Theodicy

The problem of evil arises in most religions in some form or other, although it is most acute (and therefore most discussed) in the Abrahamic religions. It consists of the problem of reconciling the nature of God (or of the gods) with the nature of the world; in particular, a creator's goodness, power, and knowledge are held to be in conflict with the evil that is found in the world. One of the main sorts of approach to the problem is theodicy: the attempt to reconcile the existence and nature of God with the nature of the world. Time plays a part both in the way that the problem is understood and in some of the approaches to it.

The notion of evil varies from tradition to tradition, generally falling into one of a number of categories—two concerning the source and two the nature of evil:

• Suffering—physical and psychological pain
• Metaphysical Evil—contingency; that is, matters such as death and the shortness of life.
• Natural Evil—the result of the way that the world is (the laws of nature, through natural disasters)
• Moral Evil—the result of the actions of intentional beings

Time is involved primarily with metaphysical evil, though what is at issue is more what happens within time than the nature of time itself. That is, the process of aging, the shortness of life, and so on. In the Buddhist tradition, for example, Prince Siddhartha gave up his life of luxury (the Great Renunciation) when for the first time in his life he encountered old age, sickness, and death, and found that suffering (dukkha), founded in impermanence (anicca), is the universal human condition. This notion of evil is highlighted by recent discussions of what is known as “evolutionary theodicy,” which focuses on the fact that pain, suffering, and extinction are an essential part of the evolutionary process.

Time also plays a role in the discussion of defenses against the problem of evil, with regard to God's nature. If God is eternal—that is, a nontemporal being, outside time—then God must create the world “all at once”; its beginning, middle, and end exist, all equally known to God, though from within the world the future (and much of the past) is unknown. There seems on this account to be no room for free will, or even for contingency: God, being essentially benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient, creates the best; therefore this world is the best of all possible worlds (however odd that may seem to the creatures who live in it), and it is [Page 1247]logically impossible that things should have been otherwise. That I might have been a politician or a serial killer rather than a philosopher might seem to be a genuine possibility, but in fact God necessarily created this world, in which I am a philosopher. Thus the free-will defense is challenged.

If God exists temporally, and if the world has not always existed, then God created it at a particular time; the world's future development is thus open (especially if genuine contracausal free will exists). This account allows for the freedom of the will, and if we take the future to be unreal, it allows us to say that God created the world without knowing what we would make of our free will. (For if the future does not exist to be known, then it is logically impossible to know it.) This raises, however, problems about the timing of Creation. It also raises the specter of ways the world might have turned out that are much worse than the actuality; although God created the world without knowing what the consequences would actually be, God knew that they might be horrendous, and this can be argued to conflict with divine benevolence.

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