January 5, 2026 • 48 mins
If God is all-good and all-powerful, then why is there evil in the world? Don’t say, "because of human free will” because we destroy that answer in this episode. Also, don’t say, “to make him more glorious” or “to bring him more glory” because we destroy that answer too. Does the existence of evil disprove God’s existence? Join us as we explore the philosophical issue of theodicy.
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(00:00):
If God exists, then why is thereso much evil in the world?
Did God have the freedom to create a world with one less
child rape than there is? There are 50 million slaves in
the world right now. That's an estimated 50 million
slaves, many of whom are sex slaves.
When evil is vanquished, does that mean also we don't get to
see how great God is? Because we don't get to see a
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pop against that dark backgroundof evil?
That is just straight up stupidity.
If God exists, then why is thereso much evil in the world?
If God is good and he's powerful, whence cometh evil?
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Today on Ideological, we're going to be talking about the
problem of evil. I'm your host, Zach Lee, and
we're just going to jump right into a very sticky topic.
This is an interesting philosophical topic.
Regardless of your worldview, regardless of whether or not you
believe in some type of deity ornot.
It deals with things like what counts as proof against God's
(01:05):
existence or other explanations.And what about the problem of
human free will and all that kind of stuff?
This is a topic that I have beenthinking about at the
professional level for decades. So I've done a lot of work on
this issue in particular. And so I'm just going to walk
you through a bunch of issues related to the problem of evil
and what we're talking about andmaybe potential solutions.
(01:27):
Maybe they work, maybe they don't.
I'm going to kind of leave that up to you to decide, but this is
the problem of evil first. I'm sorry, I got to get a little
little energy drink here. This episode is brought to you
by Monster Attack, your fatigue with a heart attack Monster
Energy drink. I feel like monster.
I feel like when they were inventing this drink, they went
(01:50):
up to somebody who does cocaine and push ups all day and they're
like, what would you what flavorwould you like?
And then he told them this and they're like perfect.
And we'll put it in a green can.So you think it's nature.
Speaking of heart attack, the problem of evil, this is called
it's traditionally called a theodicy, by the way, not the
Odyssey by Homer. You know the The Simpsons
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character theodicy. It comes from 2 Greek words
which is theos which is the wordfor God and DK.
DK is the word for justice like the kaosune is righteousness.
And so the idea is a theodicy isan attempt to vindicate divine
goodness and Providence in lightof the existence of evil.
OK, this is furthermore probablythe most common objection that
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people have against any type of theism is that there is evil in
the world. OK, why didn't God do better is
kind of the question. So there there's three facts
that seem to be in tension. You ready for these 3 facts?
First, the idea that God is all good.
Second, the idea that God is allpowerful.
And 3rd, the idea that evil exists.
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There seems to be a tension there.
OK, there seems to be a tension.Now for most of this lesson, I'm
going to be using kind of a judeo-christian definition of
God. But what I'm saying works,
whether you're a Muslim, Hindu, whatever, you'll you'll see that
different systems have differentattempts that they try to give.
To deal with the theodicy issue,let me give you a famous quote
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by David Hume, the one of the best philosophers I think that's
ever existed. I think his brilliance is
incredible. Here's what he says.
Is he willing to prevent evil? Speaking of God, is he willing
to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?
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So what what? What Hume is doing is he's kind
of highlighting that these 3 facts seem to be in tension.
OK? They seem to be in tension.
Now that idea was brought up by a lot of people before him.
Let me give you a very famous summation of that.
This comes from Lactantius, who's summarizing Epicurus.
He says this, by the way, this is from Epicurus.
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Lactantius is who we get it from.
And so he's quoting Epicurus andhe says this.
God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or he can
but does not want to, or he neither wants to nor can, or he
wants to and can. Those are kind of like the
different options that he's giving.
He continues. If he wants to and cannot, he is
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weak, and this does not apply toGod.
If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful, which is
equally foreign to God's nature.If he neither wants to nor can,
he is both weak and spiteful andtherefore not God.
If he wants to and can, which alone is fitting for God, from
what source then are bad things?Or why does he not eliminate
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them? OK, so that is the issue, that
if I can make it simpler, how would somebody defend the idea
that God is good and that he's powerful and that he exists when
he allows ordains causes regardless of what system you
want to put it in? The Holocaust, child
molestation, infanticide, wars, terrorism, cancer, rape, et
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cetera. Did you know that every day over
1000 children die just from unclean water?
Every day? OK, there are 50 million slaves
in the world right now. That's an estimated 50 million
slaves, many of whom are sex slaves.
OK, to put that in perspective, at the height of the Civil War
in the US, there was 3, about 3.9 million slaves and there are
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50 million today, more slaves than we've ever had, and a lot
of them are sexual slaves. How how do we, how do we justify
that in light of a God who's supposed to be not just good,
but all good, not just pretty powerful, but all powerful can
do anything he wants to do. That's what we're going to try
to figure out. So let's go over attempts to
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solve this. 10 I didn't realize this is a heavy issue.
By the way, let's take a little pause for again, Monster, you
know, they support this big fansMonster Energy drink, Monster
Energy drink try to eat a live rabbit.
OK, so the idea that God is all good, all powerful, and the evil
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exists, assuming God's existencein this, and we'll see if if you
know, this is going to be a casethat can also be brought against
the idea of God's existence. Because if God really is all
good and all powerful and there's evil, there seems to be
something off in how we have traditionally defined God.
So that here are the attempts tosolve this tension #1 you can
simply deny that God is good. That works for some systems.
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Like if you think of the the Greek gods, they're not really
gods. They're just kind of like
superhumans. They have the same vices as
humans, but they can also like throw lightning and do do sick
stuff. That kind of solves it.
That maybe God or the gods, depending on your religion, are
just not good or is not good. That would solve the issue.
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Now that that that runs into a host of other problems, but that
would at least solve the issue of the Odyssey.
It would at least solve the issue of God and the problem of
evil. So one attempt is you could
simply deny that God is good. Maybe there is an all powerful
being who's not quite as great as you thought he was.
OK #2 By the way, most people don't go there.
These attempts to solve the tension, By the way, I don't
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think that any of them solve thetension.
They simply deny that God is good.
But I don't know that anybody really cares about serving some
God who's all powerful but evil,right?
Like like when Jafar turns red and becomes the red genie and
and Jasmine puts on the attractive red clothes and
Aladdin, you know what I'm talking about.
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So that's not a place most are willing to go.
It would solve the tension, but at a very high cost.
OK, the second thing you could do to solve the tension is you
could simply deny that God is all powerful.
Again, that works in other religious world views and a lot
of religious world views the gods or God or whatever is like
super powerful, but he's not allpowerful.
He can't literally do whatever he wants.
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There's things that hinder him, maybe other forces or other gods
or something like that. So again, that would solve the
issue. Maybe God wants to get rid of
evil and evil exists, but he's just not powerful enough.
There's something too strong forhim.
Maybe it's the devil, maybe it'shuman free will, Maybe it's
something like that that God is not sovereign over.
He's sovereign over everything except the things that actually
matter. That's one option, but again, it
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comes at a price that the judeo-christian worldview does
not accept. OK, you can simply deny that
evil exists, that that actually would solve the problem.
OK, that actually would solve the problem.
You you could just say we are ascribing value to things that
we see, but we don't actually know the value.
Like you see a lion eat a gazelle.
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You don't see whether they oughtto eat a gazelle in a moral
sense, that this goes to something called Hume's
guillotine. You cannot imply an ought from
an is meaning, let's say for a second that there are no ethics.
There are no even brute facts and ethics that you just see a
guy, you know, murder another person.
All you saw was a guy and the killing of another guy, you
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don't see whether it's good or bad or morally neutral.
You, you don't, you don't have that.
So maybe things happen and we don't like them, but that
doesn't mean they're actually evil.
That would solve the tension as well.
But again, it comes at a high cost.
I, I think very few people are willing to say that the
Holocaust happened and we didn'treally like it.
I think they're wanting to say, no, there was something evil
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about that. When somebody's putting out, you
know, when somebody's like molesting children, I don't
think we just say, I don't like that.
That offends my sensibilities. I think we say that's seems to
be evil. There seems to be this universal
disapprobation with something like that.
Maybe that's because evil actually exists.
It's very hard when somebody's dying of cancer to say theodicy.
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OK #4 this would solve the tension as well.
You could simply deny that God exists.
Again, the most common objectionagainst the belief in God is the
strongest objection, in my opinion, which is the the
existence of the problem of evil.
OK, we'll talk about why in justa second.
But you could just say, yeah, the reason there's evil in the
world is because God doesn't exist.
A bunch of chants and randomnessand matter and chemicals
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collided and we harm people and people get raped and murdered
and wars and cancer because everything's just messed up.
In a sense, it denies both. It denies that God is good and
powerful because he doesn't exist.
Therefore you could just say there's evil.
Whether you mean that as like a meta ethical category of
something that solidly exists, or you just mean it's what what
we in society would deem to be evil.
OK. Whether you put a value judgment
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on it that's objective or not, that would solve the issue.
Next, let me give you the most common defense of God in the
problem of evil, which I think is super, super stupid.
It's the most common one throughout history.
It's held by very smart people. I just think it's a really,
really dumb ass argument. OK, hold, please.
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OK, it's called the free will defense.
What people do is they'll say, OK, how can God be all powerful
and it can be all good, and yet there's evil in the world.
Here's what we'll do. We'll blame it on human free
will. It's not God's fault, it's our
fault. We just chose this.
And God had to make us where we had to have free will or else we
couldn't really love him. And so if you're going to make
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somebody with free will, then they have to have the potential
to to sin and to fail and to bring evil into the world.
That is the dumbest argument maybe I've ever heard.
Let me go over a few problems with it.
So the free, free will argument is basically this, that it was
not logically possible for God to create a world where humans
had free choice and there was not the possibility of humans
using that free choice in a bad way.
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That's essentially what the freewill argument is.
What they're going to say is there are some things that God
cannot do. It's not an option to God
because it's logically contradictory, meaning it's not
that God's weak or not powerful.God can't make a circular square
because that's a contradiction. He can't make 2 + 2 equal 5, and
two and two still mean what theymean today because that's a
contradiction. He can't cease to exist.
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That's a contradiction. So there are some things when we
say God can't do. We're not saying that like
they're doable and he's not strong enough.
We're saying they're not things,they're just words parading
around is this idea that's consistent, but it's actually
just a contradiction. OK, So what a lot of people
would say is it was not possiblefor God to create a world where
humans had true free will and where humans use that free will,
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where where humans didn't have the potential of using that free
will in a bad way and therefore sinning and bringing evil into
the world. Let's go over some problems with
that, OK? Because one, it acts like God
really cares about human free will and that that's a good
thing, which we've not established yet.
It also acts as though God couldn't have done anything
differently and still used humanfree will, which we haven't
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established yet. It acts as though humans
couldn't have free will and havenot chosen something evil.
And so let's let's go over the problems with the free will
defense again, just to summarize, the reason it's evil
in the world is because God can't mess with people's free
will. He's sovereign over everything
basically except humans. And because everything's humans
do, they will to do. And so the most important part
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of his creation he's not controlover.
And so that means he's going to allow the potential for a bad
choice. And the humans just took the bad
choice. OK, few problems with that.
Number one, there are so many Bible passages that say that God
is sovereign over human wills. If God can't control the wills
of humans, he can't control anything that matters who gets
elected because people vote withtheir will, whether or not a
plane, a pilot wants to crash a plane because God can't
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interfere with his will. There are so many passages
again, and I don't care your worldview.
I'm I'm poking holes in the freewill defense.
I think this defense is stupid. There's so many passages where
God where like a king wants to do something and God prevents
them, or God hardens their heartmaking it worse, or God hates
Esau and loves Jacob from beforethey're born.
Like if God has free will and you have free will and they
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clash, God does not care about yours, he gets to have his and
so one. I just think the whole thing
about God not overcoming human freedom is dumb.
Even if you allow it for the problem of evil, you run into
God overcoming people's free will.
I don't know, 100 times in the Bible.
OK so that doesn't work. The other one is that there's
some chaos in the universe that seems like it didn't come as a
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result of human sins. So supposedly if you take the
Genesis story literally, which again, that's that's debatable,
if you take the Genesis story literally, you have Adam and Eve
that are supposed to be over theearth and they sin and that's
why everything becomes broken and the ground bears thorns and
thistles. What about things that they're
not over? What about a big swirling storm
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on Jupiter that's been going on for a long time, which is seen
as chaos and disorder and violence that were not affected
by Adam and Eve? Or when stars explode galaxies
away and stuff. There seems to be some things in
the universe that didn't come asa result of human sin because
humans are not over the universe.
They're just over Earth. Adama as as the name is in
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Hebrew dirt is his name Clay. If you want to call Adam that.
God could have used people he knew would freely choose not to
eat of the tree of the knowledgeof good and evil.
So let's, let's, let's go with the free will defense and say
cool, God wants people to have free will.
He doesn't want to overcome their free will.
Well then instead of choosing Adam and Eve, which God at least
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you would have to say that he knew that they were going to sin
and use their free will to choose bad, why not choose
instead of Adam and Eve, Eva andSteve?
You've heard of Adam and Eve andAdam and Steve, why not Eva and
Steve? And God looks ahead in the
future, in his future telescope,and he sees that they will
freely of their own free will not eat of the fruit and not
'cause sin to infect all of humanity and the world would be
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great. That would keep free will.
It would allow humans to have chosen the right thing again,
not coerced by God. They still have the potential to
sin and choose wrong, but they just chose right.
And God could have picked somebody who naturally would
have done that. This is before sin enters the
world. So people are not naturally bad
yet. Why didn't he do that?
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Here's you can push it back evenfurther.
If God did not want evil in the world, he could have just not
created the devil if he knew thedevil would fall and tempt man.
So notice you have Adam and Eve and they don't have a sin
nature. Again, I'm, I'm using one
narrative here because this is the one where guys like Hume or
Bale or Leibnitz or, you know, whoever's riding, they're
typically riding within a again,judeo-christian frameworks.
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That's why I'm using that one because that's the one most
people listening to this care about.
Most people are not like Zoroastrian and you know, into
Zoroastrianism and they're like,Oh, I need to know that this is
what they're into. So Adam and Eve don't have sin
originally and they're told not to do this tree and they're
tricked. There's a talking serpent and he
tricks them into eating of this tree of the knowledge of good
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and evil. Well, what caused him to sin?
Did something trick him? Like if God made everything good
and he made all these angels andone of those angels, what what
causes the devil to go? I think I want to be great too.
How, how, what, what allows him to choose sin?
What, what allows? What's that first turning?
He's not tricked, he's not tempted.
What, why does he turn and think, ah, this is, this is
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what, this is what I should do. I should try to be great too.
And then sin like Anselm, the philosopher in the Middle Ages,
who's a pretty sharp philosopher.
He writes a work called On the Fall of the Devil where he tries
to answer this question. And in my opinion, he just, it's
a swing and a mess. He doesn't actually answer it.
Did God create the devil with some sort of defect to where he
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would choose not just less being?
All creations are less being than God and everything created.
But I'm talking about negative being, like sinful things,
actively rebellious things. And if God knew he was going to
do that, just don't create that one.
Create all the other ones. Again, according to the Bible,
whether you hold that or not, God at least seems to know the
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future. He at least seems to ordain
things, whether he does them directly or not.
Cool. If you're looking at all these
angels, you're like, these are cool.
These are cool. Like flying things.
This one looks a little shady. And they just don't make him,
just don't make him OK. This position says that again,
the free will defense says that God is unable to do something
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that he wants to do, that he's unable to remove evil or to
overcome someone's will. At the end of the day, God is
eternally less happy than he could have been had humans
obeyed and sin not entered the world.
That again, is ridiculous if youhold a view of God's
sovereignty, which is one of thepoints on this whole theodicy
thing. Pierre Bale, one of my favorite
philosophers, says this, according to them, is the
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foundation of foreknowledge. Others claim that the decree
declares that the creature will be placed in the circumstances
in which God has foreseen that it would sin.
Thus some contend that God foresaw the sin by reason of His
decree, and others contend that He made the decree because he
had foreseen the sin. So he's talking about, does God
look ahead in the future, in hisfuture telescope, and see this
sin's going to happen and then decree things backwards?
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Or does God decree it and that'swhat makes it happens happen?
And it doesn't matter as his answer, no matter how it is
explained, He continues, It obviously follows that God
wished that man's sin, and that He preferred this to the
perpetual duration of innocence,which was so easy for him to
bring about and ordain. Reconcile this, if you can, with
the goodness that He ought to have for his creatures and with
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the infinite love that He ought to have for His Holiness.
There's something very interesting that Bail is
pointing out, regardless of whether you're a Calvinist or an
Armenian, whether you think God looks ahead in the future, sees
what humans are going to do, which, by the way, already means
it's set. And if God didn't set it, who
did? But he looks and sees what
people are going to do, or he ordains what they're going to
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do. Regardless of the view.
You have to come to the conclusion that God could have
done otherwise to some extent and did not.
Why not? OK.
And one of the things that Bale mentions at the end that I think
is really, really interesting, we're not just saying that God
owed his creature some sort of love.
God owes himself maximal holiness, OK?
It would be better if there was no, sorry, no evil in the
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universe for God. It would be better for God.
God who's infinitely holy and infinitely bright and infinitely
perfect. And if he is the only thing that
exists and it's pure goodness. And no evil exists, no privation
of goodness even exists. That would ontologically,
metaphysically, theologically bethe best thing.
And God didn't do it. What is happening?
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Here's another one to poke a hole in this whole free will
defense thing. Christians in heaven supposedly,
and angels won't be able to sin for all eternity, and yet they
apparently have some type of free will.
Or do they? Let me let me rephrase it.
What we're doing is we're sayingthis, this whole free will
defense is on this idea that it's good to have free will.
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And if you can't choose something's opposite, if you
don't have the freedom to sin, it's not real free will.
Cool. Well then God doesn't have free
will because God can't do his opposite.
He can't, he can't cease to be, He can't be evil, He can't lie,
says the Bible. That would mean that, you know,
in all eternity in a resurrection or heaven or
whatever your view of what happens to you when you die,
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that means those people don't have free will.
Why? Why for why for all eternity are
we spending time in a state that's worse because we don't
have the opportunity to sin? Doesn't God really love us
enough to fully give us free will to maybe fall and sin
again? It just becomes ridiculous.
We we act like Contra causal freedom or some sort of
libertarian freedom is a good thing.
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It would be much better to only choose what's right.
The only reason we value that isbecause we just have a high view
of humanity that I'm not sure that the Bible shares.
When it comes to human value, sure, but not when it comes to
our decision making. One more thing here, it's not
actually loving to give people freedom if you know they're
going to misuse it. At no point am I going to give a
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young child a loaded handgun so that they can be free.
Maybe they'll make a bad decision, but it's really loving
for me to give them the handgun.That is absurd.
The most loving thing to do is say, hey, more important than
your freedom is you not shootingyourself or forgot.
More important than your freedomis not going to hell forever.
I would so rather not have free will and not have billions of
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people go to hell forever. Again, in the historic Christian
position, if that's you, that's the please overcome my free
will. That would be a much kinder
thing. That would be a much better
thing to do. Pierre Bell continues.
He's talking about people that give kids like their kids a
sword or knife. He says this if they neglect the
welfare of their sons, meaning who've taken swords and will
hurt themselves, he says. And if they claim that they do
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not want to use force, since they would thereby be treating
their sons as if they were slaves, they show either that
they have no love or that they are not aware of its proper
function. What Bale is saying is he's
saying if you gave a kid a swordand that you knew they were
going to hurt themselves with it, or a kid got a sword and you
knew they were going to hurt themselves with it.
And you said, well, I don't wantto just take that sword from you
because then I'm overcoming yourfree will.
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Then I'm treating you like a slave, like a robot, like a
chess piece. And Bale's like, then you have
no idea what love is. Love is doing what's best for
somebody. And by the way, the same thing
is true with God. God doesn't just have good
things happen to you from a human perspective, but the idea
is he is supposed to have what'sbest happen to you from a like a
spiritual and theological perspective.
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And So what do you do with that Monster Energy drink?
Bite the beak off a bird? Try to race a race car with your
feet next. Another potential what people
think is a solution to the problem of evil.
Again, I think this one's super stupid.
Say God had to allow evil so that we could really see what
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goodness is. You ever heard somebody say
this? Well, the reason there's evil in
the world is, you know, if you have a a candle and you're
outside in the sunshine, the candle doesn't burn very
brightly. But if you're in a dark room,
whoa, you see that candle in that light?
I'm talking like, I feel like Ben Stiller from like dodgeball
or something. You know, this episode brought
(23:56):
to you by Globo Gym. Globo Gym.
We're better than you and we know it.
That should actually probably bea good ideological slogan where
we're better than you and we know it.
I like elitism. So anyway, he's there and you've
got the you've got the light with the candle in the dark
room. And so the light shines brighter
in the darkness. If you're going to make a
tapestry, you don't just put yellows in bright greens and
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such. You also have to put some black
and some some brown and some dark colors.
So it really pops. So what a lot of people say is
that the reason there's evil in the world is because it makes
the good better. Look at me real quick.
Pay attention. This means that God needs evil
to be fully good, or it means that God needs evil so that good
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can really shine. It's ridiculous.
It's certainly much better if there's just good than evil
because you can contrast it withthe evil.
To say it another way, for all eternity, supposedly God has
just been good. Does that mean God's lacking
because he didn't get to see howmuch his glory pops in light of
the darkness? Again, for eternity, supposedly
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when evil is vanquished, does that mean also we don't get to
see how great God is because we don't get to see a pop against
that dark background of evil? That is just straight up
stupidity. It's it's really dumb.
OK, for a few reasons. One I just mentioned the biggest
one that it it kind of makes Godresponsible or God need evil to
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really be as good as he could be, or at least so we can see
it. OK, well, Zach, maybe he did it
so that we could see so so God doesn't need the evil to be
good, but maybe we need the evilso that we can see how good God
is. Do you understand how asinine
that is? First of all, God does what's
best for God and what's best forhis glory first before he
decides what he thinks humans do.
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Second of all, you're telling meGod, who can do everything
couldn't implanted in our minds the idea of goodness without the
evil. Doesn't he have that himself?
Don't the angels who have not fallen have that don't don't
want humans have that in eternity.
And so it's it's it's it just doesn't seem to work.
Are we really let let me say it's stronger.
(26:01):
Are we really willing to say that God allows all the rape and
murder just so we can see something we already know?
Would you abuse your child and then give them a toy so they
appreciate the toy more that there's a great scene from by
the way, let's let's take a little pause here.
So perhaps the greatest comedy series of all time.
This is not my opinion. This is objective is Arrested
(26:21):
Development. I see a lot of people online
debate like is the office or parks and rec better?
Neither of them arrest development's better than both.
Letterkenny's better than both. And so anyway, it's it's it's
great. But there's this scene where
this little nerdy kid named Buster when they're little is
going to go down a slide. He's scared to go down the
slide. And his brother Job, which is
spelled GOB with AG, is like, come on, get down the slide
(26:44):
because he's scared. And the the little brother
Buster goes down the slide and he punches him right in the
chest. Do it.
And then he says, when you do this without getting punched in
the chest, you'll have more fun.And Buster goes, thanks,
brother. Thanks, brother.
That's kind of what you're saying.
God basically gave you the cancer or the sin or the
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whatever. So you can see how great He is
in light of that thing, right? So he punches you in the stomach
and he's like, now think about how much you enjoy the slide
when you don't get punched in the stomach.
I think that is a dumb answer. At the end of the day, it's
makes it sound like good is better when bad is there.
Let me say that again, that goodis better when bad is there.
That is super dumb. Next, another attempt people use
(27:30):
at answering this question is tosay that God created the world
good but imperfect, so that humans could grow in moral
virtue. This is sometimes called soul
building. The idea is that these bad
things produce things like character.
OK, and it's good. It's good to be tenacious.
It's good to have resolve. It's good to have fortitude.
(27:51):
It's good to overcome adversity.And all these things help you
grow. Now again, I think this one is
possible, logically possible. It's, it's certainly not within
the, the, the, the Western tradition, but it, it has a few
problems. It still makes God creation
imperfect. In this scheme, God fails.
There's a lot of people that don't get better through evil in
the world. They get worse and worse and
(28:12):
worse. Couldn't God have just created
people better without making them suffer?
Does he not have that ability? It's certainly not biblical.
Mankind is seen as morally better in the Garden of Eden.
If you want to say it that way, then after say it again.
Mankind is seen as morally better in the Garden of Eden.
OK, then after when all the bad stuff is there.
OK, those are some problems. Let's talk about some other
(28:34):
attempts that people use to explain God and evil that might
be better. But again, I'm a leave it up to
you whether or not you think this this answers the question
or not. Let's have attempts to explain
God and evil. OK, without God, what some
people will say is there is no evil at all.
With without God, there is no evil.
(28:56):
So when, when somebody gets upset and says, oh, I don't
believe in God, I can't believe you allowed this and cancer and,
and rape and all these terrible things.
And you're like, wait, wait, wait, what makes you think those
things are evil? Well, we all know they're bad.
OK, so I, I get that you're saying you don't like them.
I get the Boo Hooray. I get like the we don't like the
Holocaust. The Holocaust hurts people.
The Holocaust causes pain to go into people's bodies.
(29:19):
The Holocaust is frowned upon bysociety.
I get all of those reasons, but what makes it evil?
It seems like you just have to say like you have to say that if
God doesn't exist, evil doesn't exist.
It's just just there's just things.
There's no good or evil. Ultimately we we can create
categories as a society. We can base it on
utilitarianism. We can base it on pragmatism.
(29:41):
We can base it on day ontological ethics.
We can, you can listen to the, the we've got a lecture on
ethics and the different theories of ethics, but
ultimately that it wouldn't be grounded on anything better than
that. So we should act according to
reason and that will ground our ethics.
Cool. Why is that good?
Because it's consistent. Why is that good?
Eventually you push it back and you don't have some ultimate
ground that surpasses human experience.
(30:03):
So that's what some people will say to the the problem of evil.
Without God, there's also no good either.
OK, so to to quote Boethius, whoI love Boethius, by the way, if
you've not read the consolation of philosophy, it was the most
read work in the Middle Ages after the Bible.
And as far as philosophical work, and it is, it's fantastic.
But he says this, we cannot raise the question, how can
(30:23):
there be evil if God exists without raising the second?
How can there be good if he exists?
Not So it's it's interesting to say, well, God can't exist
because there's all this evil inthe world and you're like, cool,
is there any good in the world? Well, wouldn't that be proof for
God's existence? Yes, there's there's cancer and
all these things, but don't kidsalso just run through the park
and laugh and play tag? Don't you get to eat delicious
(30:44):
ice cream or have a great glass of wine or chug down a Monster
Energy drink? Delicious.
Tastes like a melted Flintstone vitamins.
Delicious. Aren't there good things?
Would that not be then evidence for God's existence?
Maybe God exists and it's just amessed up version of God that's
a little bit good and a little bit bad.
Maybe he's got a naughty side and a nice side, a little Jekyll
(31:05):
and Hyde God #3 listen to this one.
This one's pretty common. This one's smarter than others,
although I'm not sure it answersthe question, but I think it's
better than the other ones. Evil is not based merely on the
action itself. It's based on the end goal.
OK, is a knife good or bad? Well, it depends on what you're
using it for. A doctor uses a knife called a
scalpel to save somebody's life in surgery, and a murderer uses
(31:28):
a knife to stab someone in the neck and kill them.
You can't just say is a knife bad?
You have to say, is it being used for a good or bad purpose.
If you just saw me run and shovea kid, you might be like, wow,
that is really evil. But if I did that to get them
off the train tracks as a train was barreling their way and I
saved their life or an oncoming car, all the sudden you can't
just say, oh, why is there pushing in the world?
(31:50):
Why is there, you know, this kid, he fell down and he got
bruises. Yeah.
He didn't get hit by a train. And so that there's this sense
in which you you have to consider the ultimate end and
the ultimate good. Could it be that God exists and
he's using evil for an ultimately good purpose?
And then would it be evil? Right.
So like when a, when a kid, I mean, I remember having to do
(32:10):
this with my kids. So they'd have to go in to get a
shot when they were like real little babies or whatever.
And they didn't want to get a shot because kids do not like
shots. And so at one point I'm having
to like, hold my son down while the doctor gives him a shot.
And he's looking up at me like, you traitor, I hate you.
Because in his mind, he's thinking you were supposed to be
good and now there's evil. He doesn't understand that I am
(32:31):
actually preventing him from getting, you know, polio or some
weird disease, measles or whatever.
Like, I, I have a good purpose in it.
And so he just doesn't see it. To say it another way, if you
knew everything that God knew, would you not do the same things
that God does? OK, if, if God has a purpose for
what we call evil, that's ultimately good, that's not
(32:52):
inconsistent to then say that that he is an all good, all
powerful being and that evil exists to serve this good in.
Now this is not saying that God himself can personally do evil.
What it's saying is that he can use the actions of other
creatures or not other creaturesbecause God is not created but
of creatures, right? So humans and demons or whatever
they're evil to use for an ultimately good purpose.
(33:14):
Let me let me give you a quote by DA Carson.
He's a theologian. He's pretty bright.
He reads 500 books a year, so they're only 365 days in a year.
So stick that in your philosophypipe and smoke it.
He says this, to put it bluntly,God stands behind evil in such a
way that not even evil takes place outside the bounds of his
sovereignty. Yet the evil is not morally
chargeable to him. It is always chargeable to
(33:36):
secondary agents, to secondary causes.
On the other hand, God stands behind good in such a way that
it not only takes place within the bounds of His sovereignty,
but is always chargeable to Him and only derivatively to
secondary agents. What he's saying is God stands
behind good and bad, but in different ways.
Good flows naturally from God's nature, and we only get it
derivatively secondarily. Like if somebody does something
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that's good, that's only becauseGod has empowered that or
whatever it might be. Conversely, though, God can be
sovereign over evil, but it doesn't flow directly from his
nature. It seems like he always uses
secondary agents for that, right?
Humans or demons or, or something like that.
So again, I think that one's smarter.
But there's, there's still the problem.
Like if I say I push a kid out of the way of the train, all I'm
(34:20):
saying is that we did a little bit of evil to prevent a worse
evil. Well, what if we just didn't
have the train? Why?
Why do I have to give the my kida shot a little bit if we just
don't have diseases? It just seems like what we're
saying is it's OK for God to useevil because we get a milder
version of it when we could justhave none at all.
(34:41):
OK, maybe #4 sorry, I feel like about to sneeze.
OK, I'm not there. It is.
This episode brought you by Pepper.
Pepper. Put it in your nose.
OK? Evil is not a thing that exists.
Rather it is a lack of substance.
So this is a, again, a smarter response to the problem of evil.
And this goes back to, I mean, so many, so many philosophers,
(35:02):
so many thinkers in the early church.
I mean, it's, it's not a dumb view.
I think it's a pretty smart view.
I don't know that solves the issue, but let me explain what
it is. But first we have to have
another promotion by Meow Meow Monster Energy drink.
Pour it into a bent spoon with alighter and inject it into your
(35:23):
veins. Monster.
OK, here's the idea. Evil's not a thing that God
made. It's not something that like is
a substance that exists. So it's not like God made
mountains and humans and right rhinoceros, rhinoceri and
flamingos and planets and then this like swirling clump of
stuff called evil like some sortof like Dungeons and Dragons
(35:45):
car. I don't, I don't actually, I
don't, I don't play that becauseI'm not a virgin.
It's not like you just made evil's not a stuff.
It's not a thing. It's a lack of being.
It is God makes things and he makes them good and evil's just
the word that we use to describewhat happens when that thing
gets twisted, when that thing becomes less, when it goes in
the other direction. It's a privation.
(36:06):
In the same way that we think ofcoldness is not a thing, We
think of it as the absence of heat or darkness is not a thing.
That's the absence of light. Someone can make a case.
Those are still things. I think a better example is it's
kind of like a hole in a shirt where shirt should be.
So I have a shirt. I should have done this lesson
without my shirt on that then you would have seen there's some
good in the world. It's not the places where the
(36:28):
shirt is supposed to have holes because created beings are not
going to have as much being or existence as God has.
But if I have a hole in the middle of my shirt, that's a
hole where the shirt should be. Notice that's not a thing.
It's just the absence of shirt where a shirt should be.
You can't just have a box full of just holes without any edges
or anything. It's it's just a privation.
It's a it's a lack. That is the idea that God
(36:51):
creates everything good and evilis the turning away from that
good. It's a privation.
It's a lack of being. It's not like a substance.
It's not like God makes all these good things and then makes
this clump of gross. To quote Bonaventure, sin is not
any kind of essence, but a defect in corruption because the
creature, meaning humans, may thus do something which is not
from God according to God, or because of God.
This is sin, which is the corruption of mode, species, and
(37:14):
order. Because sin is a defect, it
cannot be said to have an efficient cost, IE something
that directly acts upon it to make it do something.
Rather, it has a deficient cost,namely the defection of the
created will. OK, if you say, well the
Holocaust happened, could God have prevented it?
Well, I don't know, but he's notevil because it was just a lack
(37:36):
of will or it was a lack of it was a privation.
It seems like a pretty positive negative.
It seems like a pretty powerful privation.
I don't know how that gets you out of the issue.
It it does get out of the issue of how God didn't just create a
clump of stuff called evil, but it doesn't get out of the issue
of why is there evil at all if God could have done something
(37:57):
different. OK, the other one you can use is
you can say that God has a reason for evil that he has not
given us, so we trust him even when we don't know the answers.
The phydeist view, we'll talk about that in just a second.
If God told us why he did everything, it'd actually be bad
for us. Rather, we are.
It would teach us to trust the answers instead of Him.
And so God doesn't give us the answers.
So we trust him. We trust the person, not the
(38:18):
reasons. OK.
Or you can say that God is beyond human critique and take
it out of the realm of rationality, and that could,
again, those could be right. I'm not saying these are.
I'm not saying any of these are right or wrong.
I'm just giving you a bunch of thoughts.
I can tell you some are smarter and some are not smarter.
OK, So what do we do? Let let me, let me just make the
question as difficult as possible.
(38:39):
You ready? God from a traditional, again,
Western early church, medieval church, Reformation, modern
church, Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, from the
traditional view that most people in the West are thinking
of when they think of God. Here's the issue.
God supposedly the Trinity has had glory and maximum infinite
(39:03):
glory for all eternity. So it doesn't make any sense to
say, well God ordained evil for his glory.
He decided to redeem people for his glory.
What do you mean by that? He already has infinite glory
for all eternity and it doesn't change.
It doesn't go up or down. OK we might be able to see it
better, but again he could make us see it better without all the
the rape and the murders. OK so God is infinite glory.
(39:27):
So him creating a world with evil or not creating a world
with evil or whatever it is doesnot affect him.
He is always infinitely glory. He does not need anything from
creation. He does not need anything from
humans. He's not served by human hands
as though he needed anything. The Bible would say cool then
why is there evil if God gets the same glory and it would keep
(39:50):
humans from going to hell? Cause according to the Bible
most people go to hell. The road is wide that leads to
destruction. There's only a few on the path
of righteousness that find it. Why?
Why not just save everybody? Why not pick somebody who
wouldn't use their free will to say, why not just not create the
devil? Why just not?
Let me say it's strong, strongerthan that?
(40:11):
Did God have the freedom to create a world with one less
child rape than there is? Could God have done that?
Is he powerful enough to have created a world where there's
just simply one? Why?
Why is it not just less evil than it is?
If you want all the problem of evil and God to be glorious and
all that, cool, I'll grant you that.
Why does it have to be this evil?
(40:31):
Why can't it be a little bit less evil?
Could God not have created the universe and planned everything
out where there's one less childrape?
Well, Zach, he doesn't overcome someone's free will.
Cool. Then he looks ahead in the
future, sees that person's goingto rape a child, and he just
doesn't create them. He could have prevented it that
way, right? Without overcoming free will,
which I don't think you understand what that means.
(40:52):
Why did he not do that? If he gets the same glory and
everyone could know God, everyone could not have cancer,
everyone could like all the things could be good, no one
could go to hell, no Holocaust, no whatever, and God would've
gotten the same glory. Why didn't he do it?
This is the hardest question. I think in philosophy of
religion and also probably in theology, it's very difficult.
(41:17):
Now what are the your different options for answers to that
problem? First, you can go the route of
phadeism, right? Phadeism is this idea that God
is not irrational. Some phadeis think that that it
they are actually irrational. They think that rationality and
and theology and stuff are at odds.
But many go the route to say that no, God is supra rational,
(41:40):
so he's above reason. So they're because God exists
and he's good. I'm just going to trust that he
has something and how he's usingevil that I don't understand.
I'm a limited human. I only know so many languages.
I only know so many facts. I only know I don't know how
many stars there are. I don't know how many hairs on
my head. At the end of the day, my mind
is not going to I'm not going totake my brain that evolved to
(42:01):
eat berries in a cave and be able to figure out the depths of
an infinite being. OK, you can go that route.
That that is, again, that's not a that's not a wrong answer.
That might be a right answer, but notice this.
It's not rational, meaning I'm not saying it's irrational.
I'm just saying it's, you're notdefending it.
You're not building this case oflogically deductible, you know,
propositions or something, and making a case for how there can
(42:23):
be a good and powerful God and evil be in the world.
But when you can go the route ofPhidaism, you can also go the
route of a circular argument, OK?
You can say, listen, the way that I know that God exists is
good and powerful and that there's evil in the world and
everything's still fine is because God has told me that I
start with the Bible or I start with the presupposition of my
(42:46):
faith. I start with Christianity.
I start with God and God has told me that he's good and
there's evil and I'm just going to take him, take it for what
it's worth. Cool.
That's a circular argument. That doesn't necessarily mean
it's wrong. There's a good case to be made
that math is circular arguments,right?
Like 2 + 2 which equals 4 = 4, right?
So that might be, but notice again, it's not rational.
(43:07):
It's it's hard when you're appealing to a circular argument
to give these proofs that could be refuted.
OK, because the opponent could simply say, well, there is evil
in the world and so logically God doesn't exist or is messed
something up or is not strong oris not good.
OK, you can state that that's rational.
To believe in God is a properly basic belief that it's a brute
(43:29):
fact, as Alvin Planiga does. Now the the that that's fine.
You're not irrational in believing in God, even with the
problem of evil being there, because again, we've already
seen that, that there could be something you haven't thought of
that God has thought of. Cool.
The problem that I have with Planaga's view, though, on the
problem of evil. Again, we're not here to prove
God's existence. In this lecture, we're talking
about the problem of evil. We're also not defending whether
or not it's rational, believing God.
(43:49):
We're talking about the problem of evil things de facto, not
just Dior A to use the Latin or di jure to use English.
Here's my problem is Planaga's answer to the problem of evil is
a type of free will defense. And we've already seen the huge
theological and philosophical problems that that has.
My favorite take on this comes from again, Bale, who I would
(44:10):
encourage you. So his work, his historical and
critical dictionary is probably the most found work in private
libraries in the Enlightenment in France.
So his influence is enormous. He influences everybody from,
you know, Voltaire to Leibnitz to Hume to I mean, he's he's the
freaking man. He has in that article or in
that dictionary, two articles I'd recommend that you read.
(44:32):
The first is on the politions, OK, the Paulicians, that's
PALICIANS, the Polishians, or itmight be Pau, might be after I
think it was a Manichean named Paul.
Anyway, on the politicians, whatis he saying?
And, and he's got an article on the on the Manicheans, on
Manicheanism. Here is essentially his view.
(44:52):
By the way, sorry, right as I said that my face lit up because
the sun came out. That's God telling you.
You should read Bail. What Bail is going to say is
when you push certain doctrines to their logical limits, they're
going to break and Bale will sayso much the worse for reason.
(45:13):
So a lot of people when they saythat there's faith and reason
and they think they clash, they take reason.
Bale goes the other way. He says, well, when faith and
reason clash, I'm going to take faith because God has revealed
himself. Because not only do does logic
and philosophy and you know, stuff run into contradictions in
religion, it runs into it in pretty much every area.
So one of the things that he's going to do in his article on
(45:34):
the Manichaeans is he's going totalk about how he, he doesn't
think Manichaeanism is right, but he thinks that they can make
a better case than a Christian can of why there's evil in the
world because they have a good principle and an evil principle.
The Christian is sucks saying there's only a good principle,
God, yet there's evil. In the article on the
politicians, he basically goes through every defense that
people give for why God allowed evil and just absolutely
(45:54):
destroys it. I mean, Bale's so smart.
He just runs circles around you and his thing is, Oh yeah, God
still exists even though there'sevil in the world and we just
don't know how it works. That's another, but notice, wait
for it, general. It's also not rational if God
exists. And again, we don't know if he
does in this lecture. We, we've, we've, we've given
proofs for and against his existence.
(46:18):
Does the way that he wants people to come to him?
It is it is it through logic? Is it through reason?
Is it through argumentation? Does God stoop down to a human
level so that we're on equal arguing playing grounds?
Or does he just say trust this, believe this, do this, I'm
bigger than you. Is it a is it a purely spiritual
thing? To what level is it rational?
(46:40):
These are all good questions. So I want you to wrestle with
the problem of evil regardless of your worldview.
I don't want to push whatever side you're on.
So if you are more atheistic or non religious or agnostic, what
do you do with a concept of objective evil?
That's not a circular argument. What do you do with the good
that's in the world? What do you do with etcetera?
(47:05):
What do you do with, you know, the contingency argument?
What do you do with fine tuning?What do you do?
You got to wrestle with those philosophical things.
If you're someone who's more religious, you've got to deal
with this problem of evil and land somewhere.
Is it just, we don't know, Great, that's cool, but that's
not philosophy, right? As soon as you say that you've
moved away from rationality and building a system.
Maybe that's what you want, or maybe you say, Nope.
(47:25):
I think that can change the freewill defense.
Nope. I think that I like the greater
good argument the best of all possible worlds.
Like Leibniz. I mean, but you, you need to
figure out which one you hold and then be honest.
If you hold that, yeah, I think God exists.
There's evil in the world, and it's just not rational.
I just don't know what to do with that.
Great. At least be honest.
Don't act like it's simple. I think one of the things, one
(47:46):
of the reasons I like Bail is hebasically just tells all
religious people, hey, stop acting like you figured this
out. Stop acting like there's an easy
answer to this. It's like when I heard I, I got
to interview a theist and an atheist recently and my
atheistic friends were like, oh,I don't like that the theist
started with this presupposition, but I reformed
epistemology. And then my friends that are
more religious are like, you know, I, I, I think atheism's
(48:09):
stupid and I'm like, listen, none of the sides are stupid.
There's very smart people for positions that you disagree
with, with which you disagree. So prom of evil, I hope it
ruined your day in a good way. Argue with your friends, post in
the comments and we will see younext time.
Thanks for joining us on Ideological.
If God exists, then why is thereso much evil in the world?
Did God have the freedom to create a world with one less
child rape than there is? There are 50 million slaves in
the world right now. That's an estimated 50 million
slaves, many of whom are sex slaves.
When evil is vanquished, does that mean also we don't get to
see how great God is? Because we don't get to see a
(00:21):
pop against that dark backgroundof evil?
That is just straight up stupidity.
If God exists, then why is thereso much evil in the world?
If God is good and he's powerful, whence cometh evil?
(00:43):
Today on Ideological, we're going to be talking about the
problem of evil. I'm your host, Zach Lee, and
we're just going to jump right into a very sticky topic.
This is an interesting philosophical topic.
Regardless of your worldview, regardless of whether or not you
believe in some type of deity ornot.
It deals with things like what counts as proof against God's
(01:05):
existence or other explanations.And what about the problem of
human free will and all that kind of stuff?
This is a topic that I have beenthinking about at the
professional level for decades. So I've done a lot of work on
this issue in particular. And so I'm just going to walk
you through a bunch of issues related to the problem of evil
and what we're talking about andmaybe potential solutions.
(01:27):
Maybe they work, maybe they don't.
I'm going to kind of leave that up to you to decide, but this is
the problem of evil first. I'm sorry, I got to get a little
little energy drink here. This episode is brought to you
by Monster Attack, your fatigue with a heart attack Monster
Energy drink. I feel like monster.
I feel like when they were inventing this drink, they went
(01:50):
up to somebody who does cocaine and push ups all day and they're
like, what would you what flavorwould you like?
And then he told them this and they're like perfect.
And we'll put it in a green can.So you think it's nature.
Speaking of heart attack, the problem of evil, this is called
it's traditionally called a theodicy, by the way, not the
Odyssey by Homer. You know the The Simpsons
(02:11):
character theodicy. It comes from 2 Greek words
which is theos which is the wordfor God and DK.
DK is the word for justice like the kaosune is righteousness.
And so the idea is a theodicy isan attempt to vindicate divine
goodness and Providence in lightof the existence of evil.
OK, this is furthermore probablythe most common objection that
(02:35):
people have against any type of theism is that there is evil in
the world. OK, why didn't God do better is
kind of the question. So there there's three facts
that seem to be in tension. You ready for these 3 facts?
First, the idea that God is all good.
Second, the idea that God is allpowerful.
And 3rd, the idea that evil exists.
(02:59):
There seems to be a tension there.
OK, there seems to be a tension.Now for most of this lesson, I'm
going to be using kind of a judeo-christian definition of
God. But what I'm saying works,
whether you're a Muslim, Hindu, whatever, you'll you'll see that
different systems have differentattempts that they try to give.
To deal with the theodicy issue,let me give you a famous quote
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by David Hume, the one of the best philosophers I think that's
ever existed. I think his brilliance is
incredible. Here's what he says.
Is he willing to prevent evil? Speaking of God, is he willing
to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?
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So what what? What Hume is doing is he's kind
of highlighting that these 3 facts seem to be in tension.
OK? They seem to be in tension.
Now that idea was brought up by a lot of people before him.
Let me give you a very famous summation of that.
This comes from Lactantius, who's summarizing Epicurus.
He says this, by the way, this is from Epicurus.
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Lactantius is who we get it from.
And so he's quoting Epicurus andhe says this.
God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or he can
but does not want to, or he neither wants to nor can, or he
wants to and can. Those are kind of like the
different options that he's giving.
He continues. If he wants to and cannot, he is
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weak, and this does not apply toGod.
If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful, which is
equally foreign to God's nature.If he neither wants to nor can,
he is both weak and spiteful andtherefore not God.
If he wants to and can, which alone is fitting for God, from
what source then are bad things?Or why does he not eliminate
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them? OK, so that is the issue, that
if I can make it simpler, how would somebody defend the idea
that God is good and that he's powerful and that he exists when
he allows ordains causes regardless of what system you
want to put it in? The Holocaust, child
molestation, infanticide, wars, terrorism, cancer, rape, et
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cetera. Did you know that every day over
1000 children die just from unclean water?
Every day? OK, there are 50 million slaves
in the world right now. That's an estimated 50 million
slaves, many of whom are sex slaves.
OK, to put that in perspective, at the height of the Civil War
in the US, there was 3, about 3.9 million slaves and there are
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50 million today, more slaves than we've ever had, and a lot
of them are sexual slaves. How how do we, how do we justify
that in light of a God who's supposed to be not just good,
but all good, not just pretty powerful, but all powerful can
do anything he wants to do. That's what we're going to try
to figure out. So let's go over attempts to
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solve this. 10 I didn't realize this is a heavy issue.
By the way, let's take a little pause for again, Monster, you
know, they support this big fansMonster Energy drink, Monster
Energy drink try to eat a live rabbit.
OK, so the idea that God is all good, all powerful, and the evil
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exists, assuming God's existencein this, and we'll see if if you
know, this is going to be a casethat can also be brought against
the idea of God's existence. Because if God really is all
good and all powerful and there's evil, there seems to be
something off in how we have traditionally defined God.
So that here are the attempts tosolve this tension #1 you can
simply deny that God is good. That works for some systems.
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Like if you think of the the Greek gods, they're not really
gods. They're just kind of like
superhumans. They have the same vices as
humans, but they can also like throw lightning and do do sick
stuff. That kind of solves it.
That maybe God or the gods, depending on your religion, are
just not good or is not good. That would solve the issue.
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Now that that that runs into a host of other problems, but that
would at least solve the issue of the Odyssey.
It would at least solve the issue of God and the problem of
evil. So one attempt is you could
simply deny that God is good. Maybe there is an all powerful
being who's not quite as great as you thought he was.
OK #2 By the way, most people don't go there.
These attempts to solve the tension, By the way, I don't
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think that any of them solve thetension.
They simply deny that God is good.
But I don't know that anybody really cares about serving some
God who's all powerful but evil,right?
Like like when Jafar turns red and becomes the red genie and
and Jasmine puts on the attractive red clothes and
Aladdin, you know what I'm talking about.
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So that's not a place most are willing to go.
It would solve the tension, but at a very high cost.
OK, the second thing you could do to solve the tension is you
could simply deny that God is all powerful.
Again, that works in other religious world views and a lot
of religious world views the gods or God or whatever is like
super powerful, but he's not allpowerful.
He can't literally do whatever he wants.
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There's things that hinder him, maybe other forces or other gods
or something like that. So again, that would solve the
issue. Maybe God wants to get rid of
evil and evil exists, but he's just not powerful enough.
There's something too strong forhim.
Maybe it's the devil, maybe it'shuman free will, Maybe it's
something like that that God is not sovereign over.
He's sovereign over everything except the things that actually
matter. That's one option, but again, it
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comes at a price that the judeo-christian worldview does
not accept. OK, you can simply deny that
evil exists, that that actually would solve the problem.
OK, that actually would solve the problem.
You you could just say we are ascribing value to things that
we see, but we don't actually know the value.
Like you see a lion eat a gazelle.
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You don't see whether they oughtto eat a gazelle in a moral
sense, that this goes to something called Hume's
guillotine. You cannot imply an ought from
an is meaning, let's say for a second that there are no ethics.
There are no even brute facts and ethics that you just see a
guy, you know, murder another person.
All you saw was a guy and the killing of another guy, you
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don't see whether it's good or bad or morally neutral.
You, you don't, you don't have that.
So maybe things happen and we don't like them, but that
doesn't mean they're actually evil.
That would solve the tension as well.
But again, it comes at a high cost.
I, I think very few people are willing to say that the
Holocaust happened and we didn'treally like it.
I think they're wanting to say, no, there was something evil
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about that. When somebody's putting out, you
know, when somebody's like molesting children, I don't
think we just say, I don't like that.
That offends my sensibilities. I think we say that's seems to
be evil. There seems to be this universal
disapprobation with something like that.
Maybe that's because evil actually exists.
It's very hard when somebody's dying of cancer to say theodicy.
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OK #4 this would solve the tension as well.
You could simply deny that God exists.
Again, the most common objectionagainst the belief in God is the
strongest objection, in my opinion, which is the the
existence of the problem of evil.
OK, we'll talk about why in justa second.
But you could just say, yeah, the reason there's evil in the
world is because God doesn't exist.
A bunch of chants and randomnessand matter and chemicals
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collided and we harm people and people get raped and murdered
and wars and cancer because everything's just messed up.
In a sense, it denies both. It denies that God is good and
powerful because he doesn't exist.
Therefore you could just say there's evil.
Whether you mean that as like a meta ethical category of
something that solidly exists, or you just mean it's what what
we in society would deem to be evil.
OK. Whether you put a value judgment
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on it that's objective or not, that would solve the issue.
Next, let me give you the most common defense of God in the
problem of evil, which I think is super, super stupid.
It's the most common one throughout history.
It's held by very smart people. I just think it's a really,
really dumb ass argument. OK, hold, please.
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OK, it's called the free will defense.
What people do is they'll say, OK, how can God be all powerful
and it can be all good, and yet there's evil in the world.
Here's what we'll do. We'll blame it on human free
will. It's not God's fault, it's our
fault. We just chose this.
And God had to make us where we had to have free will or else we
couldn't really love him. And so if you're going to make
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somebody with free will, then they have to have the potential
to to sin and to fail and to bring evil into the world.
That is the dumbest argument maybe I've ever heard.
Let me go over a few problems with it.
So the free, free will argument is basically this, that it was
not logically possible for God to create a world where humans
had free choice and there was not the possibility of humans
using that free choice in a bad way.
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That's essentially what the freewill argument is.
What they're going to say is there are some things that God
cannot do. It's not an option to God
because it's logically contradictory, meaning it's not
that God's weak or not powerful.God can't make a circular square
because that's a contradiction. He can't make 2 + 2 equal 5, and
two and two still mean what theymean today because that's a
contradiction. He can't cease to exist.
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That's a contradiction. So there are some things when we
say God can't do. We're not saying that like
they're doable and he's not strong enough.
We're saying they're not things,they're just words parading
around is this idea that's consistent, but it's actually
just a contradiction. OK, So what a lot of people
would say is it was not possiblefor God to create a world where
humans had true free will and where humans use that free will,
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where where humans didn't have the potential of using that free
will in a bad way and therefore sinning and bringing evil into
the world. Let's go over some problems with
that, OK? Because one, it acts like God
really cares about human free will and that that's a good
thing, which we've not established yet.
It also acts as though God couldn't have done anything
differently and still used humanfree will, which we haven't
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established yet. It acts as though humans
couldn't have free will and havenot chosen something evil.
And so let's let's go over the problems with the free will
defense again, just to summarize, the reason it's evil
in the world is because God can't mess with people's free
will. He's sovereign over everything
basically except humans. And because everything's humans
do, they will to do. And so the most important part
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of his creation he's not controlover.
And so that means he's going to allow the potential for a bad
choice. And the humans just took the bad
choice. OK, few problems with that.
Number one, there are so many Bible passages that say that God
is sovereign over human wills. If God can't control the wills
of humans, he can't control anything that matters who gets
elected because people vote withtheir will, whether or not a
plane, a pilot wants to crash a plane because God can't
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interfere with his will. There are so many passages
again, and I don't care your worldview.
I'm I'm poking holes in the freewill defense.
I think this defense is stupid. There's so many passages where
God where like a king wants to do something and God prevents
them, or God hardens their heartmaking it worse, or God hates
Esau and loves Jacob from beforethey're born.
Like if God has free will and you have free will and they
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clash, God does not care about yours, he gets to have his and
so one. I just think the whole thing
about God not overcoming human freedom is dumb.
Even if you allow it for the problem of evil, you run into
God overcoming people's free will.
I don't know, 100 times in the Bible.
OK so that doesn't work. The other one is that there's
some chaos in the universe that seems like it didn't come as a
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result of human sins. So supposedly if you take the
Genesis story literally, which again, that's that's debatable,
if you take the Genesis story literally, you have Adam and Eve
that are supposed to be over theearth and they sin and that's
why everything becomes broken and the ground bears thorns and
thistles. What about things that they're
not over? What about a big swirling storm
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on Jupiter that's been going on for a long time, which is seen
as chaos and disorder and violence that were not affected
by Adam and Eve? Or when stars explode galaxies
away and stuff. There seems to be some things in
the universe that didn't come asa result of human sin because
humans are not over the universe.
They're just over Earth. Adama as as the name is in
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Hebrew dirt is his name Clay. If you want to call Adam that.
God could have used people he knew would freely choose not to
eat of the tree of the knowledgeof good and evil.
So let's, let's, let's go with the free will defense and say
cool, God wants people to have free will.
He doesn't want to overcome their free will.
Well then instead of choosing Adam and Eve, which God at least
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you would have to say that he knew that they were going to sin
and use their free will to choose bad, why not choose
instead of Adam and Eve, Eva andSteve?
You've heard of Adam and Eve andAdam and Steve, why not Eva and
Steve? And God looks ahead in the
future, in his future telescope,and he sees that they will
freely of their own free will not eat of the fruit and not
'cause sin to infect all of humanity and the world would be
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great. That would keep free will.
It would allow humans to have chosen the right thing again,
not coerced by God. They still have the potential to
sin and choose wrong, but they just chose right.
And God could have picked somebody who naturally would
have done that. This is before sin enters the
world. So people are not naturally bad
yet. Why didn't he do that?
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Here's you can push it back evenfurther.
If God did not want evil in the world, he could have just not
created the devil if he knew thedevil would fall and tempt man.
So notice you have Adam and Eve and they don't have a sin
nature. Again, I'm, I'm using one
narrative here because this is the one where guys like Hume or
Bale or Leibnitz or, you know, whoever's riding, they're
typically riding within a again,judeo-christian frameworks.
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That's why I'm using that one because that's the one most
people listening to this care about.
Most people are not like Zoroastrian and you know, into
Zoroastrianism and they're like,Oh, I need to know that this is
what they're into. So Adam and Eve don't have sin
originally and they're told not to do this tree and they're
tricked. There's a talking serpent and he
tricks them into eating of this tree of the knowledge of good
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and evil. Well, what caused him to sin?
Did something trick him? Like if God made everything good
and he made all these angels andone of those angels, what what
causes the devil to go? I think I want to be great too.
How, how, what, what allows him to choose sin?
What, what allows? What's that first turning?
He's not tricked, he's not tempted.
What, why does he turn and think, ah, this is, this is
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what, this is what I should do. I should try to be great too.
And then sin like Anselm, the philosopher in the Middle Ages,
who's a pretty sharp philosopher.
He writes a work called On the Fall of the Devil where he tries
to answer this question. And in my opinion, he just, it's
a swing and a mess. He doesn't actually answer it.
Did God create the devil with some sort of defect to where he
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would choose not just less being?
All creations are less being than God and everything created.
But I'm talking about negative being, like sinful things,
actively rebellious things. And if God knew he was going to
do that, just don't create that one.
Create all the other ones. Again, according to the Bible,
whether you hold that or not, God at least seems to know the
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future. He at least seems to ordain
things, whether he does them directly or not.
Cool. If you're looking at all these
angels, you're like, these are cool.
These are cool. Like flying things.
This one looks a little shady. And they just don't make him,
just don't make him OK. This position says that again,
the free will defense says that God is unable to do something
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that he wants to do, that he's unable to remove evil or to
overcome someone's will. At the end of the day, God is
eternally less happy than he could have been had humans
obeyed and sin not entered the world.
That again, is ridiculous if youhold a view of God's
sovereignty, which is one of thepoints on this whole theodicy
thing. Pierre Bale, one of my favorite
philosophers, says this, according to them, is the
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foundation of foreknowledge. Others claim that the decree
declares that the creature will be placed in the circumstances
in which God has foreseen that it would sin.
Thus some contend that God foresaw the sin by reason of His
decree, and others contend that He made the decree because he
had foreseen the sin. So he's talking about, does God
look ahead in the future, in hisfuture telescope, and see this
sin's going to happen and then decree things backwards?
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Or does God decree it and that'swhat makes it happens happen?
And it doesn't matter as his answer, no matter how it is
explained, He continues, It obviously follows that God
wished that man's sin, and that He preferred this to the
perpetual duration of innocence,which was so easy for him to
bring about and ordain. Reconcile this, if you can, with
the goodness that He ought to have for his creatures and with
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the infinite love that He ought to have for His Holiness.
There's something very interesting that Bail is
pointing out, regardless of whether you're a Calvinist or an
Armenian, whether you think God looks ahead in the future, sees
what humans are going to do, which, by the way, already means
it's set. And if God didn't set it, who
did? But he looks and sees what
people are going to do, or he ordains what they're going to
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do. Regardless of the view.
You have to come to the conclusion that God could have
done otherwise to some extent and did not.
Why not? OK.
And one of the things that Bale mentions at the end that I think
is really, really interesting, we're not just saying that God
owed his creature some sort of love.
God owes himself maximal holiness, OK?
It would be better if there was no, sorry, no evil in the
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universe for God. It would be better for God.
God who's infinitely holy and infinitely bright and infinitely
perfect. And if he is the only thing that
exists and it's pure goodness. And no evil exists, no privation
of goodness even exists. That would ontologically,
metaphysically, theologically bethe best thing.
And God didn't do it. What is happening?
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Here's another one to poke a hole in this whole free will
defense thing. Christians in heaven supposedly,
and angels won't be able to sin for all eternity, and yet they
apparently have some type of free will.
Or do they? Let me let me rephrase it.
What we're doing is we're sayingthis, this whole free will
defense is on this idea that it's good to have free will.
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And if you can't choose something's opposite, if you
don't have the freedom to sin, it's not real free will.
Cool. Well then God doesn't have free
will because God can't do his opposite.
He can't, he can't cease to be, He can't be evil, He can't lie,
says the Bible. That would mean that, you know,
in all eternity in a resurrection or heaven or
whatever your view of what happens to you when you die,
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that means those people don't have free will.
Why? Why for why for all eternity are
we spending time in a state that's worse because we don't
have the opportunity to sin? Doesn't God really love us
enough to fully give us free will to maybe fall and sin
again? It just becomes ridiculous.
We we act like Contra causal freedom or some sort of
libertarian freedom is a good thing.
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It would be much better to only choose what's right.
The only reason we value that isbecause we just have a high view
of humanity that I'm not sure that the Bible shares.
When it comes to human value, sure, but not when it comes to
our decision making. One more thing here, it's not
actually loving to give people freedom if you know they're
going to misuse it. At no point am I going to give a
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young child a loaded handgun so that they can be free.
Maybe they'll make a bad decision, but it's really loving
for me to give them the handgun.That is absurd.
The most loving thing to do is say, hey, more important than
your freedom is you not shootingyourself or forgot.
More important than your freedomis not going to hell forever.
I would so rather not have free will and not have billions of
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people go to hell forever. Again, in the historic Christian
position, if that's you, that's the please overcome my free
will. That would be a much kinder
thing. That would be a much better
thing to do. Pierre Bell continues.
He's talking about people that give kids like their kids a
sword or knife. He says this if they neglect the
welfare of their sons, meaning who've taken swords and will
hurt themselves, he says. And if they claim that they do
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not want to use force, since they would thereby be treating
their sons as if they were slaves, they show either that
they have no love or that they are not aware of its proper
function. What Bale is saying is he's
saying if you gave a kid a swordand that you knew they were
going to hurt themselves with it, or a kid got a sword and you
knew they were going to hurt themselves with it.
And you said, well, I don't wantto just take that sword from you
because then I'm overcoming yourfree will.
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Then I'm treating you like a slave, like a robot, like a
chess piece. And Bale's like, then you have
no idea what love is. Love is doing what's best for
somebody. And by the way, the same thing
is true with God. God doesn't just have good
things happen to you from a human perspective, but the idea
is he is supposed to have what'sbest happen to you from a like a
spiritual and theological perspective.
(23:11):
And So what do you do with that Monster Energy drink?
Bite the beak off a bird? Try to race a race car with your
feet next. Another potential what people
think is a solution to the problem of evil.
Again, I think this one's super stupid.
Say God had to allow evil so that we could really see what
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goodness is. You ever heard somebody say
this? Well, the reason there's evil in
the world is, you know, if you have a a candle and you're
outside in the sunshine, the candle doesn't burn very
brightly. But if you're in a dark room,
whoa, you see that candle in that light?
I'm talking like, I feel like Ben Stiller from like dodgeball
or something. You know, this episode brought
(23:56):
to you by Globo Gym. Globo Gym.
We're better than you and we know it.
That should actually probably bea good ideological slogan where
we're better than you and we know it.
I like elitism. So anyway, he's there and you've
got the you've got the light with the candle in the dark
room. And so the light shines brighter
in the darkness. If you're going to make a
tapestry, you don't just put yellows in bright greens and
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such. You also have to put some black
and some some brown and some dark colors.
So it really pops. So what a lot of people say is
that the reason there's evil in the world is because it makes
the good better. Look at me real quick.
Pay attention. This means that God needs evil
to be fully good, or it means that God needs evil so that good
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can really shine. It's ridiculous.
It's certainly much better if there's just good than evil
because you can contrast it withthe evil.
To say it another way, for all eternity, supposedly God has
just been good. Does that mean God's lacking
because he didn't get to see howmuch his glory pops in light of
the darkness? Again, for eternity, supposedly
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when evil is vanquished, does that mean also we don't get to
see how great God is because we don't get to see a pop against
that dark background of evil? That is just straight up
stupidity. It's it's really dumb.
OK, for a few reasons. One I just mentioned the biggest
one that it it kind of makes Godresponsible or God need evil to
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really be as good as he could be, or at least so we can see
it. OK, well, Zach, maybe he did it
so that we could see so so God doesn't need the evil to be
good, but maybe we need the evilso that we can see how good God
is. Do you understand how asinine
that is? First of all, God does what's
best for God and what's best forhis glory first before he
decides what he thinks humans do.
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Second of all, you're telling meGod, who can do everything
couldn't implanted in our minds the idea of goodness without the
evil. Doesn't he have that himself?
Don't the angels who have not fallen have that don't don't
want humans have that in eternity.
And so it's it's it's it just doesn't seem to work.
Are we really let let me say it's stronger.
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Are we really willing to say that God allows all the rape and
murder just so we can see something we already know?
Would you abuse your child and then give them a toy so they
appreciate the toy more that there's a great scene from by
the way, let's let's take a little pause here.
So perhaps the greatest comedy series of all time.
This is not my opinion. This is objective is Arrested
(26:21):
Development. I see a lot of people online
debate like is the office or parks and rec better?
Neither of them arrest development's better than both.
Letterkenny's better than both. And so anyway, it's it's it's
great. But there's this scene where
this little nerdy kid named Buster when they're little is
going to go down a slide. He's scared to go down the
slide. And his brother Job, which is
spelled GOB with AG, is like, come on, get down the slide
(26:44):
because he's scared. And the the little brother
Buster goes down the slide and he punches him right in the
chest. Do it.
And then he says, when you do this without getting punched in
the chest, you'll have more fun.And Buster goes, thanks,
brother. Thanks, brother.
That's kind of what you're saying.
God basically gave you the cancer or the sin or the
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whatever. So you can see how great He is
in light of that thing, right? So he punches you in the stomach
and he's like, now think about how much you enjoy the slide
when you don't get punched in the stomach.
I think that is a dumb answer. At the end of the day, it's
makes it sound like good is better when bad is there.
Let me say that again, that goodis better when bad is there.
That is super dumb. Next, another attempt people use
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at answering this question is tosay that God created the world
good but imperfect, so that humans could grow in moral
virtue. This is sometimes called soul
building. The idea is that these bad
things produce things like character.
OK, and it's good. It's good to be tenacious.
It's good to have resolve. It's good to have fortitude.
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It's good to overcome adversity.And all these things help you
grow. Now again, I think this one is
possible, logically possible. It's, it's certainly not within
the, the, the, the Western tradition, but it, it has a few
problems. It still makes God creation
imperfect. In this scheme, God fails.
There's a lot of people that don't get better through evil in
the world. They get worse and worse and
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worse. Couldn't God have just created
people better without making them suffer?
Does he not have that ability? It's certainly not biblical.
Mankind is seen as morally better in the Garden of Eden.
If you want to say it that way, then after say it again.
Mankind is seen as morally better in the Garden of Eden.
OK, then after when all the bad stuff is there.
OK, those are some problems. Let's talk about some other
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attempts that people use to explain God and evil that might
be better. But again, I'm a leave it up to
you whether or not you think this this answers the question
or not. Let's have attempts to explain
God and evil. OK, without God, what some
people will say is there is no evil at all.
With without God, there is no evil.
(28:56):
So when, when somebody gets upset and says, oh, I don't
believe in God, I can't believe you allowed this and cancer and,
and rape and all these terrible things.
And you're like, wait, wait, wait, what makes you think those
things are evil? Well, we all know they're bad.
OK, so I, I get that you're saying you don't like them.
I get the Boo Hooray. I get like the we don't like the
Holocaust. The Holocaust hurts people.
The Holocaust causes pain to go into people's bodies.
(29:19):
The Holocaust is frowned upon bysociety.
I get all of those reasons, but what makes it evil?
It seems like you just have to say like you have to say that if
God doesn't exist, evil doesn't exist.
It's just just there's just things.
There's no good or evil. Ultimately we we can create
categories as a society. We can base it on
utilitarianism. We can base it on pragmatism.
(29:41):
We can base it on day ontological ethics.
We can, you can listen to the, the we've got a lecture on
ethics and the different theories of ethics, but
ultimately that it wouldn't be grounded on anything better than
that. So we should act according to
reason and that will ground our ethics.
Cool. Why is that good?
Because it's consistent. Why is that good?
Eventually you push it back and you don't have some ultimate
ground that surpasses human experience.
(30:03):
So that's what some people will say to the the problem of evil.
Without God, there's also no good either.
OK, so to to quote Boethius, whoI love Boethius, by the way, if
you've not read the consolation of philosophy, it was the most
read work in the Middle Ages after the Bible.
And as far as philosophical work, and it is, it's fantastic.
But he says this, we cannot raise the question, how can
(30:23):
there be evil if God exists without raising the second?
How can there be good if he exists?
Not So it's it's interesting to say, well, God can't exist
because there's all this evil inthe world and you're like, cool,
is there any good in the world? Well, wouldn't that be proof for
God's existence? Yes, there's there's cancer and
all these things, but don't kidsalso just run through the park
and laugh and play tag? Don't you get to eat delicious
(30:44):
ice cream or have a great glass of wine or chug down a Monster
Energy drink? Delicious.
Tastes like a melted Flintstone vitamins.
Delicious. Aren't there good things?
Would that not be then evidence for God's existence?
Maybe God exists and it's just amessed up version of God that's
a little bit good and a little bit bad.
Maybe he's got a naughty side and a nice side, a little Jekyll
(31:05):
and Hyde God #3 listen to this one.
This one's pretty common. This one's smarter than others,
although I'm not sure it answersthe question, but I think it's
better than the other ones. Evil is not based merely on the
action itself. It's based on the end goal.
OK, is a knife good or bad? Well, it depends on what you're
using it for. A doctor uses a knife called a
scalpel to save somebody's life in surgery, and a murderer uses
(31:28):
a knife to stab someone in the neck and kill them.
You can't just say is a knife bad?
You have to say, is it being used for a good or bad purpose.
If you just saw me run and shovea kid, you might be like, wow,
that is really evil. But if I did that to get them
off the train tracks as a train was barreling their way and I
saved their life or an oncoming car, all the sudden you can't
just say, oh, why is there pushing in the world?
(31:50):
Why is there, you know, this kid, he fell down and he got
bruises. Yeah.
He didn't get hit by a train. And so that there's this sense
in which you you have to consider the ultimate end and
the ultimate good. Could it be that God exists and
he's using evil for an ultimately good purpose?
And then would it be evil? Right.
So like when a, when a kid, I mean, I remember having to do
(32:10):
this with my kids. So they'd have to go in to get a
shot when they were like real little babies or whatever.
And they didn't want to get a shot because kids do not like
shots. And so at one point I'm having
to like, hold my son down while the doctor gives him a shot.
And he's looking up at me like, you traitor, I hate you.
Because in his mind, he's thinking you were supposed to be
good and now there's evil. He doesn't understand that I am
(32:31):
actually preventing him from getting, you know, polio or some
weird disease, measles or whatever.
Like, I, I have a good purpose in it.
And so he just doesn't see it. To say it another way, if you
knew everything that God knew, would you not do the same things
that God does? OK, if, if God has a purpose for
what we call evil, that's ultimately good, that's not
(32:52):
inconsistent to then say that that he is an all good, all
powerful being and that evil exists to serve this good in.
Now this is not saying that God himself can personally do evil.
What it's saying is that he can use the actions of other
creatures or not other creaturesbecause God is not created but
of creatures, right? So humans and demons or whatever
they're evil to use for an ultimately good purpose.
(33:14):
Let me let me give you a quote by DA Carson.
He's a theologian. He's pretty bright.
He reads 500 books a year, so they're only 365 days in a year.
So stick that in your philosophypipe and smoke it.
He says this, to put it bluntly,God stands behind evil in such a
way that not even evil takes place outside the bounds of his
sovereignty. Yet the evil is not morally
chargeable to him. It is always chargeable to
(33:36):
secondary agents, to secondary causes.
On the other hand, God stands behind good in such a way that
it not only takes place within the bounds of His sovereignty,
but is always chargeable to Him and only derivatively to
secondary agents. What he's saying is God stands
behind good and bad, but in different ways.
Good flows naturally from God's nature, and we only get it
derivatively secondarily. Like if somebody does something
(33:58):
that's good, that's only becauseGod has empowered that or
whatever it might be. Conversely, though, God can be
sovereign over evil, but it doesn't flow directly from his
nature. It seems like he always uses
secondary agents for that, right?
Humans or demons or, or something like that.
So again, I think that one's smarter.
But there's, there's still the problem.
Like if I say I push a kid out of the way of the train, all I'm
(34:20):
saying is that we did a little bit of evil to prevent a worse
evil. Well, what if we just didn't
have the train? Why?
Why do I have to give the my kida shot a little bit if we just
don't have diseases? It just seems like what we're
saying is it's OK for God to useevil because we get a milder
version of it when we could justhave none at all.
(34:41):
OK, maybe #4 sorry, I feel like about to sneeze.
OK, I'm not there. It is.
This episode brought you by Pepper.
Pepper. Put it in your nose.
OK? Evil is not a thing that exists.
Rather it is a lack of substance.
So this is a, again, a smarter response to the problem of evil.
And this goes back to, I mean, so many, so many philosophers,
(35:02):
so many thinkers in the early church.
I mean, it's, it's not a dumb view.
I think it's a pretty smart view.
I don't know that solves the issue, but let me explain what
it is. But first we have to have
another promotion by Meow Meow Monster Energy drink.
Pour it into a bent spoon with alighter and inject it into your
(35:23):
veins. Monster.
OK, here's the idea. Evil's not a thing that God
made. It's not something that like is
a substance that exists. So it's not like God made
mountains and humans and right rhinoceros, rhinoceri and
flamingos and planets and then this like swirling clump of
stuff called evil like some sortof like Dungeons and Dragons
(35:45):
car. I don't, I don't actually, I
don't, I don't play that becauseI'm not a virgin.
It's not like you just made evil's not a stuff.
It's not a thing. It's a lack of being.
It is God makes things and he makes them good and evil's just
the word that we use to describewhat happens when that thing
gets twisted, when that thing becomes less, when it goes in
the other direction. It's a privation.
(36:06):
In the same way that we think ofcoldness is not a thing, We
think of it as the absence of heat or darkness is not a thing.
That's the absence of light. Someone can make a case.
Those are still things. I think a better example is it's
kind of like a hole in a shirt where shirt should be.
So I have a shirt. I should have done this lesson
without my shirt on that then you would have seen there's some
good in the world. It's not the places where the
(36:28):
shirt is supposed to have holes because created beings are not
going to have as much being or existence as God has.
But if I have a hole in the middle of my shirt, that's a
hole where the shirt should be. Notice that's not a thing.
It's just the absence of shirt where a shirt should be.
You can't just have a box full of just holes without any edges
or anything. It's it's just a privation.
It's a it's a lack. That is the idea that God
(36:51):
creates everything good and evilis the turning away from that
good. It's a privation.
It's a lack of being. It's not like a substance.
It's not like God makes all these good things and then makes
this clump of gross. To quote Bonaventure, sin is not
any kind of essence, but a defect in corruption because the
creature, meaning humans, may thus do something which is not
from God according to God, or because of God.
This is sin, which is the corruption of mode, species, and
(37:14):
order. Because sin is a defect, it
cannot be said to have an efficient cost, IE something
that directly acts upon it to make it do something.
Rather, it has a deficient cost,namely the defection of the
created will. OK, if you say, well the
Holocaust happened, could God have prevented it?
Well, I don't know, but he's notevil because it was just a lack
(37:36):
of will or it was a lack of it was a privation.
It seems like a pretty positive negative.
It seems like a pretty powerful privation.
I don't know how that gets you out of the issue.
It it does get out of the issue of how God didn't just create a
clump of stuff called evil, but it doesn't get out of the issue
of why is there evil at all if God could have done something
(37:57):
different. OK, the other one you can use is
you can say that God has a reason for evil that he has not
given us, so we trust him even when we don't know the answers.
The phydeist view, we'll talk about that in just a second.
If God told us why he did everything, it'd actually be bad
for us. Rather, we are.
It would teach us to trust the answers instead of Him.
And so God doesn't give us the answers.
So we trust him. We trust the person, not the
(38:18):
reasons. OK.
Or you can say that God is beyond human critique and take
it out of the realm of rationality, and that could,
again, those could be right. I'm not saying these are.
I'm not saying any of these are right or wrong.
I'm just giving you a bunch of thoughts.
I can tell you some are smarter and some are not smarter.
OK, So what do we do? Let let me, let me just make the
question as difficult as possible.
(38:39):
You ready? God from a traditional, again,
Western early church, medieval church, Reformation, modern
church, Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, from the
traditional view that most people in the West are thinking
of when they think of God. Here's the issue.
God supposedly the Trinity has had glory and maximum infinite
(39:03):
glory for all eternity. So it doesn't make any sense to
say, well God ordained evil for his glory.
He decided to redeem people for his glory.
What do you mean by that? He already has infinite glory
for all eternity and it doesn't change.
It doesn't go up or down. OK we might be able to see it
better, but again he could make us see it better without all the
the rape and the murders. OK so God is infinite glory.
(39:27):
So him creating a world with evil or not creating a world
with evil or whatever it is doesnot affect him.
He is always infinitely glory. He does not need anything from
creation. He does not need anything from
humans. He's not served by human hands
as though he needed anything. The Bible would say cool then
why is there evil if God gets the same glory and it would keep
(39:50):
humans from going to hell? Cause according to the Bible
most people go to hell. The road is wide that leads to
destruction. There's only a few on the path
of righteousness that find it. Why?
Why not just save everybody? Why not pick somebody who
wouldn't use their free will to say, why not just not create the
devil? Why just not?
Let me say it's strong, strongerthan that?
(40:11):
Did God have the freedom to create a world with one less
child rape than there is? Could God have done that?
Is he powerful enough to have created a world where there's
just simply one? Why?
Why is it not just less evil than it is?
If you want all the problem of evil and God to be glorious and
all that, cool, I'll grant you that.
Why does it have to be this evil?
(40:31):
Why can't it be a little bit less evil?
Could God not have created the universe and planned everything
out where there's one less childrape?
Well, Zach, he doesn't overcome someone's free will.
Cool. Then he looks ahead in the
future, sees that person's goingto rape a child, and he just
doesn't create them. He could have prevented it that
way, right? Without overcoming free will,
which I don't think you understand what that means.
(40:52):
Why did he not do that? If he gets the same glory and
everyone could know God, everyone could not have cancer,
everyone could like all the things could be good, no one
could go to hell, no Holocaust, no whatever, and God would've
gotten the same glory. Why didn't he do it?
This is the hardest question. I think in philosophy of
religion and also probably in theology, it's very difficult.
(41:17):
Now what are the your different options for answers to that
problem? First, you can go the route of
phadeism, right? Phadeism is this idea that God
is not irrational. Some phadeis think that that it
they are actually irrational. They think that rationality and
and theology and stuff are at odds.
But many go the route to say that no, God is supra rational,
(41:40):
so he's above reason. So they're because God exists
and he's good. I'm just going to trust that he
has something and how he's usingevil that I don't understand.
I'm a limited human. I only know so many languages.
I only know so many facts. I only know I don't know how
many stars there are. I don't know how many hairs on
my head. At the end of the day, my mind
is not going to I'm not going totake my brain that evolved to
(42:01):
eat berries in a cave and be able to figure out the depths of
an infinite being. OK, you can go that route.
That that is, again, that's not a that's not a wrong answer.
That might be a right answer, but notice this.
It's not rational, meaning I'm not saying it's irrational.
I'm just saying it's, you're notdefending it.
You're not building this case oflogically deductible, you know,
propositions or something, and making a case for how there can
(42:23):
be a good and powerful God and evil be in the world.
But when you can go the route ofPhidaism, you can also go the
route of a circular argument, OK?
You can say, listen, the way that I know that God exists is
good and powerful and that there's evil in the world and
everything's still fine is because God has told me that I
start with the Bible or I start with the presupposition of my
(42:46):
faith. I start with Christianity.
I start with God and God has told me that he's good and
there's evil and I'm just going to take him, take it for what
it's worth. Cool.
That's a circular argument. That doesn't necessarily mean
it's wrong. There's a good case to be made
that math is circular arguments,right?
Like 2 + 2 which equals 4 = 4, right?
So that might be, but notice again, it's not rational.
(43:07):
It's it's hard when you're appealing to a circular argument
to give these proofs that could be refuted.
OK, because the opponent could simply say, well, there is evil
in the world and so logically God doesn't exist or is messed
something up or is not strong oris not good.
OK, you can state that that's rational.
To believe in God is a properly basic belief that it's a brute
(43:29):
fact, as Alvin Planiga does. Now the the that that's fine.
You're not irrational in believing in God, even with the
problem of evil being there, because again, we've already
seen that, that there could be something you haven't thought of
that God has thought of. Cool.
The problem that I have with Planaga's view, though, on the
problem of evil. Again, we're not here to prove
God's existence. In this lecture, we're talking
about the problem of evil. We're also not defending whether
or not it's rational, believing God.
(43:49):
We're talking about the problem of evil things de facto, not
just Dior A to use the Latin or di jure to use English.
Here's my problem is Planaga's answer to the problem of evil is
a type of free will defense. And we've already seen the huge
theological and philosophical problems that that has.
My favorite take on this comes from again, Bale, who I would
(44:10):
encourage you. So his work, his historical and
critical dictionary is probably the most found work in private
libraries in the Enlightenment in France.
So his influence is enormous. He influences everybody from,
you know, Voltaire to Leibnitz to Hume to I mean, he's he's the
freaking man. He has in that article or in
that dictionary, two articles I'd recommend that you read.
(44:32):
The first is on the politions, OK, the Paulicians, that's
PALICIANS, the Polishians, or itmight be Pau, might be after I
think it was a Manichean named Paul.
Anyway, on the politicians, whatis he saying?
And, and he's got an article on the on the Manicheans, on
Manicheanism. Here is essentially his view.
(44:52):
By the way, sorry, right as I said that my face lit up because
the sun came out. That's God telling you.
You should read Bail. What Bail is going to say is
when you push certain doctrines to their logical limits, they're
going to break and Bale will sayso much the worse for reason.
(45:13):
So a lot of people when they saythat there's faith and reason
and they think they clash, they take reason.
Bale goes the other way. He says, well, when faith and
reason clash, I'm going to take faith because God has revealed
himself. Because not only do does logic
and philosophy and you know, stuff run into contradictions in
religion, it runs into it in pretty much every area.
So one of the things that he's going to do in his article on
(45:34):
the Manichaeans is he's going totalk about how he, he doesn't
think Manichaeanism is right, but he thinks that they can make
a better case than a Christian can of why there's evil in the
world because they have a good principle and an evil principle.
The Christian is sucks saying there's only a good principle,
God, yet there's evil. In the article on the
politicians, he basically goes through every defense that
people give for why God allowed evil and just absolutely
(45:54):
destroys it. I mean, Bale's so smart.
He just runs circles around you and his thing is, Oh yeah, God
still exists even though there'sevil in the world and we just
don't know how it works. That's another, but notice, wait
for it, general. It's also not rational if God
exists. And again, we don't know if he
does in this lecture. We, we've, we've, we've given
proofs for and against his existence.
(46:18):
Does the way that he wants people to come to him?
It is it is it through logic? Is it through reason?
Is it through argumentation? Does God stoop down to a human
level so that we're on equal arguing playing grounds?
Or does he just say trust this, believe this, do this, I'm
bigger than you. Is it a is it a purely spiritual
thing? To what level is it rational?
(46:40):
These are all good questions. So I want you to wrestle with
the problem of evil regardless of your worldview.
I don't want to push whatever side you're on.
So if you are more atheistic or non religious or agnostic, what
do you do with a concept of objective evil?
That's not a circular argument. What do you do with the good
that's in the world? What do you do with etcetera?
(47:05):
What do you do with, you know, the contingency argument?
What do you do with fine tuning?What do you do?
You got to wrestle with those philosophical things.
If you're someone who's more religious, you've got to deal
with this problem of evil and land somewhere.
Is it just, we don't know, Great, that's cool, but that's
not philosophy, right? As soon as you say that you've
moved away from rationality and building a system.
Maybe that's what you want, or maybe you say, Nope.
(47:25):
I think that can change the freewill defense.
Nope. I think that I like the greater
good argument the best of all possible worlds.
Like Leibniz. I mean, but you, you need to
figure out which one you hold and then be honest.
If you hold that, yeah, I think God exists.
There's evil in the world, and it's just not rational.
I just don't know what to do with that.
Great. At least be honest.
Don't act like it's simple. I think one of the things, one
(47:46):
of the reasons I like Bail is hebasically just tells all
religious people, hey, stop acting like you figured this
out. Stop acting like there's an easy
answer to this. It's like when I heard I, I got
to interview a theist and an atheist recently and my
atheistic friends were like, oh,I don't like that the theist
started with this presupposition, but I reformed
epistemology. And then my friends that are
more religious are like, you know, I, I, I think atheism's
(48:09):
stupid and I'm like, listen, none of the sides are stupid.
There's very smart people for positions that you disagree
with, with which you disagree. So prom of evil, I hope it
ruined your day in a good way. Argue with your friends, post in
the comments and we will see younext time.
Thanks for joining us on Ideological.
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