The defence and vindication of God, defined as both omnipotent and good in the light of evil in the world. The term was first used by Leibniz in 1710.
Theodicy (adjectival form "theodicean") is a specific branch of theology and philosophy that attempts to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with the assumption of a benevolent God. An attempt to reconcile the co-existence of evil and God may thus be called "a theodicy".
Origin of the term
The term theodicy comes from the Greek θεός (theós, "god") and δίκη (díkē, "justice"), meaning literally "the justice of God". The term was coined in 1710 by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in a work entitled Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal ("Theodicy Essay on the Benevolence of God, the Free will of man, and the Origin of Evil"). The purpose of the essay was to show that the evil in the world does not conflict with the goodness of God, and that notwithstanding its many evils, the world is the best of all possible worlds.
The problem of evil
The problem of evil has from earliest times engrossed the attention of Western philosophers. In his Dictionnaire historique et critique, the well-known sceptic Pierre Bayle denied the goodness and omnipotence of God on account of the sufferings experienced in this earthly life. In a thorough treatment of the question, the proofs both of the existence and of the attributes of God could not be disregarded, and the knowledge of God was gradually brought within the domain of theodicy. Theodicy came to be synonymous with natural theology (theologia naturalis) that is, the department of metaphysics which presents the positive proofs for the existence and attributes of God and solves the opposing difficulties. Theodicy, therefore, may be defined as an attempt to explain the nature of God through the exercise of reason alone. This is in juxtaposition to theology, which attempts to explain the nature of God using supernatural revelation and faith.
Some have argued that the predetermined goal of theodicy (that of justifying the existence of God with the existence of evil) tarnishes any aspirations it might have to be a serious philosophical discipline, because an intellectual pursuit having a predefined goal and preassumed conclusions cannot be deemed in any reasonable way to be methodical, scientific, or rational. They assert that just as the existence of God may be reasonably doubted, it may also be reasonably believed, because the existence or non-existence of God is, by its very nature, beyond the realm of observable and verifiable phenomena with which science concerns itself. Therefore, since it is reasonable to believe that God may exist, theodicy is a reasonable attempt to reconcile the hypothesised existence of God with the perceived existence of evil. While theodicy cannot prove the existence of God, it can make belief in God reasonable, by showing that the existence of God is not necessarily incompatible with the existence of evil.
The nature of God
Theodicy investigates the question of God's nature and attributes. to the second class the knowledge, volition, and action of God. The action of God includes the creation, maintenance, and governance of the world, the co-operation of God with the activity of the creature, and the working of miracles. While many grant that all our cognition of God is incomplete, this branch of theodicy attempts to explain those traits of God of which we have some understanding. It includes, for instance, the classical problem of how God can be infinitely good and yet allow evil to occur.
Calvinism asserts that all events are part of God's righteous plan, and therefore, though they may involve true evil in themselves, they are intended by God for morally justified purposes (which are not always apparent to humans). Open Theism asserts that God's goodness is displayed in the creation of beings with free will. Given free will, even an omniscient God would not claim to know that which God had determined not to be knowable. Therefore, free creatures may commit evil actions, but God's gift of freedom is still good. Maltheism asserts that the "problem of evil" is not a problem at all—the initial question has a simple answer, there is no way that a benevolent omnipotent God would allow evil in the world. Therefore, they reason, God is either not benevolent or not omnipotent. "Modified Dualism", since the powers of good and evil are unequal, and the evil power is merely tolerated by the good power, who turns all the acts of the evil power into eventual good. St. John of Damascus proposed that God deliberately leaves some events "in our hands".Examples of theodicy
Resolutions to the problem of evil generally entail one of the following:
What humans consider evil or suffering is an illusion or unimportant. God's divine plan is good. What we see as evil is not really evil; A perfect God is not only good but also evil, since perfection implies no lacking, including not lacking that which is evil. Evil is the consequence of God permitting humans to have free will, or God may intend evil and suffering as a test for humanity. Evil is the consequence, not cause, of people not observing God's revealed will. God's ultimate purpose is to glorify Himself (which, by definition, He alone is infinitely entitled to, without vanity). God created perfect angels and perfect humans with a free will. For a while God will allow this to continue, so that it can be proven that his creations can not be happy while independent from God because this was the challenge which caused the rebellion in the first place. In due time God will restore the people who choose to depend on God to perfection and so bring an end to sin and with it an end to evil. Therefore, evil is a consequence of that rebellion, descendant from those who chose to act against God. God, in his justice, allows humans to experience the result of their rebellion, for a limited time, to establish their inability to eliminate evil on their own, as well as their 'need' for God and his superior sovereignty. God is a righteous judge; Evil is one way that God tests humanity, to see if we are worthy of His grace. The world is corrupt and of itself shouldn't have been created, but the work of Christ (or some savior figure) redeems the world and thus God's creation of it. One of the conflicting assumptions is wrong: Drop either the assumption that God is omniscient, or omnipotent, or perfectly good. See the entry on the subject of God and omnipotence for more details on this point. Religions such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism, and even some Christian groups, dispense with the issue by embracing various forms of dualism, in which God is opposed by an evil counterpart, and is therefore not omnipotent. Dystheism is a theoretical position that claims that God simply is not entirely good himself. This resolves the problem of evil by acknowledging that an omnipotent all-benevolent God would not create a world in which there was evil, concluding that God, assuming he exists, is not all-benevolent. Evolutionary theodicy, suggests that the plan that God has involves the elimination of all evil at the end of time, but that the means by which creation occurs always leads to the presence of evil in the interim. This theory is linked to the evolution of God himself as present in the cosmos. Nontheists claim that statements about God are unimportant or meaningless. Atheists resolve the apparent contradiction by rejecting the hypothesized existence of God (possibly for reasons other than the problem of evil). Some atheists think that the problem of evil can be used to prove that no gods exist by the method of reductio ad absurdum (proof by contradiction). This method does not prove the non-existence of all gods, rather it is an argument that if such a god exists then he is not both omnipotent and benevolent.The free will theodicy
Assume that both God and Man possess ultimate free will. This certainly entails the possibility of evil acts, making the free will theodicy plausible prima facie.
But must free will necessarily lead to evil? but that would assume a will that is evil rather than free. Another explanation is that to be free we must act differently from God, and if God is morally perfect, our free actions must then be evil; And evil, having once arisen even by chance, plausibly led to more evil.
The free will theodicy argues that if God were to 'get involved' and start influencing human actions for the better, then human actions wouldn't be free any longer. Human freedom means that God cannot guarantee human perfection (see incompatible-properties arguments).
This requires that free will be a good in itself, greater than the evil it costs to allow such freedom. Why should it be better for God to respect human freedom? The response is that free will is what makes us valuable moral agents, and that, if God were to deny us our freedom, human society would be in a deep sense, like an assemblage of robots: not only incapable of evil, but incapable of moral choice in general.... Though value would exist in such a world, the free moral agency possessed by God and actual humans is argued to be far greater.
This argument can only explain evil traceable, however indirectly, to free will. Free will does not seem to account for all the evil we observe, but only certain evil such as that we humans freely create—so-called 'moral evil'.
Some instances of moral evil also themselves involve violations of free will—e.g., murder or rape, and these present a slightly more complex problem. For God to step in and deny the violator his freedom would also be to protect the victim's freedom. It is morally implausible that, given that choice, the best thing to do is to respect a rapist's free choice to rape rather than the victim's free choice not to be raped. So, for moral evil involving coercion—the value of free will may not justify God's inaction. For God to intervene on either side would abridge freedom. God's permitting a rape to occur is logically no different from God permitting any other moral evil to occur, making this criticism of free will theodicy circular. Since one must speculate that the victim has asked for God to intervene and God has refused. Also it is reductionist since it stipulates that God's judgement would only take into account immediacy and the consequence of those directly involved rather than what effect said incident would have on all of reality over time. Compatibilists sometimes attack the essential premise that God cannot influence our choices without thereby cancelling our freedom. Thus the question of exactly how God's intervention would undermine free moral agency is crucial. We need a reason to think that there are at least some, perhaps many, ways that God really couldn't override our choices without cancelling our freedom. But it might also be the kind of coercion that motivates our above intuition that if God got involved, we'd all be 'robots'. If God were to get involved as a Divine Policeman, making threats and enforcing them, then would we be 'robots'? But then the moral claim that God should hold back must be more refined: To just what extent could God (consistently) intervene, without abridging free will? These challenges suggest different ways for God to eliminate evil, all the while leaving our free will untouched—"innocent interventions". One proposal is for God to fortify humans as to render us less vulnerable to the sins of our fellows. Most supporters of a free will theodicy would argue that it is moral free agency, not a vacuous freedom that has no moral consequences, which is essential to making us truly different from automata.
A very similar proposal is that God could allow sinful acts, but stop their evil consequences. So if I fire a rifle at your head, God allows me to make the decision, but then makes the trigger stick, or the rifle misfire, or the bullet pop out of existence. and a world where all evil choices were grossly unattractive would likewise not leave us truly free moral agents. Presumably an omnipotent God could isolate each of us in a 'virtual' world where others appear to suffer but in reality are soulless, experience-free imitations of life, i.e., each soul could inhabit its own matrix filled entirely with programs imitating human suffering but not actually experiencing it. However, a theology which rests on a huge deception orchestrated by the supreme being (namely, the false appearance that our acts can do evil), is unattractive to those concerned with knowledge of the deity, which requires revelation and the veracity of god.
The Calvinistic theodicy
John Calvin and other Reformed Christians have held to a form of theological determinism and compatibilism, and thus have denied that man possesses free will in the libertarian sense.
For God to hold man morally accountable, yet to predestine everything that man thinks or does, something other than the "freedom of contraries" must ground this accountability. But man's moral state of being is presently subject to sin, and this fact, itself, is part of the problem of evil. As a representative of the race, when he sinned against God by eating the forbidden fruit, the entire race fell under the curse of God with him. How could Adam be held accountable (and with him the entire human race), if he was not free to do other than he did do—if God really intended for him to do exactly as he did? and, second, that though both Adam and God intended that evil should come about, their purposes were distinct, God's being ultimately good, Adam's being ultimately evil.
The Reformed Theodicy boils down to the distinction of purposes between the primary agent (God) and the secondary agents (humans). While it is true that God intends to bring about evil, God's purpose is not, of itself, evil (cf. The evil doesn't disappear, it is still there (just ask the child!), but the problem of evil is no longer present, because the intention is good.
In other words not all actions which bring about suffering or even evil acts are necessarily evil themselves. There is no problem of evil in the example with the father, and arguably no evil in the sense of moral failing, because his actions serve a greater good. In either case the Calvinist must still claim that God's choice to create a flawed man who would engage in sin or evil does serve a greater good. Thus it seems this position allows us no choice but to accept that some mysterious good is served by having a world filled with imperfect and sometimes evil men as opposed to a world where only those souls who will choose to be good and holy are born.
Opponents of this position have argued that it endorses an "ends justifies the means" system of ethics, but this charge is suspect since Reformed Christians claim that the means, of themselves, are truly evil, and therefore subject to punishment, not justified by the ends to which God intends them.
Proponents have argued that the Free Will Theodicy is actually, in principle, no different from the Reformed Theodicy, it simply places the bare possession of libertarian free will as the good that God intented to bring about by the existence of evil, and that the Reformed Theodicy does more justice to the Biblical account of God and man.
In Hyper-Calvinism, on the contrary, the parallel existence of the goodness of God, and evil, is not considered a paradox at all, and hence there is no acknowledgement of a theodicy within churches holding to such a theology. The idea here is that God is the active creator and instigator of all sin and evil, including the fall, using these as instruments to accomplish his plan. Satan, thus, is considered to have no power of his own but is merely God's puppet (citing e.g. An important part of Hyper-Calvinism is the belief in the absolute predestination of all things by God, i.e., nothing happens unless God actively makes something happen. One consequence of this view is that human beings, albeit separate entities from God, do not have a will separate from God. Hyper-Calvinists, however, do not agree with that assertion, instead saying that while man has no free will, God will still hold that man responsible for whatever sins he commits because he (God) has decided to judge mankind by his laws.
Relativity of goodness — evil is not absolute
A less well known approach has been that of the mathematical logician William Hatcher.
Briefly, Hatcher uses relational logic to show that very simple models of moral value that include a minimalist concept of "God" cannot be consistent with the premise of evil as an absolute, whereas goodness as an absolute is entirely consistent with the other postulates concerning moral value.
Human nature
Another, more subtle proposal is for God to alter human nature for the better.
But would it violate our freedom for God to have given us a better nature? Moreover, if God exists, then surely he had a large hand in crafting human nature. Their free choice changed us for the worse, and for God to change us for the better would be to disrespect their free choice. Invoking Original Sin only makes God look more and more morally confused.
God is not omnipotent or omniscient
The problem of evil only exists when one simultaneously holds that God is omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful) and benevolent (all good).
Some schools of the Kabbalah (esoteric Jewish mysticism) argue that the creation of the universe required a self-limitation on the part of God, and that evil is a consequence of God's self-imposed exile from the universe He created. In some readings of this theology, God has deliberately created an imperfect world. The question then arises as to why God would create such a world, and the standard response is to maximize human freedom and free will. Other readings of the same Kabbalistic texts one can hold that this is the best world that God could possibly create, and that God is not omnipotent.
In some theistic Unitarian Universalism, in much of Conservative and Reform Judaism, and in some liberal wings of Protestant Christianity, God is said to be capable of acting in the world only through persuasion, and not by coercion. God makes Himself manifest in the world through inspiration and the creation of possibility, and not by miracles or violations of the laws of nature. God relinquishes his omnipotence, in order that humanity might have absolute free will.
The idea of a non-omnipotent God was developed by philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, in the theological system known as process theology.
In the Evangelical movement of some Protestant churches, Open Theism (also called Free Will Theism), similarly asserts that God acts under His own power, but the future following truly free acts does not yet exist and therefore cannot be known even to an omniscient God. Mackie, in his now classic article "Evil and Omnipotence", argued that human freedom is consistent with human perfection, and that God should have opted for both. Finally, he notes that God could have chosen to bring about any possible world, from the one that is actual, to a world in which people choose more wickedly, to the good world Mackie just described. The only reply can be that, in choosing to bring about that world, God would thereby deny humans their freedom. For if it were, then God would have denied us our freedom by bringing about the actual world. Bringing about a world in which people make choices is not freedom-cancelling, and so God should have brought about a world in which people make better choices. This argument is the seed of contemporary discussions of the logical argument from evil, which aims to show that theism and evil are logically incompatible. Plantinga's "free will defense" argues that evil is consistent with God's existence, because there are some possible worlds that God cannot bring about. This seems curious enough, if we assume that God is omnipotent.
Step one: Plantinga proposes that there are logical truths—so-called "counterfactuals of freedom"—about our free choices in various possible situations, with one choice dictated for every situation. On Plantinga's example, where S is a situation in which Curley is free to take or refuse a bribe, it is either true that "If Curley were to be free in S, he would take the bribe" or "If Curley were to be free in S, he would refuse the bribe" (assume that exactly one can be true). These truths about what we would freely do in possible situations help make us what we are, and are timelessly and necessarily true—and so, crucially, out of God's hands. Consequently, if the first proposition is true (and Curley would take the bribe), then God cannot bring about the possible world in which Curley refuses the bribe. God can only bring about S and sadly watch Curley's freely chosen venality manifest itself, as timelessly reported by that unchangeable counterfactual of freedom.
Step two: Plantinga argues for the possibility of a person who will sin at least once, no matter what situation God puts him in. And God can do nothing to bring about the sinless possible worlds—that's up to the sinner, who will, as a matter of fact, choose otherwise.
We've arrived at the conclusion that perhaps even God cannot bring about Mackie's virtuous and sinless worlds. God may be omnipotent, but he can't change people's free decisions, and he can't change the fact that they will freely choose as they do. And if people will make nasty choices, then those possible worlds in which they choose good are beyond God's reach. Plantinga proposes that perhaps all persons suffer from transworld depravity, that perhaps the actual world, though not the best possible world, is the best one that God could bring about, if he is to respect the free choices of the creatures therein. And this scenario is one in which God's moral perfection is squared with having created a horrid world like our own.
(Here another problem arises, related to God's claim (in many religions) that, after the end of the world, a paradise will be created where evil is defeated. The whole argument that God in his omnipotence could not create the "virtuous sinless world" described above seems to be contradicted by his own claim to plan to do this very thing! If such a world is not possible, then God is lying about the promise of Heaven. If such a world is possible, and God plans to make one world that way, why wasn't our world also made this way? The argument for why God chose not to is that, as free-will comes with the possibility of appreciation, and God wishes us to experience the free will he granted us, we must have something with which to compare paradise to, and so appreciate it.)
One recent, friendly response to Plantinga is from Daniel Howard-Snyder and John O'Leary-Hawthorne. so it is reasonable to doubt that God really is consistent with evil. The conclusion is then not that theism and evil are compatible, but that, for all we reasonably believe, theism and evil are compatible. Although, if God is given the two choices of "transworld depravity" or "transworld sactified", this would simply create a microcosm of the larger question. If Plantinga's God could create either world, being all good, would logically require the choice of "transword sanctified", as Mackie notes the less sinful world would be the required choice. In Plantinga's scenario, God's decisions cause human behavior and the psychological makeup whence that behavior stems; consequently, Gale maintains, human freedom gets cancelled by God's decisions. Now, as Gale notes, Plantinga's God can't change peoples' counterfactuals of freedom; But, by Plantinga, God does decide which possible persons get actualized, knowing full well their counterfactuals of freedom; it's up to God who gets to exist and then do their stuff. Moreover, God crafts his creatures' psychological makeup, which in turn exercises significant influence over their decisions. This is freedom-cancelling, even if our psychology doesn't determine our decisions, for it makes God like a mad scientist who implants a test subject with new dispositions and preferences to make her more agreeable. The result is that Plantinga's God is in charge of too much, robbing humans of their freedom. Lewis called pain "God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world".
Non-dual (Advaita) answers to the problem of evil
Non-dual mysticism answers the question of theodicy by maintaining that every seemingly separate person is in fact a thought, dream, or experience of God. God creates and becomes / experiences each creation, deliberately limiting itself to a specific identity in space and time to undergo a particular life experience. Therefore it is God who experiences every pain, suffers every indignity, dies every death, experiences the illusion of being each separate individual. If a theodicy were true, then all evil events, including human actions, can be somehow rationalized as permitted or affected by God, and therefore there can no longer be such a thing as "evil" values, even for a murderer (indeed, this is the basis of the moral argument from evil, by Dean Stretton ).
Hindu answers to the problem of evil
Hindu philosophers, especially those from the Vedanta school, have also attempted to craft solutions to the problem of evil.Against theodicy
The late Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder wrote an unfinished essay entitled "Trinity Versus Theodicy: Hebraic Realism And The Temptation To Judge God" (1996). Yoder argues that "if God be God" then theodicy is an oxymoron and idolatry. Yoder is not opposed to attempts to reconcile the existence of a God with the existence of evil;
Yoder was deeply concerned and engaged with the problem of evil; Yoder's "case [is] against garden variety 'theodicy' "— in particular, theodicy as a judgment or defense of God.
Yoder asks:
a) Where do you get the criteria by which you evaluate God? b) Why [do] you think you are qualified for the business of accrediting Gods? He writes, "Theodicy is a familiar technical term, coined by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to mean 'the justification of God.' " In his book, Braiterman coins the term "antitheodicy" meaning "refusing to justify, explain, or accept" the relationship between "God (or some other form of ultimate reality), evil, and suffering." it might even express stubborn love that human persons have for God. After all, the author of a genuine antitheodic statement must believe that an actual relationship subsists between God and evil in order to reject it; and they must love God in order to be offended by that relationship." Yoder describes their approach as "the Jewish complaint against God, dramatically updated (and philosophically unfolded) since Auschwitz ...Evidential arguments from evil
Evidential arguments from evil seek to show that the existence of evil provides evidence for God's nonexistence, rather than implying the logical impossibility of God. The theist may always postulate some unknown, distant good that cannot be seen, and this will always be possible since there will always theoretically be something that God can know that we cannot. Hence, such philosophers focus instead on whether evil provides evidence for or against the existence of God. Their line of argument is: the existence of God may be logically compatible with the existence of evil, but the logical possibility of his existence does not mean that we are justified in believing that He does in fact exist. For such a belief to be justified, evidence is needed, and in the balance of evidence for and against the existence of God, the facts about evil weigh heavily on the negative side of the scales.
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