The Other Half of the Problem of Evil

It's weird that we encounter so much evil that doesn't make sense - but it might be even weirder that we encounter so little evil that does!

A terrible flood that conspicuously did not put out a terrible wildfire

Some of the most common responses to the perennial problem of evil can be grouped under the heading of “greater good theodicies.” Put simply, these theodicies approach the problem by arguing that God allows instances of suffering and pain only when they ultimately bring about some greater good that makes the original evils “worth it.” God, on this view, is like a doctor who needs to give a painful shot that cures a deadly disease - the momentary suffering he brings about is real, but the benefits ultimately outweigh, and therefore justify, inflicting it.

The obvious problem here is that some forms of evil, like deadly diseases or hurricanes, don’t seem to bring about any goods at all - or at least not the kinds that could justify inflicting them on innocent people. William Rowe gives the example of a baby deer getting trapped in a forest fire and burning to death. It’s just hard for us to imagine that even an infinitely wise and powerful agent like God could somehow maneuver that sort of pointless suffering into some greater good down the line. Some evil appears, for all the world, to be legitimately gratuitous, with no deeper meaning or purpose.

Of course, theists have responses for this. One of the most popular is to argue that we simply aren’t in a position to understand or evaluate God’s reasons for acting. We’re just puny humans, after all, and not infinitely wise and all-powerful timeless beings like God. So why should we expect to understand what greater goods God is bringing about? We’re like toddlers who can’t imagine why their parents might force them to eat broccoli or take a bath - just because it doesn’t make sense to us doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense. It could very well be that every act of seemingly pointless evil really does bring about some greater good out there, and we’re just unable to make the connection. It’s clear, I hope, why this position is sometimes called skeptical theism.

Hundreds of books and papers have been written on the subject of gratuitous evil, and I’m sure my Substack post isn’t going to solve the problem once and for all. Instead, I just want to make a simple point that I haven’t seen many other people make, which is that such gratuitous evil is really only half the issue. It’s definitely hard to explain why we often encounter immense suffering that doesn’t seem to serve any purpose. But it’s equally hard to explain why we rarely (if ever) encounter immense suffering that does seem to serve a purpose. In other words, the problem of too much inexplicable evil comes paired with the equally difficult problem of too little explicable evil.

To see what I mean, recall the basic premise of the basic greater good theodicy. It says that every evil God allows must necessarily bring about some greater good that justifies it. Zooming in on natural evils, that means every earthquake, hurricane, famine, and epidemic in human history has been a “net positive,” in the sense that the benefits ultimately outweigh the harms. But something immediately jumps out: While human beings are intimately aware of the harms these things bring, we basically never come to understand what the outweighing benefits supposedly are. Really focus in on that point for a second. It’s not just that we’re occasionally, or even regularly, unable to identify the greater goods that come from these disasters and misfortunes. It’s that there are basically no “easy cases” where the connection between the evil and the sufficiently valuable good that makes up for it is obvious. How could that possibly be?

One way to think about this is by imagining a basic distribution of evils on a 100-point scale of explicability. At the low end of the scale, you have evils that make no earthly sense (think about the nicest, sweetest grandma you know getting hit by a meteor) while the high end of the scale has evils that result in some obvious earthly good (think about that same meteor singling out some terrorist moments before they set off a nuclear bomb). Even if we accept the greater good theodicy that says all the evils on this scale are ultimately justified, it’s still very surprising that they tend to overwhelmingly cluster towards the “makes no sense” end of the scale. Exactly how the distribution actually shakes out might be controversial, but for the vast majority of evils, I think it’s extremely implausible to argue that they even clear the 50-point mark; when it comes to your average cancer diagnosis or massive famine, most of us wouldn’t feel comfortable even making an educated guess as to what goods they supposedly obtained.

This distribution is puzzling because there’s nothing that guarantees it has to be the case. You can easily imagine a world like ours that contains twice as much natural evil, but with the stipulation that the extra helping is always explicable. In this world, we see all the same evils we struggle to explain - earthquakes still wipe out entire cities, children still die of cancer, famines still starve tens of thousands to death, and so on. But crucially, in this world, you also see evils that make a lot of sense. Ruthless dictators constantly fall ill with rare diseases, hurricanes pop up to put out industrial fires, and lightning strikes stop mass shooters moments before they enter schools or shopping malls. In other words, about half of all natural evils aren’t puzzling at all - they seem exactly like the sorts of things a loving God would bring about in order to secure a greater good.

If you’re just adding up the raw suffering involved, this imaginary world would be twice as bad. But it seems obvious (to me, at least) that there would still be far fewer atheists in a world like this. Why? Because, in this world, human beings would have reasonable evidence that God does use natural evils to secure greater goods at least some of the time. And once you have evidence God has good reasons for some natural evils, it’s not too hard to imagine there are good reasons for all of them. The difficulty in our world is that we have so little to “get us going” in the first place.

This is why just pointing to the massive gulf between God’s intellect and ours doesn’t work here - there are all sorts of worlds in which that gulf remains fixed and most natural evils are still totally explicable. There has to be something else that explains the skewed distribution of explicability in our world besides just the fact that God is infinitely wise while we aren’t. I might be dumber than a rock when compared to God, but I’d still understand what he was up to if an incredibly small tornado threw Donald Trump and only Donald Trump into the ocean. Something else must be going on, and skeptical theists should be expected to explain what it is.

Of course, for all we know, there is that something else - some explanation out there for the skewed distribution we just can’t grasp with our tiny little minds. So isn’t the skeptical theist safe here? Can’t they just take their basic reply and push it one step back? I don’t think so. To explain why, here’s a quick analogy:

Imagine you’re in some competition you don’t know much about, and your partner is a supposedly high-powered AI. Unfortunately, the AI might be malfunctioning in a way that makes it behave completely randomly. Near the end of the match, you start to think about what moves the AI has made. Some have been great - it made all the obvious moves that even you would have made, and a bunch of clever ones you would have missed. But quite a few of the AI’s moves didn’t get you any points at all, and they sometimes set your opponent up to take points for themselves. What would you think about all this?

Here, I can understand saying something like, “Well, the AI seemed to know what was going on with some of these moves, so maybe I just don’t get the rest of them.” Whether that sort of reasoning is actually justified is up for debate, but at least it makes sense; your knowledge of the game might just be too shaky for you to grasp the optimum strategy every single time. Personally, I’d still be inclined to think all the productive moves were just good luck - it seems much more likely that malfunctioning AI would occasionally do well than that a perfect one would occasionally do poorly - but as long as the AI sometimes shows a real aptitude for the game, it might be reasonable to throw up your hands and trust it.

Now imagine instead that, near the end of the match, you realize the AI hasn’t made a single move you can confidently say was anything more than random. Every decision it makes seems completely pointless or even intentionally destructive. How would that change your evaluation? Of course, no matter how many moves appear to go wrong, it’s still conceivable that the AI is working perfectly. Maybe your knowledge of the game is so deficient that you’ve failed to appreciate the strategy behind every move. Or maybe, by losing, the AI can get an advantage in a second round you don’t even know is coming. Who knows? All of those are metaphysically live options, but it’s hard to see how it could plausibly play a role in your actual evaluation of the AI’s status.

In real life, you would obviously decide the thing was malfunctioning, and you would be absolutely justified in doing so. Could you be wrong? Sure, it’s possible. But at the end of the day, you still need to work with the evidence you have, and none of that evidence even gets you started down the path of confidence. And it wouldn’t help for the designers to simply point out that the AI’s skill is so much greater than your own. After all, it’s not that you’re failing to trust the skill of the AI, once you’ve accepted it exists. It’s that you’re failing to trust any such skill exists in the first place!

The same is true, I think, when it comes to greater good theodicies. The issue isn’t just that so much suffering seems gratuitous. It’s that so little suffering seems necessary! If I had good reason to believe that God sometimes uses natural evils to obtain greater goods, then it wouldn’t be hard to trust that every natural evil had that sort of purpose. But without reliable and consistent examples of God actually doing so, I have no reason to even consider it as an option. This is the other side of the problem of evil, and I hope more theists (and atheists) will take the time to examine it directly.