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A podcast focusing on issues related to nonviolence, and a member of the Kingdom Outpost.
Automatically generated transcript. Not manually reviewed. Names, quotations, and speaker attribution may contain errors.
In the last couple episodes, I took a look at how evil might have come into the world given what we know or what we think. The big question has been if God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and therefore we think that He could have created a perfect world, and presumably not just a world perfect in its
Origination, but a world that would continue perfectly, then how is it possible that sin might have entered the world if that's true? Is it even possible? And I threw out two kind of concepts about how that might even be possible to begin with. How it might not be logically impossible for evil to have arisen.
In this episode, I'm going to introduce a similar but slightly different question that deals more with the why.
Because even if we can get God off the hook, so to speak, for the possibility that evil could come into the world and could exist, then we still are left with the question of why evil was allowed to enter into the world. And even worse than why it could enter at a moment in time, why it's able to persist.
I mean, just from a simple analogy standpoint, imagine that you are a software developer. Let's just say Microsoft, for instance, because so many people use Microsoft software.
Imagine a bug enters their system. You don't have to imagine that. It happens all the time, right? It's extremely common. So many holes and so many exploits that people can work through to create bugs in the system or naturally occurring ones from code that was missed or sloppy or whatever. So Microsoft recognizes that there's a bug.
What do they do? They have patches and updates that come out constantly to fix that bug. What would you think of a software developer that let out software that maybe was perfect to begin with, but then became compromised and never fixed their product? Never wrote out the code or wrote code to combat the faulty code or the viruses or whatever was introduced into the system?
You would probably stop purchasing their software because it would only be good for a short period of time, and then it would go to hell in a handbasket. So the last two episodes where we talked about how it's possible for evil to enter the world, that's a great start to kind of help us to see that it's not logically impossible for sin or evil to enter. But now we need to discuss why might it have entered? Why might it persist?
So we are going to introduce the concept of theodicy here. Now, theodicy was a term, from my understanding, that was first coined by Leibniz in one of his defenses of God.
He wrote this famous work where he was kind of trying to work through how is it not logically impossible that sin and evil continue to persist if we believe that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.
And so Leibniz came up with this idea of theodicy, which is just going to be a defense of God. And he postulated that ultimately we are living in the best possible world. So there might be a multitude of reasons or ways that the world could be better. And in fact, you're probably familiar with some of those sorts of ideas. If you think of a world like
I can't even think right now. 1984 is probably not a great example because the people in there are evil, but maybe Huxley's work is a little bit better. It's still dystopian in a sense, but it's quite a bit different.
Huxley's Brave New World is a whole lot more about people just getting pleasures and, you know, living what seems like a really good life. Now, there are other things that go on, like freedoms curtailed and, you know, unwanted groups of people, minorities who are subjugated or, you know, disposed of. So, there are bad aspects to that. But overall...
The vast majority of people in that culture end up thriving and living lives of pleasure. Nevertheless, this book is considered dystopian because even though...
This might be maybe not the best possible world that you could conceive of for people. It's a pretty good world for the majority of people. But what does that look like for all of the other people living around? It sucks for the people who are disposed of or enslaved or tossed to the side or outcasts outside of the walls of the community. It's not good for other people.
So you could easily get that in your mind as what Leibniz is meaning by something like the best possible world, but I would argue that Leibniz is more thinking, hey, God's gonna create a ship.
He's going to create the world and inevitably there are going to be some accidents, some people are going to fall or jump overboard, but he's going to create a ship that is going to be able to save and preserve the most amount of people logically possible in a given world.
So for God to sit there and manipulate and try to save everybody, like to create a perfect world, we could have it like Aldous Huxley's world where God actually is going to be an autocrat who ends up taking care of all evil that comes into being, but he does it in a way that
Roboticizes everybody and everybody becomes automatons and where he's dictatorial in a sense. He causes you to forget things and controls you and whatever else. We can think of ways that perhaps God could have created the world perfect and kept it perfect. But Leibniz is more thinking, no, given what we know about God and given what we know about human choice and all of those other things.
What is the best possible world that could have been created that led to the most good for the most amount of people without God being an autocrat and all that stuff? Now, ultimately, the point of a theodicy isn't to say that we know for sure the explanation for why evil persists or why it came into being.
But rather, the point of a theodicy is to show that a good, powerful, and all-knowing God is not incompatible with the world that we live in. So it's possible for evil to persist and this God that we proclaim to exist simultaneously. I don't know if the reason I give you is the reason for why evil persists and God is good, but I can at least show you that it's not logically incompatible.
I can show you or help you to see that God's goodness and the existence of evil and persistence of evil are not like a square circle, but more like light being a particle in a wave. Something that's really hard to conceive of and imagine, but something that we can see is true. We know that the two aren't logically impossible because we can see evidence or possibilities for how they can exist together.
So theodicies are not about certainty. That's not the goal to provide you with certainty, but rather to provide you with more confidence. Or if you don't believe in God, it's a little bit of dissonance to say, hey, maybe I need to consider this because I might have dismissed it out of hand.
Now, there are a number of theodicies that exist that have come into existence or have existed before Leibniz and after him. And he coined the term, but like obviously people were wrestling with this stuff long before Leibniz was. But today, I would say that probably two of the most prominent theodicies that exist are going to be the soul building theodicy and the free will theodicy.
The soul building theodicy is essentially going to say that yes, while God created everything in a good state, humanity, we're still infants. However you believe Adam and Eve were created as adults or kids, we were in our infancy in terms of our knowledge of God, of creation, of our own selves, all of that.
And so humanity had a whole lot of growth to go through to make us fit for something like the kingdom of God, where we live together in harmony and peace and community, fellowship, all of those things. So a lot of the stuff that we're going through, just like kids who are learning to walk, get bumps and bruises and fall down and...
We get hurt and go through dangerous situations and experience pain that they've never experienced before. Sometimes a kid will...
Just, it was very difficult for me to have really little kids because they're so irrational, right? They like bump themselves and they start to freak out and cry, you know, like you just, you bumped your elbow. Okay, it hurts, but it's not something that you should ball about, right? Or somebody takes their toy away or something really simple or you can't go out of the house without this certain stuffy that they left behind.
Like my gosh, just like deal with it, right? That was very hard for me with little kids because they're completely illogical. Adults most of the times are at least willfully illogical, which can be infuriating in its own right. But kids are just incapable of logic a lot of times. And it drives you nuts. And they need to learn. They learn by experiencing pain. Like, hey, if I bump my elbow a little bit,
That's not really something to freak out about. If I forget something at the house, something minor, it's okay. It's nothing to freak out about. And so humanity on the soul building theodicy needed to learn and grow in order to...
To accomplish their God-given tasks and fulfill their God-given roles and to enjoy peace and harmony and love in its truest and fullest extent. Our souls had to be built and part of that comes through pain. The other theodicy that
That is very common, especially popularized by Alvin Plantinga, which if I remember correctly, I don't think Plantinga, I think he was actually reformed. So I don't think he actually believed in libertarian free will like a lot of libertarian free will people did. He's just like, hey, this is a theodicy. It doesn't have to be true. It just has to be possible and make sense.
to a group of people and so he put it out there because a lot of people believe in libertarian free will. I could be totally wrong on what I'm remembering. This was like 15 years ago when I had like read his stuff and looked into it while my wife was doing her apologetics classes. So I might be wrong on that. Don't quote me on that. But there's this free will theodicy popularized by Alvin Plantinga. And the free will theodicy is just what it sounds like. It's, hey, humanity has free will.
Libertarian free will, we could choose otherwise, and it would actually be unloving of God to step in. So that means if God created a perfect world, he had to give us the legitimate choice to choose otherwise, to choose evil. Because if he would have forced us to choose him, then that would have been
You know, that wouldn't be love. We would not truly love him, we'd just be robots. Now that sounds very reasonable on his face, and I think it's a great theodicy to have out there for people who believe in libertarian free will. Obviously, if you've listened to the first part of this season, I don't adhere to libertarian free will. And not to mention, one of the episodes that we did was on, I think,
What do you call it? Like alternate universes, alternate worlds and things? And just saying if it's always possible to choose otherwise, then that means for every evil choice that existed, it was possible for those choices to be their opposites. It was possible for all those bad choices that have ever been made to have been good choices. So there are worlds that exist, have to, have to, where
Every single choice always was good, right? If you think about every combination of cards in a deck of cards, if you think about doing a million coin flips, the chances of you getting all heads, astronomically impossible. But if somebody did it for all of eternity,
If you had an infinite amount of people doing it for all of eternity, you'd get an infinite amount of times where somebody got all heads on a million flips. Statistically, it's unlikely in any given million flips, but you do it an infinite amount of times with an infinite amount of people, and it's statistically impossible that it never comes up. It's gonna happen.
So, there are an infinite amount of worlds where all good choices were made. Why did God not just instantiate that one?
But anyway, I don't want to go down a rabbit trail of going against free will here because the point is the free will of the Odyssey exists. I just don't adhere to it. I think there are too many problems with it. But I think it is very palatable for most people because in our relationships, we recognize forcing somebody, whatever you mean by force, forcing somebody to choose you
That's not loving, that's not kind, that's not fitting with our human dignity and all that kind of stuff. I'm just saying, given free will, there are worlds where God didn't have to force anybody. All the good choices would have always been made.
But I'm not going to spend time looking into the soul building, theodicy, or the free will theodicy. That's something that you can look into yourself. There's tons and tons of literature out there on it. And those two, in that five minute description I just gave you, you can probably put all the pieces together pretty well on your own. They're intuitive and they make sense.
I'll explore a few other nuances of them and additions to round them out throughout the season, but I'll leave most of that for right here. I do want to address one item, though, before I introduce theodicies in the next episode. One of the things that strikes me when I think of Leibniz's theodicy and
Arguing that God has created the best possible world is the idea of consequentialism that I have brought into every season, dedicated a whole season, season number two, all to consequentialism. And we talk about it pretty much every season because it touches everything. So when I first was introduced to Leibniz's Theodicy after thinking a lot about consequentialism,
I had a problem with it on its face because essentially what it seemed like he was saying is that I'm going to show you that evil is okay. The existence of evil is justifiable because good is brought about for the most people, right? The greatest good is brought about.
I'm very wary when I hear the idea of greatest good come up because it just, it reeks of consequentialism to me of, hey, you know, it's okay to do evil so long as you bring about more good than the evil you do. And I just don't think that's a Christian ethic at all. And so I think it makes for a bad theodicy if it's presented like that.
So at the outset, I want to say that I do not adhere to that idea of lesser evils and greater goods and all of that stuff if you couch that a certain way, the way a lot of people do today.
I would rather say that if I talk about a greater good, or if I imply that sort of concept, that I am trying to make a distinction between doing evil and allowing evil. And there are a lot of times that that sounds really cheap. You know, doing evil versus allowing evil.
And James certainly talks about this type of thing, right? I think of faith and works. So somebody comes to you, they're hungry, and you say, hey, I'll pray for you. Which means, largely, you're gonna passively sit by and not actually meet their real needs. And so you're like, well...
I'm not the one who fired them from their job. I'm not the one who spent their money on things they shouldn't have spent it on. You can make all these excuses for, well, I didn't do evil to them, but James is like, you did evil, right? Doing the wrong thing is the same as not doing the right thing. There are a lot of
There are a lot of confessions in reforms, in our denomination at least, and some of them go back to certain catechisms and other things like on the catechism on, or maybe it's not the catechism, the larger confession of faith maybe on...
Commandment six, thou shalt not kill. Like, it goes into when you fail to do things to preserve life, you are guilty of violating the sixth commandment. Like, 100%. So, I do want to nuance this very carefully, right? There is a difference between doing and allowing evil, and a lot of times though, allowing evil is the doing of evil. So, I do want to acknowledge that.
Allowing somebody to starve to death when you could feed them, that's evil. Allowing somebody to drown, I think this is David Hume's example, or some philosopher. He was talking about this kid drowning in a pool, and you could save him.
Is allowing a kid to drown if you can swim? Is allowing a kid to drown when you can save them doing evil? You bet it is, right? Nevertheless, there are times when there is a distinction between doing evil and allowing evil. We could argue about and hash out reasons that are justifiable for allowing evil all day that don't make you culpable for the doing of evil.
That's not what's in scope here. I just want you to know that there can be a distinction between doing evil and allowing evil. So, here's an example that I think will make this hit home. I had a professor when I was out at Cedarville University, and I think he actually ended up getting dismissed in part because of this, but he was very Calvinistic.
And he would have discussions, like kids would ask him questions. And I guess to his fault, he wanted to candidly answer those questions and be honest about them. And so he got dismissed for this, or at least in part. But I don't even know how this question came up, but he essentially said that he did not have kids and was not going to have kids because they might go to hell.
Including, if they died as infants, he thought they might go to hell because they didn't get to choose God. Who knows if the Holy Spirit saved them, right? All of a sudden, libertarians don't want choice to matter when it comes to infants. But he's like, yeah, I don't know.
I don't know. And a lot of people at Cedarville were not Calvinists, and a lot of people had big problems with that answer. And there were tons of people who were extremely offended by that answer. But he said he would not have kids because he knows they're gonna be sinners, 100%. He knows they're gonna do evil.
And he cannot guarantee their salvation, and he did not want to be responsible for bringing souls into the world that might end up in hell. Now, I would extend that here by saying you know when you have kids. Anybody who's going to have kids knows that when they bring their children into the world, yes, they'll be sinners. Yes, if there's a hell, they could go to hell. Whatever. But they know 100% for sure.
that their kids will experience pain, trauma to some degree, death eventually, and probably some really, really, really severe pains. Emotional pains, physical pains, all that kind of stuff. They know it. Yet few would say that bringing children into the world is an evil on the part of parents.
Despite the parents knowing that they are introducing their children into a life where pain is going to happen. So much pain. They don't know exactly what pains. Parents aren't omniscient, but they know the world. They know the types of pains that their kids are going to come in contact with.
Parents don't cause that pain directly. Well, hopefully they don't cause most of that pain, the severest pains directly. Of course, they will inflict pain on their children to some extent, because parents aren't perfect. But nevertheless, they know, and therefore they are allowing their children to come into contact and to experience pain.
Now, God might know the specific pains that will befall all of His children, all of His creation, whereas we don't. But we are just as certain of the great pains that will come to them. Our children might end up dying a torturous death from leukemia when they're young. But even if they escape that and live to a ripe old age, we all know what happens to ripe fruit at the end, don't we?
They're all gonna face all of their loved ones up until their passing decades from now. They're gonna face all of their loved ones dying if they're able to live long enough. And then, at the end of their life, if they did live to a ripe old age, they're gonna suffer a, most likely, a lonely death of isolation tucked away in some nursing home forgotten and not known by the current generation.
Or maybe we'll have euthanasia to look forward to by the time of our kids being octogenarians, who knows? But I think if you have that in mind, that analogy of the parents, I think it can help you to, even if that's not exactly what it's like with God, I think that can help you to kind of have a little bit more of a perspective of how we might not be consequentialists here, distinctions between allowing and causing evil, and all that type of thing.
I think there's a danger in Leibniz's idea of greatest possible worlds, at least the way that we perceive it and use that oftentimes today, because we can think of God as doing evil or implementing evil. More of this, what do you call it, the...
Divine command theory of sorts, which I think is utterly abhorrent that God can just determine what is good and evil, right? Well, God does it, it's not evil. I mean, there are some cases of that, right, where it's God's prerogative to do things, but there are things that are just absolutely immoral and God doesn't do. Like, I would argue, lie. Or torture babies for fun, which is the common one in the apologetic sphere that they like to use.
That will never be good. Not even if a psalmist writes about doing it sometimes. It will never be good. God does not condone that. And he cannot do it because it's evil. So, with all that in mind...
I would like to, in the next couple episodes, move into just a couple theodicies that I've had rolling around in my mind for a couple years that are going to be, I think, helpful in at least just providing a couple other perspectives to add to your repertoire of theodicies. There might be pieces of each of these that are true. Kind of like the atonement, there might be many facets that are true. There's probably not just one theodicy that works.
But things that give you just different perspectives to see God or the world or yourself in a different light, that might help you to wrestle with evil's persistence a little bit differently. And also, at least one of the theodicies, but I think both of them are going to be helpful when it comes time to discussing how the problem of evil fits into
This podcast in general about nonviolence, the kingdom of God, and love. My hope is that after we go through the couple of theodicies that we're going to work through, that number one, it increases your confidence in God or dissonance in your life if you don't believe in God or if you think that he doesn't make sense at all.
Number two, I hope it helps you to understand the nature of God, or at least some facets about him, and his intent for what we should value, and how we should act, and where we can find hope in the face of evil.
And finally, I hope it helps us all to see how we can try to maintain integrity in the face of evil. How we can be grounded in hope because, man, there is so much evil. The older I get, I remember it was not long after having kids, but some of the shows that I used to watch were really dark. I still like dark movies. I like movies that portray
The Way the World Really Is. But at the same time, there was a level of darkness, and I don't even know how to put words to it, but there were certain types of evil and levels of darkness that I can't watch or think about anymore because it's...
Just so evil, especially related to like kids and the things that happen to them in this world. It's just, it devastates my soul to think about or dwell on those kinds of things, even though those things happen and need to have people dealing with them. So when the world is that evil and there's that much injustice, how do we deal with that?
So one of the common answers is that you fight violence with violence, you fight power with power, and that is a path that many, especially in the American Christian circles, are taking. And yeah, maybe there is some validity in certain positions in trying to do those types of things. Maybe there would be a lot of nuance there.
But we're gonna have an episode where we kind of pull this together and say, what does integrity look like? What does it look like to not do nothing? And what does it look like to do something, the most real thing, that maybe looks like nothing to people?
But knowing what we know about human nature, about who we are, about what evil is, about who God is, what might actually be doing the greatest thing, even if it might appear at moments like it's doing nothing? And theodicies are going to be important to help us, at least in some aspects of addressing that question.
So I hope you'll stick around, and if you haven't listened to previous episodes, you might need to or might want to as we get into a couple of these, because we will be discussing some aspects of free will a little bit with the theodicies. Not too much, but might be good to kind of catch up. Anyway, I hope you will be back next week. That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.
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