The Argument from Evil is lame

 

I think there are several impressive arguments against belief in traditional forms of theism, but the famous "argument from evil" isn't one of them.

One version of this "argument from evil" has been attributed to Epicurus and is often known as the "Epicurean paradox" or "Epicurus's trilemma".  It goes something like this (I've seen it phrased a few different ways, but they are variations on a theme):

"Why does God permit evil to exist? 

First leg: If God is all-powerful and all-good, and he permits evil to exist, then he must not know that it's happening, so he must not be all-knowing.

Second leg: If God is all-knowing and all-good, then he must be powerless to prevent evil or it wouldn't happen, so he can't be all-powerful.

Third leg: If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and he permits evil to occur, then he must not be all-good."

Sometimes, when this argument is presented, it is followed by something like, "Therefore, God cannot be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good at once.  And since God is defined as an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being, this implies that God doesn't exist.  QED."

If that doesn't grab you, Dostoevsky presented a more literary and emotionally passionate version of what amounts to the same argument in the fourth chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, his character, Ivan, asks how a just God could permit "the suffering of an innocent child": 

"[A] poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by... cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?

"... I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony."

First, I must point out that "Epicurus's" trilemma does not appear in any of Epicurus's recorded writings - not entirely surprising, because of Epicurus's 300 purported writings, only a handful have been preserved, and these are mostly fragmentary and often of dubious accuracy.  But I find it quite unlikely that Epicurus made this argument, because Epicurus did indeed believe in God - or rather, in many Gods, which he conceived as living within the intermundia and being unconcerned with human affairs.  It would not have bothered him that the Gods permit evil among human beings.  Similarly, Aristotle's conception of God was of thought thinking itself, and for Aristotle this lack of concern for humanity made God good: precisely because self-contemplation is the highest pleasure for God, God's very impassivity was a credit and not a demerit.  Although it's not explicit in his writings, I think that Epicurus would have felt something like the same way.  He would have regarded a God's dispassionate attitude towards human suffering as evidence of that God's greater ataraxia.

Now as to the argument itself, it doesn't seem especially convincing to me.  (And no, I'm not going to appeal to the stupid argument that "You can't have any idea what's good or evil without God."  Of course you can, and most people do, most of the time.  For instance, nothing in the Bible says that slavery is wrong, yet you know very well that slavery is wrong.  We humans are quite capable of developing quite complex ethical systems without reference to divine revelation.  But whether our human moral categories would apply to God - that's another story.)

There are many places where one can poke holes in "Epicurus's" trilemma.  Even the first leg seems pretty suspect to me.  But the third leg seems especially wrongheaded.

Think of someone who maintains a terrarium.  If they allow a frog to eat a fish, does this make them morally evil?  Yes, they are permitting the suffering of the fish.  But what if they intervened, and prevented the frog from eating, wouldn't that be causing the frog to suffer?  Now, perhaps one could argue that God could have devised frogs in such a way that they wouldn't need to eat other creatures - perhaps, in another world, perhaps in another possible universe, in an alternate timeline, all animals are plants and can get their nutrients directly from the soil and sun.  Would that be morally better?  It's hard to say, at least for me.  But even if we could say which possible world would be the most morally perfect from a human perspective, does it make much sense to impose our human moral categories onto God?  We don't say that a frog is immoral for eating fish.  But presumably, frogs are much more similar to humans than either is to God, in a somewhat analogous way that 5 seems far from 19 quadrillion - but compared with infinity, 5 and 19 quadrillion are so close together as to be virtually indistinguishable.  It just seems bizarrely presumptuous to imagine that I could understand God's perspective well enough to pass judgement upon it.

(Strangely, reading Nietzsche and considering a perspective that is "beyond good and evil" might lead one to dismiss the argument from evil as rather weak - and thus, perhaps, to become more willing to believe in God?) 

Even if we were to accept that the three legs of the trilemma were airtight, what would that prove?  That God didn't exist?  Or that we were conceiving of God in the wrong way?  

After all, where does this notion come from, that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent?  

(That's actually not a rhetorical question.  I genuinely would like to know, and thus far, my research has not produced a conclusive, single source.  It would seem that this idea developed gradually and in parallel in several different traditions, and more recently than one might suppose.  But I'm not certain.)

Nowhere in the Bible, for instance, does it claim that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.