Thinking to Believe

When something bad happens, it’s common for people to offer the encouragement that “everything happens for a reason.”  Is it really true, however, that everything that happens, happens for a reason?  To answer that question we need to explore what we mean by “everything,” “for” and “reason.”

Let’s start with “reason.”  What do we mean when we say something happens for a reason?  It means there is some intelligible and discernible relationship between two events, and that this relationship was purposed by an intelligent agent.  For example, the reason I give money to the checker at the grocery store is because I want to buy food.  There is a rationality to my action that links the events of giving money and receiving food.  One is done for the reason of the other.  In a similar manner, there is a discernible and intelligible relationship between bad and good events in our lives that was purposed by God.

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Probably the most-cited argument against the existence of a theistic God is the logical form of the problem of evil, which argues that the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil because an all-good God would want to prevent evil and an all-powerful God could prevent evil, and yet evil exists. From this, it follows that God is not all-powerful, not all-good, or more likely does not exist at all. There could be a world in which God exists, or there could be a world in which evil exists, but there can be no world in which both God and evil exist. Since it’s empirically evident that evil exists, God does not.

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Many think that the existence of evil disproves God’s existence. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evil is a real problem we must wrestle with, but it argues for God’s existence, not against it.

For evil to be a problem, evil has to be real – not just an expression of human desires, preferences, or opinions.  Evil is the absence of good, so for evil to be real, an objective standard of goodness must exist that transcends human beings.

What is the source for that standard?  God.  He is the Good, and we recognize good because we are made in His image.

Besides, denying God’s existence because evil exists does nothing to solve the problem of evil.  Only if God exists can we have hope that evil will be overcome and those who commit evil face true justice for their moral crimes.

If God is good, why is there evil? Because love requires freedom, and freedom entails choosing either the good or the evil. God was good to give us free will. We are responsible for abusing this good thing, not God, and yet God has taken it on Himself to fix the problem we created. God is not just observing the pain and suffering we experience from evil, but became one of us and experienced it Himself so that He can empathize with us and ultimately overcome evil for us.

After the failure of the logical problem of evil (deductive argument) to demonstrate the impossibility of God’s existence given the presence of evil in the world, atheists have largely turned to the evidential problem of evil (inductive argument) to provide a probabilistic argument against the existence of God.  Whereas the logical problem of evil argued that the mere existence of evil in the world proves God cannot exist, the evidential problem of evil argues that the amount of evil in the world is so great that it is highly improbable that a good God exists.  Those who advance the evidential form of the argument claim that if the amount of evil in the world reaches some threshold, then it is no longer reasonable to believe that a good God exists—and of course, they believe the amount of evil in the world has reached this threshold.  The argument could be stated as follows:

(1) The probability of God’s existence is commensurate to the amount of evil in the world.
(2) The probability of God’s existence declines as the amount of evil increases
(3) There is much more evil in the world than we would expect there to be if a good and all-powerful God existed
(4) Therefore, it is improbable that God exists.

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In days gone by many atheists thought the existence of evil in the world disproved theism.  Largely due to the work of philosopher Alvin Plantinga, however, most professional philosophers now concede that the presence of evil in the world does not disprove the existence of God (unfortunately, lay atheists failed to get the memo).  As atheist and J.L. Mackie came to admit, “Since this defense is formally [i.e., logically] possible, and its principle involves no real abandonment of our ordinary view of the opposition between good and evil, we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another.”

No longer able to use the mere existence of evil as evidence against God’s existence, atheists began to argue that the amount of evil in the world makes the existence of God unlikely.  “Why,” they ask, “is there so much evil in the world?”  James Corman and Keith Lehrer are representative of this modified argument:

If you were all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful, and you were going to create a universe in which there were sentient beings — beings who are happy and sad; enjoy pleasure; feel pain; express love, anger, pity, hatred — what kind of world would you create? Being all-powerful, you would have the ability to create any world that it is logically possible for you to create, and being all-knowing you would know how to create any of these logically possible worlds. Which one would you choose? Obviously you would choose the best of all the possible worlds because you would be all-good and would want to do what is best in everything you do. You would, then, create the best of all the possible worlds, that is, that world containing the least amount of evil possible. And because one of the most obvious kinds of evil is suffering, hardship, and pain, you would create a world in which the sentient beings suffered the least. Try to imagine what such a world would be like. Would it be like the one which actually does exist, this world we live in? Would you create a world such as this one if you had the power and knowhow to create any logically possible world? If your answer is “no,” as it seems it must be, then you should begin to understand why the evil of suffering and pain in this world is such a problem for anyone who thinks God created this world. This does not seem to be the kind of world God would create, and certainly not the kind of world he would sustain. Given this world, then, it seems we should conclude that it is improbable that it was created or sustained by anything we would call God. Thus, given this particular world, it seems we should conclude that it is improbable that God – who if he exists, created this world ­­– exists. Consequently, the belief that God does not exist, rather than the belief that he exists, would seem to be justified by the evidence we find in this world.^[1]

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