Fences Around Evil

This is an immediate follow-up to a comment near the end of my last posting: God puts fences around human evil, though he doesn't restrain it entirely. That post was getting to be too long, so I didn't explain that idea fully there. More specifically I did not address the objection I fully object to hear:

"Fences? Fences?! You're saying that God is restraining evil? Then show me how the Holocaust and the gulags fit in with that! It sure doesn't look fenced in to me!"

To quote a recent objection by doctor(logic):

Yet, there appears to be no pain threshold above which God intervenes. Indeed, the entire scheme of life on this planet is inherently evil if we could be better off. And we could be.

Let's consider a thought experiment on that. Suppose the evil and pain the world were, from deepest history until now, just half of what it is now. How would we view ourselves in that situation? Would that be little enough pain that we would all freely acknowledge that God had done a good job of constraining it? I don't know how we would come to that conclusion, for lack of a standard to compare it to. We certainly wouldn't know that God had cut it by half. We would know that much of life was wonderful, and that some of it was awful, and there would likely be the same objections to the awful part as we have here in this world.

Suppose it were cut again by another half, in another possible history. Would we then say, "This amount of pain and suffering is just fine. Thank God he's restraining it." How would we know?

Now, suppose there were twice as much pain and suffering in the world as there is now. Surely we would object to that; it's easy to see that would be the case.

My question is this: how do we know we are not in the world where God has already reduced the pain and suffering by half or three quarters? There is no standard by which we could know that. The only possible source of that information would be revelation from God, and he has indeed told us there is a limit to what he will allow.

Thus there is no logical place from which one can state, "Why hasn't God restrained evil?"

The Biblical position does not commit one to a position that God must reduce evil to its absolute minimum possible. It is that he must maximize the good, with a minimum of evil consistent with maximizing the good. (I addressed what "good" means in that previous post in this series.) Anti-theist objectors may feel that he has not done so, but putting coherent logical content together with that feeling is impossible.

Fifth in a series:
1. Solved: The Logical Problem of Evil
2. What is "The Problem of Evil?"
3. Is God Likely, In View of Evil?
4. Can Evil Be Made Good?
5. Fences Around Evil
6. Reflections on the Mess We Live In

Posted: Mon - May 29, 2006 at 08:03 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Fences Around Evil

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson