Relationships and Evil

By Loren Meierding

The problem of understanding why an all-powerful and wholly good and loving God could permit so much evil to occur has puzzled many Christians as well as skeptics since St. Augustine grappled with the problem in the Fourth Century A.D. Many skeptics have found the evidence of evil sufficient to reject belief in God. The author believes that this book provides a comprehensive, plausible, and satisfying treatment of the problem of evil consistent with the Bible and orthodox Christianity. Traditionally free will and the value of character development have been the primary approaches to explaining evil. Many evils are not adequately explained by either approach. The book offers an approach emphasizing the value of relationships between persons. If relationships are to reach the greatest depth and have the greatest value, then evils are necessary. The environment must provide opportunities to make sacrifices, have risks and dangers, and have poverty and limited resources.

One chapter is devoted to analyzing the argument from evil against Gods existence. It shows evidence limited to evil alone is weak evidence. When evidence is expanded to evidence of good as well as evil and evidence for design, the evidence supports theism and weighs against naturalistic views.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 23, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469709772

Loren Meierding

Loren Meierding (B.A. Yale; Ph.D in philosophy University of Texas) resides in Montana. He was an actuarial assistant for a pension consulting firm and a system engineer designing defense systems for Hughes Aircraft Company. He has published books on how to take the SAT and on the problem of evil.

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Contents

Preface

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Epilogue

Notes

Glossary

To Karel, a builder of relationships par excellence.

Preface

The problem of evil has fascinated me since my college days when I became convinced that it was a powerful argument. When I chose a dissertation topic for my Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Texas, I decided to do an analysis of the argument from evil against God’s existence. I analyzed deductive and inductive versions of the argument.

Why God permits some of the evils to occur has always seemed somewhat surprising. Having read books explaining the two major approaches to theodicy, the free will as represented by St. Augustine and Leibniz and the soul-making as found in John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love, I did not find them entirely satisfactory. I wanted to find treatments that did not merely show possible answers and explanations, but explanations that were plausible and convincing.

My dissatisfaction with with the free will and soul-making approaches can be found in the discussions of the two approaches in Chapter 3 where the problems of each approach are stated. I wanted a theodicy which is fully compatible with orthodox Christian belief and doctrines. Although John Hick’s soul-making theodicy has much to commend it, it espouses universalism and an implicit Pelagianism seems unavoidable.

Some two decades ago I reached the conclusion that a theodicy which focuses on interpersonal relationships would be far more satisfying. I have called it a theodicy of relationship building and believe it is more comprehensive and reasonable than other approaches. For some who are intimately familiar with the Bible, many ideas in the book may seem obvious. The approach is also compatible with Biblical Christianity. It provides some general answers. The approach is not incompatible with the soul-making approach, but shifts emphasis from character development and human effort to interpersonal relationships and God’s work. There is also a very strong emphasis on the value and benefits of human moral and epistemic weakness. Human weakness plays an important role in forming and deepening of relationships.

There is much that is speculative and the theodicy can only be a sketch. There is undoubtedly much that is in God’s mind and plans that we cannot fathom. Yet, it seems that the theodicy offered here goes a long way toward providing plausible explanations for evil. Even if someone judges that the theodicy offered falls a little short of adequate justification, sufficient success may have been enjoyed to believe that additional and deeper insight may be attained in the future. Possession of a plausible theodicy brings comfort to the Christian because it strengthens belief in God’s justice and that God has his plans and purposes and has everything under control. A plausible theodicy provides good grounds for asserting, and assigning a high probability to the falsity of skeptical claims that there is insufficient moral justification for evil.

After developing the theodicy, a chapter (Chapter 10) is devoted to an analysis of the argument from evil per se. Some readers may be interested primarily in understanding the theodicy. They may want to skip this chapter. I believe that the analyses offered will help to clarify a number of issues and will show that theists have little to fear from arguments from evil. Much of the force of inductive arguments depends on limiting the evidence to evil and using only two hypotheses. A proper analysis really needs to expand the evidence to the mixture of good and evil and the hypotheses to at least five. In fact, the amount of good and evil in the universe is related to the purposes a designer would have, so it would seem appropriate to admit all evidence relevant to design as well. When the evidence and hypotheses are expanded in these ways, rather than being constrained excessively, the force of the argument from evil is greatly weakened.

Although the analysis of the argument from evil makes use of probability theory and Bayes’ Theorem, this should not be taken to imply that belief in God is the same as belief in an hypothesis or that God views events in probabilistic terms. If he is omniscient, it is known that future events will be either true or false, not merely probable. However, from a human standpoint there is uncertainty. The application of Bayes’ Theorem and probability merely helps us to evaluate an inductive argument and the rationality of belief In God in view of the problem of evil.

Christianity has often been portrayed as requiring adherents to make irrational leaps of faith. There are two things wrong with this idea. First, Christian faith is not a matter of believing a set of facts or doctrines are true, although that is a condition which must be satisfied. Christian faith is trusting in Jesus, in God, for guidance and help as one lives one’s life. A relationship is involved. Second, people do not normally place trust in others without some evidence of trustworthiness. So they should also expect to have evidence that God exists and is trustworthy. Belief in God should therefore be rational. I believe that there is an abundance of evidence, but many people may need to exercise some diligence to find it. The theodicy and analysis of the argument from evil is part of an enterprise of showing belief in God is rational on the evidence. The arguments and demonstrations offered here do not have the force of deductive proof. We are dealing with inductive evidence which requires a certain amount of subjective evaluation. Nevertheless, a certain amount of agreement between rational people seeking to be objective should be possible.

Although I am committed to theism, I have tried to adopt as objective a view as possible and to have been as neutral as possible. Obviously when we are dealing with the moral obligations of supreme beings, there is much that is speculative and subjective. Even though a significant subjective element is involved, I have tried to view the arguments and evidence in a way that has some sympathy with the views of skeptics. Judging that justifications are inadequate is done from a human point of view and with a limited perspective. It reflects our understanding of the moral obligations that may apply to a supreme being. It need not be interpreted as judging God for we may simply not know enough.

A longer and more thorough analysis of the problem of evil by the author has been published by iUniverse.com with the title God, Relationships, and Evil. It doubles the length of this work, has more complete notes, some material not found here, and uses four chapters rather than one to analyze the argument from evil. Some readers, especially academic philosophers ought to obtain the more complete treatment.

Since this work is a print-on-demand publication, revisions are relatively easy to make. I encourage any reader who finds what he or she believes are errors, lacunae, or has other suggestions as to how the work can be improved to contact me by e-mail at [e-mail].

1

Questions About Evil

The problem of evil has fascinated me for much of my life. I am the oldest of the three children, born in 1946, two years before my brother Paul, and three and a half years before my sister Karel. I learned to read before I went to school by asking questions. At age six my grandmother gave me a King James Bible. At about age seven I read the story about Solomon’s prayer to God to give him wisdom to be a good ruler over his people.¹ God granted that request and more, promising that he would be the wisest man. I was impressed with this and asked God to give me all the wisdom and understanding that I could possibly have. The goal of achieving wisdom has been the primary goal of my life.

My brother, sister, and I were raised in a strong Christian home. Both sides of my family had a long history of faithful church attendance. On my mother’s side especially there were a number of relatives who were very devout. My mother had had an overwhelming spiritual experience when I was 2 years old. As I was growing up we had daily family devotions. I was a believer that prayed to God often. I was confirmed in the Lutheran church. In high school I became interested in philosophy and decided that I wanted to major in philosophy in college. After graduating from high school, I matriculated at Yale in 1962.

During my freshman year I chanced upon Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian.2 His primary reason for not believing in God is the existence of so much evil in the world. It would seem that if God is not only benevolent, but also all-powerful and all-knowing that he should eliminate evil from the world. Everything everybody does should be good. But in fact there is considerable evil in the world. This seems to refute God’s existence.

I found this argument quite convincing. Moreover, as I looked at the environment of my family and church, I recognized that they were all fine and well-meaning people. But I did not see what I considered to be convincing evidence that God was active. They may all have believed in God because they had been raised to believe in him and never questioned it. Since I did not have convincing evidence, I entered upon a period of skepticism and agnosticism. I stopped praying and attending church.

After graduating from Yale I spent a year at the University of Montana working on an M.A. in mathematics. Before I completed the work however I was drafted and spent a couple of years in the U.S. Army. During this period of time (1967-68) the other members in my family became involved in the charismatic movement. After finishing my army commitment, I found myself attending meetings conducted by evangelists like Herbert Mjorud. There were evidences of miracles or events that defy any scientific kind of explanation. At a meeting conducted by Herbert Mjorud, my aunt saw a large goiter the size of a grapefruit on the neck of the lady sitting directly in front of her. It was so ugly my aunt claimed she could not take her eyes off of it. When there was a word of knowledge that a goiter was being healed, the goiter disappeared instantaneously as my aunt watched astounded.

My mother and sister had many stories about how God had acted in some way in their lives and about people who had been healed by miracles. The events seemed to be too remarkable to just be coincidences. They also gave prophecies which seemed to be coming from God and were not the kind of utterances that I believed they could or would invent themselves. Everything that served as evidence agreed with statements in the Bible. I reached a point at which the evidence for God seemed clearly sufficient, despite the question about the existence of evil. I realized that I was a sinner who needed forgiveness and I also was unsure about what I wanted to do with my life. If left to my own devices my life would probably be invested in pursuing the objects of my own interest and desire and would largely be wasted. I asked Jesus to take charge of my life and to lead me along the path that he wanted me to go.

I believe that there is abundant evidence that God is mightily at work in the lives of people. God is glad to provide evidence of his activity and trustworthiness to all who truly seek him. Those who truly seek will find plenty of evidence. Though there may be sufficient evidence for God, we are left with the question—why does God permit evil to occur? Even if we answer this question by pointing out some reasons why God might be justified in permitting some evil, there is also the question—why does God permit so much evil to occur? The amount of evil seems to be excessive and hard to understand.

Occasionally in world history evils occur which are of such massive scale that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are wiped out. Let us call these large scale or horrific evils. Examples of large scale evils are the Bubonic Plague of the Fourteenth Century that wiped out one-third of the population of Europe, major famines that have occurred periodically, World War I, World War II, the Jewish Holocaust, the many millions deliberately killed by the regimes of Stalin and Mao, and the Cambodian Holocaust. We may find reasons to conclude that a supreme being is justified in permitting the small scale evils, but not for permitting the large scale evils. So we may want to raise a third question—can large scale evils be justified?

It is important to keep large scale evils in perspective. The massive scale on which they occur tends to grab our attention and make us prone to thinking that they comprise a larger proportion of total evil than they do. The fact that many of the worst mass murders and large scale famines have occurred in the Twentieth Century may make us particularly prone to overestimate their importance. Even in the Twentieth Century, the large scale evils are responsible for less than 5% of the deaths. When we consider the last twenty centuries, the percentage of deaths due to large scale evils is probably less than one percent. Hence the run-of-the-mill small scale evils comprise the vast majority of the evil in the world and our main focus must be on explaining how God can be justified in permitting them to occur.

The three questions that have been raised, are the key questions that this book will attempt to address. The answers usually provided have often been deemed unsatisfactory by inquiring minds. While some people are so skeptical that no attempts to justify the existence of evils will change their minds, perhaps some will find the explanations provided in this book to be helpful and reasonably convincing.

My sister Karel was born in 1949. She was a happy child even though she was often frustrated because most of the children in the neighborhood happened to be boys and there were no other girls about her age with whom she could play. Even at age 2 Karel would go around the house singing Holy! Holy! Holy!, the hymn that normally opened the Sunday service at church. Karel participated in the normal activities for children in a Lutheran Church. She was an excellent student and was elected to Montana Girl’s State. After high school she attended the Lutheran Bible Institute in Seattle to satisfy the wishes of our parents.

While attending the Lutheran Bible Institute, Karel attended services conducted by Herbert Mjorud who had been an evangelist in the Lutheran Church but was fired when he began preaching the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Karel asked for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and received power. She learned to prophesy. After two years of LBI she graduated and decided to go on a trip to Mexico to help spread the gospel with about five other friends from LBI—three boys and three girls. When the friends pulled up to my parents front yard in Missoula, Montana to pick up Karel, my father’s heart about died. They had a twenty year old run-down, beaten-up, Chevrolet. It looked like a major miracle would be required if it were to go another hundred miles, let alone four or five thousand miles. Had he seen the car before he agreed to allow Karel to go on the trip, he undoubtedly would have put his foot down.

During the trip as they were driving the back roads of Mexico, the car did break down on a number of occasions. But Karel later said that every time, almost immediately some Mexicans would appear, say, Cheevy, Cheevy, and start beating on the engine with a hammer and pretty soon they would have the car running again. Karel always felt that by driving an ancient Chevy, they were able to get closer to the Mexicans even though they did not speak very much Spanish. The Mexicans did not feel that they were some Americans who were better than they were. Consequently they were more ready to accept and believe the Spanish gospel tracts that my sister and her friends handed out in the back villages they visited following the directions of some American missionaries.

My sister and her friends had many experiences on that two month trip. The car broke down a number of times and they did not have much money. Yet they had faith in God and everything worked out whenever there was a problem. They had embarked on the missionary journey for his sake and their needs were always met. Karel felt that her experiences on the trip really taught her to trust in God.

Karel was always full of enthusiasm. She would concoct various projects and her enthusiasm would cause others to join in. If she was at a party one knew that it would be fun, because she would be having a great time. She loved people and put them first. She was most happy when she was around friends. She had many friends. Her correspondence list exceeded 200 people, most of whom received a Christmas letter from her with a written note. She was a real friend as those who knew her will attest. When they had problems she herself would have great concern and would try to do what she could to help them.

After graduating from LBI, Karel went to St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Her brother Paul was a junior at St. Olaf. The following year, his senior year and her sophomore year, they were both members of the St. Olaf Choir. The choir went on a tour of Europe singing in many cathedrals during the next summer, the summer of 1970. I had been on active duty in the Army in Korea, but finished my tour of active duty about ten days before the choir tour. I arranged to buy a Volkswagen Beetle and pick it up in Germany. I traveled around some on my own while they were on their tour but also listened to them at some of their concerts. When the tour was over we spent another two months traveling around Europe staying in youth hostels and seeing the great sights of Europe. Karel left us when we were in Switzerland and went to stay for a few days with another friend from the St. Olaf Choir who was planning to live in Vienna for a while. She then returned to the U.S. before Paul and I did. We took a swing through Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece before returning home.

Those who believe can see God’s hand in many of the circumstances of life. The believer prays for various things and receives them. The skeptic may scoff at many such answers to prayer dismissing them as mere coincidences. But believers may see them occurring sufficiently often to be good evidence that God exists and intervenes in the affairs of human beings. An example of the kind of incident I have in mind was described by my sister Karel, together with our mother Gwen, in a short piece entitled My Heavenly Hijacker, about their experiences related to Karel’s return trip from Europe in 1970 when Karel discerned the hand of God. It was incidents like this story of Karel’s, along with many other evidences, that caused me to return to belief in God. There are many details which are significant so the story takes some space to tell, but is worth including.

KAREL: Back in 1970 hijacking planes had only been in vogue a short while; no major airline strikes had yet occurred. So I thought little of the Northwest plane strike that began at the beginning of the summer as I made plans to go to Europe with my college choir. The initial plan was that I would tour with the St. Olaf choir for three weeks and then return to the States. I was a little envious of my two brothers who were planning to tour with the choir and then hitchhike through Europe for the rest of the summer. Several days before departure one brother bought a Volkswagon bug to be delivered to him in Germany. Upon this change in arrangements, both brothers offered to take me along on the extended Europe trip if I wouldn’t complain of cramped quarters in the back seat. I was thrilled to be allowed to go. At the last moment we arranged for my return charter ticket for the end of August with a group of students from midwestern schools and colleges. The flight was scheduled for the day before the wedding of my close friend, Carolyn. We took off with the choir for a good three-week tour in Germany and environs.

GWEN: Shortly after returning home to Missoula, Montana from Minneapolis following the departure of our three children to Europe, I received a telephone call from Carolyn. She was unaware of Karel’s opportunity to tour Europe, and was calling to ask her to be a bridesmaid at her wedding in August. Since I did not feel I should make that decision, I gave her an address so she could contact Karel on the trip. Since she hoped for an affirmative answer, she asked me to send her a formal of Karel’s to be used by a seamstress, and added that she needed to know how long to make the sleeves. I recall stating she should have them made an inch longer than the pattern. I then sent her the dress.

KAREL: While in Germany a letter came from Carolyn asking if I would be one of her bridesmaids. With a heavy heart I declined due to travel uncertainties. Needing to fly standby from Minneapolis to Seattle upon my return, I would have fairly close connections. I couldn’t rightfully accept the invitation and be fair to Carolyn. The plan was a bit too risky.

Soon the three-week choir tour was over, and my brothers and I embarked on the next part of our journey: to Scandinavia. While visiting relatives in Norway, I received a confirmation letter regarding my ticket for the return flight. That set my mind at ease, even though I didn’t have the ticket in hand.

Next on the itinerary were Scotland, England, France, and Switzerland. Making a grand tour, we spent a delightful Swiss National Day in Grundelvald, complete with alpen horn blowing, yodeling, gymnastics, folk dances, and oom pah pah bands. In Zurich I looked for my confirmation papers and to my chagrin was unable to locate them. At the KLM airlines office, they assured me that if I had received such confirmation I’d be listed on the flight roster. With that reassurance I took leave of my brothers and headed to Vienna to visit a friend there for several weeks before my charter flight home. While in Vienna I received a telegram from

Carolyn. Another friend of hers who was to be a bridesmaid had succumbed to mononucleosis, and was too ill to be at the wedding. Would I please take her place. Under these new circumstances I consented.

GWEN: Knowing that our three children were traveling all over Europe by car that summer caused my husband and I to be in much prayer for