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  • Why is the sky blue?

  • Which came first: orange the color or orange the fruit?

  • And why is C3PO afraid of everything? Like, who decided it was a good idea to teach a droid to experience fear?

  • There are some questions that we ask ourselves, either as kids, or adults, or both.

  • They're questions about weird, everyday things, and they're weird because most of

  • us don't know the answers to them offhand.

  • But most of the time, those questions turn out to be pretty answerable.

  • Like, for the ones I just mentioned, the short answers are:

  • Because of the way photons interact with the molecules in the atmosphere.

  • ...the fruit; Anduh…'cause that's what George Lucas wanted.

  • Maybe because 3PO's a protocol droid, and they need to be able to relate to humans.

  • Though, he could stand to turn his fear settings down a notch.

  • Now, as you know, philosophers have a soft spot for questions that can never be answered.

  • Most of the time, these puzzles make for great thought experimentstests of our skills in logic and argument.

  • But there are some questions whose very lack of an answer can be downright troubling.

  • Unlike the occasional fluke of physics or bit of Star Wars trivia, there's a part of us that really wants,

  • or even needs to have an answer to these things.

  • For the past month or so, we've been exploring the philosophy of religion,

  • and we've been doing it mainly from a theistic perspective, looking into arguments that justify belief in God.

  • But one of the most persistent challenges to god's existence is also the root of one of the most-asked,

  • but least answerable, questions that we, as thinking beings, face.

  • Why is there evil?

  • [Theme Music]

  • Evil comes in many forms.

  • And likewise, for philosophers, poses many problems, especially vis a vis the existence of god.

  • First, there's what's known as the logical problem of evil.

  • Like all rational people, theists can't help but acknowledge that the world is full of evil.

  • And here, we're understandingevilto be all manner of bad stufflike, not just Hitler or Darth Vader or Moriarty.

  • It's everything that's in the vast spectrum of badness, from stubbed toes to plagues and everything in between.

  • Theists and atheists both agree that evil exists in this way. But they disagree about the next part.

  • Many theists believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.

  • But atheists argue that this creates a contradiction – a set of beliefs that can't all be true at the same time.

  • Because, evil is bad, rightwhether it's stubbed toes or genocide or paper cuts or epidemics?

  • So, if there's really an all-knowing God out there, he knows about all the evil.

  • He might even know about it before it happens.

  • And if he's all-powerful, he could stop it.

  • And if he's all-good, then he would want to stop it.

  • And yet he doesn't. The evil continues.

  • Philosophically rational people shouldn't hold inconsistent beliefs,

  • so atheists argue that you're going to have to give something upand the thing to give up is God.

  • Some theists, however, take a different route. They choose to give up one or more divine attributes.

  • They argue that maybe God isn't powerful enough to stop evil,

  • or maybe he's not knowledgeable enough to know about it,

  • or maybe he's not even good enough to care about stopping it.

  • That might sound weird to some of you,

  • but if you've ever heard someone say that God is envious, or petty, or jealous,

  • that's basically what they're doing

  • they're acknowledging the possibility that God is not actually good.

  • If you've ever checked out the Old Testament, there is a God there who has some anger issues

  • one who's not at all opposed to wiping out entire populations just because of some bad behavior.

  • Still, despite this scriptural evidence, many theists are committed to God's omni-attributes,

  • and are thus stuck with a problem. They have to resolve the logical problem of evil

  • and find some way to explain why God would allow evil into the world.

  • And if you can do that, then you are presenting what is known as a theodicy.

  • A theodicy is an attempt to show that the existence of evil doesn't rule out the possibility of God's existence.

  • Yes, this is such a big deal that there's a word for it.

  • And the most popular theodicy is called The Free Will Defense.

  • This argument holds that God maximized the goodness in the world by creating free beings.

  • And being free means that we have the choice to do evil things – a choice that some of us exercise.

  • This theodicy says that God doesn't create evil, but evil can't be avoided without depriving us of our freedom.

  • And a world without freedom would be a worse place overall.

  • This explanation preserves God's goodness, because he created the best possible world,

  • and also preserves his omnipotence and omniscience, because,

  • although he does know about evil and could stop it, he has a good reason not toto ensure our freedom.

  • The problem is, the free will defense really only really addresses what's known as moral evil

  • or the evil committed, on purpose, by humans.

  • Now, we're certainly responsible for a lot of bad stuff, but you can't blame us for everything.

  • We can't be held responsible for the fact that the plates of the earth sometimes shift,

  • causing destructive earthquakes, or that a storm might knock a tree over that falls onto someone's house.

  • This type of evilthe stuff we're not responsible foris called natural evil,

  • and the free will defense can't resolve natural evil.

  • Religion is one of those philosophical issues that can make it hard for us to consider anything objectively.

  • That's where fiction comes in handy because fictional stories can let us see how hypothetical

  • people deal with hypothetical situations.

  • And with that in mind, let's go to the Thought Bubble for some Flash Philosophy!

  • Let's consider the case of Ivan, a good Russian who decides to break up with God.

  • In the novel The Brothers Karamozov, 19th century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky presents us with Ivan,

  • a man who claims to believe in God.

  • But Ivan finds the fact that God allows evil to exist to be so unforgivable,

  • that he decides worshipping such a god would be, just, unconscionable.

  • Ivan goes so far as to declare that he isreturning his ticketto heaven.

  • If the same God who allows evilparticularly the suffering and death of children

  • is also saving a cozy place in paradise for Ivan, well, Ivan wants nothing to do with it.

  • So, his way out of the problem of evil is to deny God's goodness,

  • and to conclude that a bad God is not only unworthy of his worship,

  • he's also not someone Ivan wants to spend eternity with.

  • It's like the ultimate un-friending.

  • Now, some readers have found Ivan's decision to be noble, and full of integrity.

  • After all, if you really think God is letting all of this bad stuff happen, why would you want to be on his team?

  • But other people think Ivan is being irrationalwhy condemn yourself to eternity in hell on principle?

  • For theists, it's another question that doesn't have an easy answer.

  • Thanks, Thought Bubble! Now, unlike Ivan, a lot of people aren't willing to give up their ticket to heaven.

  • So they need to work on a way to keeping believing in, and worshipping, God, even though evil is still a thing.

  • One way to do that, is to argue that good can't exist without its opposite.

  • The idea here is that you can't understand the concept of pleasure without pain.

  • We don't know what it feels like to be warm if we haven't been cold.

  • We can't understand the goodness of filling our bellies if we've never been hungry.

  • But there's also another way, though it involves a little more work on your part.

  • 20th century English philosopher of religion John Hick offered what's known as the soul-making theodicy.

  • Unlike the traditional view that God created a perfect world,

  • which we ruined through our own poor choices, Hick argued that God deliberately creates usunfinished,”

  • and our earthly lives are designed to toughen us up, in a sense, kinda like boot camp.

  • The harshness of life, Hick said, gives us a robust texture and character that wouldn't

  • be possible without an imperfect world.

  • Hick said that we're not just God's little pets, and he's not our benevolent owner,

  • whose sole job is to keep us in a safe, comfortable environment.

  • Instead, he wants to build us, to train us, into a particular kind of being.

  • So we need an environment that's suited to the sort of growth that he wants

  • the sort that this world makes possible.

  • A lot of people find these and other theodicies to be pretty compelling.

  • However, the problem of evil actually goes a step deeper.

  • What we've been talking about so far is the logical problem of evil.

  • This problem can be resolved, if we can explain why there's evil.

  • But there's also the evidential problem of evil.

  • This problem points out that we might be able to explain why evil exists,

  • but we still can't explain why there's so much evil in the world.

  • For instance, let's say that it's true that we really do need evil in order to understand goodness.

  • In that case, why can't we understand the contrast through some sort of low-level evil

  • like paper cuts and head colds and having to work straight through our lunch hour every now and then?

  • I mean, slow, painful deaths from cancer, and city-destroying hurricanes

  • they don't really add anything valuable to our understanding of goodness. Do they?

  • If God were truly good, and if a negative contrast were really needed in order for us

  • to understand the goodness of the world, then why wouldn't he give us just the very minimum

  • dosage of necessary to achieve that goal?

  • A counterargument might suggest that there's always a good that corresponds to, and is proportionate to, any evil.

  • But empirically, such goodness is really hard to find.

  • What good, for example, could possibly correspond to the horrors of a genocide?

  • In cases like this, Hick's soul-making doesn't seem to cut it.

  • You can't really argue thatwhatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger,” because,

  • sometimes, evil does kill us. A lot of us.

  • And sometimes it kills us before we have a chance to grow and learn from the suffering we've endured.

  • Despite these and other philosophical sticking points, a lot of people have found a theodicy that satisfies them

  • one that they believe reconciles the apparent evil in the world with God's existence.

  • Others find all of these theodicies to be flawed, and they reject God's omni-nature,

  • preserving their belief in God by finding him to be less than perfectly powerful, or knowledgeable, or good.

  • Still others are convinced that the evil in the world is simply incompatible with the existence of a god,

  • or at least any god worth worshipping.

  • Wherever you end up, this is a problem that needs to be grappled with.

  • And you'll probably be thinking about it long after this lesson has ended.

  • After all, today we have considered the biggest problem in theismthe problem of evil.

  • We've thought about different theodiciesor ways that we might reconcile the existence

  • of evil and the existence of god,

  • and we've explored whether those responses are sufficient.

  • Next time, we'll consider what kinds of justification we need to have for our religious beliefs.

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  • Crash Course Philosophy is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.

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  • This episode of Crash Course was filmed in the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio

  • with the help of these awesome people and our equally fantastic graphics team is Thought Cafe.

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