“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall
I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

These haunting words are from Elie Wiesel’s book Night, where Wiesel reflects on his childhood in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, describing in particular the “flames” that consumed not only his parents, his younger sister and thousands of others, but also his faith in a loving God. For Wiesel, and many like him, God died at Auschwitz. As another Jewish writer, Eugene Borowitz, has stated:

“The argument against God seemed irrefutable. Any God who could permit the Holocaust, who could remain silent during it, who could ‘hide His face’ while it dragged on, was not worth believing in. There might well be a limit to how much we could understand about Him, but Auschwitz demanded an unreasonable suspension of understanding. In the face of such great evil, God, the good and the powerful, was too inexplicable. So men said, ‘God is dead’.”

But despite the significance and tragic dimensions of the Holocaust, it is only one of countless horrific evils that have littered our world. History, as Hegel reminds us, is “the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed”.

One does not even need to delve too far back into history to discern the depth and scope of evil. One need only consult the morning newspapers to find out what horrors have been accomplished or befallen us overnight: a suicide-bomber kills several people and injures many more in west Jerusalem; a Washington mother, having dressed and fed her three children, smokes some crack cocaine and then strangles two of her children to death with a clothesline, and attempts without success to do the same with her third child; a volcano in Congo leaves 450,000 people homeless; two Kenyan teenagers are charged with murdering 67 of their schoolmates by setting their dormitory on fire (these are all actual events). The list could go on and on ad nauseam, literally.

In the face of such perplexing evil, how could one accept the belief that the world was created and is governed by an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God? This is what philosophers call ‘the problem of evil’, and it is undoubtedly one of the greatest stumbling blocks to belief in God.

One popular response to this problem involves the development of ‘theodicies’. A theodicy, to borrow John Milton’s words, is the attempt to “justify the ways of God to men”. In other words, a theodicy aims to vindicate the goodness of God in the face of the evil found in the world, and this it attempts to do by offering a plausible explanation as to why God allows evil to abound in his creation.

Many theodicies appeal to free will and character development. Much evil is clearly the result of the misuse of human freedom, in which case responsibility for that evil lies with us, not with God. Also, suffering can be an incentive towards moral and spiritual development – this is the central idea in the ‘soul-making’ theodicy put forward by the English philosopher John Hick in his 1966 classic Evil and the God of Love. It is through suffering, Hick claims, that we are enabled to transcend our natural self-centredness and to freely develop the most desirable qualities of moral character and enter into a personal relationship with our Maker. But such personal growth would not be possible if we were created in a hedonistic paradise where we would experience a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of pain. Rather, an environment that is able to produce the finest characteristics of human personality – particularly the capacity to love – must be a world like ours where there are obstacles to be overcome, tasks to be performed, goals to be achieved, setbacks to be endured, problems to be solved, and dangers to be met.

But can the misuse of free will account for all suffering, especially suffering that results from natural disasters? Also, if there is in fact a soul-making process in our world, it seems to be a very flawed one, since there are many people who do not benefit or grow in adverse circumstances, but are degraded and dehumanised by their experience of suffering. It is debatable, therefore, whether theodicies such as Hick’s completely succeed in explaining why God permits evil. Rather it seems that, at least with respect to some cases of evil or suffering, we simply cannot find any good reason why God would allow such things to occur.

At this point, the religious believer is likely to say that God may very well have good reasons for permitting evil, but his reasons are too complicated for us to understand. Indeed, as one philosopher recently put it: “Why suppose that if God does have a reason for permitting evil, we would be the first to know? Given the great gulf between our limited cognitive abilities and the infinite wisdom of God, it is only to be expected that we would largely be in the dark concerning God’s reasons for permitting evil. It would be strange, to the say the least, if we could fully understand God’s reasons for permitting each and every evil we see in the world – it would be like a primary school student understanding Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

Although this response has an air of plausibility about it, it too is problematic. For even if God’s reasons for allowing us to suffer have to be hidden from us (because, perhaps, they are too complicated for us to understand), why should God’s existence and presence also be hidden from us, especially during times of intense suffering? And yet, as Elie Wiesel observed, it is often when we most need God that he appears absent.

What answer, then, can we hope to give to the problem of evil? My view (which I cannot go into in any detail here) is that the problem lies with the problem itself, the way it is formulated and structured. Philosophy is not so much about finding answers as about discovering questions. Answers can be cheap and easy. Questions, penetrating and illuminating ones, can take a lifetime to develop and fine-tune. The moral of the problem of evil is to start asking better questions.

*Dr Nick Trakakis is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University.