Part I. The Problem of Evil.

A typical form of the Argument from Evil claims that it is unreasonable to think that a God exists who would permit evil, if he is assumed to have the following properties:

• Omnipotent (all-powerful)
• Omniscience (all-knowing, all-wise)
• Perfectly good

(Actually, it would be even more typical if the presentation used the term “Omnibenevolent” for the moral property.  But I can’t help but notice that this term is only ever used by skeptics presenting this particular argument.  It is not a term traditionally used by theologians, and I’m not entirely certain what its meaning is.  What does the “omni” part extend over?  Different persons?  Different acts?  Does it mean that God is obligated to create every possible being?  Does it mean that God is obligated to give every possible good to every possible being?  Traditional theology tends to deny the existence of such obligations.  I have accordingly replaced the “moral” attribute with what I consider to be a better term.)

The argument goes, that if God is perfectly good, he will want to prevent us from experiencing any evil.  If God is all-wise, he will be aware of the best method for eliminating evil.  And if God is all-powerful, then he will be able to implement this method without encountering any obstacle to his power.  So then what is the explanation of evil?

The term “theodicy” refers to attempts to explain why God permits evil.  This post will not, quite, propose any specific theodicy.  Although there are various theodicy-like proposals that I will make in various places in this essay, most of them fairly tentatively.  Instead, my points will be more on the meta level.  I will argue for some reasons to be skeptical about the cogency of the Argument from Evil in this form.  I will argue for the following theses:

1. It is not highly implausible that God has reasons for permitting evil that we don’t know about.

2. If there is a logically satisfactory explanation for suffering, it is not unlikely that the explanation—to the extent that we can understand it—would not emotionally satisfy us.  Arguably, it could not do so, without undermining whatever purposes God has for allowing suffering in the first place.

3. There are some deeply paradoxical aspects of the human relationship to “good” and “evil”, that make it impossible for us to conceive of a perfectly good state of affairs, involving (a) human beings recognizably like us, who (b) experience no evils, and in particular (c) are content with this state of affairs.

(Strictly speaking, the discontent in (c) is a subcase of (b), but I have given it a separate letter anyway, because you can’t stop me from doing so!)

While I maintain that thesis 1 follows from entirely straightforward and reasonable probabilistic considerations, the other two thesis may seem stranger.  How can there be an explanation for suffering that doesn’t satisfy us?  How can it be not good for things to be perfectly good?

But I doubt that we can avoid all such paradoxes by denying Theism.  Especially the paradox in my 3rd thesis, which has to do with the nature of human preferences, and which would be a quite serious problem, even—in fact, especially—in a hypothetical transhumanist utopia designed by atheists.

The Order of Limits

Let me start by making one point, which I have said before, and which I consider to be utterly obvious.  It is stupid to think that Omniscience makes the Argument from Evil stronger.  It obviously makes it weaker.  The argument I mentioned above:

If God is all-wise, he will be aware of the best method for eliminating evil,

presupposes that God’s infinitely greater wisdom only matters for purposes of selecting the most intelligent means, to accomplish those goals that we in our finite human wisdom have identified as good.  But it is equally possible that God’s greater wisdom will involve him pursuing higher goals that humans are unaware of.  God could well be aware of forms of goodness we have no clue about.  (As well as seeing various ways in which our own goals might be better served, by first putting us through a sequence of events that doesn’t seem to us like a good way to accomplish those goals.)

It is pure hubris to think that God’s infinitely greater intelligence would only be like a higher technology in service of human ends.  Rather than also giving him a higher perspective on what are the goods most worth acquiring.

In other words, the Argument from Evil would be most convincing, if it were about a being who has human-level wisdom, but universally benevolent, and infinitely* powerful.  I certainly agree that such a being would be unlikely to construct a world that looks like our own.  But that is not the Judaeo-Christian doctrine about God, is it?

[*Footnote: except, to make the hypothetical work, the infinitely powerful being would have to be somehow prohibited from using one of their wishes to wish for greater wisdom?  The thought experiment doesn’t really make sense, but that isn’t the point of the thought experiment, so let’s ignore its internal contradictions.]

On the other hand, if we imagine an infinitely wise being with finite power (but still universally benevolent) it is quite hard for me to imagine that I know what such a being might think are the most important priorities.  It could very easily be something quite different from my own top priorities.

Remember, infinite wisdom is a lot of wisdom. Now wisdom is not quite the same thing as intelligence, but if we consider intelligence then one of the smartest people who have ever lived is St. John von Neumann.  Suppose we imagine a being who is as much smarter than John von Neumann, in the same ratio that von Neumann is smarter than an average 4-year old child (let’s call this being HvN for hyper-Von Neumann).  Then HvN is presumably able to have an enormous number of qualitatively important insights, that would be impossible for HvN to explain even to Von Neumann.  And this is a being who still has a finite amount of wisdom.  The same is true of hyper-hyper-Von Neumann (HHvN), hyper-hyper-hyper-Von Neumann (HHHvN) etc.  But God would be smarter than all of these.  (And, if you accept, as most modern mathematicians do, St. Georg Cantor’s theory of transfinite cardinals of different size, then we probably aren’t even done yet.  God’s wisdom would not be exhausted just by saying it is infinite—it is bigger than the hierarchy of all possible infinities!)  So who knows what an infinitely wise being would do?

And note, that, at less than one iteration of this process, there are already plenty of evils (like needing to brush one’s teeth and go to the dentist) that the average 4-year old is not likely to be able to understand the reasons for, but an average adult can understand.  (Of course, the 4-year old could simply trust their parents that there is a good reason to brush teeth, but this would involve faith in a higher authority, not the 4-year old’s own reason.)

I’ve been using a bit of rhetoric here to drive home my point, by harping on how alien an infinitely wise being is likely to be, compared to us.  To be sure, it is equally valuable to meditate on the other prongs of the argument—just how much compassion a perfectly good God would have towards a child who gets cruelly murdered etc.  But proponents of the Argument from Evil have doubtless already rhetorically hammered on these points enough for almost everyone to know what that would look like.  I am inviting such proponents to meditate on a different prong of their argument, for a change.

So, the Argument from Evil seems likely to be solvable if God is (infinitely wise, reasonably finite power level).  And it seems likely to be unsolvable if God is (reasonably finite wisdom, infinitely powerful).  What if (as Classical Theism holds) God is infinite in both respects?  Well then, I maintain that it is at least not obvious which of these 2 cases gives a better analogy to the (infinitely wise, infinitely powerful) case.  It’s a bit like one of those functions F(x,y) in calculus where you get one answer if you take the x → ∞ limit first, and a different answer if you take the y → ∞ limit first.  So the value of F(∞,∞) is ambiguous.

Except that, the whole point of my argument is that we don’t really know what happens when the “wisdom” parameter is taken to be enormously large values, even if those values are finite.  Maybe, insight into goodness tops out some wisdom level W, and all beings wiser than W would basically all agree about what goods are worth pursuing (and what means should be used to attain them, whenever said means are possible).  Then, any being wiser than W would either be able to “justify God’s ways to”—well maybe not “man”, but to somebody sufficiently far up in the sequence (vN, HvN, HHvN, HHHvN…).  Or, alternatively, maybe a being wiser than W would be able to tell that the Argument from Evil was perfectly sound.  But I see no particular reason why this should happen at a human level of intelligence.

On the other hand, it is also possible that infinite wisdom leads to some qualitatively new insights about goodness that aren’t accessible to anyone in that sequence.

Which of these is more important, God knowing more about goodness than I do, or God being so powerful that he has ways of avoiding having to ever make a tradeoff?  Beats me!  But if agnosticism is justified concerning this critical question, then the Argument from Evil seems to rest on some pretty shaky foundations.

Maximizing Functions

Without assuming it is accurate in every respect, let us consider a crassly consequentialist model of the “God knows about more kinds of goods than we do” scenario.  Let’s write a function \(f(w)\) that sums up all the kinds of goodness which we humans are aware of.  Here let \(w \in W\) where \(W\) is the set of all the (logically consistent) possible ways the world might be.  Now let us suppose that God is aware of the existence of other important kinds of goodness besides the ones we are aware of.  Call these additional goods \(g(w)\).  So the total goodness is the sum:

$$\mathrm{Total} \, \mathrm{Goodness}(w) \,=\, f(w) + g(w)$$

Let us suppose this function has a maximum possible value, and that God selects whichever world \(w\) maximizes total goodness.  (Or if there is a tie, he picks one of the maxima arbitrarily.)

What are the odds that the world \(w\) which God selects, maximizes not only \(f + g\), but also \(f\)?  Well it is impossible to say for sure, without knowing what the function \(g(w)\) is.  But intuitively the answer seems to be, vanishingly unlikely (approaching probability 0), unless there is some reason why the function \(g(w)\) happens to be 0, or directly proportional to \(f(w)\), or some other weird thing happens.

This deviation will, almost by definition, appear to us to take the form of a gratuitous evil, since \(f(w)\) is smaller than it might have been and we are unaware of \(g(w)\).  So, on this hypothesis, we should be highly confident that God will create a world with at least one form of gratuitous evil.  It seems like this is even more likely to be true in a more realistic model where worlds \(w\) differ in a very high dimensional space.

How different will the optimum world be, from the apparent optimum?  They could be quite “close” if \(g(w)\) is small compared to \(f(w)\).  But we have no particular reason to think this is true.  If \(g(w)\) is comparable in size to \(f(w)\) or bigger, then maybe the maxima lie in quite different directions.

Aside: Some Goods May Be Incomparable

Now actually, my moral and theological beliefs are quite a bit different from the setup above.  I don’t think goodness is really a number.  I think sometimes things can be compared, and sometimes they can’t be.

In my view, there are many (radically incomparable) different forms of goodness, and (like an artist writing a novel) nobody has any right to complain if God creates one form of good over another, as long as the world is actually good, and there’s no way he could have done a better job at making that particular good thing he was aiming at.

God is already supremely good before he makes anything at all, and in that sense all of creation is gratuitous.  But, once we specify what specific type(s) of goodness God is aiming for, it seems inevitable that there are better and worse ways of going about it, and therefore in some specific aspects, the consequentialist model above probably captures a fair amount of truth.

However, if these beliefs are right, none of the corrections I have made in this section seem to make the Problem of Evil harder to solve.  If anything, they make it easier to solve.  (There might be a question of why a God who is already supremely good made anything at all, but this is a different theological problem.)

If you are an AI-Doomer, you should reject the Argument from Evil

Let me put the argument another way.  Perhaps some of my readers belong to the Singularity school of thought (people who are hopeful/worried about AI bootstrapping itself into an enormously superhuman level of power in a short amount of time).  To such readers, I would note that the following beliefs seem to have incompatible justifications:

1. High risk of Yudkowsky-style AI doom (conditional on a powerful AI being built)
2. The Argument from Evil is devastating evidence against standard Theism.

As I understand it, the argument for (1) partly proceeds through the claim that an agentic AI can be modeled as a utility maximizer.  While the AI’s utility function is likely to overlap in some ways with ours (since we built it to accomplish some tasks), relatively small mistakes in the AI’s utility function, are (in this view) likely to lead to consequences which most humans will regard as grievously evil (e.g. human extinction or perpetual slavery).  Basically, the idea is that utility maximization is a harsh mistress.  Since whatever maximizes one set of goals perfectly, will often be a very bad fit to any other set of goals.  And if the utility maximizer has enormous power, so that the maximization is done over a very wide space of possibilities, we aren’t in a good position to predict whether such a universe will be human-friendly.

But now consider the view Theism + Moral Realism.  On this view, God is an agent who seeks objective goodness.  For purposes of this argument, let us model goodness as maximizing some utility function, which partially overlaps with human preferences.  But as pointed out above, if there are any additional terms in the function (e.g. types of good which God knows about and we don’t) then (if you buy the argument in the previous paragraph) it seems almost certain that the world will contain certain things that humans see as grievous evils, upon extreme optimization over God’s “utility function”, as it were.

In fact, if you are a dystopian about AI, that means you must regard our current world (prior to the predicted AI apocalypse, anyway) as rather surprisingly human-friendly, among the space of worlds optimized by utility functions slightly different from our own.  A world where, if the AI had produced it, the AI-doomers would all breathe a big sigh of relief that alignment had gone better than expected, even if we didn’t get the Transhumanist Utopia.  But that means that the existence of apparently grievous evil is actually expected on the hypothesis of a benevolent God!  (That is, if you buy the AI-doom argument.)

In other words, if you think:

1. High probability of great evil, given a powerful AI whose preferences are slightly “incorrect” relative to human preferences,

you should also think:

2. High probability of (apparent) great evil, given that human preferences are slightly “incorrect” relative to divine preferences.

Of course, the God of Classical Theism is vastly more powerful than any AI could be, but it is not clear that this helps, since (in the case of the AI) people think that the more powerful it is, the more concerned they should be.

Does this mean that humans should hate and fear God, the way AI-doomers hate and fear unaligned AI?  Well, I would agree that a certain type of “fear” is appropriate, towards a powerful being with somewhat inscrutable goals.  There is a reason why the Bible talks about the “fear of the Lord” as a characteristic trait of pious people.  But if moral realism is true, I don’t think that hatred can be appropriate towards a being that maximizes true goodness.  (Imagine, if it makes it easier, that you would come around to God’s point of view after a million years of what Yudkowsky calls “coherent extrapolated volition”.)  Note also that this view does not imply moral skepticism, as the things we care about can still be really morally good, and the things we dislike can still be really morally bad.  It’s just that God just cares about some additional things, that we don’t know about.

Degree of Inexplicability Not Proportional to Magnitude

It is tempting to say, well maybe this sort of theodicy explains stubbed toes or a lack of parking spaces, but surely it does not justify allowing mass starvation, rape, children dying of cancer etc.  But really it all depends on what is contained in the mystery box \(g(w)\), and how important it is.

Intuitively, there is a pretty big difference between a stubbed toe and childhood cancer.  It feels like explaining away the latter is almost offensive to the child or parents.  And indeed, in the presence of those who are suffering grave evils, one should be cautious about speaking in a glib way about God’s plans.  But this social rule of politeness also applies when speaking to people who are convinced that their suffering is part of God’s plan.  So this rule of politeness is hardly substantive evidence that there is no divine plan.

That said, it seems like a conceptual mistake to identify how apparently “gratuitous” an evil is with how large it is.  It is just as mysterious to me what good is gained when we stub our toes, as it is why some children get leukemia.  Indeed, the more severe an evil is, the more likely it is to build character or something else (infuriatingly) edifying, rather than just cause irritation without personal growth.

Part II. The Problem of Moral Action

Let us now consider a potentially serious paradox if we accept the above framework.  Suppose that there really are greater goods that justify all the evils in the world, it might seem to have the unpalatable consequence that it would be bad to try to improve the world.  For suppose we truly believe the world maximizes the goodness function \(f(w) + g(w)\).  If we try to change the world in a way that increases \(f\), presumably we decrease \(g\) by a greater amount and end up in a worse place.

So seemingly we shouldn’t try to cure cancer, or help little old ladies cross the street, or prevent rape, or anything like that, since any defects we see are part of God’s purpose.  But that is morally absurd (and also contrary to the teachings of most Theistic religions, where God commands us to do good deeds).

Of course, since God also made us, we can’t really think about God’s goals in isolation from what we do.  As a result, it is not clear that this unpalatable conclusion actually holds.  But, to speak more carefully, not every possible bundle of hidden goods \(g\) will have the property that it still justifies our attempts to improve things.  Only some possible \(g\)’s will have this property.  So, this does place a serious constraint on the kinds of justification that are possible.  It has to be a justification that is compatible with the continual struggle to morally improve the world.

But this fact, once we acknowledge it, has pretty significant implications for the whole problem.  And not all of these implications are bad for Theism.  Some of them help to explain certain aspects of why God might allow the existence of apparently gratuitous evils.

The Correct Explanation Might Not Be Satisfying or Helpful

It is tempting to say, “Why doesn’t God at least explain why evil exists, so that we can be satisfied that our suffering is for a good reason?”  This might not eliminate the evils, but it would at least make them no longer appear to be gratuitous.

But there is no reason to think that, even if the answer is comprehensible to us (it might not be) that we would find it emotionally satisfying to learn the answer.  One thing that I have learned in life is to be suspicious whenever anyone says “I could bear my suffering if only I had [specific unobtainable consolation C]”.  Sometimes when the C is finally obtained, it  doesn’t help as much as we think it would.  The only way to be confident that this sort of thing is true, is if we actually had C and found that it helped us.  Obviously, we are not in this position when it comes to the Problem of Evil.

So it is quite possible that God doesn’t explain the reason for allowing evil, because he knows that if we did, we wouldn’t like it.  (Even though it actually is explanatory.)

The odds are good that the true explanation has some steps like “Let me first sit you through several courses in microbiology so that you see how inevitable it is that copying errors will appear in DNA of life forms like you.  Now let me say why I appreciate biology enough that I don’t just do random miracles to stop it.”*  Are you any happier now that your kid got cancer?  What if there are footnotes answering all the obvious objections?

[*Footnote: I don’t mean that this is an actually correct theodicy that should convince you.  Just that the actual one could be something which is similarly unsatisfying.]

No?  Then you didn’t want that reason.  You wanted something else: a compelling life narrative in which suffering (even if you don’t know the specifics of why it happens) contributes in a meaningful way to your own personal beatitude (and that of your child in this hypothetical).  What you really need is inspiring stories about how historical people just like you have overcome the suffering and become heroes and saints.  In other words, to meet your emotional needs, what will really help is precisely the kind of consolation that a religion like Christianity actually offers, most especially through its view that suffering unites us to God if we offer it back to him, through the crucified Christ.  Even if it doesn’t feel like solving the Problem of Evil in the abstract sense originally posed.

Or let’s put this another way.  What would satisfy us as “Solving the Problem of Evil”?  What most of us want, if God exists, is for him to tell us some specific fact A that makes it so we don’t have to struggle anymore with the seeming futility of life.  But if the moral struggle is part of the point (of our current stage of existence), then it necessarily follows that God had better not to tell us fact A.  Because if he does, we will stop struggling with it!  Perhaps he can tell us other things, but not that.  (Not yet.)

Or, suppose no such fact A exists, but there is some other good reason B for our struggle, but it has the property that learning B would not cause us to stop struggling.  Well then, in that case, learning B will not feel emotionally like a good explanation for evil.  And this is precisely because it doesn’t cause us to stop struggling with the fact of evil.  So if God specifically wants us to mature through a process of struggle, we can’t expect to be fully emotionally satisfied by any presently available explanation as to why we struggle.

To summarize, if there is a good reason for God to have us suffer, then it follows God won’t not tell us the reason for that suffering, unless knowing that reason doesn’t cause us to stop suffering, and is therefore emotionally unsatisfactory.

Of course, having discovered this reasoning, I already feel a bit better about God not telling me why I suffer!  So perhaps I am undermining my own argument a bit here.  But, it could also be true that there is an important difference between my having a theory about suffering exists, versus a hypothetical situation where we know the answer because God tells us explicitly.

Why Do Pandas Exist?

The Argument from Evil has the greatest force if, conditional on both God and evil existing, we would expect to know the reasons for the evil to exist.  (Then we can appeal to the fact that in the real world, there are seemingly gratuitous evils, where “gratuitous” means there isn’t a  good reason, contrary to our expectations on Theism.)

But do we have the right to expect this, even conditional on Theism?  I think it is important to put the problem of evil in perspective, by noting that almost everything we observe in the universe seems similarly gratuitous, in the sense that we don’t know its purpose for existing.

To be sure, people don’t complain very much about gratuitous non-evils.  But that doesn’t make them any easier to understand from an intellectual point of view.

For example, why do pandas exist?  Is it to be cute and fuzzy?  Is it because they give humans joy?  A plausible theodicy, but we don’t really know that this is why God made pandas.  (Or snakes, or beetles, or…)  If we don’t know the function and role that even seemingly good things play, in the ultimate purpose of creation, then why would we expect to know the function and role of seemingly bad things?

(One cannot simply appeal to their goodness, as there is a huge variety of good things God might have made.  Why are there pandas instead of dragons?  Who knows!)

This may be part of the meaning of the Answer to Job in the Bible.  It’s not as if we were in a position to say to God, “OK, I know why you did everything else, it’s totally obvious why there had to be elliptical galaxies and all those beetles, but what about evil?”  Most people can’t even give a good explanation why humans exist, let alone all these other things in creation.

Evolutionary Theodicy

Or maybe we do know why pandas exist?

There’s another way to interpret what God says to Job.  “I can’t explain why evil exists in your current state of development.  But I’ll give you a big hint, for the benefit of future generations.  It has something to do with why there are so many different kinds of animal species that behave in lots of crazy ways!”

Many generations later, Darwin comes along.  We now know something people didn’t know in the past, which is that the brutal competition to avoid death and find love, is actually powerful enough to create new animal species and in fact, this is the reason why there are so many amazingly cool animals and plants out there.  Wild!

But, that means we do now know at least part of the reason for all the death and striving in the animal kingdom.  It was needed to produce humans.  (Not just us, of course, but also cats and dogs and horses etc.)  If God had decided that all creatures get to flourish equally, there wouldn’t have been any creatures like us in the first place.  The reason you have all these unfulfilled strivings (to avoid pain, seek arduous goods, acquire a mate etc.) is precisely that it was only those who struggled in this way, who were able to pass on their genetic heritage to future generations.

You have pain because it was useful for the survival of your ancestors.  Thus, the evils that appear in evolutionary history clearly play a causal role in the creation of human beings. And human beings are good.  Therefore the evils in past evolutionary history were, at least in broad strokes, justified by the final outcome.  You, in turn, have that same capacity to suffer, precisely because it is the biological legacy passed on to you by your ancestors.

I already told you that you wouldn’t like the explanation for evil, and that it wouldn’t resolve your suffering, or make much difference to how you live your life.  But you didn’t believe me then, did you?  Do you believe me now?

Some readers might have the following objection: God could have created life forms by some completely different method.  For example, like Young Earth Creationism (YEC) or something.  But precisely because Darwinian evolution is so—well explanatory—there is something about this view that strikes me as being fundamentally silly, like the YEC trees being created with rings already in them, or the YEC Adam and Eve having belly buttons, despite not having been born in the usual way.  But the point is far more profound than this.  The fact is, our evolutionary history is partly constitutive of who we are.  If God created life forms ab initio, without evolution or pain or striving, surely they wouldn’t look anything like humans, with our bundles of animal drives.  They wouldn’t even look like ideally happy humans.  They would have to look like something completely different.  Like angels or something.

But in that case, we wouldn’t exist.  So is it good for human beings to exist?  If so, why shouldn’t God create them?

You could bite the bullet and say that God should have simply created intelligent beings very different from us.  It’s plausible.  But it also reduces my confidence that such a world would really be better, since it would be quite radically different from our own.  Our confidence in our ability to assess the goodness of a world, should surely diminish as we get farther away from the domains in which our common sense applies.

(Of course, traditional Christian theology says God did create angels; he just didn’t stop there.  God went on to also create humans.  So the answer might be that it is indeed better to create angels than humans, but having created the angels, God decided the world would be even better if it also contained evolved animals such as us.)

I don’t actually know if this amounts to a complete theodicy.  It may only be one piece of the puzzle.  But it is rather interesting that there is a nontrivial theodicy buried within Darwinian Evolution, even though this is widely regarded by many people as the scientific theory most supportive of Atheism.

Of course, that is because of its implications against (certain forms of) the Argument from Design (as well as the fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis) leading to many religious folks having an immune reaction against Evolution.  But in this post we are now considering the Argument from Evil, not the Argument from Design.  There is nothing contradictory about Darwinism partially undermining both of these classic arguments, for and against Theism.

The Ubermensch

Our current struggles put you in continuity and sympathy with past life forms, whose struggles absolutely were necessarily in order to create you.  What about the future course of evolution?  Here’s another idea that might make Nietzsche happy: your current struggles might well create an evolutionary gradient that will result in the emergence some superhuman life form.

It is true that some (mostly not-very-Christian people) around the start of the 20th century got rather too excited by the possibilities of humans evolving into the ubermensch, and a bunch of silly and horrible things happened as a result.

While evolution might indeed occur in the future, I reject the idea that we should make this into a religion.  We shouldn’t worship our descendants, any more than we should worship our ancestors.  As St. Lewis wrote:

There is no sense in talking of `becoming better’ if better means simply `what we are becoming’ — it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination and defining destination as `the place you have reached’.  Mellontolatry, the worship of the future, is a fuddled religion.
(“Evil and God”)

At least in the case of our ancestors, if we choose to worship them, we have some notions what they were actually like.  But in the case of our distant descendants, it would just be a blank canvas to project our fancies.  For all we know they will be completely different from what we think they are going to be.

It is true that, if the world lasts long enough, future evolution may well create more evolved forms of the human race, and all this might in turn morally justify some amount of whatever “survival of the fittest” is taking place in the present.  But this is speculative, since none of us knows what is going to happen in the future. If you put all of your eggs in this basket, you’ll look pretty silly if Jesus comes back sometime in the next few thousand years, and ends history before this hypothetical new evolutionary stage emerges.

The Christian worldview is bigger than the cosmos, not smaller.  So we should be willing to acknowledge whatever truth there is in other worldviews, even if those other views aren’t seeing the entire picture.  As a Christian, I can accept that there are elements of truth to the Nietzschean philosophy, that struggle is a valuable thing and shouldn’t be eliminated.  But there are lots of other moral truths that need to be held in balance with this one.

If learning about evolutionary struggle makes some people think it is OK to go around starting fistfights, collecting harems, and pissing in other people’s swimming pools, then maybe there’s a reason God didn’t spell all of this out in the Book of Genesis.  Maybe instead of asking God why he allows evil, we should instead ask ourselves whether we humans are sufficiently trustworthy for God to explicitly tell us the explanation for evil.

Instead of trying to breed a new human race, maybe we should focus on trying to be good people.  Of course, you are allowed to have (some) opinions about what you think people should be like, when you choose a spouse and raise your kids.  But maybe we should leave the long-term management of the human gene pool to God.

We Christians have very good reasons to believe that God’s ideal for human behavior is closer to St. Francis of Assisi, than to Genghis Khan—the most evolutionarily “successful” man of his generation!  But without evolutionary history, you don’t get Francis any more than you get Genghis.  Francis had the same animal impulses, to retaliate and lust, that you or I have.  His meekness was like the gentleness of a tamed lion.  Not that of a mouse too small to do much harm.

Part III: The Problem of Humanity

Suppose we accept that it a good thing for human beings to exist—then on that supposition, the Argument from Evil amounts to this.  We are saying to God: “I’m okay with being a primate with a big brain, dedicated not just to seeking food and sex and affection, but also solving complex, difficult problems.  But, I also want to be placed in a world where there are actually no important problems that need solving, or at least none that I care about enough to affect my happiness.  Just give me the food and love, without me having to do anything to get them.  And please don’t let me get bored either.”

That comes across to me as a bit lazy and spoiled.

Perhaps it is even true, that the more moral virtue we have—in the sense of routinely accepting difficult or painful tasks for the sake of achieving greater goods—the less plausible we will find the Argument from Evil.  Because virtue gives us the lived experience of bringing goods out of evils (apparent or actual).  So the more we are able to do that, the more we will see the goods that can only exist when we overcome badness.  Conversely, a cynical and selfish person, is almost bound to see the world as more deeply bad than it actually is, whenever it contradicts their most superficial desires.  (Note that I am not implying that people who raise the Argument from Evil are acting on bad moral motivations, at the moment they raise the question.  What I am talking about is something happening at a deeper and prior level, before the argument is ever raised.)  Admittedly there are other ways in which being a good person makes our hatred of evil sharper, so the balance here is not entirely straightforward.

Somebody could say, well maybe virtue is only good because (unfortunately) it is necessary to do hard things in this world, and that’s why we admire it.  But in a hypothetical perfect world where nothing bad happened, virtue would also be unnecessary.  We could be cowardly and selfish, and it just wouldn’t matter because there would be neither danger nor competition.   On such a utilitarian view, virtue doesn’t really matter for its own sake.  It only matters to the extent that it leads to more pleasure or less pain.

But I don’t share this view.  I think it is good to be a good person, not just that it is instrumentally useful for gaining hedonic pleasures.  Indeed the so-called “happiness” of a hedonist is trivial, in comparison with the meaningfulness of a typical life of virtue.

What is the Optimal History?

In fact, the existence of large problem-solving brains, itself problematizes the entire concept of maximizing goodness, at least if this is considered in a static sense.  Suppose the world were already optimal, i.e. the best world possible, at the time that human beings first came into existence.  Then, there would seemingly be not much point in God creating intelligent animals like us.  Because animal intelligence involves the ability to imagine the world as different from how it is, and then to act to bring about that change.  But if the world is already optimal, than any change we make will make it worse, and that seems to make the use of intelligence a bad thing, rather than a good one.

But this is a paradox.  Because from another perspective, intelligent life is the highest, best, and most valuable good thing, among all the things we experience.  If intelligence were purely instrumental, that would imply you should be willing to sacrifice almost all of your intelligence to achieve your other goals, like pleasure.  But this is an absurd wireheading scenario.  (In this thought experiment, I am assuming it is possible to have large amounts of consciousness/pleasure, without much intelligence.)

So what is the best possible way to have intelligent beings like humans that meaningfully use their intelligence?

One possible way out, is for God to try to optimize for the best history, rather than the best static world-state.  That is, the world could be one that starts out imperfect, but eventually (at least in part as a result of human struggle, without ruling out a possible need for divine intervention) achieves a state of complete perfection.  (Of course, you could worry that once we reach perfection, the same problems will recur, but I will postpone that discussion to the end of this essay.)

Suppose this scenario is true.  Then at a sufficiently early state of our development, we should expect to find ourselves in a situation where the world is imperfect and requires fixing.  Well guess what?  Look around, and that’s just what we see!  Suspicious, huh.

Nothing I have said in this section necessarily requires libertarian free will.  But if it turns out that we do have such free will, then it is of course possible that some of our free actions will make things worse, rather than better.  This basic observation is different from trying to attribute all evils to free will, which is not at all the idea that I am proposing here.  (Though, there may be more attributable to this than we think.  For example, if nobody ever made the kinds of evil choices that cause or require wars, and if all that time and energy had gone to medicine instead, presumably there would now be far more cures for diseases.  Thus, many current events that we frame as natural evils, could be reframed as consequences of past moral evils.)

It should be noted that this moral action theodicy, like the free will defense, obviously overcomes the objection that it de-motivates moral action.  If a major part of the reason why the world contains imperfections is so we can remove those imperfections, then obviously this will motivate, rather than de-motivate, moral action.

The Garden of Eden

Someone might object by mentioning the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis.  I’ve already mentioned Adam and Eve, so this is fair game.  Doesn’t Christianity claim that human beings did start in a perfect state, and only lost it because they sinned, by eating the forbidden fruit (that is, the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil)?

To be sure, multiple aspects of this story would need to be interpreted non-literally in order to be compatible with Darwinian Evolution, a fact which any scientific worldview needs to incorporate.  But if we relax a bit, and just read the story as a story, it seems to describe a world without sin and death.  So isn’t that the perfect world we are looking for?

I would deny this claim.  A world without sin is not the same as a world where nothing bad ever happens.  Even if we go by the literal text, Genesis indicates that there was pain before the Fall (Gen 3:16), and also things that were not good (Gen 2:18).  Even before the Fall, there was a mission to name the animals and to tend the garden.  And there was already a conflict brewing with the crafty serpent, implying that (to remain sinless) Adam and Eve were required to resist some of their own desires, an experience which is not usually 100% pleasant for the persons concerned.

Following a more Eastern Orthodox approach to the story, I would see Adam and Eve not as being perfect in the sense of maximally mature, but rather as being at the very beginning of their story, rather than at the end of their story.  We don’t know how what the middle of the story would have looked like, if they hadn’t sinned.  It could even be, that if Adam and Eve had resisted temptation for long enough, God would have eventually permitted them to sinlessly eat from the Tree of Knowledge.  (Knowledge is an inherently good thing, not a bad thing.  The problem was trying to acquire this particular knowledge by disobeying God, and also at a time when they were insufficiently mature to deal with the consequences of this knowledge.)  In any case, the story doesn’t tell us what would have happened next if they hadn’t succumbed to the first temptation, since they did succumb.  And as they say, the rest is history.

Haggling over the Price

Anyway, I certainly admit that there could well be lots of ways of introducing removable imperfections into the universe, that don’t involve anything near as great a degree of suffering as we see in the real world.  Or, where we have enormous bliss at the same time as we solve a bunch of intellectually stimulating puzzles.  Or at the very least where there isn’t death at the end of every road.  (Though most Theists think we survive death in one way or another.)

But at some level, this is just haggling over the price.  All of us can point to significant changes we would like to see in the world.  At the same time, that is exactly what this theodicy would predict—that there will be features of the world we find unsatisfactory and want to remove if possible, and also that it should not always be obvious how to remove them (since otherwise intelligent thought would not be needed).  And we can’t expect to solve all the problems either, not if there is to be anything left for future generations to do.

There are lots of possible quantities of evil in the world that could be imagined.  But wherever on that spectrum God places the human race, it’s always going to seem to us like he should have included a bit less evil.  And this is presumably going to be true all the way up to the point where, from the standpoint of our current world and its evolved preferences, we would see that there would then be not very much point in having intelligent creatures at all.  (Perhaps there really is an objectively optimum amount of evil to overcome, in which case God would presumably have created the human race right at that optimum point.  But I have very little idea how to assess how much or how little evil that is, relative to what we currently experience.)

Trying to solve the Problem of Evil here and now, is a bit like expecting to have, in the middle of an adventure story, the same sense of satisfying closure that you have at the end of the story, after the main character is rescued from the trials and tribulations which prevented them from getting what they wanted.  Maybe you can have this the second time you read the book, but not the first time (assuming you don’t like spoilers).

Again, it’s okay if you hate it.  Nothing about this explanation implies you will feel satisfied with this explanation.  At some level, you shouldn’t!  Bad stuff is bad and you aren’t supposed to like it.  You are supposed to fix and/or endure it.  You aren’t required to like it.

We Prefer Stories where Bad Things Happen

But maybe we don’t hate it as much as we think?  I just mentioned stories.  Consider our revealed preferences about that.  When all of our basic physical needs are met (or when we don’t want to face our problems) our favorite pastime as humans is to tell each other stories.  Campside stories, bedtime stories, TV, books, movies, video games etc.

And one thing we absolutely insist on, almost always, is that these stories should have some bad things happen in them!  Problems to overcome.  Villains to fight, victims to rescue.  Or conflicts of value, hard choices that reveal character.  Trials that test characters, or break them.  Finding revenge, or redemption.  If there is nothing bad to overcome, the story is (usually) considered boring.  (Maybe this isn’t true of strictly all stories, there might be some stories without much bad stuff, but it takes a very good writer to keep that interesting!  And certainly nobody would want all stories to be like that.)  It’s okay for the story to have a good ending, but only if there was something to overcome in the middle.  (But there are also people who prefer tragedies and sad endings!)

Isn’t that strange!  We want to remove bad stuff from our actual lives, but that makes us bored, so we insist on bringing bad stuff back in by the back door, as long as it is fictional evil.  Since this is something we all take for granted, being accustomed to it from our youths, I suggest that you stop, and really contemplate for 120 consecutive seconds, just how weird this (almost) universal human desire is.

Secretly, in the spirit deep within our hearts, we already know that some evils are necessary, in order for certain great goods to exist.  Let me be clear, I am not claiming that you should believe this based on the above arguments.  Rather, I am claiming that you already believe this, whether you recognize it or not.

To answer an obvious objection, I agree of course that a fictional bad event is quite different morally from a real bad even, i.e. it isn’t necessarily actually bad.  For example, fictional people don’t really suffer, we only pretend that they do.  If fictional evil were really evil, then it would be morally problematic to write fiction in which terrible events occur, and nobody thinks that this is the case.  (Perhaps it is sometimes immoral to write dreary nihilistic fiction, but if so this is only true because it demoralizes actual human beings.)

Nevertheless, our love for the fictional story represents a real desire in us.  So it is striking that this love not only allows, but often requires bad things to exist, in the story.  And this love suggests, in turn, that there is something good about worlds that include evil, that simply cannot be found in worlds without it.

And of course, many people enjoy confronting potential evils in the real world—it’s called a sense of adventure.  We certainly like hearing about stories of adventure that really happened too.  In fact, as long as the story is equally good, it is more interesting to us if it really happened.  Though for most of us, we would prefer for it to happen to somebody else!  But if bad things never happened to anyone, presumably we wouldn’t know how to tell or enjoy stories about it happening.  So even fictional badness requires some real badness (even if only a limited amount of it).

Somebody could say, well maybe we only like stories which include bad stuff because we are evolved to face bad stuff in the real world.   So in a world where nothing bad happened, we would also not have a taste for adventure stories, and we wouldn’t get bored not having them.  But doesn’t that seem… at least a little bit bad?  There is a genuine good in these adventure stories, and it seems like in some ways the perfect people would be missing out, not being able to appreciate them like we do.  But then, if these stories capture some sort of goodness that requires evil to exist, then surely this implies the existence of a partial justification for evil?

If some amount of fictional evil is needed to maximize fictional good, then plausibly some amount of actual evil is needed to maximize actual good.  And perhaps, the actual goods concerned, are not completely unrelated to the goods that we appreciate in stories: adventure, interestingness, a dramatic plot etc.  Perhaps, one of the differences between God’s notion of goodness and are own, is not that so much that he values some things we think are evil, but rather that he sees that some of things we genuinely like (in certain contexts), are in reality far more valuable even then we think they are, when viewed from an eternal perspective.

At any rate, our taste in stories implies that, if we were just judging God’s creation as if it were a fictional narrative, from an aesthetic viewpoint rather than a moral one, we would certainly judge that it had better contain evil.  At any rate, in order to not feel that way about life, human beings would need to relate to the concepts of good/bad in a rather different way than we do so now.  (Perhaps, we would need to be a species without “the knowledge of good and evil”?)

From this purely aesthetic perspective, one could even argue that maybe our modern world doesn’t have nearly enough evil! Since most people’s lives are rather dull from a day-to-day basis, with most of our daily needs met, and no dramatic actions needed.  Most people need to seek out adventure, by reading about other people’s problems (people whose lives are usually much less pleasant than average).  On the other hand, from a moral perspective, since real people aren’t fictional characters, we also have good moral reasons to want them to suffer less, out of mercy.  So maybe this world is actually a compromise between the two perspectives, the aesthetic one and the moral one.  With enough drama to be interesting, but not enough to ruin the majority of day-to-day pleasures.

(Admittedly this doesn’t do much to explain evils that are also boring and tedious, like factory work and so on.  Though a lot of these evils come from our choice to organize society in a particular way.)

Again, I don’t know if this is the correct theodicy.  Perhaps it is mostly off-base.  But there is at least one insight from this discussion which I am quite confident about.  Which is this lesson:

I can’t think of any conceivable scenario in which human beings as we know them are totally happy, without some badness to overcome somewhere.

In other words, it’s not that I can identify some specific way to run the world, in which everything is perfectly hunky-dory, but our human-level intelligence is also meaningfully exploited, and I am wondering why God doesn’t do that.  Rather, I can’t see any way to avoid some evil existing (even if these might be different evils than the ones we actually see in the real world.)  Maybe Omniscience would see another solution, but I can’t.  To me, any such solution is, and I mean this word advisedly, inconceivable.  By this, I mean, not that it is logically impossible, but rather that if there is a solution, I don’t think any human being on Earth has succeeded in conceiving it.

To be sure, there are plenty of specific bad things about the world, that I would change if I could.  I never denied that, and in fact it is part of my argument.  What I find impossible to imagine, is a world in which everything is perfect, by human standards.  I claim that a world like that is literally impossible to imagine.  Or put another way, any utopia which you can imagine will always have some aspects which are unsatisfactory, and will thus not be fully compatible with our present human conceptions of what a good life should look like.

Transhumanism and the New Jerusalem 

This is why, in transhumanist utopian fiction, once technology reaches the point where almost all problems are overcome, there is often a somewhat bittersweet tone, once you realize the characters living in that society have little to strive for.  Or in a long fantasy series, after the main character becomes a wizard-god so powerful that they can just do whatever they want, and then the character—or at least the reader—has to grapple with the resulting lack of meaning.  (Of course, most good storytellers are smart enough to never put their protagonists into this situation, since it usually ruins the story.)  These scenarios illustrate the sort of ennui which any actual paradise would have to somehow overcome, in order to truly be paradise.  (Here is a book review by Scott Alexander, discussing this problem.)

Of course, these scenarios are a pretty long way—and perhaps we should say, thank God—from what a typical human life looks like.  Although there is a little bit of an earthly parallel, in the archetype of the bored aristocratic hedonist:

There are things you need not know of,
though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure
than you are sick of pain.

(The Aristocrat, St. Chesterton)

Perhaps some readers are tempted to say, well I certainly would never get bored with a life of prolonged pleasures and no other suffering.  But it is not clear why anyone should believe you, if you haven’t yet been put to that particular test.  Others among my readers might think that for precisely this reason, they wouldn’t want to live forever in Heaven, because surely (after a gazillion googleplex years, or if that isn’t enough, try Graham’s number) it would eventually become tedious.

Fortunately, the Christian concept of Heaven—or to use more accurate biblical language, “The New Heaven and New Earth”—isn’t vulnerable to this objection, that any conceivable infinitely prolonged utopia would end up being boring and shallow in the end.  The reason for this is simple: we can’t yet conceive it.  Not until after the Resurrection, when our bodies are made new, and when we see God face-to-face.  As St. Paul writes:

“What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
the things God has prepared for those who love him.
(1 Cor 2:9)

Since the New Heaven and New Earth isn’t conceivable by us, arguments about “all conceivable utopias” don’t apply to it.

Once again, I am using the word conceivability quite literally, to mean “capable of being conceived by our minds”, not as a cheap synonym for “logically possible”.   If I thought that the New Heaven and New Earth weren’t logically possible, then I obviously I couldn’t also believe that it will come to exist.  But there is no reason why every possible state of affairs must be imaginable by us, especially if that state of affairs is created by a God who exceeds our understanding, and in some way involves union with that God.  It might not even be measured by time, at least not in the exact same way that our current earthly existence is.  It might instead participate somehow in the timeless and eternal life of God, in which case we definitely can’t imagine it.

This is why the Christian hope is not subject to ennui.  Ennui arises when you get what you thought you wanted, but you still aren’t satisfied, and say “Is this all there is to life?”  But since the state of the redeemed is beyond our understanding, and requires going through a radical transformation as a preliminary, nothing in our current life experience contradicts the idea that those who love God can be perfectly happy and fulfilled, once we get there.  Without ever getting bored, or pining for an impossible state of affairs.

If we are eternally happy in God’s kingdom, then in turn justifies all the suffering we had to go through, in order to get into it.  At least, so long as having gone through suffering in some way improves our eternal experience once we get there.  And it’s hard to prove that this can’t be the case, if we don’t know what it is like to see God face-to-face in the first place.

It is easy enough to make the case that our current life is not fully satisfactory.  But if our current life is just a preliminary to another, greater life, then the things that make an earthly life good or bad might well be very different from what we now judge to be the case.  In other words, on the assumption of an afterlife which is radically different from our current one, it is virtually certain that the original idea I defended—that God will know a lot of stuff about goodness that we don’t—is going to be true.

As an analogy, our unborn existence in the womb was a preliminary to a greater life, that mostly couldn’t be imagined by an unborn child, who has no real concept of sight, taste, or open space.  Of course, the unborn child can still hear sounds and music from outside the womb.  Perhaps it is not a coincidence that music is one of the most common ways that religious literature describes the activity of the saints in heaven?

And don’t give me that stale line about “I don’t want to play a harp on a cloud”.  I’ve already said that we can’t imagine it, and cartoon imagery is definitely out of the question.  But even if we take the accusation on its own terms, who says it has to be a harp, if you prefer some other musical instrument?  As musically inclined people know, jamming with some friends on earth can be a transcendental experience, in which we somehow go out of ourselves, and feel as if we are participating in a higher harmony of existence.  A deeper rhythm, which reconciles us to all the sorrow and longing we’ve felt, by making it seem part of a greater and more significant wholeness.

On a religious outlook, this feeling gives us a real insight into the nature of reality.  The New Heaven and the New Earth will be something like that.  Only better.