Geisler on Problem of Evil

Norman Geisler, one of my least favorite apologists, gave a talk on the Problem of Evil at Saddleback’s Apologetics conference. You can stream the mp3 here. He addresses the problem of evil in what he considers its strongest form. Readers will typically disagree with what is the best form of the problem of evil, as will I, but I will ignore that issue for this post and just focus on Geisler’s chosen argument.

Geisler’s Presentation

1) If God is all good, he would defeat evil.
2) If God is all powerful, he could defeat evil.
3) Evil is not defeated.
4) Therefore, no such God exists.

Geisler says we should agree with the first two premises. Rather than explicitly disagree with the third premise, he critiques it for being somewhat equivocal. According to Geisler, there is a hidden “yet” in the third premise. It doesn’t follow from the present existence of evil, says Geisler, that evil will never be defeated. Evil might be defeated in the future.

Geisler thinks that the persistence of evil is the “most important question” that we can face. Yet as believers in God we can conclude from the premises, “Therefore evil one day will be defeated.”

Geisler says he knows evil will be defeated from “the nature of a theistic God” and “the god of the bible.” The “very nature of the God [atheists] are attacking” suggests that God would/will defeat evil.

However, even if we know that God will defeat evil, Geisler points out that God would still need to have a purpose for allowing (defeated) evil. So the atheist can construct a new argument based on the apparent purposelessness of evil.

Geisler’s response is essentially the “skeptical theist” response: Just because we don’t know there’s a purpose, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Geisler says he doesn’t know why some things happen, but that he knows why he doesn’t know – because he is finite, God is infinite, and so on.

Geisler discusses how we know some purposes for some evils. He uses “warning pains” as examples, such as chest pain, which alerts us of certain dangers. Another example of a purpose for an evil is pedagogical. Geisler doubts that many of us learn life lessons from our pleasures, yet many people learn great lessons from their painful experiences.

My Response

First, I begrudgingly enjoyed Geisler’s speaking style. I think I prefer his spoken to his written work.

To me his talk accomplishes at least one valuable thing: it highlights that according to the gospel, God has done something about evil. Geisler says that Jesus “officially” defeats evil in his first coming, and “actually” defeats evil in his second coming. If that is the case, then it seems like we can hold “God will defeat evil,” and greatly lessen the force of this particular argument from evil. And so this problem of evil won’t be convincing in terms of this particular God. The atheist would have to argue for a specific time frame we should expect from a good, powerful God. And that kind of endeavor seems like it would have a very ad hoc outcome.

The time-sensitive nature of defeating evil is interesting, because if God were to defeat evil the moment it arises, the problem would reduce again to whether God would allow evil. But various theistic arguments already try to show that there are plenty of good reasons to allow evil.

As I hinted earlier, I do not think Geisler’s formulation of the problem of evil is the strongest formulation. I actually have my own secret recipe which I think is the most powerful version, which I will not share. But I suppose I think Geisler effectively deals with the form of the argument he chooses.

His later presentation of the skeptical theist response (in response to the question of the purposes God might have for allowing evil, however defeated it might be in the future) is less satisfying. I’ve always suspected that the skeptical theist response to the problem of evil relies on the dubious principle of limiting our moral judgments on account of a trivial epistemic limitation – not knowing the minds of others. If the skeptical theist can say that we must reserve moral judgment when we can’t know the purposes of God, why can’t we also reserve moral judgment when we can’t know the purposes of a rapist? It seems to me that we never know the mind of others, whether they are gods or not. So the skeptical theist response on this issue may prove too much.