The Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, disease, and natural disasters: the coexistence of these and similarly dreadful phenomena with a supposedly omniscient and wholly good God is often referred to as “the problem of evil.” Some philosophers have observed the extent of genuine evil in the world and have concluded that God could not exist along with such evil. That conclusion is clearly a logical error. God surely could exist along with the world’s evil; it’s just that the god who so exists might be quite different from the god those philosophers thought they believed in.

Brian Davies is a professor of philosophy at Fordham University, a Catholic school. He takes on the issue in The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil. I finished the book because it was an assigned reading for Notre Dame’s Summer Symposium in 2018; otherwise, I would have tossed it midway through chapter 3 (of 9). It is replete with logical errors, but I suppose it is representative of the thinking of generally religious people who wonder why their god tolerates or allows the occurrence of world wars, genocides, and plagues.

Davies correctly assumes that the problem of evil does not arise unless there is a god who is both all good and omnipotent. But, he denies “that the problem of evil shows God to be certainly or probably non-existent.” He attempts to refute arguments made by David Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion “that evil shows that there is no God (as [one of Hume’s interlocutors] conceives of him.” Davies actually handles that argument by Hume pretty well. More on that later.

To prove his thesis, Davies must assume or posit that a god exists. After all, the title of the book includes the “Reality” of God. So Davies tries to demonstrate that God exists through the old (discredited) argument of the Uncaused Cause or First Cause. In doing so, he gives Hume short shrift on a more important argument. The Uncaused Cause argument posits that every thing or condition requires a cause. Hume demonstrated that this assertion is merely an empirical observation, not a principle of logic.

In Davies’ words, “…it seems obvious to me, if every object in the universe needs something other than itself to account for its existence, the universe as a whole does so as well.” But all the causes cited by Davies and other theists are merely changes in pre-existing matter, not actually bringing new matter into existence, ex nihilo. They conflate the configuration of things with the very existence of the atoms that compose those things. Thus we cannot be sure that the universe as a whole had a similar “cause.” And even if it did have a cause of some kind, it could have had multiple causes. Hume speculated that multiple “gods” could account for the existence of the universe just as well as a single God. And in any event, that cause or causes need not be anything like a God—it or they could be completely impersonal, like gravity.

But how does a theist like Davies cope with the prevalence of evil and his notion of god as omnipotent and all good?

His first approach is to minimize the extent of evil. Moreover, he says that some evil may be necessary for there to be good. This is the old “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” argument. Nevertheless, he admits that some evil may not have any good aspect to it.

His second approach to say that we cannot judge God by our standards of morality. To him, his God is not a “moral actor.” Davies wants to say that his God is good, but to do so he must change the normal meaning of good!

Thirdly, he resorts to the obfuscation that the ways of god are inscrutable to us mere mortals. That seems like a cop out to me.

Chapters three through nine of the book are rather repetitious in that Davies repeats those same three “arguments” in various rephrasings.

In the final chapter, the author raises the question of whether God is “loving.” In a sentence that captures the spirit of the book, he states that we can

“…make true statements about God—e.g. that God exists, that God is perfect, that God is good, or that God is loving. But…we are seriously in the dark when it comes to what it is for God to exist, or to be perfect, or to be good, or to be loving.” [Emphasis added.]

Here the vapidity of Davies’ arguments are on display: he wants desperately to say that God exists and is perfect, good, and loving; but to do so, he must say that he has no idea what those words mean when they are applied to God!

In summary, I agree with David Hume that you cannot prove the existence of a god through the exercise of pure reason. On the other hand, I agree with Davies that if you believe in God (a BIG IF), the presence of evil in the world ought not dissuade your belief. And like Davies, I think the persistence of evil ought to make devout theists alter their perception of what their god is like. But unlike Davies, I am not willing to twist the meaning of the words “good,” “moral,” or “powerful.” Perhaps Davies’ god is not powerful enough to prevent evil, or, (more frighteningly) he is not good enough to care.

(JAB) ( )