Should the existence of extreme human suffering lead a religious believer to abandon their faith?

Essay

The existence of extreme human suffering is evidence against an Abrahamic God, but it does not follow that this should lead a religious believer to abandon their faith. The free will defence offers a powerful way for believers to avoid any logical inconsistency between theism and evil, whilst additional observations which offer positive evidence for the existence of God mean that a theist need not even conclude from extreme human suffering that their faith is unlikely. In this essay, I first briefly address why certain readings of the titular question may render the problem of evil irrelevant to obtaining an answer. I then evaluate the traditional logical and evidential problems of evil as they relate to an Abrahamic God, and assess the convincingness of different theistic responses to each. Finally, I conclude that it is entirely possible that a religious believer is justified in maintaining their faith despite the apparent existence of extreme human suffering, and that they can do so without resorting to radical scepticism or moral anti-realism.

There are some interpretations of the terms “should” and “a religious believer” under which the answer to the titular question is either trivial or does not turn on a resolution to the so-called “problem of evil”. Not all religious believers hold that there exist omnipotent beings – and even of those who do, not all think that there is a single, benevolent god. If one’s religious beliefs are polytheistic and include some evil gods, or are monotheistic with a malign or indifferent god, or indeed involve no supreme gods at all, then evidently it would be wholly consistent for one to maintain one’s faith whilst also accepting that there really is extreme human suffering (Bernáth and Kodaj 2020). Therefore, for the remainder of this essay, I will focus on the challenge that the existence of evil poses for adherents to Abrahamic religions – that is, those who believe that

Even in the case of Abrahamic believers, the problem of evil could be sidestepped when answering the titular question. If one asserts, as consequentialists would, that the deontic value of believing a proposition can come apart from that proposition’s truth-value, then it may be morally right to have faith in a certain conception of God even if that conception is logically impossible. To motivate this claim, consider the following scenario:

Regardless of whether God exists, a consequentialist would argue that Thomas should not abandon his faith if doing so would lead to worse outcomes than maintaining it. Such reasoning could convince atheist consequentialists that at least some believers ought not to abandon their faith Here one could also enter into debate about the nature of faith – whether it definitionally involves belief in the absence of evidence, if instrumental faith is a contradiction in terms, and so on – but such discussions are tangential to the thrust of this essay, and so I set them aside. in spite of the existence of extreme human suffering. However, since Abrahamic religions typically oppose consequentialist ethics (Porter 1995), this argument is unlikely to be used by religious believers themselves in defence of their faith. Therefore, for the rest of this essay, I shall further restrict my analysis to focus on whether the existence of extreme suffering should lead an Abrahamic believer to abandon their faith when deciding whether to do so exclusively on the basis of the truth-value of their present beliefs.

With those clarifications of scope made, I now set out the logical problem of evil, which attempts to show the impossibility of an Abrahamic God’s existence. The argument can be summarised as follows (Mackie 1955):

Since this is a logically valid argument, the theist must challenge its soundness in order to demonstrate the conclusion is not logically true. Both premisses are viable candidates for attack. P1, as an empirical claim about the world, can be rejected by a theist who argues that incidents which appear to involve extreme human suffering are not suffering in the relevant sense – that is, not morally bad events whose occurrence might be incompatible with the existence of God (Mackie 1955). Whilst a refutation of the existence of extreme human suffering, or indeed evil at all, does enable the theist to show the logical problem is unsound, it also requires a willingness to accept either that the real state of things may not be at all as they seem to us or that moral statements function very differently from other factual ones. As a result, the theist cannot reject P1 without opening the door to radical scepticism or anti-realism, positions they may wish to avoid.

A more palatable approach for the theist is to reject P2, by appealing to the existence of greater goods which necessitate the presence of extreme human suffering. Defences of this sort concede that there is extreme human suffering but claim that there are plausible reasons for its presence even given God’s existence. Importantly, these reasons must merely be possibly true in order to resolve the logical problem. Plantinga (1974, 29) provides one compelling account with his free will defence: it may be the case (a) that some worlds containing free will are better than any without it, (b) that alternate possibilities are required for free will, and (c) that God could not have actualised a world absent of extreme suffering but containing free will. If so, P2 would be false, as an omnibenevolent God would actualise a world with free will (and also, unavoidably, extreme suffering). One could criticise this objection with the observation that there appears to be far more extreme suffering than we would expect to see in a benevolently-created world with free will (Tooley 2021). But this is beside the point: there is nothing logically impossible in the claim that our world does in fact have the absolute minimum amount of suffering for it to contain free will (Inwagen 2004). Since this low bar is all that the defence must clear, it is clear that the logical problem is defused: there is no logical impossibility in the existence of God.

Whilst the existence of God may not be impossible, that does not mean it is likely, nor that the existence of extreme human suffering poses no problem for religious believers. This is the insight behind the evidential problem of evil, which is formulated as follows (Benton et al. 2016):

A free will defence is insufficient to demonstrate the unsoundness of this modified argument. As noted above, there are plenty of instances of extreme suffering which have no discernible justification. It is not enough for a theist to reject P3 by simply asserting that such justifications might well exist – they must outline what the specific justifications are for every case of extreme suffering, a formidable task. Since a religious believer would not object to P4, and C’ follows directly from I and P4, objections must thus focus on the inference of I from P3. This typically involves arguing that, in order to validly derive I from P3, it must be true that were there such justifications we would likely notice them, and that this counterfactual is false (Zagzebski 2007, 162). Such objections are flawed, though, as they require their proponents to accept radical scepticism: if the inductive step here from “for all φ I have observed, φ is not a justification for extreme suffering” to “for all φ, φ is not a justification for extreme suffering” is unlicensed, then we would never be able to validly generalise from experience (Rowe 1991, 73). So, judging solely from the existence of extreme suffering, a believer who does not endorse epistemological scepticism should indeed conclude that it is likely that God does not exist.

Yet the existence of extreme human suffering is just one observation that we make in the world, and an individual’s subjective credence in the existence of God may rationally be influenced by other observations. To take an extreme example, if one wholly believed the ontological argument, which argues the existence of God is logically necessary, then no amount Perhaps these observations would reduce your credence in the ontological argument, but we can suppose for the sake of the argument that your confidence in purely logical arguments is unaffected by empirical observations. of extreme suffering would cause one to doubt the existence of God. For those who do not believe the ontological argument is sound but do nonetheless take, for instance, the fine-tuning argument as positive evidence for God, Rowe’s argument asserts only that the existence of evil should them to reduce their prior probability that God exists (Tooley 2021). Therefore, a theist would certainly not need to abandon their faith as a result of the problem of evil, even though the existence of extreme human suffering should cause them to lower somewhat their credence in God.

So, to conclude, the existence of extreme human suffering should not necessarily lead a religious believer to abandon their faith. Even for followers of an Abrahamic God trying to determine the truth-value of their beliefs, the problem of evil is not, on its own, an overwhelming reason for them to conclude they are false. As I have shown, the possibility of the free will defence renders the logical argument invalid, and demonstrates that God is not incompatible with the existence of extreme human suffering. Moreover, even though the evidential problem provides Bayesian evidence against the existence of God, seeing instances of evil are not the only observations that a religious believer makes about the world. As a result, taking into account other positive evidence in favour of God’s existence allows the adherent to maintain a high probability in their beliefs despite the genuine problem of evil.

Bibliography

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