After our meditation on animal suffering, we will return our attention to a more popular association with the evidential problem of evil known as moral evil (as opposed to natural evil). While many theists are happy to accept the good of free will as an explanation for moral evil, or perhaps even a necessary stumbling block for growing moral creatures, we must also question how much moral evil is permissible in the best possible world.
Hans Jonas asks us to consider if there is a “limit” to how much evil we can accept in a theoretically ordered world. Marilyn McCord Adams situates concerns like Jonas’ into a category called “horrendous evils,” and offers possible responses.
Required:
Jonas, Hans. “The Concept of God After Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice” from The Journal of Religion, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Jan., 1987), 1-13.
Adams, Marilyn McCord. “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God,” from Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 63 (1989), 297-310.
Optional:
Hick, John. “Soul-Making Theodicy” from Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, edited by Peterson, Haskal, Reichenbach, Basinger (2014).
Hans Jonas, a Jewish philosopher, offers a different sort of framing for God than the classical definition (omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent) that we have worked with in class. Jonas observes that, while we can perhaps explain away evils on a smaller scale and chalk it up to the goods of human free will, this explanation falls short for Jewish texts. Indeed, the world according to many Jewish theologians is "the locus of Divine creation, justice, and redemption." In order to square how a God's chosen people could appear to be wholly abandoned by God during the atrocities of the Holocaust, Jonas posits that we require a picture of God that is becoming rather than being. In doing so, Jonas submits that God is passible via a "myth" of his own invention. In arguing for a God that is capable of suffering, caring, and ongoing change, we can 1) account for how there is extreme evil in the world since God could not intervene in the world and 2) find some sort of relational redemption in the genuine capacity for this same God to nevertheless care about what happens to humanity. Present in this piece is a sense that Jonas' God is actually a risky God; a God who does not know what will occur in the future, and yet gambles to create the world anyway.
Passible: Capable of being affected and/or suffering.
Impassible: Not capable of being affected and/or suffering.
Becoming: An ontological category that indicates some sort of change. For many theologians, this change is linear and implied to be progressive (God gets better, not worse, over time). A good example of things that are considered "becoming" are seasons (changing!), bodies (as they are capable of generation and destruction), and so on.
Being: An ontological category that indicates eternality and atemporality. The classical definition of God often equates God with pure "Being." Things that are said to participate in "Being"could be an objective Truth (never changes), the realm of Ideas (Justice, Beauty, Temperance-- think virtues, or Platonic Forms).
Mariyln McCord Adams argues that the existence of disproportionate suffering makes it theoretically unfruitful to pursue the question of why evils happen. Instead, she addresses the question of how God deals with-- and indeed, defeats--- evils. She calls the class of evils that are of utmost concern “horrors”-- i.e. evils that threaten to engulf a person and destroy all meaning in his or her life. She is critical of the standard approaches to theodicy, which justify God’s actions from a global perspective by arguing that the goods of the world offset or outweigh the evils and that the world is good on the whole. Obviously, much philosophical discussion and debate surrounds theodicies based on this understanding of God’s goodness. Adams, on the other hand, believes that, for cases of horrors, theodicy must show how God’s goodness is related to each individual sufferer. Although standard theodicies generally connect created and temporal goods to various evils being explained, and although they tend to use only those goods that are also recognized by their critics, Adams argues that horrors are so deep and destructive that no finite goods can overcome them. The worst evils (horrors) demand to be overcome by the greatest good, which is the infinite good of God himself. Only intimate connection to God-- the beatific vision in classical terms-- can engulf the most horrible evils, making the sufferers life a great good to him or her, and eliminate any doubt that life is worth living.
Theodicy (Theo=God + dikeo= judgement): A theodicy shows that it is reasonable to believe in God despite evidence of evil in the world and offers a framework which can account for why evil exists. A theodicy is contrasted with a defence, which attempts to demonstrate that the occurrence of evil does not contradict God's existence, but does not propose that rational beings are able to understand why God permits evil.
John Hick offers an explanation for evil in the world that contrasts to the well-known Augustinian type of theodicy. Whereas Augustinian theodicy sees present evil as representing a fall from a pristine- original state of the world, Hick follows St. Irenaeus in arguing that an adequate answer lies not in seeking the causal genesis of evil but in interpreting evil as a stage in human progress and development. In other words, rather than view the present state of the world as fallen from a kind of previous perfection, Hick views the world as a necessary stage in the evolution of a relatively immature creation into a more mature state. God seeks to bring forth mature moral and spiritual beings who are capable of freely exercising faith in him and love toward their fellows. Hick discusses the main features of an environment that would be conducive to bringing about these results. Two such features are ambiguity about the existence of God and human vulnerability to one another-- both of which provide opportunities for moral and spiritual growth. In the larger context of Hick’s writings, we find that the divine program of soul-making will culminate in the afterlife which Hick believes must involve universal salvation.
Reach out with Qs, per usual.
-S