DB - 600

Module/Week 7 Presentation: Evil and the hiddenness of God Transcript

Hello, this is Kevin Smith. Welcome to another presentation in philosophy 201 on Evil and the Hiddeness of God. What we should say right up front is that the problem of evil in philosophy of religion is not just a philosophical problem. It's also a very real, personal, emotional, and deep problem on every existential level. And so we cannot possibly plumb the depths of all that means and all of the ways that effects each one of us and humanity in general—or its effect on God for that matter. However, in this philosophy of religion unit we will analyze a couple of basic or fundamental issues in philosophy of religion as a relates to the problem of how we can believe in a perfect supreme Being—that is one who is perfect in knowledge power and goodness—and also believe in the persistent reality of evil. And that is just the challenge for theistic concepts of reality.

On the one hand, while that's a challenge, on the other hand it's also an advantage. I want to explain this in a way that may surprise you at first. Because obviously, logically speaking, each of us has a variety of belief-options in terms of big-picture worldviews. The biggest aspect of any worldview being whether there is a God and what sort of God that is. While it's often pointed out that evil is a sticking point or problematic point logically for belief in God, what most people don't consider is that the problem of evil is a logical problem no matter what view or worldview that you take. Many people haven't thought about the fact that if you simply jettison belief in God that doesn't make evil go away nor does it make the problem of explaining what evil is and why it is go away. At first it might seem that atheism is an easy way out; if there's no God then there's no conflict between the perfectly good Being—theoretically—and the in-your-face reality of evil everywhere we turn. But it's not quite that simple.

Let me illustrate in this way: if you are a materialist, an atheist, or a naturalist, then this egg can represent the totality of reality. Let's let this be “the Cosmic Egg,” if you will. There is nothing else in the naturalistic worldview but the physical cosmos; there is no god outside of that—that’s all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be. If we reduce reality to that, we have an immediate problem of how do we fit an explanation of evil into this worldview? I mean we can say that bad things happen, that hard things happen, but how can we call those things “moral evil?” How can we object to them? How can we even identify them as evil rather than good? Because there is no outside standard of referent by which you can measure any act, motive, or state of being as good or not good.

So for the atheist, the naturalist, or the materialist, consistently speaking, once you embrace that metaphysic the problem in philosophy of religion doesn't go away concerning evil. The naturalist has no natural grounds for calling something morally evil. It would simply reduce to inconvenient for certain subjects. On the other hand, many acts which we nearly universally call evil are in fact very convenient for a select few who oppress others. Or sometimes, even temporarily, they are the common good by which regimes, such as Stalinism, justified the mass slaughter of innocents. In the name of common good or in the name of egoistic personal convenience or advantage, many things can be done, which the victim would call evil, but the advantageous agent or society would call justified and good.

So the problem is that a moral relativism based on materialism alone simply collapses into an inability to actually identify evil with any objective standard. In other words: what you call evil or what this group calls evil isn't objectively wrong. I think as a theistic philosopher that's a much greater weakness in a worldview then the difficulty that I have in my worldview which is: the cosmos is physically real, but there's something outside of the cosmos that made it, that upholds it, that does control it according to His will, to a certain extent, as He wills. So if this is the hand of God, then this is the theistic concept of reality. And while the origin, the purpose, and the persistence of evil may have mysterious dimensions, there is at least in theory a possible explanation for evil in contrast with good because of an objective hand or standard that upholds all things. In other words, without a transcendent standard of morality we can have nothing to complain about morally speaking.

So, is evil a problem for theism? Yes, because I wonder what this hand is doing sometimes. Sometimes this hand has showed itself to me, sometimes it has not. Sometimes the world and God's purposes for it seem closed or hidden to me. But again, if there is a hand, there is a heart, there is a mind, there is a purpose, and even when I don't understand it fully—one day perhaps I will. Also there's another hand to God, which may also be closed to me. One day the cosmos in its current state will be repaired and in a different condition we might call this the new heaven and the new earth—still in the hand of God who has not dropped this in the mean time even when he fails to meet my demands for full answers on my terms.

Is evil a problem? Yes. Is evil a reality? Yes, but only if there is a standard for good and evil you can even call something good or evil if this is all there is. There are other worldviews that are mixtures of this that are also problematic for similar reasons but as you do the readings I want you to keep the big picture in mind.