As discussed in the previous essays, Trump and some of his followers claimed that God intervened to save Trump from being killed. If this is true, then it would follow that God decided to let one person die and two others get critically injured when He could have intervened. This raises the classic problem of evil, a stock Atheism 101 argument.
The simple version of the argument is that if God is all good, all powerful and all knowing, then there should be no evil. But there is evil, so God does not exist. A slightly more sophisticated version concludes that either God does not exist, or He is lacking in at least one of those three attributes. Much more sophisticated versions consider, in depth, how to reconcile God’s qualities with the existence of evil. I will look at each of these three attributes and how they might be reconciled with evil.
Philosophers usually present God as being omnipotent, but there is debate about what it means to be all powerful. The famous question of whether God can create a rock He cannot lift is part of this discussion. Some philosophers, the Intellectualists, claim that God’s intellect is his primary quality and that He either will not or cannot do the impossible. On this view, God can do anything that is possible, but His omnipotence is thus limited. For example, God cannot make a triangle that has 4 sides. Those accepting this view often try to use this logical limit to solve the problem of evil. For example, God cannot create a perfect world and hence the world must be imperfect. One version of this reasoning points out that if God created a second perfect being, that being would also be God. But there cannot be two perfect beings (because each being would lack what the other has and for various other reasons) and this is why there can only be one God and why the world must be imperfect. On this view, evil (imperfection) is a necessary part of the world and that is why God saved Trump but lets other people die. The usual response to this is to point out that the world is worse than imperfect, and God could make things better while the world remained imperfect.
People also try to explain evil by limiting God’s powers in other ways. A classic move is to embrace a form of polytheism and attribute evil to the Devil. But this requires accepting that God and the Devil are comparable in power or coming up with some explanation as to why God lets the Devil cause evil. Another classic gambit is to invoke free will and use that to explain human caused evil. Free will limits God’s power and that is how evil can occur. The challenge is explaining how free will works and then explaining why God could not allow free will but mitigate the evil it is alleged to cause. Others also speak of God’s plan; that the evil that occurs is necessary for His plan. This also postulates a limit on God’s power, since He cannot reach His goal without allowing evil.
Reducing God’s power in various ways to explain evil is an option that can solve the problem of evil, but it comes with the obvious cost of diminishing God. On this view, God could save Trump, but because of whatever limits His omnipotence, He could not have prevented the other people from being shot.
There are other philosophers, the Voluntarists, who claim that God’s will is supreme and He can will anything, even the impossible. This means the logically impossible and not just things that are very difficult. For example, God could will that triangles have 4 sides while still being triangle. It is not that we would call squares triangles, it is that the necessarily three-sided figure would be four-sided but still a triangle. He could also make all contradictions true and all tautologies false. He could make it so that if A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then A is smaller than C. None of this makes any sense to our mortal minds, but a God that can do the impossible can do all that and infinitely more impossible things. It might initially seem that being a Voluntarist would make it more difficult to solve the problem of evil. After all, the Voluntarist would have to accept that God could create a perfect world. But one consequence of God being all powerful in this sense is that He also defines morality, so He can make anything good or evil, even if it made no sense to us. This moral view is called divine command theory, on this view what God commands is good and what He forbids is evil. People who like divine command theory tend to think that God commands what they themselves want and forbids what they dislike, but that is not how the theory works. God could, at any moment, chose anything to be good or bad and He can obviously lie about it. So, for all we know, God just decided that being a woke transgender vegan advocate of renewable energy is the very best thing to be. Or maybe it was that way all along. Given that God can change logic and truth at will, our reason is useless in sorting any of this out. Or anything at all, since God’s will also applies to physics, chemistry and so on. On the plus side, the problem of evil is solved: whatever God wills is good, so everything that happens is good. On the minus side, reason is useless. On this view, God saved Trump, killed one person and let two people be critically injured. But maybe this is all good? We do not and cannot know. While most thinkers focus on God’s power, His knowledge can also be relevant to the problem.
As with God being all powerful, philosophers debate what it means for God to be all knowing. Does this mean that God has all possible knowledge or that He even has impossible knowledge? In terms of the problem of evil, it could be argued that evil occurs because God does not know that it is occurring. On this view, perhaps God suddenly knew that Trump was in danger and acted just in time to save him. As might be guessed, free will could also figure in here: because humans have free will, God does not know what we might do. So, God did not know that the shooter was going to shoot until he started shooting. God will also need to require time to gain knowledge and act on it, otherwise He could just intervene instantly, which would raise the question of why He did not act. While claiming that God has epistemic limitation would explain evil, it does create its own problems in terms of diminishing God and making prophecy more difficult to explain.
The easiest solution to the problem of evil is to abandon the idea that God is all good. The two usual options are to simply reject that God is all good or to argue that our conceptions of good and evil are wrong. Rejecting that God is all good, that evil also comes from God, solves the problem. Evil exists because God is not all good. For Trump’s followers, God did a good thing in saving Trump but letting the other people get shot is not a problem because God does or allows evil as well.
If it is argued that our conceptions of good and evil are wrong, then the problem is solved because we are wrong about there being any evil. On this view, everything that happens is good, but we might not realize this. This is sometimes explained in terms of God’s plan (which ties back to limiting God’s power) or the big picture argument. The big picture argument often uses an analogy to looking at a beautiful painting by pressing it against your face. It will look awful. But if you move back from the painting, you will see its beauty. So, while the person dying at Trump’s event seems bad, it would be seen as good once one sees the big picture. This view might also involve accepting that God has a limit on His power since His big picture must apparently be made with a lot of events that seem evil up close. This approach is appealing to many since it explains away any evil that occurs, which is the solution most look for.
First, I think it has to be said that: on the assumption God is a Trump supporter, God wanted bullets to fly and a least a couple of people to die, but for Trump to survive! E.g. if it had been a film, the film director would have certainly shown some die, because those deaths added impact and poignancy.
Still, even if those deaths were not pointless in a good of the species like way, the next questions is how can we explain their seemingly heartlessness in a good of the individual like way? Here are four possibilities that come to my mind:
(1) Perhaps those Trump supports that died actually volunteered deep inside because they would happily give their lives for trump’s re-election.
(2) Perhaps God choose those people of die because they are better off dead for some other reason that eludes us, so what we are missing in our perception of evil is their karma.
(3) Perhaps death is really not such a big deal to the immoral soul and we make far too of a big deal about it. I.e. what we are missing in our perception of evil is that sufferings is actually void of meaning in of itself it only exists for the real purpose of life which is spiritual growth, and spiritual growth often comes though suffering. Thus the famous maxim “what does not kill us makes us stronger” is actually often an understatement because what kills us also often makes us stronger. For example, the courageous man who dies for his country is pleased with his choice on the other side.
(4) Perhaps it is mistake to imagine every human being having a soul and being an object of Gods care. The Ancient Greek Philosopher Plato argues the body exists for the sake of soul, and the body’s possessions for the sake of the body, and it seems to me to be an allegorical description of the way he views the society- i.e. the “third part of the soul”, that is the ordinary people, exist for the sake of an first part of the soul, that is the philosophical “reason”, so their lives are not measurable in the stand alone sense modern philosophers believe. The city then is not the multitude of souls we imagine, it is perhaps only one soul but only the very wise can see that, e.g. it why the King says “we” instead of “I”.
Following these points it is easy to imagine your last point, the “big picture point”, namely what matters is that the history books are interesting and engaging not death.
For me there is really difficult caveat. Humanity does not seem to be progressing, it seems to be getting worse! For example, many people today say we are the most morally depraved and philosophically retarded people in history, that is why for example we are the first people in history to abolish the death penalty and equalize men and women.
Plato actually talks about the idea that the world goes through long progression and regression cycles in which evil seems to sometimes rule in turn with good, and many yogis say the same sort of thing, as does even the Bible I think with the golden age and the eating the apple story etc. For example, perhaps the apple is modern technology or something like that, and by eating it we are sucked into the world of non-being and destroy ourselves.
Some people also advance an NPC hypothesis. On this view, taken from gaming, some “people” are not people at all, they are just “extras” and do not matter. The PC (player characters) are the only real people and only they matter. This solves the problem of evil by insisting that the really bad stuff happens just to NPCs. A bit of a problem arises when bad stuff happens to you rather than someone else; in that case another explanation is needed since we all presumably think we are PCs and that others are the NPCs.
Full disclosure. See my remarks about the blog presented by John Messerly@Reason and Meaning. IMHO, we are living with Evil.Many want to re-elect a devil as President. I don’t think that wise.. do you? Not much difference between evil and devil. Ok, time for a nap…
Respectfully.
Was going to return to your remarks on metaphysics of God’s armor. But no, this is still on the train, I think. So, God, whatever God is—is all-knowing; all powerful; omnipotent, right? Ergo, God has no need for armor. Believers in God only need armor because they are ephemeral, temporal and need protection from each other. Isn’t that the point? I think so. Hmmmmmmmmmm….
As you illustrate, there are numerous variations; ways of thinking, about the problem of evil. Whether or which of these is a correct way of thinking is always already a topic for debate and discussion. I read an account of evil, many years ago and found it credible. Instead of trying to reconstruct, from memory, the points taken and lines of thinking, I recommend readers look for themselves. The book was by Becker—I remembered his first name being Ernst, but it may now be given as Ernest. The book title is, ironically perhaps, Escape From Evil. There is probably no escaping, therefrom., inasmuch as escape from society is pretty difficult?