1. What is the problem?
   The basic problem is that it seems hard to see how a perfectly good God, who can do everything, and knows all our actions, could be responsible for a creation in which there is so much suffering and so much human malice and cruelty.
1. The problem looked somewhat different from the ancient world almost until the17th century. In those days, most people, perhaps almost everyone in the European world believed in a God who is omnipotent, benevolent, and omniscient. So they knew there must be a solution to the problem of evil, and they tried to find one. Not very successfully.
2. With the rise of science, and of a particular kind of philosophical uncertainty, it was no longer thought to be at all obvious that such a God exists at all; and the evil in the world at least counts against the existence of such a God. Unless one can solve the problem of evil, there is no good reason to believe in God at all. There might simply be no solution, no meaning to the suffering and disasters in the world.

2. The Less Ambitious Project
   There are two ways of trying to cope with ‘The Problem of Evil’
1. The more ambitious one is to explain precisely why God should allow each and every instance of evil of which we are aware. One might try to show, for instance, that out of every evil comes a greater good. But, this is at least not obvious, and may not even be true.
2. The less ambitious: try to show that there are no good grounds for saying that a God who creates this world cannot be a good God. This is what I shall try to defend.

To ‘cope’ with the problem of evil is not to be comfortable with it, or to find tragedy not really so very disturbing. Rather it is to understand why such tragedy need not make belief in God intellectually dishonest.

1. When is Someone to Blame for what Happens?
   The general idea is to try to understand reasonably precisely under what conditions we are justified in blaming someone for something (that’s the vague was of putting it, for the moment); think those through carefully in a non-religious context; and only then discuss whether there are any good grounds for blaming God for the way the world is, or what is the meaning of it all.

A What happens is bad, all things considered The person was the cause of what happened They knew how things would turn out They knew they could have done better

B The world is an evil world all things considered God created the world God knew how the world would turn out God knows he could have created a better world

In short, we should blame someone only if they did wrong, and knew they could and should have done better. All four requirements have to be met if someone is to be held blameworthy. How, then, does this apply to God and our world? Must we blame God for the way things are?

2. Something going wrong
   In which of the following has something gone wrong: a tidal wave; an earthquake, someone dying, a genetic mutation. Can something be evil unless something has ‘gone wrong’?
   
   
3. Various Points of View
   Take, for example, a predatory animal eating another animal; a lioness killing a gazelle, for instance
1. From the point of view of the lioness’s cubs
2. From the point of view of the lioness
3. From the point of view of the gazelle?
4. From the point of view of the herd of gazelles?
5. From the human point of view?
6. From an ecological point of view?
7. From God’s point of view?

Change the examples: instead of lion, take a malaria parasite, a flu virus, non-vegetarian humans, cows, a gardener cutting flowers for a bouquet. Try to say exactly why you think of each of these examples in the way you do.

4. An Overall Assessment
   To assess things, or states of affairs, or actions as good or bad all things considered is not at all a simple matter. One needs to sort out:
   1. What is the correct point of view from which the questions under should be considered?
   2. Which features are relevant (eg. that the action was performed on a Saturday, that someone’s feelings were hurt, that the dog was hungry)? How does one settle what things at least need to be considered?
   3. revealing examples:
      1. Is Earth as it was 15 billion years ago (before there were any animals) better or worse overall than the moon, or Mars
      2. Is Earth as it was after the evolution of human beings better or worse than it was before there were any humans?

Notice how difficult it is to give a definite answer to this question about the world as a whole (still less, one might think, about the Universe as a whole) It is all too easy to make snap judgements depending on our mood at the time, or on the news at the time, or our grasp of history, and so on.

Obviously, if the universe is not bad overall, then there is nothing for which God could be blamed; if it is bad overall, then it could be, but need not yet be, fair to blame Go (if there is a God). The jury would still be out, so to speak.

5. Can God do everything?
   The quick definition of God’s omnipotence, suitable for children who need to learn to distinguish it from omniscience, is that God is omnipotent because God can do everything. Needless to say, perhaps, the matter is not as simple as that makes it sound
   1. Here is a simple list of things which God obviously cannot do: walk, sing, speak English, feel tired, catch a cold, die. (Note: I am not here talking about what the man Jesus, who is God, could do because he was human.) Why not? Because, at least on the ordinary belief we have about God, God does not live in a world of time and space, with a body, arms, legs, tongue, organs, etc. So he cannot perform those activities which require such things.
   2. Here is a list of rather more controversial things which perhaps God cannot do: can God feel irritated, angry, delighted, encouraged, loving? The answer to these questions depends on two things:
      1. Do all emotions involve bodily changes?
      2. are any/all of the items in this list emotions?
   3. And finally a list of things which we might want to say that God both can and cannot do: hear, speak, cease to be angry, make things, remember, change. The reasons here are the same ones as those above under a) and b); but perhaps we might want to say that although God cannot literally do these things, there is a sense in which he can.

There is a neat little point made by Thomas Aquinas; in the light of all the above considerations, it might be better to say not that God can do everything, but that God can do whatever a being like God can do. Well, this is better; but it is also almost totally uninformative. So where next? Aquinas suggests that God can do everything that can be done. Is this any more helpful?

6. How do we distinguish between what is possible, and what is not.
1. The easy bit. We know that if something has actually happened, then it must be possible for it to happen.
2. The slightly less easy bit. To some extent we can know what else is possible by using our knowledge of the existing state of things. So, we know that John could have gone to the pictures yesterday; that I could grow begonias in my garden but not giant cactus; that I could change my shoes before supper; that we could clone a human being. In short, we to some extent understand what the laws of physic and chemistry and biology are, and what would be compatible with them.
3. The more difficult bit: do we know the limits of what the laws of nature will allow? Could we breed a naturally tartan sheep? Could a person be disassembled in one place, and reassembled somewhere else -- as in ‘Beam me up, Scottie’? Could someone learn to remember everything that ever happened to them?
   


7. The best possible world?
   Well, then: could God using the laws of physics abd biology as they are produce a world with selected improvements? For instance, no flash floods, tsunamis, handicapped children, or disease? Hume thought that the answer to this key question was obvious: if God is omnipotent, he could do any or all of these things: so why doesn’t he?

1. But, though it is easy to imagine a world like ours with just a few selected improvements, it is not so clear that such a world would be possible. The notion of what is possible is very difficult to grasp: and we have got so used to saying that God can do all things without really thinking about what that might mean. Possibilities come in packages, as it were: you can’t have humans without having water, an atmosphere without gravity, and so on. Hence some difficult questions:
2. Chaos theory tells us that even a very small difference in the basic facts of physics would have enormously different effects. If so, you couldn’t ‘fine-tune’ the universe to produce just a few selected improvements. Put another way: God, in choosing to create a universe like this has chosen not to create a different one.
3. But perhaps God could have created a totally different universe? Perhaps so, but if it is very different, would it be similar enough to ours for us to ask whether it is better or worse? Think of how one might try to answer the question ‘Is Pythagoras’s theorem better or worse than Arsenal?

Hence a conclusion, perhaps: God can’t just tinker with this universe: even tiny tinkerings would make it very very different. But if God made a totally different universe, it might be so different that we could not say if was better overall than this one. In which case it would be very hard to say that God could obviously have done better, could have created a better universe than this. But if we can’t say that, then we have no justification for blaming God for the way things are – unless no universe at all is clearly better than this one…. You can’t blame anyone for doing the best that can be done.

8. Human Malice
   Whether we can justifiably blame God for natural disasters – the Tsunami, disease, handicap, flash floods – is one question. Maybe, if the arguments given in Lecture III are all right, these natural misfortunes don’t give us good grounds for blaming God.

But how about the Holocaust, 9/11, terrorist bombings, cruelty, slavery, other forms of systemic injustice? Did an omniscient God not know what he was unleashing in creating humans?

9. Is God responsible for what we do?
   1. Can God be defended by saying that it is we ourselves who are responsible for our malicious actions, therefore not God? There are two possible reasons for saying that this way of defending God is insufficient:
      1. Since God is the first cause of all things and events, his causation is somehow involved even in our free action. Yes, but perhaps not in such a way that we could say that in us God sins, for instance. Exactly why not is a more complicated issue, though.
      2. But if God knew what we would do before he created us, then he surely is responsible for the situation in which we in fact do behave in these horrific ways.

So the alternative way of defending God would have to be that even an omniscient God somehow didn’t know how human behaviour would turn out. Is this possible?

10. Two ways of defining freedom
    1. A person does something freely if they do it because they want to, and if they do it because of what they think they are doing.
       1. The first bit of this excludes external force; but there are unclear cases: addiction; psychologically compulsive behaviour; behaviour under threat. The second part of this excludes things done in sleepwalking, or in ignorance of the true facts – turning on a light and blowing up the house because there was a gas leak, for instance. The person turned on the light freely, but did not freely blow up the house.
       2. Note: on this version of freedom, it is not required that the person could have done something else at the moment of choosing; she might, for instance, not be able on this occasion to act ‘out of character’.
    2. A person does something freely only if they were fully able to do something else at the moment of choosing.
       1. This excludes even actions performed in line with our character, if we could not there and then have done anything else. As a result much of what we do would be unfree on this definition.
       2. Actions resulting from addiction, psychological compulsion, irreversible habit, do not count as free.
    3. Sometimes we use the word ‘free’ in the first way, sometimes in the second. Is the first compatible with moral responsibility? Is the second ever true of anyone?
       
       
11. Freedom and Predictability
    Can we ever predict what someone will freely do? Can we ever know what someone would do if they were ever in such and such circumstances? The answers to these questions are not altogether clear: but perhaps
    1. Obviously, we can know of actions which people freely do – but we can know this because they have done them
    2. We might often be able to predict what people do freely, in the first sense – that is to say, spontaneously but in character
    3. But it seems impossible to predict what people would freely do in the second sense – all options still open at the time of choice.
       
       
12. God’s accountability for our free actions
    1. God, being omniscient, would know all that we in fact do; and could ‘predict’ everything we will do ‘freely’ in the first sense
    2. God could not know in advance, so to speak, what we would freely do in the second sense of ‘free’So God is accountable for what human beings spontaneously do, and hence for the harm and malice of our behaviour in those cases; but not for things which we do when we could equally well have done something else.
       

Once again, then, the conclusion might be that whether God could be blamed for creating humans will depend on whether freedom in either of its two sense is sufficiently valuable as to outweigh the bad consequences.

13. Is God to blame?
    It seems to me that there is no good reason to suppose that God knew that it was possible to create a world which would have been overall better than this one. In that case, God cannot be blamed.It therefore follows that in that sense ‘the problem of evil’ is solved; it is not intellectually dishonest to believe that an infinitely good, omnipotent and omniscient God could have created a world like ours.
    
    
14. Some quick questions and answers:
    Q: Does ‘absolving God’ make sufferings easier to bear?
    A: No. At best it might make it a bit easier not to add to the suffering by fuelling resentment against God.
    
    Q: Why is there suffering in the world, then?
    A: The answer to this is in one way very simple: suffering is inevitable in a world like ours; natural events

    Those things are just what happens in a world which evolves in the way that ours has evolved. So we can give an answer, different in each instance, which explains how the suffering came about.

    Q: But what is the meaning, the point of suffering?
    A: I think the question is asking for a kind of answer which simply is not there.

15. The passion and death of Jesus
    1. We can in one way explain why Jesus suffered: he was politically dangerous to Pilate, and religiously threatening to at least one influential group of Jews.
    2. But the attempt to ask for its meaning leads to some unacceptable ways of thinking: God as a kind of Shylock, in one way or another needing his son to suffer; or a retributive theory of God’s justice.
    3. So I suggest that it is a mistake to see the sufferings of Jesus as in themselves valuable, or redemptive.
    4. In another sense, though we can explain the sufferings of Jesus: they came about because of his fidelity to his divine mission, his dedication to the truth even in those dangerous circumstances, his obedience to the Father who wants not sacrifices but a pure heart.
       
       
16. Finding God in suffering
    Various solutions offered: Contrast two ‘solutions’ in Romans Chapter 8.