Many different arguments have been made against Christianity and other religions because of evil. It’s understandable; just think of atrocities like the murder of youths in Norway last summer (recently in the news again as their killer has been declared insane). And smaller, everyday kinds of evils are also disturbing (of course, part of the horror of things like murder is precisely that they happen every day).

The best of these arguments focus on evil that purportedly lacks a morally sufficient reason. For God might well allow evils whenever He has good reason to do so, but it’s hard to see how a good God could allow gratuitous evil.

So the basic argument (offered in its most sophisticated form by atheistic philosophers like William Rowe) is this:

1. There are some evils for which we can find no morally sufficient reason.
2. Therefore, there is likely no morally sufficient reason for these evils.
3. If God existed, He would not allow evils without a morally sufficient reason.
4. Therefore, God probably doesn’t exist.

There are a few problems with this argument. I’ll focus on the move from 1 to 2. Why think that our lack of ability to find such reasons means they don’t exist?

Sometimes, of course, when we can’t find something, that’s a very good reason to think it doesn’t exist. We are designed to be pretty good at seeing middle-sized objects like buses or St. Bernards right in front of us.[1] Other things we’re not so good at: the detailed structure of big, complex situations that we can’t personally do much about, like the weather. Or like God’s reasons for making the world.

We just have no reason to think our natural abilities are that good at seeing things. How could a person whose life is determined by a squishy, small pile of grey matter approach the skill required to know about the total picture of a universe this complex—and which includes, of course, the squishy bits of matter without we couldn’t think? We can often sense good and evil in particular situations, but the larger framework of which they are a part is beyond our ken. So good reasons that rely on the complex interworking of creation—the sorts that would probably be most on God’s mind when deciding what to create—aren’t the sort of thing we could see. We can’t even see in the dark!

And the history of salvation supports the idea that we aren’t good at telling God’s plans and reasons. Who would have guessed that God would reveal Himself to a particular tribe, or decide to fulfill His promises to them by becoming incarnate, or use controversies about the person of Christ to produce the great creeds? Yet all this happened, despite the fact that people likely couldn’t tell at the time why things were unfolding the way they were.

So we shouldn’t place much confidence in our ability to tell exactly how all things are working together for good. We’re not so good at figuring out the “all things” that such knowledge would require. And this means it isn’t at all surprising that there are evil things for which we can’t see a morally sufficient reason.

It would be surprising if things were any different.

Tags: evil, skeptical theism