Tradition makes many claims about God, such as that he’s omnipotent (capable of doing anything), omniscient (knows all there is to know), omnipresent (can be found in all places), eternal (unchanging, or existing beyond time), and benevolent (wishing the best for all). There are some problems, though, with putting all of these into one neat package, which I’ll discuss in greater detail.
Also, by “Abrahamic God,” I refer to the deity at the center of what’s often called Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious tradition (frequently shortened to “Judeo-Christian”).
One of the most important and best-known paradoxes imposed by western beliefs about God is known as the “problem of evil.” Simply put, if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent, why is there evil in the world? Isn’t God capable of eliminating evil (since he’s omnipotent), and wouldn’t he want to (since he’s benevolent)?
Most religious people don’t consider this to be a serious problem. They simply accept, axiomatically, that evil exists in spite of God. Even so, there have been many attempts over the last couple millennia to explain why evil exists in spite of an all-powerful, benevolent God. These are known as theodicies. While I cannot address all of the theodicies which have ever been proposed, I would like to discuss a few of the most common ones.
Of course, one could, alternatively, conclude that God is either not benevolent or not omnipotent. This is not a theodicy, however, since the point of a theodicy is to explain why God can be both of these things, yet evil exists.
There are problems with all of these theodicies. The pragmatic theodicy and the irrelevancy theodicy are related to one another, and in either case, all discussion ends, at that point — neither theodicy gets us anywhere, both leave one still trying to understand how evil can exist in a universe created by an all-powerful, benevolent God. So these don’t satisfy.
The divine-limitation theodicy is flawed, because ultimately, it isn’t a theodicy; it states that God has limitations, which is impossible, if one also asserts that God is omnipotent. Even most theologians do not accept this theodicy, although it does still crop up from time to time.
The illusory and deceptive theodicies fall apart due to the fact that suffering and evil are inherently subjective in nature. That is, only someone who is suffering can say if they’re actually suffering. If you broke your leg, for example, I cannot stand by and insist that you are’nt experiencing any pain. Of course you are, you know it — in spite of the fact that no one else can sense your pain — and it would be laughable for me to do so. By the same token, God (or his apologists) cannot stand off, aloof, and simply define the suffering or evil that goes on in the world, as not being “true” evil, or as not actually existing. This distinction is ours to make, not His. Since suffering occurs, and evil exists, and we all know it since we’ve all experienced them, these theodicies also fail.
The learning and comprehension theodicies are related to one another; they fail due to God’s omnipotence. That is, he is infinite in potential; there must, therefore, be ways for him to teach us things, or to express his goodness, which “don’t” require us to suffer. So these theodicies also fail.
The heavenly-reward theodicy has the flaw of assuming our physical lives to be — ultimately — meaningless. This makes no sense, however, for obviously God has given us physical lives, for a reason. Our physical lives cannot be “inconsequential,” they must by definition have some meaning. Furthermore, once one has suffered, the experience of having suffered, remains. The only way to eliminate that, would be to wipe our memories upon our entry into heaven — which, again, relegates our physical lives to irrelevancy, and we’ve already established that our physical lives can’t be irrelevant. So this theodicy, too, fails the test of logic.
This leaves us with the free will theodicy, which might appear the strongest of all, and it’s the one most theologians (and theists with any interest in the subject) lean on. Evil exists, according to this theodicy, so that we can choose to do good or ill, or ultimately, so that we can choose for or against God. There are a number of problems with this theodicy, however:
As you can see, all theodicies are flawed, fatally. Every single last one of them. From the empirical evidence before us, we know that we live in a world full of evil and suffering; and moreover, we know that it’s inconsistent to posit a God who is both all-powerful and benevolent. What remains is to determine which of these two qualities God actually has.
I will address this issue with a thought experiment. Imagine that you are at the beginning of Time. God is — well, somewhere! — all alone. He decides to make a Creation.
Let’s assume that God is all-powerful. At the moment of Creation, therefore, He has an infinite number of possibilities before Him. He can create any kind of universe He wants — including one so alien to us that we couldn’t even conceive of it! He has some goal in mind — a cosmic purpose, if you will — and wants to achieve it, whatever it might be.
Now, at the moment of Creation, God made a decision. He chose to make the universe we are in, right now, a universe with evil in it.
What does this tell us about God? you may be wondering. Put bluntly, it says everything! Really, it’s all we need to know about the Abrahamic deity.
Whether God is or isn’t all-powerful, obviously it was His choice to create the universe we now live in, and populate it with people who would be subjected to suffering and evil.
All of this leads us to the conclusion that, if He exists, the Judeo-Christian God is not actually benevolent, at least not by our definition of that word, since He has placed His interests ahead of ours, to our detriment. (He may still call Himself “benevolent,” however, this has no meaning to us since He cannot be benevolent in any way that we can recognize.)
So if God is not benevolent, it stands to reason that He must be either ambivalent (neutral toward humanity’s welfare) or malevolent (desiring our suffering). Deists of the 17th and 18th centuries took the former view; they believed that God created the laws of interaction (what we’d call the laws of physics), got the ball rolling, then stood back and watched. But another underlying assumption that the Abrahamic faiths make about their God, is that he is interested in the world we live in and has interacted with it periodically through history ... and he continues to do so even today, in the lives of his believers. Logically, then, this eliminates the possibility that the Abrahamic God can be ambivalent or uninvolved in his own Creation.
There is, of course, one final way to view God’s moral and ethical nature. That would be to assert that, while God cannot be “benevolent” in any way meaningful to us, it is just as invalid to call Him ambivalent or malevolent. In short, since He is infinite in power and scope, it’s impossible to qualify His morality by any human term. His nature doesn’t lend itself to description by humans using human language.
Empirically speaking, this is a valid viewpoint, if one is speaking of God only in a generic sense (as, say, Deists do). But we are speaking here specifically of the Abrahamic God, and the idea that he is beyond comprehension is one which most Abrahamic theists do not agree with; in Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, God has most certainly revealed himself to humanity, whether through prophets (as Judaism and Islam claim), or in person (as Christians do). The Abrahamic God cannot be anything like the aloof, esoteric, remote being posited by Deism (for example), since he has been involved in his creation since the beginning. The idea that God cannot be known, forces us even to dispense with the idea of “God” altogether, since by virtue of this decision, we have decided that God cannot be described in words and therefore cannot even be labeled by humans, let alone understood.
The only rational and logical conclusion one can come to, then, about the Abrahamic God, is that it is not possible for him/her/it to be benevolent or even ambivalent. Logically, the Abrahamic God can only be malevolent.
↵ Go back up to the “Extras” page.
↵↵Go back up to Early Christian History menu.