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Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
-Epicurus
I didn’t intend to write a Part III for this topic, but it seems I have started a bit of a trend. Five days after I published Part I, the New Yorker publishes this article about the Problem of Evil (PoE)! I had no idea that their writers read my blog!
Okay, the article is a review of a book (Bart Ehrman’s God’s Problem) on the subject and it’s more likely that the PoE was on their minds for the same reasons it was on mine – the recent natural disasters in Myanmar and China that killed about 200,000 people. Regardless, James Wood wrote a great article on the topic. For those of you who prefer more of a narrative style to my philosophically-centered writing, I recommend giving it a read. Here’s an excerpt:
Theologians and philosophers talk about “the problem of evil,” and the hygienic phrase itself bespeaks a certain distance from extreme suffering, the view from a life inside the charmed circle. They mean the classic difficulty of how we justify the existence of suffering and iniquity with belief in a God who created us, who loves us, and who providentially manages the world. The term for this justification is “theodicy,” which nowadays seems a very old-fashioned exercise in turning around and around the stripped screw of theological scholastics. Still, if polls are correct, about eighty per cent of Americans ought to be engaged in such antiquarianism.
Well at least a few of us Americans did engage in such ‘antiquarianism’. If you missed out, you can still contribute to the discussions here, here, and especially here.
Seeming to once again following my cue, Wood wrote about his personal growth into non-belief and the role that the PoE played.
I remember the day, in my late teens, when I drew a line down the middle of a piece of paper, on one side of which I wrote my reasons for belief in God, on the other my reasons against… Theodicy, or, rather, its failure, was the other major entry on my debit side.
More interestingly, he has a beautiful response to the Free Will Theodicy:
But Heaven is also a problem for theodicists who take the freedom to choose between good and evil as paramount. For Heaven must be a place where either our freedom to sin has been abolished or we have been so transfigured that we no longer want to sin: in Heaven, our will miraculously coincides with God’s will. And here the free-will defense unravels, and is unravelled by the very idea of Heaven. If Heaven obviates the great human freedom to sin, why was it ever such a momentous ideal on earth, “worth” all that pain and suffering?
At least he didn’t copy completely from me. 
I should also mention that one of my intellectual heroes, Peter Singer, beat us both to it.
That free-will theodicy point is a good one.
Yeah, it never even occurred to me. Honestly, I don’t see any possible way around it other than denying the free will theodicy. It’s logic 101. The free will theodicy makes the statement “Free will implies sin”. If accepted, the contrapositive, “No sin implies no free will” must also be accepted. Simple yet powerful.
Sid I’m having a little trouble with your statement and it’s contrapositive.Here is another example of a statement and it’s contapositive which is incorrect.”Hating the U.S implies being a communist” Now the contrapositive”Not being a communist implies not hating the U.S” Well we know the last statement is untrue because there are many non communists who hate the U.S.
I don’t mean to be difficult but I don’t understand how the conclusion you made is simple yet powerful.
If the definition of sin has free will as an integral part of it then what you say is true however once the word implies is admitted to then the case is weakened.
Statements and their contrapositives always have the same truth value, whether that value be true or false. It’s a fundamental of logic.
In your example, the statement “hating the U.S. implies being a communist,” is false, as you point out. Thus it’s contrapositive must also be false.
In the example from the post, free will theodicists accept “free will implies sin” as true. Thus they are logically bound to accept “no sin implies no free will”. The implication for a sin-free afterlife is clear.
Does that help explain it?
To make it bare bones logic:
Take the statement: If A, then B. That is, if A is so, then B must also be so.
Now say B is not so. Therefore, it absolutely can’t be that A is so, because if it were, B would be so as well.
So, (If A then B) implies (If not B then not A).
Also, Scott, sid’s argument can perhaps be made a bit clearer when amended like this: Free will implies the ability to sin. In heaven there is no ability to sin (who would accept that people could sin in heaven?), so following the contrapositive, there is no free will in heaven.
Thank-you Sid and Snurp for your explanations.
First Sid “hating the U.S implies being a communist” is true in the context of my argument not false as you said.If you remember the cold war that was a fairly standard conclusion and for the most part it was right hence the word implies.The contrapositive however is false.This is because not everyone who hates the U.S is a communist.I think the problem I have is the word implies which hints at the connection .If and only if i think would be a better way to characterize the connection between sin and free will as in you can sin if and only if there is free will.
Now that I think about it I suppose I was splitting hairs but somehow the word implies just did’nt seem to be a strong enough connection between free will and sin.I think the two are joined at the hip.
Salesmen imply things all the time but it does’nt necessarily make them true.
Snurp your logic is good too (if a then b) tightens it up over implies.I suppose I am taking the common use of implies while you and sid are using it in a more hardened way.
Your comment to Scot got me thinking when you said that sin was impossible in heaven.If you have a heaven filled with good people there should be no problem just like here.If god has to destroy their free will in order to let them into heaven then they can’t be trusted and should’nt be there in the first place.Hopefully god is powerful enough to let those people into heaven who won’t run amok and if he can’t figure that out he is’nt much of a god.
As a matter of fact i would say free will is a cornerstone of heaven because without it God is saying he does’nt trust the people he lets into heaven and that is where you have lost me.
I guess we could look the other way and ask about the people in hell.Where do they stand on the free will scale and what if they decide to be good do they get out?
Anyway I have never met anyone who has been to either place so talking about them as if they really exist is interesting only in that it helps reveal the contradictions involved.
Here comes my little contrapositive on the subject.
“If something exists it has to be consistent” “Heaven and hell involve contradictions therefore they do not exist”
Talk to you both later
So, sawaz, you read the explanations (particularly Snurp’s rather cogent one) and still argue that a statement and it’s contrapositive have different truth values? That is impossible. Before I get into our communism example, allow me to explain what is meant by ‘implies’.
You are correct, Snurp and I are using a ‘hardened’ definition of ‘implies’. The word ‘implies’ has a very specific meaning in logic. “A implies B” means that if A is true, then B is true. ‘Implies’ wording and ‘if-then’ wording are equivalent. So the use of ‘implies’ is appropriate for the context.
Since you seem to be more comfortable with the ‘if-then’ wording, let’s use it in your statement: “If a person hates the U.S. then that person is a communist” (let’s call it S for convenience). In your comment, you claim that S is a true statement. However, this is not the case. Osama bin Laden serves as well-known counterexample. Osama hates the U.S. and is not a communist. Both S and its contrapositive is false.
You’ll likely find that most religionists will say that even ‘good’ people (by human standards) sin. That’s the whole point of ‘needing salvation’. So even a collection of only ‘good’ people (again, by human standards) would sin. Heaven is supposed to be sin-free. How does a religionist reconcile the two? It depends on how they explain sin.
Free will in heaven is only a problem for the free will theodicists who believe in a sin-free heaven. The free will theodicy states that sin results from the exercise of free will (‘free will implies sin’ or, if you prefer, ‘if a person has free will then that person will sin’). Since heaven is sin-free and sin is a consequence of free will, no one in heaven can practice free will.
Hello Sidfaiwu Thanks for you response.
Your statement “if a person has free will then that person will sin” is making the jump from the possibility of sinning to the inevitalility of sinning and probably is unwarranted.
Also what would spirits be like without free will if we have it?Would they still be our essence and if not how am I getting rewarded?
Would they be just some sort of ethereal robots perhaps not even self aware and what sort of reward would that be?
Since sinning is done on earth here just what sort of sinning could a spirit do anyway.I am assuming there is nothing to steal and no sex so no cheating and no murdering either .
I like the contrapositive statement in the last blog whereby if something exists it is consistent but the idea of heaven isn’t so therefore does’nt exist.
Some people would argue with that to which I can always fall back on the old pragmatic argument I.E show me!
Anyway back to earth there is an interesting presentation by Stephen Wolfram about cellular automata which I’m sure you would enjoy.Google stephen wolfram then onto Paul rockwood Memorial lecture
“Since sinning is done on earth here just what sort of sinning could a spirit do anyway.”
I would assume there are plenty of sins that can be done without a body. If a spirit could still think, it could hate God, or (if you want one specifically violating the ten commandments) worship other gods.
Snurp Yes they could worship other gods but they could’nt make any craven images and how exactly could they worship other gods and would’nt the fact that they are in heaven preclude that possibility?
I’m assuming of course that people in heaven are logical and know who is the boss and just how powerful he is.Starting to worship other gods would be foolhardy in the extreme and i will have to admit I had never thought of that but I guess that is a consequence of free will in heaven.
Likewise with hating god that would be bad move and would likely lead to censure or ejection to who knows where although i don’t know if anyone gets kicked out of heaven for being bad anymore that gets kicked out of hell for being good.
I suppose there is hardly a word about either since heaven and hell are only meant to modify people’s behaviour and going to a good or bad place is enough to keep many people in line.
How about a revolt in heaven against the oppressive rules God has laid down would that be possible or is god’s control so extensive that he makes the north koreans look like pikers?I suppose the answer is an unqualified yes in which case heaven is beginning to take on the characteristics of some sort of Orwellian police state squared.
The more I think about heaven the more I realize the internal contradictions and hence it’s implausability.
Who would have thought from the problem of evil theodicy would come some conclusions about heaven which would be very unpalatable to religios people.
I am thankful we live in a part of the world where this sort of discussionn is allowed because as you know in other parts of the world you must accept the official line which also means not even asking questions about religious orthodoxy.That in itself tips me off as to how much faith some people have in their beliefs that they are afraid to inspect them under the microscope of critical thought.
In that vein the north koreans rear their ugly heads again which begs the question what are the similarities between all absolutist ideologies both secular and religious?
These are problems and questions for the free-will theodicist, not me. They make the claim that sin is the result of free will and they usually believe in heaven. I believe neither.
Sid i guess i don’t have to ask you your view on hell then.So why do so many people believe in heaven and hell and I guess no one believes in one and not the other.It is either all or nothing it seems.
We seem to have torn some holes in the idea of heaven at least and hell does’nt exactly stack up in reference to a loving god.So how can that be? How is it we have concluded something which we can both agree on (I think) but which is diametrically opposite from what most people believe at least in the U.S and many other parts of the world?
Is it totally presumptious to think we have figured out something which the majority of others haven’t or is we who are missing something?