An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
What does the presence of evil tell us about God? Is it a problem? If God is God, then why is there evil?
I’m Fred Zaspel, editor here at Books At a Glance, and that’s our topic for today. We’re talking to Dr. Greg Welty, author of the new book, Why Is There Evil in the World (and So Much of It)?.
Greg, welcome, and congratulations on your new book!
Welty:
Thanks, I’m really, really, glad to be here and talk to you about it.
Zaspel:
Explain for us, what is the problem of evil?
Welty:
Well, it’s a number of things in history but the problem of evil as I’m addressing in this book is primarily an intellectual problem. It’s supposed to be an argument against the existence of God. It’s an argument that starts from the pain and suffering in the world and then it concludes that that pain and suffering makes the existence of God really unlikely, maybe even impossible.
The argument typically has at least three premises, three starting assumptions, and then it has a conclusion. The premises are: number one, a perfectly powerful being can prevent any evil. That’s what it means to be perfectly powerful. Secondly, a perfectly good being will prevent evil as far as he can. If he’s perfectly good he would want to get rid of all the evil in the world. And then, thirdly, God is supposed to be a being who is perfectly powerful and good, a being who has those attributes that are talked about in the first two claims. So, you put those three things together, then the implication is that if God has those kinds of attributes, then if a perfectly powerful and good God exists, there’s not going to be any evil because he would be able to prevent it and he would want to prevent it. So, there’s not going to be any evil. But, since there is evil, a perfectly powerful and good God just doesn’t exist. So, it’s really an argument against God from pain and suffering.
Maybe the other thing I’d like to clarify, just by way of the scope of the book, is that we really should distinguish the intellectual problem of evil from the more existential or emotional or personal problem of evil. Many times people will suffer evil and they will say, “Why did this particular evil happened to me, or happened to my family member? And how can I cope with evil, practically? How can I persevere in the midst of my own suffering?” Those are really important questions, but there’s another book in our Big Ten series that deals with it. My book is pretty much on the intellectual, more Christian apologetics question. Is evil a good argument against God’s existence? So, that’s the problem of evil as I look at it.
Zaspel:
And it’s actually a criticism that’s brought against Christianity from atheists and critics quite often, isn’t it?
Welty:
Very much. I would say it’s probably the number one criticism of the Christian faith is the problem of evil. Number two might be the issue of religious pluralism – you know, how can Christians be so narrow to think that their way of thinking is the correct one? But, the problem of evil is typically number one. Although, it doesn’t just come from outside of the community of faith. Many times this is a live issue even intellectually speaking, for those who are within the community of faith. They’ve become a Christian, they’ve trusted in Christ for salvation, but then they’ve stumbled upon this very ancient argument that has endured to the present day. And they are really wrestling with it and they’re not quite sure how do I relate what the Scriptures teach, what I know to be true, with this sort of new challenge to me as a Christian. So it’s really an argument that’s relevant in our life for people inside and outside the Christian faith.
Zaspel:
You say that we could attack either the content of the argument or its structure – explain all this for us.
Welty:
Okay. Well, earlier I just gave the problem of evil against God’s existence as a kind of argument that has three premises, three claims, and a conclusion. And that’s really what an argument is. All arguments are just series of claims that are given in support of a further claim. There’s ultimately only two ways to attack an argument: there is its content and its structure. This is something I try to make clear in my critical thinking class. Either there is something wrong in the assumptions of the argument, what I’m calling its content. Like, the premises just aren’t true; maybe that’s what’s wrong with the argument. Or, maybe there’s something wrong in the structure of the argument. Like, the premises, even if they were true, they don’t actually support the conclusion. The conclusion just doesn’t even follow. So, sometimes the problem with an argument is its structure. The argument is going to commit some kind of fallacy of reasoning of some sort. The premises don’t support the conclusion. For instance, someone might say, “I don’t like church people; therefore, God doesn’t exist.” That’s just a painfully bad argument because the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. Whether or not God exists doesn’t depend upon your preferences or your attitude toward church people.
But, what’s interesting is that the problem of evil that I gave earlier, isn’t like that. It doesn’t actually commit any logical fallacies. I didn’t want to waste the reader’s time working through an obviously fallacious argument against God. There’s actually no problem with the structure of that argument. If it’s three premises are true, the conclusion must be true. There’s actually no problem with the logic or the form or the structure of the argument. So, as Christians if we’re going to relevantly respond to the argument, we have to attack its content, rather than its structure. We have to attack its premises. And that gives us a focus in attacking the problem of evil because there’s not an infinite number of premises, there’s only three. Either we can challenge the first premise and say, “Hey, perfect power can’t really prevent every evil.” I wouldn’t recommend that as being the way to respond. Or we could say, “Hey, a perfectly good being maybe will not always prevent evil as far as he can.” And I talk more about that. Or, you could say, “Well, maybe God just isn’t perfectly powerful or good.” And I wouldn’t recommend that way out either. But the point is that if there are only three premises to the argument, you don’t have a lot of wiggle room as to how you will respond to it. So, I narrow it down to: we really need to respond to the content of the argument, the premises. And so, there’s a particular premise that I urge the readers to really scrutinize and see if the arguments for it are up to snuff, as it were.
Zaspel:
What is “the greater good” argument that you advocate? And explain for us how you want to nuance it.
Welty:
Right,iIt should be nuanced, and I try to make that case later on because I think that we can maybe know enough about this greater good approach to be dangerous with it and really do more pastoral and even intellectual evil than good. But, the way that I think about this greater good argument is that, going back to that earlier problem of evil that we been talking about, on my view the premise of the problem of evil that Christians should reject is that second one. The unbeliever or the critic who is using this argument is claiming, in the second claim, a perfectly good being will always prevent evil as far as he can. And I want to ask why should we think this? If God has a perfectly good reason for permitting evil, for instance, maybe he’s working out to the greater good, then a perfectly good being is not going to prevent every evil because he has a good reason for permitting it. The greater good theodicy is a general way of supplying these kinds of good reasons that God would have for permitting evil. I summarize, right at the beginning, the perspective that I’m going to try to articulate and defend throughout the book. And so the summary of this perspective on theodicy is that the pain and suffering in God’s world play a necessary role in bringing about greater goods that could not be brought about except for the presence of that pain and suffering. The idea is that the world would actually be worse off without that pain and suffering and so God is justified in pursuing the good by these means. This is called a theodicy because it comes from two Greek words, theos and dikaios. A theodicy is a kind of justification of the ways of God to human beings. So, I regard the greater good theodicy as a kind of umbrella. It’s a kind of larger perspective; and then there are more particular theodicies that fall under that umbrella.
If you want, I can briefly, in a nutshell, explain the four theodicies that I think, together, are part of the greater good theodicy.
Zaspel:
Yes, why don’t you do that.
Welty:
Okay. Well, the punishment theodicy says it’s a good thing for God to display his justice in punishing sin; and so that may involve pain and suffering for us. The soul building theodicy says it’s a good thing for God to shape our characters through trial; and so that may involve pain and suffering for us. The pain is God’s megaphone theodicy (that’s a term I get from C.S. Lewis in his book, The Problem of Pain) says it’s a good thing for God to get our attention if we’re spiritually indifferent or lazy or needy; and God’s getting our attention may involve pain and suffering. And then, finally, the higher order goods theodicy says it’s a good thing to respond to and overcome the pain and suffering in the world; and so, that might involve pain and suffering for us to respond to and overcome.
We haven’t even gotten to the Scriptures yet – hopefully that’s on the horizon. But, the greater good theodicy is a general way of saying that premise two may not be all it’s cracked up to be – that a perfectly good being will always prevent evil as far as he can. Not if he has a good reason for not preventing the evil, and that good reason may involve these greater goods that he is aiming at.
Zaspel:
Just briefly, what are some biblical considerations that support this approach?
Welty:
As a philosopher of religion, I first came at the problem of evil through the normal sort of textbooks and articles that you read about it. And it lays out all of these theodicies (and others I haven’t talked about, a free will theodicy, a natural law theodicy) and you’re supposed to put these altogether and present this to the world as a kind of set of divine reasons that justify God in allowing all this pain and suffering in this world. But it wasn’t until I really started reading through the Scriptures, devotionally, as a Christian over many years that I hit upon something that I really found to be remarkable. And that is: in studying the biblical narrative about three people in particular, (I call these the three J’s). Three people in Scripture who have really suffered – that would be Job, Joseph and Jesus. The Joseph is the biblical patriarch, Joseph, from the book of Genesis, the three J’s. And what I found, is that when you study their stories, in each case there’s these three themes that emerge from their narratives. And these themes are intertwined with each other. When you put them together, my conclusion was that they really do support a greater good theodicy.
Here are the three themes that I think are deeply biblical: the first is the goodness of God’s purpose. God is a God who aims a great goods. In Job’s case, God is aiming at the vindication of his own name. He’s being questioned by Satan. In Joseph’s case God’s aiming at the preservation of Israel in the midst of famine. In Jesus’s case God is aiming at the salvation of the world. So that’s the goodness of God’s purpose.
Right alongside that, secondly, there’s this theme of the sovereignty of God’s providence, including his sovereignty over the evils in the world, the pains and sufferings in the world. God often intends these great goods to come about by way of various evils. So, again, think of Job’s sufferings – I’m going to say that Job’s sufferings were a means by which God’s name would be vindicated because, of course, it provided a great opportunity for Job to be faithful in the midst of suffering. Think of Joseph’s betrayal, being left for dead, being sold into slavery, being imprisoned, those are his sufferings. Think of Jesus’s cross.
So, you have the goodness of God’s purpose; you have the sovereignty of God’s providence; and then I also saw that in each of these narratives for Job, Joseph and Jesus, you have the inscrutability of God’s ways. And maybe that’s part of the nuance of the greater good theodicy that you were mentioning earlier. Many times advocates of the greater good theodicy have not sufficiently brought out this theme of God’s purposes being undiscernible by us, unguessable by us. God often leaves created persons in the dark about which goods he’s aiming at, how the goods he’s aiming at depend upon the evils. The point here is that if you were on the scene, observing the sufferings of Job, or the sufferings of Joseph, or even the sufferings of Jesus – think of the Roman soldiers standing there, observing it – if you were there, you probably couldn’t have an inkling, you couldn’t have guessed what God was up to there, right? His ways are inscrutable. My idea, here, is that we have a sort of seed, the beginnings of a genuinely biblical case for a greater good theodicy because these three themes aren’t hidden in obscurity. They’re right there on the surface of the biblical text. And so, there’s a divine modus operandi, a divine way of working that is repeatedly revealed to us in the narrative. We don’t have to guess at this; it’s not hidden in the corner; this seems to be how God works.
Starting with those three narratives, I then try to license this greater good theodicy as a kind of general response to the problem of evil. There’s a later chapter that then broadens our horizons to the rest of Scripture and how God relates himself to the pains and sufferings of the world more generally. And, once again, I find these three themes coming to the surface again, and again.
So that’s briefly some of the biblical considerations that led me to favor this approach.
Zaspel:
Excellent.
Explain for us the relation between God and evil and the distinction between primary and secondary causality.
Welty:
Yes, this is language that has a particular sort of theological, historical, heritage, right? The same thing with ultimate causality, approximate causality, remote causality. Probably the most difficult part of the greater good theodicy isn’t merely the idea that God’s in control when it comes to even the most severe sufferings of the world. The difficult part, really, is that in some sense these pains and sufferings are part of his plan, because the greater good theodicy says God pursues great goods by way of great evils and that seems to be his modus operandi, his way of working again, again.
I don’t shrink back, in the book, from trying to explain what I think is a scripturally supported perspective. Which is, God’s own intentionality stands above and behind the responsible choices of his creatures, even their evil choices. And God’s intentionality stands above and behind these responsible choices of creatures without erasing our intentionality, suppressing it, erasing our deliberations, the fact that we reason among alternatives, we choose among alternatives. All of that is still there, but what you have is something like the classic line in Genesis 50:20. Joseph is saying to his brothers, it’s very evocative, “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive.” So, I try to make the case again, again, there are actually two sets of intentions here when it comes to the moral evils in the world. There’s clearly the intention of the perpetrator which is certainly wicked. Think of Satan’s intentions in the case of Job. Think of the intentions of Joseph’s brothers in the case of Joseph’s betrayal. Think of the intentions of Pilate and the Jewish leaders at the time in the case of Jesus and his cross. There’s clearly the intentions of the perpetrator. These intentions are wicked. But there’s also the intention of God which is good and praiseworthy. So, the distinction between primary and secondary causality doesn’t just preserve but it argues for God’s being morally innocent in the midst of his sovereignly intending evils for good. Maybe a way to summarize it is to say it’s not a sin to ordain that there be sin. It’s not evil to ordain that evil be. In fact, if the greatest good was only obtainable by way of the existence of evil, then it’s clearly good that there be evil since it’s something that God will work out to a greater good. He is meticulously sovereign over evils; he works them out to a greater good. So, these various evils that take place are means that God uses. The earthly human agents, if we’re talking about moral evil, are clearly making their choices, right? They are the actors, the doers of sin. They are what I’m calling the secondary causes, the earthly agents on the scene. From the back of that, you do have God as primary cause. Now these are theological terms of ours. They are not found in the Scriptures, so we ought to be very clear as to what we’re saying about what God does in these cases and what humans do. We’re not talking about a divine hand coming down out of heaven and slapping us silly until Saul falls on his sword or something like that, right? The way God works in providence is presumably more inscrutable, less discernible by us than that, but there does seem to be a biblical case to be made.
Zaspel:
Yeah, God does not stand behind evil in the same way that he stands behind good, right?
Welty:
Yes, that can be another point that is made, as well. So, when God intends for goods to come to pass, he has good intentions. Of course, his intentions are going to align with our intentions as we do the good; but, in the other case, the cases of Job and Joseph and Jesus, there’s clearly going to be a kind of asymmetry here. There’s going to be a set of wicked intentions that the earthly agents have, but those surely are not God’s intentions. His intention is to bring about great good out of these situations. The earthly causes of Job’s sufferings and Joseph’s sufferings, Jesus’s sufferings, they do have earthly causes; but they are the means in the hands of God by which God brings about great good. So, we’re abstracting a bit from the specific biblical passages, but I try to explain and expound, but that’s pretty much the gist of it.
Zaspel:
How can we answer the objection that the greater good argument is just another way of saying that the ends justify the means? Does God do evil that good may come?
Welty:
That does have an echo of an actual passage in Scripture, which is Romans 3:8, and Paul is very clear that God forbids doing evil that good may come. He says we are slanderously charged as apostles of teaching this, because we teach that God uses our wickedness as an occasion to glorify himself in the judgment of that wickedness. And does that mean we should do evil that good may come? By no means.
So, one thing I try to stress is that in the greater good theodicy God actually isn’t doing evil that good may come. I guess this comes back to the earlier point: it’s not a sin to ordain the existence of sin. God isn’t the agent on the earthly scene who is doing the evil. In each of these passages, human beings are the ones who are doing evil. God is the agent who ordains that the evil shall be, but he is not the agent who is doing the evil. You can find this kind of distinction, explanation, for instance, in Jonathan Edwards’ famous work, The Freedom of the Will, where he tries to deal with this objection of does this approach make God the author of sin.
Now, it might be that what’s behind the question is really, does God have the right to ordain suffering? And I would say that even in human case, of course, the very limited cases, we might have enough knowledge and enough power to bring about our greater good by way of suffering. Think about how parents discipline their children, right? So, within very definite limits there is a good that can be brought about by the pain of, let’s say, disciplining children. But our knowledge and power have great limits. If we tried to bring about great good in the world by way of sufferings, we would just be bumblers, we would just be fools, we would not have the kind of knowledge and power we would need to bring off our intended end. That’s why I think, apart from these very limited cases like childrearing, we’re not called, we’re not permitted to ordain suffering that good may come. But I don’t think that’s above God’s pay grade, as it were. He has the requisite knowledge; he has the power; he knows human nature perfectly; it’s not irresponsible for him to work out these sufferings as he aims for a greater good. So I do think there is a Creator/creature distinction, here, that we have to respect.
Zaspel:
For further answers our listeners will have to get your book; but highlight for us the kinds of questions and objections raised against the greater good argument that you address in your book. You don’t have to get into answering them, we’ll leave that for the book, but just tell us what awaits us in the book.
Welty:
Well, I tried to stuff those in, I think, in the last chapter. I have a whole chapter, the sixth chapter, that is devoted to objections. As you know sincere, pious Christians are definitely going to disagree over the best way we ought to present to the world an answer to the problem of evil. You can be a faithful Christian and not see eye to eye as to what is the best approach here. So many of these objections to the greater good theodicy don’t come from unbelievers on the outside. Some of them do, but many of them come from fellow believers who say we’ve thought about this, but there’s no way we could use this greater good theodicy is a good answer. We need to use a free will theodicy or a natural law theodicy or something like that.
I cover about nine objections to the greater good theodicy and I’ll just name them, briefly. One objection is just that the greater good theodicy motivates fruitless searching. A greater good theodicy is just going to consign us to a lifetime of fruitless searching for this greater good. You’ve told me that God aims at great goods in these evils, well, I’ve just experienced great pain and suffering and now I guess I better spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what God was up to when I suffered this tremendous loss, or when a close family member suffered such a loss. And I know you didn’t want answers to these, but I’ll just give you a mini answer to this one. It’s no part of the greater good theodicy to claim that we can actually know, in any particular suffering, what is the greater good that’s aimed at by God in that suffering. In fact, there’s many biblical examples of people guessing about what God’s up to, and they just get it completely wrong. Job’s friends got it wrong; they thought it was punishment; they were wrong. Jesus’s disciples thought the man born blind was born blind because of either his sins or his parents’ sin. In John 9, Jesus said you’re getting this wrong. The natives on the Isle of Malta in Acts 28 think Paul has been bitten by a venomous snake because the god, justice, has not allowed this sinner, this prisoner to live. They got it wrong. So, it’s no part of the greater good theodicy to say we should spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out what God’s up to. The Bible regularly encourages us to trust God even we can’t figure him out.
Maybe a second objection is just that this whole approach is really, pastorally counterproductive. The idea here is that someone who has suffered a great loss – maybe a small child is killed in a drive-by shooting, or something like that. How in the world can you, even at a pastoral level, start talking about greater goods and divine intentionality behind sufferings and that kind of thing? Surely, we should just say God merely allowed it; he has no purpose in it. Or maybe it’s all because of the value of free will or that kind of thing. I try to respond to that one, as well. I don’t actually see the greater good theodicy as any worse than the other kinds of theodicies on display.
There is criticism that it denies God’s goodness, that it destroys moral motivation, that, well, if God’s going to work everything to good, I might as well do evil, that kind of thing. It treats people as means, like pawns on a chessboard – that’s how God views us. It makes us moral skeptics, at least the way I explain it in the book, because for all we know God has a reason that justifies him – well, for all we know somebody on trial for some crime, they have a reason that justifies them. Just because we can’t figure out that reason, doesn’t mean they don’t have a good one; therefore, we should let them off the hook. The idea is that this approach makes us moral skeptic. It promotes divine hiddenness. Why doesn’t God just tell us what his particular reasons are for the evils in the world? Maybe some people just think this is a copout to just say for all we know God has a reason, but we can’t really tell you what it is in any particular case. Someone might say, “Well, come on, you’ve got a hotline to God, you’ve got God’s book, surely you can tell me more than that.”
I try to spend some time dealing with each one of these. These are serious objections, so anybody who wants to think through my approach, I think would want to think through these kinds of objections.
Zaspel:
Well, at some level, every Christian has to acknowledge that God has ordained evil for a greater good because every Christian wants to acknowledge that at the cross.
Welty:
Yes. Even within the three J’s, I take the first two J’s, Job and Joseph, to be faint prophetic anticipations of this grand revelation in the cross of Jesus. That the cross really is God’s great victory over evil. It’s clearly his way of having victory over the evil in our hearts, we who need repentance, we need redemption and forgiveness and reconciliation.
Zaspel:
And using evil to conquer evil.
Welty:
Yes, right! God is a God who uses evil to conquer evil in ways that we could not anticipate. There’s the inscrutability theme, as well. So, yes, there’s a common ground I think all Christians should have when we see the cross as not an afterthought in the mind of God, but really, he is the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. I actually try to use that as a common ground to say we don’t have to fully get into, for instance, the Calvinist/Arminian issue, or some of these other issues. If you just have enough in common to agree that God really is a God who is able to plan these evils and work them out to a greater good in the case of the cross, can’t we trust him for all the rest? The cross puts God on display, then, and I think the greater good theodicy is trying to find further evidence for that in the rest of Scripture.
Zaspel:
Before we sign off, give us a brief overview of your book and how you approach your subject.
Welty:
Well, it’s six brief chapters. First chapter, what is the problem of evil? What are the kinds of evil that get talked about? Moral evil, natural evil. What are kinds of ways to respond? Second chapter is where I give that initial case for the greater good theodicy, these three themes that you find in Job and Joseph and Jesus. Then in the third chapter I try to license the greater good theodicy. I try to say that we can actually broaden our horizons and we see in Scripture more generally, not just in the three J’s, but in all of these other passages God has sovereignty over natural evils and even moral evils and he’s working them out to a great good. I try to argue for God’s sovereignty over evil there, in particular.
In Chapter 4, I limit the greater good theodicy. Here, I think, if I could just pause for a moment, I think this is really the apologetic hinge on which the whole book turns. Because, what I try to say is that Christians need to be rebuked for thinking that they can just march into someone’s situation of suffering and say, “I declare this is God’s reason why you suffered this loss or this pain.” Scripture gives us no encouragement that we as Christians know enough about anybody’s particular situation that we could confidently declare what God’s particular reason is for why they suffer that. We don’t know enough to rule in one of these four theodicies as applying. You know, the punishment theodicy, or the soul building theodicy, etc. But the issue here is unbelievers, critics of the Christian faith, don’t know enough to rule out these theodicies applying. They don’t know enough to know about the person’s circumstances or God’s intentions whether it really was a case of divine punishment or chastisement or shaping the person’s character or waking the person up to spiritual realities or that kind of thing. But, of course, that’s what the unbeliever has to do to make the problem of evil, this argument, successful. They’re the ones who are saying there is no reason that would justify God. Well, if they’re going to make good on that claim, they’re going to have to rule out these kinds of reasons I talk about as applying. But, I try to argue, that’s exactly what they can’t do. So, I limit the greater good theodicy by stressing the inscrutability of God’s purposes. That might seem like a total dead end, like, wow, it’s limited, we can’t use it; but my point is that it’s not just limited for Christians, it’s limited for unbelievers. They can’t actually say they know enough to rule out one of these theodicies.
In Chapter 5, I talk about a couple of theodicies and explain why I don’t recommend them as being a part of the Christian answer to this problem, and that would be the free will theodicy and the law of nature theodicy. And then, finally, in Chapter 6 I deal with objections.
In terms of how I approach the subject, maybe I’ll try to summarize it this way: there are three principles that are at work. One has to do with the Bible. One has to do with inscrutability, and I guess I’ve already explained that. And one has to do with the philosophy. So, let’s talk about the Bible and philosophy. What I think that the Bible says on this topic should be front and center. That’s just part of my approach. I just think we should never shrink away from that. We should inform the world this is what God really says. I think it would be foolish for Christians to hide the teachings of the Bible from those who are skeptical about the truth of the Christian faith in order to ultimately persuade them to embrace the teachings of the Bible. I mean that doesn’t make any sense – hide the Bible to persuade them of the Bible. I think what the Scriptures say should be front and center. But then, secondly, philosophy can play a subsidiary role here. My advanced degrees are in philosophy and it seems to me the best philosophical reasoning available on the subject helps to confirm what Christians already claim to know on the basis of the Bible. The role of philosophy can be to complement and confirm the biblical message. I think that we are allowed, in defending the Christian faith, to use philosophical reasoning to defend the biblical teaching from various spurious objections. We can use it to clarify what the alternatives really are. When we examine this argument, here are a limited number of ways we can respond. And we can even use philosophy to bring to light that the assumptions of many critics might look good, they might strike us as eminently reasonable, but when you reflect upon them, in reality, they are anything but that. And so, I think that’s a useful role for philosophy to have, so I try to put that on display in the book.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. Greg Welty, author of the new book, Why Is There Evil in the World (and So Much of It)? He has thought through the problem carefully, he’s provided cogent answers to the problem, and he’s answered objections that might further be raised. It’s an excellent new resource for anyone who would consider the problem carefully. We highly recommend it.
Greg, good to talk to you, and thanks for your good work.
Welty:
Sure, thank you. It’s very good to have a talk with you about the book.
