The Problem of Evil

Commonweal has a good article this time, titled All Will Be Well, and subtitled "Julian of Norwich, David Hume, and the problem of evil", by Denys Turner.  It also brings in discussion of Duns Scotus, and contemporary Calvinist theologian, Alvin Plantinga.  It is a longish article, but worth reading. The problem of evil touches on our discussion in Anne's thread of the meaning of intercessory prayer. It's only fair to point out that it's not going to answer our questions, but shows that people through the ages have kicked around the same dilemmas. 

I have posted some excerpts from the article here:

"...Because we are in the thick of it, it can seem obvious that the starting point for the problem of evil cannot be God and God’s omnipotent goodness—Augustine’s starting point. No, the starting point must be with the manifest evil there is in the world, and with the problem of how a good God, who could prevent it, does not do so. This is the approach of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. When it is a matter of where to start in addressing the problem of evil, it seems that the boot is on the skeptical foot."

"...It can seem as if faith in God can never convincingly explain away the world’s evil, let alone justify it, so that it is from those evils that we must start. It was thus that in the late eighteenth century, David Hume formulated the classic statement of what we now call the “problem of evil.”

"...For Hume there just is a problem of evil—anyone who is not a philosopher with an ax to grind can see that...I am not sure this makes Hume an atheist. For certain it makes him a Pyrrhonian skeptic."

"Let us leave Hume there for the moment, because I now want to draw attention to a surprisingly different time, place, and style of reflection on the problem of evil—that of the fourteenth-century English theologian Julian of Norwich. Unlike Hume she believes categorically in the existence of a good and all-powerful God. That said, she shares one thing with him: she is quite baffled at the quandary that is caused by the quantity and viciousness of sin. What’s more, just as Hume refuses to eliminate the problem by way of atheism, so Julian refuses to dissolve the problem by way of theology. She confesses that she does not know why a good and almighty God should have created a world in which there is evil."

"Julian’s book of her “showings,” as she calls them, is an extended set of meditations on a central problem that besets her: she is profoundly troubled by her experience of evil, especially that consciously evil human behavior that she calls generically “sin.” And who would not be after reflecting on conditions in what must be the second nastiest century after our own, ravaged as it was by disease, death, war, poverty, malnutrition, starvation, and economic decline? Julian herself, at the age of eight or nine, had survived the Black Death, which in the space of two years took the lives of one third of the population of England. "

"...You cannot sweep away the evil with some gesture toward the compensating goodness of God. Sin, she says, is real and inexplicable: it may be the source of—or may consist in—all sorts of illusions about ourselves, our fellow human beings, indeed about God."

"...Why, given a God who is omnipotent and all good, is there sin at all? For Julian as for Hume, it is a question that demands that she hold on to the dilemma without eliminating one of its horns. The omnipotent and unfailing love of God and the existence of sin are both undeniable. How, asks Julian, if we cannot deny either, can we assert both and hold the two in tension? "

"...A world of completely free agents who never choose evil actions is certainly describable, but by strict logical necessity even an almighty God could not create one, since for God to cause a human world to be sinless would be for God to rob human choices of their freedom, it being assumed that no action of mine can be free if anything other than I is the cause of it. And that “anything other” includes God. So a world of sinless human beings is describable but uncreatable. In this view, Julian’s question “Why is there sin?” is redundant. Such, for example, is the view of the Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantinga."

"Christian theologians, especially those who seek the escape route between the horns of Hume’s dilemma that is known as the “free-will defense,” should give serious thought to Julian’s doubt here. One of the reasons Julian is too often presented as a cheerful and empty-headed goody-two-shoes in some pious Christian circles is that readers today fail to see how far she is from pursuing the escape route from the problem of sin available in the conventional “free-will” defense."

"...She is told that in this world with all its sin, with all its “sharp pain,” nothing is “amiss.” In this world, sin is “behovely....As a rough translation into modern English, Julian’s “behovely” means something like “fitting,” or “befitting,” implying that there is something that the behovely fits with and gets its sense from. "

"It has to be admitted that at this point in the argument it is all too easy for the contemporary theologian to lose his or her nerve—and that is why the free-will defense of Plantinga and others can seem to be the only way out for believers. You take Plantinga’s line in order not to be stuck with Julian’s and because you feel weighed down by the heavy burden of human evil. If all you need to say is that evils of such incalculable extent and intensity can’t be helped, that they wouldn’t be sins if they weren’t freely done, and that our not sinning would not be free if God had prevented it, then it’s all our fault and you cannot blame God for sin. In this view, a world without sin would be without humans, occupied only by automata preprogrammed by God. A sinless world is impossible given freedom, and without freedom there are no human beings."

"...Julian’s text refuses completeness in Milton’s sense, in which the occurrence and pervasiveness of sin is said to have been theologically “justified,” for she thought no such justification of God’s ways is possible for us in our time. In not providing one, Julian’s text does not fail of completeness. In what sense, then, is her text not yet “performed”?

"It is the “not yet” that matters here, the provisional. What is provisional is Julian’s theological refusal of both the logical completeness of Plantinga, which would purport to demonstrate the formal consistency of an infinite love’s creating just this sinful world, and the narrative completeness claimed by Milton, which would purport to finish the story that “justifies the wayes of God to men.” 

"...For the completed narrative is, literally, the end of the story. And that, Julian knows, is the beatific vision, the price of which is death....In the meantime, there is but the meantime, the “not yet.” And Julian does her theology obedient to the temporality in which neither understanding nor living can yet be “completed"