The Problem of Evil

Suppose that evil exists as the denial of good. Does that disprove the existence of God? I argue that the existence of evil does not serve as evidence concerning God. The entire problem of evil assumes that we can comprehend God’s nature and will; but if God should exist, He would exist beyond human comprehension, so the ‘evil’ we perceive cannot provide any evidence concerning God’s existence.

The three qualities of God appear to be defined easily—all powerful, all knowing, and morally perfect. However, they lie contrary to terms like truth and knowledge, which apply to human experience. For example, defining knowledge as justified, true, belief (JTB) leads to the Gettier problem, where one can have JTB without actual knowledge due to accidental truth—cases that are not just hypothetical but probable in the empirical world. In contrast, the paradox of God’s qualities lie in the concepts themselves, cannot be applied to experience, and outline the limit of our comprehension. 

Omniscience is the ability to know all truths. But if God knows all, including the future of humans, then do humans have free will? And if God knows its own actions in the future, then does God have free will? Another challenge to omniscience comes from Cantor’s theorem, which showed the impossibility for the existence of a set of all truths. Though this is widely accepted, many question the relationship between this impossibility with omniscience; namely, does there exist a difference between God knowing every member of a set of all truths and God knowing all truths?

Omnipotence means all powerful. It gives rise to the classical paradox of God’s ability to bind himself—can God create a rock that He cannot lift? If He can, then there would be a rock He cannot lift; if he can not, then he lacks the power to complete an action. Either way undermines God’s omnipotence. 

Beyond these unresolved paradoxes, human models of God not only fail to resolve these contradictions, but also cannot explain how God influences and knows our world. We know the world through our senses and the mind, and act upon the world through our body. However, we have no comprehension of how God, should he exist, interacts with the world. Some might say through miracles, dreams, or visions, but none of these we can rationally explain. Humans acquire knowledge through learning, while God’s knowledge comes through his essence—we cannot comprehend what this means. Because of our inability to understand God’s abilities, attempts to limit and define Him will ultimately fail.

The incomprehensibility of omniscience and omnibenevolence causes omnibenevolence to also be unknowable. To be omnibenevolent is to be morally perfect—everything about God is good. The basis of omnibenevolence lies in omnipotence and omniscience. God’s omniscience allows him to know ‘good’ perfectly in any circumstance, while omnipotence gives him the power to ‘enforce, determine, or act’ good in any given circumstance. Only if one has the knowledge to know right and power to do right in all circumstances can one be perfectly good; only an omniscient and omnipotent being can be omnibenevolent. Since omnibenevolence depends on omniscience and omnipotence, it too must be beyond human comprehension. 

Arguments made on the problem of evil relies on the assumption that we can perceive the role of evil in the world from a divine perspective. That is, there exists evil in the world which an omnibenevolent God, should He exist, would interfere with. But because of our inability to comprehend omnibenevolence and God’s relationship with good, any argument that relies on it fails. Evil cannot serve as evidence for the existence of God, not because suffering does not exist, but because we have no access to the divine moral framework by which God operates. We assume that evil is incompatible with God, but if divine morality transcends human comprehension, then that assumption is unjustified. 

Attempts of humans to define divine morality while proving the existence of God have resulted in contradictions, paradoxes, or unsatisfactory results. The most common problem concerning omnibenevolence is the Euthyphro dilemma—is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? If God’s will defines good, then we have no guarantee what God commands is actually ‘good’. Even if God acts ‘evil’, it would still be ‘good’. Human moral judgements would then be irrelevant, as good and evil upon which moral judgements are based on will be arbitrary. In the latter case, good is something external, ultimate, objective, and outside of God. God chooses the ‘good’ over the denial of good. However, God cannot act evil and must always choose good, which undermines God’s omnipotence. Certain philosophers have also suggested that God’s essence is good, and God embodies goodness itself. This, however, comes down to the Euthyphro dilemma as well—is God’s nature good because it aligns with moral standards, or are moral standards good because they align with God’s nature? It seems as if we cannot avoid moral arbitrariness or paradoxes. 

Another model by Kant uses a different method. Through his metaphysics framework of transcendence, he argues that human reason is the foundation for moral good: humans are rationally obligated to do good. Kant posited God as a necessary assumption within his system to ensure the alignment of moral virtue and happiness. But this model also fails to resolve the issue of incomprehensibility—Kant assumes human moral structure and its relationship with God, which cannot be necessarily applied to the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being that God is. Even he himself said that he could not prove the existence of God, only assume His existence.

Some philosophers might suggest that even if omnibenevolence is incomprehensible in principle, religious morality still functions in practice. This suggests that divine morality is to some extent understandable if divine scripture guides moral behavior effectively. However, these moral systems are merely human attempts to approximate God’s model—their origin lies in our interpretation, and are fundamentally human morality rather than divine goodness. We also do not have any guarantee that divine scriptures such as the Bible come from God, or are merely human attempts to interpret the existence of God. 

I should point out that this is no form of skeptical theism. I stand not against theism or atheism, but rather the problem of evil itself—any argument that uses evil as evidence is null, as its most fundamental assumption that an omnibenevolent God would interfere with a human’s perception of ‘evil’ is not proven. 

Though many argue that evil exists because some suffering appears so unnecessary that no moral system could justify it, they all assume that either 

(1) that rendering morality unknowable is evil, or 

(2) that we judge good and evil from a divine perspective. 

Both assumptions fail: (1) fails to distinguish between divine and human morality. Making divine morality unknowable does not affect human morality nor does gratuitous evil render divine morality unknowable, but rather our ability to comprehend. (2) assumes that we can perceive divine morality, which we cannot.

In the end, we have no rational guarantee that gratuitous suffering is evil, and that God will interfere with evil. The incomprehensibility of omniscience and omnipotent causes omnibenevolence, which is based upon those two qualities, to also transcend human logic. The problem of evil, then, was misguided from the start. 

Not only can human reason not comprehend omniscience and omnipotence, but also the nature of good and evil from a divine perspective. Therefore we cannot interpret or connect in any way from human experience/reason to the will of God. As a result, no human argument regarding evil can serve as evidence for God’s existence in any way. Any attempt to assess evil or good in perspective with God will only result in failure; it would be as if a three dimensional creature attempted to understand a five dimensional one.

The only possible way that humans would be certain of the existence of God is that God appeared and spoke to all of humanity, not through a book, but through first-hand, clear appearance; though limited as the human’s perception will be, we will certainly know of God’s existence. But so far, it seems like the God is not willing. 

Essay ends here.

Transcendent things are that which exists beyond human experience, but that which humans can perceive the appearances of. That is, though we cannot perceive things as they are, we can still perceive them as they seem to be. A being such as God, however, has the ability to perceive (omniscience) and manipulate (omnipotence) ‘appearances’ of the empirical world and the world of ‘things-in-themselves’, which, according to Kant, humans cannot perceive. Thus, just as the transcendent realm transcends our world, these two qualities transcend the transcendent world, and trans-transcendent. We must recognize that omniscience and omnipotence are merely trans-transcendent qualities, and God, a being which embodies these qualities, is a trans-transcendent being. We must also see that there can be no trans-transcendent objects, only beings—only a being can manipulate or perceive objective things, whether it be the phenomenal world which humans can perceive and manipulate, or the noumenal/transcendental world which God can perceive and manipulate. 

The only way humans can interact or perceive trans-transcendent qualities/beings is through the change of ‘appearances’ in the empirical world. However, there is no guarantee that any ‘appearance’ we perceive comes from a trans-transcendent being, as to the human, rational perception, it might as well be another change in the empirical world. Contrary to the transcendent things of the noumenal world, which can only be applied negatively to demonstrate the limits of human knowledge, the trans-transcendent qualities can only be applied positively, and not to human reason. For example, if we ask the question, ‘can God know this’ or ‘can God do this’ , the answer will always be ‘Yes, God can know/do this.’  And though we always know the answer, we cannot comprehend how this yes comes to be, as that answer lies beyond human reason. For example, we can comprehend that ‘God made a phone disappear’, but we cannot comprehend how God made that phone disappear. However, this comprehension does not relate in any way to the existence of God, as there is no certainty in the comprehension. It would be the same as one who reads the Bible—an atheist would question, a theist would believe. Even should one have first-hand experience of an unexplained comprehension as ‘a phone disappeared’, there might be other ways an event could have come to be through qualities of the empirical world, and not the trans-transcendent God. 

From this, we see that no matter which path we attempt to take to define good and how God is omnibenevolent results either in a meaningless definition of good, or a contradiction between omnibenevolence and the other two qualities. Not only can human reason not comprehend omniscience and omnipotence, but also the nature of good and evil, and the action of being good not from a human perspective, but from a godly perspective. Therefore we cannot interpret or connect in any way from human experience/reason to the will of God—we simply cannot comprehend God’s existence in any way. As a result, no human argument regarding evil can serve as evidence for God’s existence in any way. Any attempt to assess evil or good in perspective with God will only result in failure; it would be as if a three dimensional creature attempted to understand a five dimensional one. Likewise, many human arguments for the existence of evil would be irrelevant.