Some Popular Defenses

There are a number of fairly popular defenses, things that people have been known to say when confronted with evil or suffering. Here are six of the most common.

1. Test Defense: God allows evil and suffering to see how much faith we have in order that he can know whether or not we should go to Heaven.

2. Lesson-Learning Defense: Evil and suffering can teach us important lessons, like “Don’t drink and drive.”

3. The Punishment Defense: Suffering is God’s punishment for sin.

4. Virtue Defense: Evil and suffering allows for the existence of various virtues, like forgiveness and charity.

5. Free Will Defense: First Satan misused his free will by rebelling against God, then Adam and Eve misused their free will in the Garden of Eden, and now we misuse our free will ever day. Evil and suffering is the result of this misuse of free will.

6. Epistemic Contrast Defense: You need to experience bad in order to appreciate (or even recognize) the good. You can’t have the idea of good without the idea of bad. So God lets us experience bad, in the form of evil and suffering, so that we can understand the good.

Of course, it’s one thing to give an explanation for something; it’s another thing to give a good explanation. In order to refute the claim that if an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent being exists then there would be no evil or suffering in the universe, we need to give a good explanation for why God would permit bad things to happen. Are any of the defenses we’ve just seen good explanations?

There are two criteria of adequacy for any defense of God against the Problem of Evil and Suffering.

1. It should apply to God. In particular, it shouldn’t be anthropomorphic, or require that God be limited in distinctly human ways.

(Basically, anthropomorphism is the inappropriate attribution of human characteristics to something that isn’t human. If you want, we can think more about this notion, but if you’re comfortable with it, we can go on.)

An explanation which accounts for why human beings allow other human beings to suffer often rely upon the fact that human beings are subject to certain limitations. A parent lets her child undergo the suffering of an vaccination, for instance, because she can’t protect her child from certain diseases in any other way. Our explanations for why God would allow evil and suffering to exist shouldn’t rely upon limitations which apply to humans but not to God. We should always remember that we’re talking about an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipotent being, not some “Guy in the Sky.”

2. It (perhaps in conjunction with other defenses) should account for all of the evil and suffering in our experience.

If our defenses explain why God would allow intentional evil to exist but doesn’t explain why God would allow natural disasters to happen, then the existence of natural disasters could still prove that there is no God.

Of these two criteria, the first is more important. This is because every defense must be nonanthropomorphic, but not every defense needs to account for all of the evil and suffering in our experience. It’s enough if we can assemble a set of nonanthropomorphic defenses which, if taken collectively, would account for all of the evil and suffering in our experience. In short, we don’t need every defense to cover all evil and suffering; we just need all cases of evil and suffering to be covered by some defense.

With these two criteria of adequacy in hand, let’s see which of our defenses might be acceptable. We’ll start with the Test Defense.