A Useful but Incomplete Theodicy
If God is so good, why is there so much pain? This is a question that all philosophers have been trying to understand up and down the centuries coming with varied answers. If God is so powerful that he can make the universe, and loves humans so much, how can there be so much pain in the world? Those two things seem so contradictory that they cannot both be true. That is why so many different schools of thought accept one at the expense of the other hand have so much appeal. This is where the creation myths of a tyrannical God making humans by accident or for slave labor come from. Even contemporary philosophy can see this as a tenable position, seeing the Christan God as a power-hungry, petty, dictator. Can a rational person believe that God is good, or in the even stronger claim of divine simplicity, that goodness is not just an attribute of God, but God himself is goodness? Is this a superstitious concept that we now should be too enlightened and rational to fall for? The Greek stoics did not think so. In the theodicy they created to explain the existence of evil and the goodness of God, the late Stoics present arguments that show these things are not contradictory and still work today as a start for building a response to the problem of evil.
The stoics built on a system that allowed there to be the world's evil while God’s goodness remained intact. They do so by building arguments that are used for both natural and human suffering. Human error is more easily argued, especially within stoicism. The main principle of stoicism is that man is meant to find harmony within the world that he does not have. So, the fact that man is not at peace with nature is the starting point for them. Not much explanation is given as to why man does not have this order, it is just an assumption.
This idea that man finds himself with mixed and irrational desires is something that Christian theory would in no way disagree with. As Saint Augustine said, “All wicked people, just like the good, desire to live without fear. The difference is that the good in desiring in this, turn their love away from things that cannot be possessed without the fear of losing them. The wicked on the other hand, try to get rid of anything that prevents them from enjoying such things as wicked” (Augustine, P.7-8) Augustine agrees with the stoics that vice is found in those who do not know how to live out the virtues, but it is the virtues and their rewards that all pursue. Christian revelation also gives a source to this reality known to many natural observers in the Genesis account of original sin “By our first parents' sin, the devil has acquired a certain domination over man, even though man remains free... Ignorance of the fact that man has a wounded nature inclined to evil gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education, politics, social action, and morals” (CCC 407) So this idea the stoics give the world that man does not how to live it right reason, which is emphasized in Christian philosophy and revelation, gives reason to think God should not be held responsible for the actions humans choose.
While Christians can agree with the Stoics on some things, there are significant differences that should be noted. In the area of living morally, while a Christian and a stoic can agree on how hard it is for man to act virtually, they do have significant differences in what that virtue is and where it comes from. Christian theory holds that virtue and good are to immediate goodness himself, God “The goal of a virtuous life is to become like God.” The stoics, however, saw the happiness that comes from the virtuous living in accord with nature, and that happiness is the reason for pursuing virtue. “According to the stoics, no act is evil and reprehensible in itself: it is the intention, the moral condition of the agent from whom the act precedes, that makes the act evil: the act as a physical entity is indifferent” (Copleston, P.390) This ethical relativism may seem appealing to some when presented with it, but just like all forms of relativism, very few people are fully ready to accept the idea that there is no such thing as right and wrong outside of the subjective feelings of the person acting. While this may seem like a meta-ethical question to abstract and too heavy on semantics, there are real consequences to this. C.S. Lewis at the start of his essay, The Weight of Glory blames the Stoics and Kant (who Peter Kreeft calls the most famous stoic of all time) for the change in how most Western people think of the highest virtue, from thinking it is the love of neighbor to thinking it is just unselfishness. And back to the main concern about the theodicy, the stoic understanding of God is not as challenging as the Christann's when it comes to understanding God’s goodness, because they do not see any real sense of objective goodness. Christians on the other hand not only think that objective goodness exists, but again exist not as an accident of God but is God himself. So, while the Christians can find a common group with stoicism when it comes to anthology giving rise to evil and pain, but is should be noted the key differences in the schools of thought that limit agreement to not much past that. (P.25-26)
The greater insight the stoics gave in their theodicy though was an explanation for natural evil. When it comes to the suffering caused by other humans, showing that other humans are the cause, and that God should be given the blame is most of the times seen as a valid apologetic. However, how do you explain evil that does not have a human cause? If God reveals himself to be the prince of peace, that means that people in war are rebelling against his laws, and he should not be blamed for it. But when a parent loses their child to a disease or an earthquake destroys an entire city, there seems to be no person to blame, except God who created the world with the disease and our plate tectonics, with the biological and geological laws that created the pain people experience.
The stoic answer to this can be very convincing. They show how pain is necessary for pleasure, so in creating humans with the ability to feel pleasure, he also gave them the opportunity to feel its opposite. They show that when looking at it through this lens, there can be a benefit to pain. One example Copleston cites from the Stoics is “Given the possibility of our teeth decaying, toothache would seem to be a definitive good or benefit. (P. 390)” Under the theory of evolution, this would make sense that there is a benefit to our pains since having them gives a competitive advantage to animals that do not. While this idea fits with the theory of evolution, Darwin’s theory is not necessary. it also makes sense in Christan theology. In chapter 2 of his book arguing for belief in God’s goodness even with all the suffering in the world, Lewis in The Problem of Pain, lays out a quite similar argument to what the stoics have pointed out. If God created multiple creatures, there must be a space for them to interact with each other, and there are laws that govern this place where souls interact with each other. “If fire comforts that body at a certain distance, it will destroy it when the distance is reduced. Hence, even in a perfect world, the necessity for those danger signals which the pain-fibers in our nerves are designed to transmit.” (P. 564) He shares in this chapter how there seems to be a necessity for some sort of pain for there to be pleasure in the world but says how man cannot know if God could have done otherwise, or if doing so is a contradiction God cannot do. Copleston argues that there could have been a way God created a world where pain was not a necessity to feel pleasure. He says Pleasure cannot exist without pain “unless, of course, God determines otherwise; but we are now speaking of the natural state of affairs, and not preternatural.” (P.390) So even if there is a way God could have made a world where the pain is not necessary, in the nature we have now, to have now logically implied each other. So, with this being the case, the stoic argument does gives so give a theist some argumentative power, that in giving us the ability to feel pleasures, God was giving us the power to provide pain.
Again, a significant difference should be pointed out in Christian and stoic thought. When explaining God’s goodness, not only do the two systems have different ideas of goodness, but they also have different ideas of who God is. Peter Kreeft indicates their view of God as “not a spirit, much less a person, but an impersonal order or logos in all things. (P.166) He points out they do not see God as creating and governing nature but as being nature itself. When God and goodness are the same, it makes sense that when a view gets one wrong, it will make a similar error in the real thing. And just like with the idea of goodness, in their concept of theodicy, their idea of God makes it easier for their God to be good. If God is just the universe around us, then we can justify in diverse ways it not having the power to not cause pain, and with what has already been established about the low standard they have for what makes things good, it takes fewer steps to show how this God could allow evil. But the Christian claim is quite different. God’s revelation shows that he is not just nature, but is outside it, allowing him to perform acts in the realm of supernature. That means the Christian has a larger task in providing an explanation for how the personal God who is goodness allows for evil when he shows himself to be capable of working miracles. This theodicy can certainly be done, but we should be aware the augment adequate for stoics are not adequate for all other theologies.
So, if the stoics’ arguments can just justify theodicy under the Christian view, should Christians just reject it? Christians do not need to be overly rigid. Just because someone examining matter and its movement is a materialist and sees that there is no meaning to this movement, that does not mean we cannot learn from those real patterns and use their findings to discover laws that God gives to the universe. In the same way, even though stoics did not have a complete understanding of what is goodness and who is God, they had enough of an understanding to tell that there would be a perceived contradiction in these two concepts, and from just their mere reason, they made compelling arguments that Christians should use as a foundation that the grace of faith can make the necessary additions to. The stoics, working without divine revelation, made several errors that deeply affected the strength of their theodicy. However, they still deserve credit for the first articulation of principles that we still use today to argue for God’s existence in a world filled with so much suffering.
Works Cited
- Augustine. On Free Choice of the Will. Translated by Thomas Williams, Hackett., 1993.
- Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II. United States Catholic Conference, 2000.
- Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy: Volume 1. Greece and Rome. Image, 1993.
- Kreeft, Peter. Socrates’ Children Ancient Philosophers. Word on Fire Insitute, 2023.
- Lewis, C. S. “The Problem of Pain.” The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics, Harper One, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, San Francisco, 2017, pp. 543–646.
- Lewis, C. S. The Weight of Glory: And Other Essays. Harper One, 1949.
Written by Avery Starr
