Where Does Atheodicy Get Us?
In the famous article of his Summa Theologiae wherein he sets forth his “five ways” of proving the existence of God, St. Thomas Aquinas cited and briefly rebutted two main objections to holding that God exists. I label them the explanatory superfluity of God and the problem of evil. They remain the most common objections to this very day. The difference today is that the latter is often used to support the former. That seems to work well for many—until one asks: “What then?”
The term for disbelieving in God because of the problem of evil is ‘atheodicy’. The chief motivator for atheodicy is not just any old evil, however, but a certain kind of evil: great, undeserved suffering. Even when people cite great moral evils, such as the Holocaust, as a reason to disbelieve in God, what gives the reason its force is precisely how those evils make the innocent suffer and/or die. Given such evil, many see the existence of the God of classical theism generally, and that of mainstream Christianity in particular, as either logically impossible or greatly improbable. Those who have seen a beloved little child die horribly, or who otherwise can identify with the character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, understand that attitude well.
Now many philosophers of religion, secular and religious alike, are willing to concede that the evil in question does not ultimately pose a logical problem. For it is at least logically possible not only that God can bring “greater good” out of evil, as St. Thomas says, but also that such greater good is reason enough for permitting such evil. Even secular utilitarians can and should appreciate that point. (In fact, I would argue that only God is in a position to be a successful utilitarian. But that is for another time.) Today the problem of evil is mostly seen as one of abductive explanation, aka “inference to the best explanation.” Atheodicy now typically holds that, given how hard it is to explain why an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God chooses to preside over great, undeserved suffering, such evil is much easier to explain on atheism. If the world was not created with a (good) purpose, we shouldn’t be surprised that it usually distributes such suffering without regard to deserts. And since such suffering is entailed by the natural order of things, God is probably superfluous for explaining the universe’s existence too.
But as a philosopher, I’ve long been curious to know what positive accounts of reality people who embrace atheodicy turn to or develop. How do they explain the existence of the world, if at all? How do they deal with the kind of evil that most troubles us? Do they become nihilists, or perhaps Buddhists? Some do. The latter might even have something to recommend it, if only on a practical level. But it’s more interesting to seek out those who try to devise answers that would make the world’s existence seem explicable and worth embracing—and in the same vein, to explain undeserved suffering as potentially more than a cause for resignation and detachment.
What I have found is not encouraging. One might look to those philosophies, old and new, which purport to show that the world just had to exist, and be pretty much (or even exactly) as it is. I did, at one time. For good if various reasons, however, none of them are broadly influential. If one declines to enter those thickets, or emerges from them the wiser, what’s left is philosophies that neither explain the existence of the world nor afford reason to hope that the kind of evil which bothers us most serves a greater good. How is that an explanatory advantage?
In my next several posts, I shall examine and rebut what I see as the best arguments against classical theism from the “evidential problem of evil.”