Billions of people around the world believe in a monotheistic God, and this conviction bleeds into every aspect of life. God can be found in households, classrooms, courtrooms, prisons, and printed on national currency. Many believers find it difficult to separate their faith in God from their professional lives, for their actions and choices often reflect religious values learned at a young age. God’s pervasiveness is unquestionable: there is an enduring strength in numbers, and the concept of a monotheistic God is alluring. He is known as a benevolent Father who is all-knowing and all-powerful but always shows mercy and lenience towards His children. Unfortunately, some of these characteristics are inconsistent in the face of reality. An absolutely benevolent God would not allow widespread famine, disease, poverty, and violence to occur, but those misfortunes certainly exist in abundance. Widespread evil and suffering runs rampant on Earth, and therefore the magnanimity of this omnipotent God is problematic. Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus phrased this ‘problem of evil’ best when he asked “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is He impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then is He malevolent.  Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” (Hume 198). The presence of evil and unjust suffering is indisputable, so a theological dilemma arises when attempting to reconcile its existence with the power and beneficence of God.

To date, there is no consensus between religious and secular theorists about the Epicurean paradox. A common answer to the problem of evil is that humans cannot fathom the thoughts and actions of their Creator, and therefore human views of justice and suffering are incomplete. The Old Testament suggests this explanation as one of many in the Book of Job. This Biblical story describes the suffering of Job, a “perfect and upright” man lauded by God (Job 1:1). According to the tale, Satan meets with God and asserts that Job is loyal only because he is blessed and that if God took away all of Job’s blessings, Job would curse Him to His face. God denies this and grants Satan permission to test Job’s faithfulness by destroying his wealth, killing his family, and afflicting him with a terrible disease that covers him with boils and causes him unbearable agony. After all of this terrible grief and undeserved suffering, Job still does not curse God. Job’s friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, come to visit him, and they encourage Job to confess his sins. Job declares his innocence, and Bildad says, “If thou wert pure and upright; surely now He would awake for thee, and make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous” (Job 8:6). Job’s friends argue that God would not punish Job unless he had done something terrible, but Job mocks his friends’ narrow understanding of God. Then, another young man, Elihu, speaks up, frustrated with the disagreements of the older men. Elihu contends that God causes suffering in order to elicit an appreciation for Him and for life when the suffering ends. God has the power “to bring back [Job’s] soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living” (Job 33.30). Finally, God interrupts and answers Job and his friends. He chastises Job for being so insolent as to believe that God owed him and explanation for his suffering. Overwhelmed, Job admits his foolishness and concedes “therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not” (Job 42:3). God is pleased with this and redirects His wrath towards Job’s friends, furious that they attempted to justify His actions. He orders them to sacrifice to Him, and says that He will forgive them only when Job prays for them. God eventually restores Job’s wealth and gives him a new family, and the book concludes with the lesson that people cannot rationalize God’s actions or assign him unchanging traits, for He is above any narrow human understanding and needs no justification.

Analyses of the Book of Job identify a theodicy described by Elihu: that God causes suffering to foster the gratefulness and goodness that result from overcoming hardship. Job and his friends are humbled by God after Job’s suffering and become even more virtuous after the encounter. This explanation is described by author and Professor Emeritus of the College of New Jersey Roy Clouser as the ‘soul making theodicy,’ which says that “those who struggle with [undeserved suffering] may become more virtuous and better fit to serve [God] and live in His Kingdom” (Clouser 39). However, Clouser rejects this hypothesis by maintaining that an omnipotent God could have made Job, or other sufferers, more virtuous without toying with their struggles. In a cynical sense, the Book of Job attributes a certain pettiness to God. Why would an ultimately wise and benevolent God destroy a man’s family and livelihood in order to win a bet with the devil? And, if He is omniscient, should He not have known the outcome of the bet before it came to fruition? Contrary to its intention, the Book of Job can be seen as evidence that God is not all-merciful or all-knowing.

Some advocates of God’s ultimate wisdom support another theodicy that Roy Clouser calls the “greater good defense.” This theodicy claims that unjust suffering exists under a benevolent God because evil produces a good that outweighs the suffering caused by the bad. This implies that God uses unjust suffering as a tool to reach an end, and that end justifies the means. Using that logic, God certainly seems more Machiavellian than benevolent. German philosopher Gottried Leibnitz, on the other hand, was a supporter of the greater good defense. In his Theodicy, Leibnitz wrote, “the best [course of action] is not always that which tends to avoid the evil, since the evil might be accompanied by a greater deal of good. For instance: the general of an army will love a great victory with a slight wound more than no wound at all and no victory” (Leibnitz and Kroeger). Leibnitz’s example fails to account for the hypothetical child whose father was killed by the general and has now sworn to avenge him by murdering the general and his entire family. Good can come out of evil in some situations, but in general, “evils seem to beget more evils” (Clouser 40). Unjust suffering can just as easily start a vicious cycle of unending pain as it can cause an act of goodness.

The third theodicy put forth by Clouser is the argument from free will. This line of reasoning asserts that God chose to create creatures with free will, and therefore had to risk that His creations would choose to make evil decisions. Free will proponents first claim that “God cannot create free creatures that are always good,” so unjust suffering occurs as a result of the evil actions of free creatures (Clouser 41). In the case of natural disasters, such as hurricanes, some advocates of the argument state a second claim that says that natural disasters are the result of Satan’s actions from free will. Clouser answers the first claim with the point that even if God could not stop humans from making evil decisions, He could still “intervene so as to prevent all the unjust suffering that could result from evil free acts” (Clouser 41). The Book of Job itself negates the second claim because though God did not Himself cause Job’s suffering, He explicitly gave Satan permission to do so, making himself partially responsible. Furthermore, those who believe that God never causes suffering are misguided; He unabashedly accepts responsibility for disasters in the verse “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).

The only rational conclusion, then, is that if a God exists (a different argument altogether), He (or She or It) cannot be omnibenevolent. His other characteristics such as ultimate power and knowledge may be debated, but in the face of evil, His supposed infallible love for His creations cannot be defended. Even the language with which one uses to speak of God is very telling about His characterization. For example, a pious person might refer to himself as a “God-fearing man” in English. A fear of God is encouraged in the Bible, and Psalm 111:10 states, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” One must wonder why it is expected of a faithful believer to fear a loving and benevolent God.

The Book of Job reveals a final interpretation of God that does not imply his absolute benevolence. God rebukes Job’s friends when they try to attribute characteristics of righteousness and beneficence to Him. He implies that though He is all-powerful, He has the choice to use His power to act as He pleases without the need to conform to any human ideas of virtue. This explanation is perhaps the most convincing of the many arguments that exist, for it does not actually attempt to reconcile His benevolence with unjust suffering at all, but rather displays His power and free will.

The argument that God is not all-loving and all-merciful is not to say that He never acts with kindness and compassion. As a giver of life, He creates a world with such qualities as love,happiness, beauty, compassion, and wealth. However, the same world exists with pain, grief, poverty, hunger, and cruelty. An omnibenevolent God would have no choice but to intervene in every instance of possible suffering. “If even one child ever tripped and skinned her knee,” God’s benevolence would be undermined (Clouser 37). This notion makes God a slave to His own creations. He would not have the freedom to choose to be benevolent at all; in fact, he could not possibly be malevolent under the constrictions. Certainly an all-powerful God has the freedom to act as He sees fit, so the idea of total beneficence is almost preposterous. “God created mankind in his own image,” giving them the freedom of free will that He himself possesses (Genesis 1:27).The fatal flaw of some theodicies is that they assume that humans have free will and cannot help but to act out of evil; they ignore that God has the same opportunities to act out of malice.

This view is a somewhat unflattering description of God, for it implies that He willfully chooses to cause unjust suffering. As a theodicy, it fails because it does not reconcile God’s omnibenevolence with the problem of evil; it denies His absolute goodness. But in order for God to be unconditionally benevolent, just, and righteous, He would have no choice in the matter,eliminating His free will.  God’s free will has never been in question, so it follows that He chooses when to be benevolent and when to allow evil and unjust suffering to occur.

References

Clouser, R. A. (2012). Part Three: Christianity. (pp. 37-45).

Hume, D., & Smith, N. K. (1947). Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. New York: Macmillan Pub. Co. (Original work published 1854)

Leibnitz, G.W., & Kroeger, A.E. Leibnitz’s Theodicy. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 4 (October, 1873), pp. 30-42