In this article, we are going to take a hard look at the problem of evil. We begin with an excerpt from my book You’re not as Crazy as I Think. I then offer some additional thoughts.
On April 15, 1989, Ramon Salcido took his three daughters—Teresa, age two; Carmina, age three; and Sofia, age four—out to a field. He then proceeded with horrifyingly methodic calculation to take each child over his knee, pull her head back, and slit her throat. Here is the account provided by Carmina (the sole survivor): ‘[He] grabs my hair, pulls my head back and I put my hands up … protecting, so he cut open my fingers and I moved them…. I move my hands out of the way, [in] one clean cut. It was just like a razor.’ And there he left them to die, lying facedown in the dirt, with gaping wounds from ear to ear. Approximately thirty-six hours later the children were found. And while Teresa and Sofia were long since dead, incredibly three-year-old Carmina was still holding on to life.
Undoubtedly, Christians are most successful at dealing with the problem of evil when they treat evil as some abstract quantity that can be isolated and analyzed apart from actual evil events. Kept at the level of abstraction the problem of evil is relatively manageable. As we have seen, God allows evil because of his intent to achieve commensurately greater goods, a view that is called the greater goods theodicy. In much the same way that a parent subjects a child to the suffering of chemotherapy to achieve the greater good of a cancer-free body, so God subjects human beings to many horrible experiences, in part, for the greater good of sanctified creatures.
While this theodicy works fine in the abstract (that is, when our discussion is restricted to ‘evil’ and ‘good’ as general qualities abstracted from their concrete instantiations), when applied in the concrete it loses much of its appeal. Indeed, in the minds of some it makes God look positively monstrous. Even for the Christian who accepts God’s providential hand working sovereignly in all events, there is something distinctly unpalatable about the notion that an Israelite mother cannibalized her child or a father slit his children’s throats so that God might achieve a commensurately greater good. As a result, though I may believe the argument to be valid, I can nonetheless understand why atheists like Richard Dawkins find the reasoning of greater goods theodicy to be ‘grotesque.’
In that excerpt, I point out that evil is not an abstract problem. Or at the very least, it is not primarily an abstract problem. Rather, it is a concrete problem which is constituted by many terrible acts including Ramon Salcido’s unspeakable murder and attempted murder of his daughters. At this point, I’d like to go further into the resulting disagreement between (Christian) theists and atheists concerning the relationship between these kinds of horrors and theism.
That brings us to a common philosophical saying — One man’s modus ponens [MP] is another man’s modus tollens [MT] — which provides us with a key to interpreting this standoff. In order to explain this statement, we should begin by explaining what MP and MT are. These terms refer to two different valid forms of logical argument:
MP
- If P then Q.
- P.
- Therefore, Q.
MT
- If P then Q.
- Not Q.
- Therefore, not P.
So now, back to the saying: One man’s modus ponens [MP] is another man’s modus tollens [MT]. The idea here is that two different people can interpret the same data differently relative to their distinct starting points, and that includes the theist and atheist’s very different interpretation of Ramon Salcido’s horrific actions:
MP [The Theist’s View]
- If God allowed Ramon Salcido to commit this atrocity then God had morally sufficient reasons for doing so.
- God allowed Ramon Salcido to commit this atrocity.
- Therefore, God had morally sufficient reasons for doing so.
MT [The Atheist’s View]
- If God allowed Ramon Salcido to commit this atrocity then God had morally sufficient reasons for doing so.
- God did not have morally sufficient reasons for doing so.
- Therefore, God did not allow Ramon Salcido to commit this atrocity.
[Given that Ramon Salcido could only commit this atrocity if God (an omnipotent being) did allow it, the conclusion to MT entails that God, as defined, does not exist.]
Note that the theist and atheist agree on the conditional first premise. But they part ways at the second premise: P vs. not-Q. The Christian theist reasons that God allowed this evil from which it follows that he had morally sufficient reasons to do so. The atheist, by contrast, insists that God could not have a morally sufficient reason to allow this evil. And thus, we can conclude that God did not allow it (and indeed, that God does not exist).
Interestingly, at this point in the standoff, I often find atheists growing frustrated. “Well if you’re going to insist that God has a morally sufficient reason for every evil that occurs then how can I ever hope to falsify your Christian faith?”
It’s a strange complaint, however. Don’t get mad at me if you are unable to demonstrate that this terrible evil is one for which God could not have a morally sufficient reason. After all, you’re the one claiming to have a reason to believe God does not exist.
Moreover, the atheist objector needs to appreciate that they are in precisely the same position. If the Christian is failing to demonstrate to the atheist’s satisfaction that God had a morally sufficient reason to allow this evil, the atheist is likewise failing to demonstrate to the theist’s satisfaction that God does not have a morally sufficient reason to allow this evil. There is a perfect symmetry in this standoff, a stark contrast of intuitions borne of distinct starting points.
And that brings me back to the opening excerpt from my book You’re not as Crazy as I Think. One thing each side should do is attempt to see things from the other’s perspective. The Christian should develop a sympathetic understanding of the atheist’s perspective by contemplating horrific evils rather than evil in the abstract. And the atheist likewise should develop sympathetic understanding for the Christian’s perspective by grappling with the reality of cognitive closure such that our inability to see how God could have a morally sufficient reason for allowing evils like this is not, in itself, a good reason to believe that there is no God who has a morally sufficient reason for allowing evils like this.
Finally, at the end of the day, we may each find ourselves in a place like Martin Luther at the Council of Worms:
“Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.”
In other words, we must each make our own judgment as to how things seem to us. But hopefully, we will do so with a charitable appreciation for the reasons that others may reasonably disagree.
