death. And the Bible says death is our greatest enemy. And where does that come from? It comes from our rebellion against God. And then in Genesis 3, that's exactly what we see happening. The snake slithers into the garden and temps the woman first, who then takes it to the man. He's tempted, and he gives in. They sin, and then there's this pronouncing of curses that comes. There's a curse on the serpent. There's a curse on the woman. There's a curse on the man to the serpent. Basically God promises a war between the devil, who is the serpent here, between the devil and the offspring of a woman, which is to say, there's a child coming that's going to beat you and destroy. And that's a prophecy of Jesus Christ.
There's a curse on the woman that there now will be pain and sorrow in childbearing, which is to say that now, even those most precious things in our lives will suffer the consequence of our rebellion. And then to the man, there's curses on the physical structures of the world, which is important because that's where he works, and that's where he tends the ground and all those things. And so the Bible says things like thorns and thistles will spring up. You'll work the ground by the sweat of your brow. And then this thing's picked up in Romans 8, that even the creation is broken and bent now.
And so the picture we get here is of the thing that God made, which was itself good, is now bent and broken. And there's this statement in Genesis 3. It's a very important statement. It says, or as it's talking to the man in these curses about working the ground by the sweat of the brow, it makes this statement. It seems almost off the cuff, but my gosh, it's a highly important statement. God says to them, "And thus, it shall always be until you return to the ground." We say, this is now what life on this planet will be like. Well, now yes, you'll still have chocolate pie and yes, you'll still fall in love. And yes, you'll still laugh at jokes and all those good things are still going to be there because it's still God's world, but the good side of it is not the full story.
We also live in a world with broken and sickness and disease, where even the physical stuff is bent. Our DNA, our structure, the world around us, everything about it is bent and broken now by the fall. And God says, "And that's how it's going to be until you die." Which means as long as you're on this side, this is now what your experience will be like. This is what you can expect. So I would say, and it's ironic here is that the presence of evil I think for many people gives them a bit of a shock and a surprise. Well, my gosh, if Christianity is true, I wouldn't have expected this evil and suffering, but what I want to point out is, well, actually the Bible predicted what we're experiencing now is exactly what it said we would experience.
So I say this shouldn't count against Christianity as a discomfort of it. It should count, I think, for it as I conformation because we find the world to be exactly the way that the Bible said it would be. It's still got good things in it, yes, but it's also bent and broken, now experienced hardships. So regarding that question of, well, how did it get here in the first place? Simple, human rebellion. And when that happened, it bends and twists the whole fabric of creation at that point. It's still God's creation, but it's not as it ought to be at this point. And it's not just moral evils. By moral evils what I mean here are when a moral agent like you or me, a being that has the ability to choose things. When we do things that will cause pain and sorrow and conflict with people, you have not just that stuff, but you even now have physical evils, which is cancer and hurricanes and tornadoes and disease, and these types of things. It also explains societal evil, where we have the very structures of our societies get bent and twisted and do horrific things.
All that to say, I find the world to be exactly the way the Bible described it it would be. And that is how I would respond to this question of, well, why did it get here in the first place?
Joe Fontenot: Okay. That makes sense.
Jamie Dew: And the next question, right?
Joe Fontenot: Yeah, right.
Jamie Dew: Of well, so then why does he continue to allow it? And that's another. And so we may have a plausible response as to why it got here, but I think for many people, this is, but God, we know you're powerful, we know you love the little children and we know all of these good things about you, when we're suffering, God, why don't you let it persist? And this is where the work of what we call theodicy comes in. And I should have maybe introduced these terms yesterday. Yesterday, as we dealt with logical problems of evil, I gave what are really referred to as defenses. So like when an atheist makes an argument against us and tries to score points, so to speak, against Christianity, defenses, what do defenses do? Defense try to prevent offenses from scoring points in sport.
A defense on problem of evil stuff is when the atheist has made an argument against us. And we simply try to show how the argument doesn't work. So for example, God is all good. God is all powerful, evil exists. And then they try to make that argument that it's incoherent. What did we do? We simply attack the premise and said, "No, that premise is wrong." And what we were doing there is diffusing the bomb so to speak. Same thing when people made that skeptical argument, well, if God had exists, he'd have reasons for evil. If he had reasons, we would know what they are. We don't know what they are therefore, he doesn't have reasons, therefore, God doesn't exist. What did we do? We attacked more of the premises of that argument and said, "No, that's not right." And we're diffusing the bomb. Those are called defenses, right?
Theodicies are more offensive. A theodicy tries to explain what God's reasons may be. So in our various responses, we'd say, "Well, maybe God has good reasons." The atheist, I think at that point, and even the Christian to some degree is it's understandable that they would then ask, "Well, what are those reasons?" And that work of answering that question, what are God's reasons? That's the work called theodicy in the problem of evil studies. And this is where you're going to get a wide assortment of answers throughout Christian history. There's not just one answer that Christians have given. There's actually quite a number of them. Let me mention maybe four or five different kinds of theodicies that could be used. To answer that question, okay, here's what God was doing.
One approach is what we might call a freewill theodicy. And a freewill theodicy would simply say something like this. It would say, "Well, I know evil is bad, but the alternative to get rid of evil, evil happens because we make free choices. Therefore, to get rid of evil, he would have to get rid of free choices. And if he got rid of free choices, we'd have a world full of robots basically. And there'd be no love. And since we exist to love God, then he's got to allow us to have some kind of freewill capacity there too." So on the whole, this theodicy is going to say something like this, that on the whole it is better to have a world with love, but contains evil than to have a world with no evil, but also no love.
And so a freewill theodicy is going to say something like that. At the end of the day, even though we have to suffer from evil, it's still better to live in this world where we have love and the free will to do what we do. And so that's one kind of theodicy. What are God's good reasons? Allowing us to have free will so that we can love and do things like that. And of course, this is hotly debated. This is where debates between a Calvinist and an Armenian are going to come in and Calvinist is going to have any number of reservations with that kind of response. And an Armenians typically going to go to bat for this kind of response in a very strong way. That's one approach.
Another approach is what we might call an Augustinian approach, which by the way, Augustine also advocates at various times in his writings for the freewill one that I just gave. But Augustine's probably most known for what we would call... When we think about an Augustinian approach, think of what we might call meticulous providence. Meticulous, meaning down to the very details and providence, meaning God works through the stuff of this world to bring about his purposes. According to meticulous providence, essentially what this approach would say is God allows the evil... It's going to answer that question of why did God allow the evil or does he continue to allow the evil? God allows the evils that he then uses to bring about greater goods. So you could even call this a greater good theodicy that God will allow evils because from it, he's going to bring about greater goods in your life or at least goods of equal value.
And if I had to say which of the theodicies is the most popular? I would have to say this is by far and away, probably the most popular theodicy that Christians will adhere to. Even if prior to listening to this podcast nobody knew the diff difference between a defense and a theodicy and stuff like that, most Christians think in terms of this theodicy. A quote from Romans 8:28, "For we know that all things work together for the good of those who love God," and things like that. And so, hey, in its favor, this theodicy, clearly there are times in the Bible, and even in our own lives where God does take things that were meant for bad and he turns them for good. So that's what this theodicy is going to say.
Now there's questions with that. I mean, does this make God the author of evil? Does this make God dependent on bad things to bring about good? And there's a variety of questions like that, that philosophers and theologians will debate on that, but that's the second kind of theodicy, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Then there's what we might called a Molinists strategy. This is William Lane Craig. Actually Chad Meister and I have a book called God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views where some of these theodicies I'm giving you right now are actually discussed at length by various philosophers. William Lane Craig advocates for this view. And generally speaking, anything, William Lane Craig advocates for, you listen to and you take seriously. And I think of myself as a Molinist of some sort, but I'll say, I don't know that I'd want to apply this the way he does, but essentially a mole in his tier would say yes, meticulous providence. So it assumes this first greater good, meticulous providence approach that I just mentioned. But now what it's going to say is God has all sorts of extra knowledge that you and I don't even think about, and that's a whole podcast in and of itself to describe what this idea is about.
But this view would say, "God utilizes all this other knowledge that you and I could almost never even conceive of that he has to better guide the events of history providentially to bring about his stuff." So you can almost think about this one as an amplified version of the greater good theodicy in some ways. You have an open theist theodicy, which would basically say, "Well, what are God's reasons for allowing evil?" An open theist would say, "Well, God just doesn't know the future. And he can know everything there is to know about the past, everything there is to know about the present, but God could not know the future because if he knew the future, that would determine our choices and we'd have no free will." So this one's going to assume a freewill theodicy, but it's going to basically add that God doesn't know our future choices and that's why evil happens or something like that.
And then lastly, what I call an Irenaean theodicy or what we could call a soul making theodicy. And Irenaeus thought that, well, God allows evil to serve on our lives as a bit like a laboratory or a gymnasium in which we grow, or we are enhanced or strengthened. So Irenaeus thought that we did not come into the world perfect, but rather perfection had to be kind of worked out in us, so to speak. Now what evil and suffering does is it gives us, even though we hate it and it's awful, and it's bad. What it does is it gives us the opportunity to develop Christian character and love for God and things like that. There's other theodicies. That's a handful of theodicies. I think I've mentioned five. People always ask me, "Which of these do you affirm?" Each of them has a fairly significant dose. Well, I say that, I'm not a fan of the open theist theodicy. Let me say that.
Joe Fontenot: It's a problem on the surface.
Jamie Dew: I want to be very gentle in how I say it, but I tend to think that that's heresy to say that God does not know the future. The Bible very clearly talks about him doing it. And that is what the Christian Church has affirm for its history. So I would just simply say, this is a deviation from where Christians have been and what the Bible seems to be very straightforwardly teaching, despite how popular that is amongst some Christian philosophers and some theologians today. I just think that's problematic view. Other than that one, I tend to think, and look, I say that with deep respect for the people that affirm those views out there, they're very intelligent people and I'm sure many of them love the Lord, but I just don't like that view. The other ones I think that any number of them have a fairly substantial rationale behind them and I can see some merit in each of them.
And I think you can find examples in the Bible of each of those. I don't know that any one of them could just say, "That's it, that's the sum, total answer to all of those things." And so as such, Christians, theologians and philosophers continue to debate all of these things. But at the end of the day, I think it got here because of our human rebellion. And it bent the world. The whole universe is now bent in a unique way. And then God allows it for maybe some of the reasons we've talked about today. Maybe some other reasons, maybe some of these other theodicies would work, but at the end of the day, there's some plausibility of some of theodicies.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah. I feel like there's two angles to the problem of evil from a question or standpoint. So there's the one, like how do I defend it against other people? And then there's the two, what do I think about it? Am I okay with this sort of thing? And I think the first side, our first podcast does a lot of that. Like you mentioned the defense, and then this one too. But I think about when maybe it was one of the disciples asked Jesus, "When are these things going to happen?" And he says, "This is not for you to know." And it's as if he's saying, "You've got enough to follow and believe and build your entire life around what I'm talking about in me." And I feel like when we look at these things, this is what comes to my mind. We have enough to follow and trust and love God, and it's nothing wrong with learning more and delving, and we should delving into this, but we're just not going to know some things.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, the desire to know, and to understand why he does these things or allows these things is the very understandable desire and the desire to know when it will be rectified. And by the way, that is promised. I mean, this is the eschatological hope of all Christians is that there's coming a world where God will do away with all sickness and tears and all of those things. That's where the book of Revelation ends with that promise. We are told of the kingdom to come where God makes everything right by his grace, that we made wrong by our rebellion and sin. And we long for that and we wait for that. And we're not the only ones. The psalmists were asking for this and longing for this, "How long O Lord will you wait? How long O Lord will you leave us in suffering?"
And those are very normal feelings that every Christian throughout the ages have had. So believer, if you struggle with that, you're not alone. And we hang on in those moments when we can't see exactly what God is doing. We hang on to the fact that he's there, we hang on to the fact that he's good and he's kind, and he loves us. And we hang on to the fact that when it's all said and done, he's got us and maybe moments along the ride, it doesn't feel like it, but we trust in the fact that he does.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah, that's great. That's really helpful. Certainly for me.
Jamie Dew: I appreciate it. And enjoying the conversations as always, man.
Joe Fontenot: All right. Talk soon.
Jamie Dew: See you.
Joe Fontenot: 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.