cellio | theodicy

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judaism

theodicy

Sunday night I attended the first in a short series of classes my rabbi is teaching on the (theological) problem of evil. This is not a summary of the class (I wasn't taking notes anyway); this is a ramble prompted by the class.

If we hold that God is all of omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipresent, then we have a problem answering the question of why bad things happen to good people. Now to my mind there's "bad" and there's "evil", and they might have different sources. A hurricane is not evil; it's just bad. Evil, I think, requires intent. And while the Torah specifies a system of reward and punishment for following (or not following) the commandments, it's hard to make the argument (Jerry Falwell, I mean you) that when something bad happens to a lot of people, like a region or everyone on a ferry or plane, everyone there had it coming to him. That just doesn't make sense. I think badness is indiscriminant and just part of how the universe works.

Evil, on the other hand, is directed and intentional. It is the act of people. We are nearing the end of reading the Yosef story for this year. I have heard the argument that Yosef had to be sold into slavery so that he would end up in jail so that he would interpret the baker's and butler's dreams so that Paro would call on him so that Yosef would end up as vizier of Egypt so that all of Israel would go there so that they could be enslaved so that they could be freed and get the Torah -- and, therefore, since selling Yosef into slavery led to getting Torah, it wasn't really evil and might even have been divinely engineered. I don't buy it, for two reasons. First, that argument hinges on the idea that this was the only way to get that result, but we have seen nothing to suggest that this was necessary (only sufficient). Surely if Yosef's brothers hadn't sold him into slavery God would have found some other way to reveal the Torah. Second, ends don't justify means. So yes, good resulted from the eleven brothers' evil act, but it was still an evil act.

People have free will, and for that to mean anything, we have to be able to choose good acts or evil acts. The rabbis teach that we have two inclinations, the yetzer tov and the yetzer ra, good and evil inclinations, and that they're arguing it out every time we make a decision. Where did they come from? God, actually -- not a demon or a snake, but they are part of creation. This might have bothered the rabbis; there's a passage in Isaiah that mostly ended up in the daily liturgy (my rabbi and I studied this a little while ago during our talmud study), with one significant change. The prayer says God forms light and darkness and creates order (wholeness? the word is "shalom") over everything, but the rabbis made a change: the passage in Isaiah (45:7) says God creates light and darkness and... evil. Can an omnibenevolent being create evil? It would seem so -- either that, or God isn't omnibenevolent. (Tradition takes it for granted that he is, but I don't think we can grant that, or that we need to.)

Deut 11:13-17 (part of daily liturgy) lays out a system of reward and punishment: If you hearken to my commandments then you prosper; if not you perish. That's a singular "you" in the Hebrew, near as I can tell, even though the rewards and punishments are specified corporately. (It's not like some farms will get rain and others not, after all.) This is plainly stated in the Torah, but I don't think most people today believe in an ever-attentive God with a scorecard at the ready handing out individual rewards and punishments. Theology evolves. Even in rabbinic times, it had evolved enough that the rabbis had to develop the idea of Olam HaBa, the world to come, where ininquities in this world would be compensated for. They didn't have a better way to explain bad things happening to good people either, it seems.

I don't believe that God is constantly adjusting the mix of good and bad in my life in response to my actions; if he's doing that he's getting a lot of things wrong (in both directions), and God is too smart to get things wrong. And if I die or get sick, it's not because God decided I needed to be punished. But nor do I think that God is absent or ignoring me. I think he gives us choices and opportunities and challenges and is mostly hands-off, except that sometimes he might drop some hints or nudges to people who are receptive. While, if badness or evil befalls me (l'havdil!), it might get me to stop for some self-examination, I attribute badness to the natural order of things and evil to individual people -- not God. God enabled evil but is not responsible for its use. God enabled badness but is not targetting it.

There are certainly a lot of unanswered questions, and I don't know if these ramblings are actually useful to anyone, but I wanted to write some of this down to come back to later.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I actually sort of come close to understand Rabbi Akiva's point. . .

Here's how I look at it: I can read a biography of, say, Benedict Arnold, and I can look at the choices he made. I can know everything that he did, more or less, and the choices he made, and why. It's all written. But Arnold had free will.

Hashem lives outside time, so can look in at our lives, can look at the decisions we made, and can know it all. Yet, just because Hashem knows what I did doesn't mean that I didn't have free will to do it.

Oh, that's an excellent simple way to put it.

Here's a notion which I think I picked up from _The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen_. G-d knows everything, but since the future hasn't happened yet, it isn't real and thus isn't knowable. Have you heard of that idea actually turning up in Judaism?

Both the Rambam and Ibn Ezra made variations of that argument, as I understand it. Not exactly like that, as it's taken for granted that an omniscient G-d would know the future as well as the past — but, in some sense, knowledge of exactly what goes on in the world is part of the world, not part of G-d, just as time and space are part of the world, not part of G-d.

That was definitely in _The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen_.

A hurricane is not evil; it's just bad.

You're standing at the switch of a fork in a rail line. Down the main trunk comes barrelling an out-of-control train. Down one of the two forks -- the one the switch currently has the train pointed at -- are four workmen working obliviously on the rails who will be killed if the train is not diverted. Down the other are several hundred tons of marshmallow into which the train could safely derail hurting no one and nothing, stopping the train with no more damage than making it slightly sticky.

If you do nothing, and allow the train to plow into the four workmen, killing them, not because you didn't know (you did), not because there was nothing you could do (there was), not because you were not there (you were), how would you morally characterize your inaction?

Is there any way, in the scenario as given, in which you could characterize your act as benevolent?

Nope. You're begging the question. Under your scenario, assuming that HaShem caused the Universe, then HaShem would need to be evil, and the scenario only has this one solution.

Further, in order to answer your question, we presume omniscience, or at least serious hubris or vanity. G-d may have a reason we don't understand for allowing your 4 workers to die.

Does HaShem allow bad things,or even cause them? Absolutely. Is this evil? I have no way to answer that. It is our decisions that can be judged good or evil. Just as we cannot ask HaShem to forgive us for transgressions against other people, we cannot make HaShem accountable to us.

Further, in order to answer your question, we presume omniscience, or at least serious hubris or vanity. G-d may have a reason we don't understand for allowing your 4 workers to die.

Well, I certainly agree that it is hybristic for humans to assert there is a being which is omnipotent, but that was one of the conditions of the initial problem: a being able to do anything, even bending the laws of nature.

The point of my example was to clarify just what the Problem of Evil was. The "Problem" is no problem at all for anyone who dispenses with one of the three conflicting attributes lists: all knowing, all powerful, and all benevolent.

You seem to be having difficulty with grasping what the Problem of Evil is. It may help if you think it through without bringing theology into it, first, then apply it. Because what you just said amounted to, "It can't have that result because then that would mean X and X cannot be true because I don't like X."

The whole point of the word "omnipotence" is "have your cake and eat it too." If you can do anything that includes violating causality. Causality is the "this has to happen for something else to happen".

The whole point of saying that a supernatural being has "omnipotence" is that the natural laws of causality do not apply to them. Such a being is outside of time and space, constrained by neither but able to bend them to its will.

Which means being able to take any actions without any consequences. It means no consequences. It means being able to save the four workers and also acheiving whatever other end one may have a reason to acheive, because all ends are acheivable without having to recourse to any means.

Omnipotence means there are no trade-offs, and there are no reasons not to take any action, except for subjective ones, whether or not one likes that action.

There are, as far as I know, no religions which actually posit a single being which is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. Many claim that, but if you examine them closely, they cede one or more of the points.

Either they say that their candidate is subject to some form of causality, such that the being must make trade-off choices, perhaps not causality as we know it, but a "Deep Law" (C.S. Lewis), and is not omnipotent; or is in ignorance of human affairs (a rare choice for a monotheistic religion) and is not omniscient; or is not omnibenevolent, and this usually requires the defining of "good" as not requiring benevolence or to redefine "benevolence" to mean "something completely unlike human benevolence that we do not understand at all and would not recognize as benevolence in a human if they acted that way".

I brought up the question because I am interested in

cellio's approach to the answer. I think, really, everyone has to answer it for him or herself.

But while I'm pointing out issues in logic, I'll point out that:

Just as we cannot ask HaShem to forgive us for transgressions against other people, we cannot make HaShem accountable to us.

does not actually hold. I don't really care, except in a completist sense; believe whatever is in your heart to believe. Just, for the record, the two clauses aren't parallel: there are three parties in the first, and two in the second. There's no particular comparison between asking a third party to intervene in the relations between two others, and the relations between two people. There may be reasons you cannot hold your god accountable to you, but that isn't it.

For if those you have transgressed against can hold you accountable (and I do not know that you grant any such thing! I'm just positing it), then you, presumably, have a right to hold your god accountable for his/her transgressions against you. Such presumption may false, of course, if one grants that, say, one's god is one's king and is not held accountable to his subjects, a priori.

Well, I certainly agree that it is hybristic for humans to assert there is a being which is omnipotent, but that was one of the conditions of the initial problem: a being able to do anything, even bending the laws of nature.

You misunderstand. It is hubristic of humans to ascribe understanding the practical application of omniscience, omnipotence or omnibenevolence. The scenario still fails, since we lack the comprehension to understand it so as to give a meaningful answer. Whether the assumption of a deity is hubris or not, I can't say.

There are, as far as I know, no religions which actually posit a single being which is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. Many claim that, but if you examine them closely, they cede one or more of the points.

You're saying that they claim to have one, but fail to actually deliver? Again, since we don't know what your three terms really mean in practice, we can't very well say that something does not have those attributes.

I think that God, being God, could have set things up any way he wanted, but in creating this world, he limited himself on omnipotence in this instance in order to permit free will. He could have retained omnipotence, but then he would have been required to intervene in every case of badness or evil -- which means he's doing the cosmic equivelent of producing a play, not allowing his creation to run itself. Creating a world with natural laws is only meaningful if you let those natural laws do their thing; creating people with free will is only meaningful if you let them act. Even if you don't like the outcome and you could have set things up differently.

This doesn't mean God isn't omnipotent globally; it means he accepted a restriction within our domain.

(Tangent: Yes, God sometimes violates natural laws to produce miracles, like at the sea of reeds (yam suf). A plain reading of the torah tells us that he also sometimes violates free will, by hardening Paro's heart, and the rabbis have a lot to say about that. These violations of the natural order of things are, by definition, unusual.)

Now, back to your train example. It is clearly willful neglect, an evil act, for me to fail to throw the switch as you've outlined the scenario. Now let's change some parameters: would it be evil if what's down-rail is not four workers but a mouse? How about one of my possessions, which I carelessly left lying on the track? It is wrong for me to kill my fellow man by inaction because he's my fellow man; we're on the same level. I, personally, take care with animals too -- well, at least the ones I consider beneficial, so pets yes and mosquitos no -- but most people see animals at a lower level. Physical property, which isn't alive, is certainly at a lower level still. So, all that said, how does God view his creation? We are clearly not his equal; are we low enough in relative status that it is not evil for God to fail to intervene if a natural event is going to kill some of us?

Suppose you have written a really good AI simulation. Your world has people with individual personalities, generated originally from your templates and then self-modifying from there. They've got a little society going in there; it's a pretty spiffy creation. What obligations do you, as the creator of all this, have toward those beings? When they build homes on flood plains do you have to modify your flooding algorithm to protect them? When some of them turn violent do you have to intervene before they do damage? You could do these things; is it evil if you don't?

I'm not saying that we're just God's toys here; we're told that God cares enough to intervene in the world some of the time. But he could still be taking a mostly hands-off approach, and I don't think that would be evil.

If God knows all, how could he not know how we will use that free will? One approach is that of Rabbi Akiva, who said all is forseen yet free will is preserved. (It's a mystery, in other words.) Another approach is to say that God, being God, perceives the world and time itself very differently than we do. Another approach is to just admit that God doesn't micromanage.

The second of the three is how I see it... God knows all possible futures. Kind of like knowing all the endings to the Choose-Your-Own-adventure books, but on a infinite scale. Hence God Knows what you're going to do... but you still have free will.

I wouldn't say that hurricanes are bad... they simply are natural. A hurricane out in the ocean somewhere, that never hits land is never seen as "bad".

God knows all possible futures. Kind of like knowing all the endings to the Choose-Your-Own-adventure books, but on a infinite scale. Hence God Knows what you're going to do... but you still have free will.

I agree with you anout knowing *ALL* possible futures (plural). Apologies to any Calvinists in the audience, but quantum mechanics trumps predestination.

However, I don't believe that God knows what you are going to do -- God knows *every possible thing* you are going to do, as well as the probability of each thing occurring.

quantum mechanics trumps predestination.

Oh, I *like* that concept! May I quote you?

Yes, you may (he says, logging in to LJ for the first time in *days*).

I have heard the argument that Yosef had to be sold into slavery so that he would end up in jail so that he would interpret the baker's and butler's dreams so that Paro would call on him so that Yosef would end up as vizier of Egypt so that all of Israel would go there so that they could be enslaved so that they could be freed and get the Torah -- and, therefore, since selling Yosef into slavery led to getting Torah, it wasn't really evil and might even have been divinely engineered.

Actually, Yosef himself says that (in last week's parsha, talking to Yehuda). Well, at least through getting all of Israel into Egypt (to save them from the famine).

I can actually see the rest; I've been hatching an understanding over the past few months that the whole thing from Yosef being sold through the Golden Calf was part of a centuries-long, complex lesson about idolatry — then G-d dumped us in Cana'an for a few hundred years to start working out just what it meant. (Apparently not entirely a unique idea; there is a suggestion in the Gemara that the incident of the Golden Calf was in some sense necessary after Matan Torah, because we were too "perfect" to advance any further at that point and G-d had to "break the spell" to get us back onto track.)

Actually, Yosef himself says that

That doesn't make him right. :-)

A centuries-long lesson about idolatry is an interesting idea. It's one way to get the outcome God wanted; I don't assume that it is the only one. It's the one we ended up with, though.

Of course, the book to consult here is Job.

Harold Kushner(When Bad Things Happen to Good People) identifies several of your proposed solutions to the "friends of Job" who come and explain that his disasters are not really evil, or that he has somehow deserved them, or such. And Job refutes them all.

Kushner suggests that, at the end of the book, the Voice of the Lord, heard in a whirlwind, implies that the answer is that God has chosen to release the World from His omnipotence. Things happen here that He would very much not like to happen. People suffer and die in misery. That's not the divine plan.

Kushner claims it's wrong to say to a women who has seen her infant die: "God needed her in heaven. It's all part of a plan we can't understand." It would be more correct to say, "God did not want your baby to die. He grieves with you."

However, the Lord can take misery and suffering and grief, and turn them into great things. If Yosef offers his suffering to the Lord, it can become the source of great goodness. The stone which the builders reject becomes the cornerstone.

Of course, the book to consult here is Job.

Indeed. And in the end Job submits, saying, essentially, "ok, I can't possibly understand your ways", which on some level isn't very satisfying. It does, hoever, tell us that bad things aren't necessarily punishments. (By extension, then, good things aren't necessarily rewards.)

It would be more correct to say, "God did not want your baby to die. He grieves with you."

This sounds right to me. (I really should get around to readhing that book.) Thanks.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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