God and the Second Person Problem of Evil
Greetings,
The problem of evil is one of the set piece questions in the philosophy of religion. Generally it’s stated in terms of three propositions that are taken to present a paradox or contradiction:
God is all powerful.
God is all good.
Bad things happen to innocent people.
According to Charles Taylor, modern secularity is constituted by the fact that religion has become a choice. It’s not that belief is socially or intellectually impossible in our world. Secularity is less a matter of hostility to belief than the notion that faith is optional. One might add that another feature of modernity’s approach to religion is to assume that it is primarily about belief. For the denizens of modernity, particularly those without a religious identity, religion tends to collapse down to the question, “Do you think that God exists?” Religion becomes primarily an epistemic question. The problem of evil is thus seen as a challenge to the plausibility of belief in God.
Modern philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga have noted that “the problem of evil” is actually several different philosophical puzzles. There is a logical problem of evil, which suggests that there is something literally incoherent about belief in God. In other words, conceptually affirming the three propositions above involves one in the logical equivalence of saying “Some triangles have four sides.” For reasons that have been explained with greater erudition than I possess by others, I don’t think that there is a logical problem here. The problem of affirming belief in God in the face of evil is not a matter of making a formal, logical error.
The much more challenging problem of evil is what is sometimes called the evidential problem of evil. The distinction between this problem and the logical problem of evil may be lost on those who find little delight in narrow intellectual distinctions. Roughly stated, it’s the distinction between saying, “I don’t think some triangles have four sides” and saying, “I don’t think that there are elephants who dance the tango in the nightclubs of Buenos Aires.” The first statement is a logical objection while the second is an evidential objection. The problem with the tango-dancing elephants isn’t that belief in them involves a logical contradiction but rather that there is little evidence for their existence and many reasons to doubt it. The evidential problem of evil amounts to the claim that widespread innocent suffering is a reason for downgrading the probability of God’s existence. While I think that there are arguments that can be made against the evidential objection, unlike the logical objection, I find it plausible and don’t begrudge the person who finds belief in the face of evil difficult.
One of the striking things to me is that neither the logical problem of evil nor the evidential problem of evil make any appearance in the scriptures. Indeed, the scriptures have very little interest in the question of whether God exists. Not being the product of a secular age, they aren’t really keyed into secularity’s conundrums. Hence, the Bible is content to say, “ The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” (Psalm 14:1) and move on to other issues.
Rather scripture focuses on what I think of as the second person problem of evil. Both the logical and the evidential problem of evil think about God in the third person. The issue is whether that person over there about whom we are talking in the third person in fact exists. In contrast, the second person problem of evil involves the believer who accepts God’s existence and in the face of suffering asks, “Where art thou?” This is the question of Job. More hauntingly, it is Jesus’s question on the cross when he cries out, “Eli Eli lama sabachthani?”
One might read these as rhetorical gestures in the debates of secularity, a poetic way of framing the epistemic question, but I think that’s a mistake. While in moments of personal despair, the logical or evidential problem of evil can take on existential significance, I think that mostly they are intellectual parlor games. They are the kind of fascinating philosophical conundrums that undergraduates discover and play with for a while until the pose of philosophical profundity becomes boring. They are also serious philosophical puzzles, but they often have the unreality of many “serious” philosophical puzzles. The second person problem of evil is much more real and visceral.
As I read the scriptures, there are basically three responses to the second person problem. There is the answer in the Book of Job. There the real action is the literary virtuosity with which the second person problem is put. The answer is altogether unsatisfying to me, as it amounts to a claim that humanity lacks the second person authority to put the question to God. God’s response in effect is to say to Job, “YOU have no business asking such a question of ME.” It’s viscerally second personal and avoids the descent into philosophical parlor games. But it's a frightening and unsatisfying answer.
The second answer is in effect the answer that Jesus gives to his own question on the cross, namely that one simply submits and hopes. Writing on Palm Sunday this is a less vacuous response to me than I suspect it appears to many of the denizens of modern secularity. The horror of Good Friday will be followed by Easter morning. I hope.
The third answer is that God will provide comfort in the face of one’s suffering. Comfort is a complex idea. When one suffers, comfort is not the same thing as healing or explanation. The suffering remains and may remain unexplained, but one does not suffer alone. There is a caregiver and a bit of water on parched lips. I don’t know that this is an especially powerful intellectual response to the second person problem of evil, but that is perhaps the point. The second person problem of evil isn’t really an intellectual problem. It is an interpersonal problem between the sufferer and God.
All that I can say in “defense” of this response is that I have experienced the late night despair of hospital rooms filled with the suffering of loved ones. In that moment, I felt the voice of God saying, “Peace to thy soul, my son.” And for me that is enough.
Until next time,
Nate Oman