theodicy

[cellio]

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.)

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.

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.

Comments

[cellio]

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.