Concept

Theodicy

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Theodicy

The philosophical defence of God’s existence and goodness in the face of suffering and evil — the classical ‘problem of evil’ challenge. The word derives from the Greek theos (God) and dike (justice): theodicy justifies God. The problem of evil is the argument that the existence of a good, omniscient, and omnipotent God is incompatible with the suffering observable in the world. John Lennox has a developed response to this argument that runs through both his wiki episodes; Iain McGilchrist and Steven Pinker engage with the problem from different starting points.

The problem of evil: the argument stated

The logical problem (Mackie): if God is omnipotent, He can prevent evil. If God is omniscient, He knows about evil. If God is perfectly good, He wants to prevent evil. Yet evil exists. Therefore a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good does not exist.

The evidential problem (Rowe): even if the logical problem has a formal solution, the quantity and distribution of suffering — particularly innocent suffering, natural disasters, and apparently pointless pain — constitutes strong evidence against the existence of a benevolent creator.

This is the most common objection raised against theism in public debate and the one Lennox addresses most directly.

Lennox’s response

The first move: distinguishing types of evil. Lennox distinguishes moral evil (evil caused by human choices — murder, oppression, genocide) from natural evil (suffering caused by nature — disease, earthquake, predation). Moral evil is readily explained within a theistic framework that includes human free will: God created beings with genuine freedom, and those beings use that freedom to harm each other. A God who eliminated moral evil by removing freedom would have eliminated the persons who commit it — and God was creating persons, not moral robots. See Free Will.

The second move: the response to natural evil. Natural evil is harder. Lennox does not attempt a complete philosophical explanation. His response is twofold: (1) the universe is not as it was intended to be — the fall, in Christian theology, has cosmic as well as personal dimensions; and (2) the Christian response to suffering is not primarily philosophical argument but incarnation. God does not offer an explanation; God enters the suffering. The cross is God’s answer to the problem of evil: not ‘here is why evil exists’ but ‘I am here in it with you.’

This is the response Lennox gives consistently in debate. He credits John Lennox’s debate with Peter Singer on the problem of evil as the sharpest formulation: Singer challenges Lennox with the suffering of children with brain disease. Lennox’s response is that Christianity is the only belief system whose founder personally suffered an unjust death — and that this is not irrelevant to the question.

The third move: the secular alternative is not obviously better. Lennox argues that atheism has its own problem of evil: if there is no God, there is no objective meaning to the difference between kindness and cruelty. The reduction of suffering becomes a preference, not a moral obligation. Pinker can note that suffering has declined (see Enlightenment), but cannot — on purely naturalist grounds — say that this decline is good in any sense stronger than ‘most humans prefer it.’ For Lennox, the very intuition that suffering is wrong — not merely unwanted — is evidence for a moral order that naturalism cannot provide.

The fourth move: the analogy of the surgeon. If a child is diagnosed with a life-threatening condition that can only be treated by painful surgery, the good parent does not refuse the surgery because it will cause pain. The pain is allowed, even caused, in the service of a greater good. This does not establish that all suffering is redemptive, but it establishes that the existence of suffering is compatible with the existence of a good agent with purposes the sufferer cannot fully see.

McGilchrist’s engagement

McGilchrist does not offer a classical theodicy but engages with the problem of evil in a distinctive way. His view is that suffering, loss, and death are not anomalies in a world that would otherwise be without them but are intrinsic to the kind of world the right hemisphere reveals: a world of becoming, relation, and finite creatures. The left hemisphere’s fantasy of a perfectly ordered, controllable world without suffering is a delusion born of the refusal to attend fully to what is.

His engagement with the sacred — the fourth of his four epistemological pathways — includes a recognition that suffering has revelatory power. Following the tradition of tragedy (Aeschylus: ‘wisdom comes alone through suffering’), McGilchrist holds that suffering properly attended to discloses something about the structure of reality that comfort conceals. This is not quite a theodicy — it does not justify God’s ways — but it is an engagement with the problem that takes suffering seriously rather than explaining it away.

The connection to his panpsychism: if experiential properties are fundamental to reality, the capacity for suffering may be too. A world of beings who experience joy must be a world of beings who can experience its absence. The theodicy problem, on this framing, dissolves into the observation that you cannot have one without the other — though this does not explain why the distribution of suffering is as it is.

Pinker’s position: the secular reduction of suffering

Pinker does not offer a theodicy — the question is moot for him because God does not exist. But he engages with the same territory from the opposite direction: the reduction of suffering is the central moral project, and the Enlightenment is its vehicle.

For Pinker, the problem of evil is not a philosophical puzzle about God’s existence but a practical challenge about how to reduce preventable suffering. The data in Better Angels and Enlightenment Now — the decline in violence, disease, poverty, and premature death — are the secular answer to the problem of evil: we can make the world better, we have made it better, and we should continue to do so.

Pinker’s implicit theodicy is progress: suffering is not justified by God’s hidden purposes, but it is not meaningless either. Suffering is the material on which human ingenuity and compassion operate. The fact that we can reduce it, and that reduction generates genuine moral value, gives the project of reducing suffering its obligatory character.

The problem: as Lennox notes, on a purely naturalist account, the obligation to reduce suffering is a preference — perhaps a very widely shared one — not an objective moral fact. Pinker’s secular humanist account of why reducing suffering matters implicitly draws on moral intuitions whose justification requires more than evolutionary psychology. This is the residual gap that McGilchrist and Lennox both identify.

Where mainstream views differ

The logical problem of evil (Mackie) is now widely regarded as defeated: philosophers across the spectrum accept that free will provides a logically sufficient defence of the logical compatibility of God and evil (Alvin Plantinga’s ‘free will defence’). The live debate is about the evidential problem.

The debate over the evidential problem divides along two main lines:

Skeptical theism (Wykstra, Bergmann): we have no reason to expect that we could see God’s reasons for allowing specific instances of suffering, any more than a two-year-old can see its parent’s reasons for a painful medical procedure. The inference from ‘I cannot see a good reason for this suffering’ to ‘there is no good reason’ is epistemically overconfident. Skeptical theism is the philosophical elaboration of Lennox’s surgeon analogy.

The inference to atheism (Rowe, Draper): despite the formal solutions available, the intensity and distribution of natural suffering — particularly the suffering of non-human animals over billions of years before humans appeared — constitutes strong probabilistic evidence against theism. A God who is perfectly good and omnipotent could have created a universe without, say, the suffering of animals in the process of evolution by natural selection. The fact that such a universe is apparently available and not chosen is evidence (not proof) against such a God.

McGilchrist vs. Lennox on the response to suffering: McGilchrist’s view that suffering is intrinsic to a finite world of becoming does not sit easily with the classical theist doctrine of God’s omnipotence — a classically omnipotent God could have created finite beings without suffering. Lennox would resist the naturalistic flavour of McGilchrist’s account of suffering as part of the ‘right-hemisphere’ view of reality; for Lennox, the account of suffering that matters is theological (the fall, the cross, resurrection).

In the wiki