The Problem of Evil

One of the most common objections

to the existence of God is the presence of evil in the world, and even though it seems most professional philosophers have long ago decided that the existence of evil does not disprove the existence of God, there remains a lot of discontent about the amount of evil in the world. A lot of people claim that if God really is loving and powerful then He should do something about the volume and severity of the evil that we see around us today (Haiti, for example) and that we see throughout history. This objection, however, seems to me to have at least two fairly serious flaws.
Firstly, this objection presumes that God does not have a morally sufficient reason for allowing suffering to take place. This strikes me to be a hugely arrogant claim to make. In order for this claim to be valid, one must in fact be omniscient. To claim that God had no good reason for allowing something to happen presumes that we know every possible outcome of any given event, and can say with certainty that this event will not result in greater good somewhere or somewhen down the track than the suffering caused today. But how can we, as finite, fallible creatures make this claim? I am certainly not conceited enough to lay claim to God-like powers of omniscience, to claim that I know all things that are and that might be.

Also, it seems obvious to the student of history that good and necessary things have often come from events that seemed at the time to be nothing short of gratuitously evil. Take the bombing of Pearl Harbor, for instance. At the time, it seemed to be merely an act of war that resulted in the death and suffering of tens of thousands of people. Yet, without that, would the US have entered the war? If they hadn’t, how long would the war have progressed? How many more people might have been killed? Would the allies have been able to defeat the combined might of Germany and her allies and Japan without the aid of the US? It seems obvious, to me at least, that the suffering brought about by the destruction of Pearl Harbor led to a lessening of suffering in the end. Consider also the decision by Hitler to cease bombing military targets in Britain and begin bombing civilian targets. He didn’t know at the time that Britain was only weeks away from total military destruction, and his decision to bomb cities not airfields allowed them to rebuild their military might and meet him toe-for-toe. The suffering of some allowed a greater good to be produced. These are but two examples from a very short period of time that should show us that we are incapable of judging the long- (and even short-) term outcomes of an event that looks to us today to be an evil. (Incidentally, this is also the fatal flaw in Utilitarian ethics – we are supposed to strive for the greatest good for the greatest number but how can we ever figure out what that actually is?)
Secondly, and this seems to me to be an even more serious problem with this objection, the person who denies the existence of god has no grounds for calling anything evil. Onward we go to page 2.

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