The Argument From Evil

The argument from evil is used to prove that God doesn’t exist. The gist of this argument can be summed up as “… the fact that there is evil in the world (or that there is so much of it) proves there is no God”. Since we can’t provide any concrete evidence to prove that God indeed exists, why don’t we just extrapolate from the things that we already knew to prove whether God exists or not? There are different methods to approach this argument, below are three versions for this argument to prove that God doesn’t exist.

This first one is based on the premises that if God exists, that being will be omnipotent and God will not allow any evil in the world, but there is still evil, so God doesn’t exist. However, this logic is not really tight. First of all, the concept of good and evil is not inherent but rather an idea imposed by human, so how can we know that God agrees with us on what is evil and what is not; then, there is no way to prove that God is as powerful as what we think he is. Thus the conclusion is not built on solid ground. 

The second version is slightly different from the first one. The second version acknowledges the existent of evil and the reason for the existence of evil is for human to build souls, but if there is an almighty God, why the amount of evil is so large that it exceeds the soul-building minimum? Hence, there is no God. The second version seems like a quiet valid argument, but it fails to factor in the free will of people. God gives us free will to do whatever we want; some people choose to do good things and some don’t. God has no control over their choices, thus God can’t limit the number of evilness to a certain level. It is clearly the second version of this argument is still untenable.

Then how about we factor in free will of human. Let’s look at the third version of the argument. Suppose God were to exist and that being has divine power to do everything, then there would be no more evil than the minimum required for soul-building and as a consequence of human freedom, but the quantity of evil found in human history still exceeds the minimum required for soul-building and as a consequence of human freedom. For example, If God could have used divine power to prevent the egg and sperm from coming together to produce little Hitler (doing this wouldn’t necessarily rob Hitler’s parents’ free will), millions of lives would have been saved and the world would have been a much better place. Hence, God doesn’t exist. Although this version seems like an impeccable one, it still has one big problem left. There is a question of testability in this version of argument. It is impossible for human being to know what is the minimum quantity for soul building. Only God can tell how much evil is the minimum quantity for human to build their souls. If this version of arguments were to stand, it would have been built on the fact that we knew what God could do and we knew what he thinks is the minimum requirement for soul building. If so, it would contradict with the conclusion this version of the argument drew. 

The abovementioned version of argument follow the format like this: “If an omnipotent God exists, the evil of X kind will not exist, but the evil of X kind exists, so no omnipotent God exists”. The logic in this argument is fine but it is really hard to prove the premise of this type of argument is true. How about we use a modest kind of argument, which is called the evidential argument from evil. The format of this type argument is that “If A is true, you would expect B is not true; If A is not true, you would expect B is true, thus B is strong evidence against the truth of A”.

To understand the formation of an argument and be able to evaluate the validity of an argument is not only an important step for us to build a critical thinking but also help us to better formulate our own arguments in the future. The argument over the existence of God has been around for hundreds of years, which makes it a classical example for us to learn how to make a point and how to make a solid argument with tenable premises. The argument from devil approaches this question with a new perspective. Instead of proving a point by finding direct evidence to support the conclusion, one can try to go tackle the problem “the other way around”.