Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed

Guides for the Perplexed

by Chad Meister

<div><br/><div>One of the most perplexing problems facing believers in God is the problem of evil. The words of Epicurus put the point concisely: "Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?" This is a difficult problem to unpick and it remains an issue that continues to concern people and inspire debate. <br /><br />The problem has taken a variety of forms over the centuries; in fact, there are numerous "problems" of evil—problems for theists but, perhaps surprisingly, problems for non-theists as well. <em>Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed</em> explores, in a rigorous but engaging way, central challenges to religious belief raised by evil and suffering in the world as well as significant responses to them from both theistic and non-theistic perspectives.</div></div>>

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

136 pages, Hardcover

First published February 2, 2012

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book left me feeling dim-witted and nauseated, not a great combination. The author is a philosopher and try as they might, even when writing for the general reader, they can’t help but drift off into the loftiest and at the same time the most nitpickingest speculations. I will give one example, from page 110 :

In philosophy a distinction is sometimes made between first-person psychological reports, such as “I seem to see a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak,” and perceptual experiences, such as “I see a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak”. With the latter kind of experience a person can be mistaken. I thought it was a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, but it turned out to be a Downy Woodpecker… With the former kind of experience a person cannot be mistaken. Even though it turned out to be a Downy Woodpecker, the claim that “I seem to see a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak” is nonetheless true.

Fair enough.

This book is mostly about the Christian response to the standard problem of evil. I appreciated that Professor Meister did not soft pedal the evil that is heaped up round us on this slaughterhouse of a planet. For one chapter the spotlight is on Ted Bundy, for example. I always want Christian apologists to think a lot about Ted Bundy. And Chad Meister seems to get the fact that not only evil exists but so very much of it happens all the time. And he gets that many, maybe most people who encounter evil, either in its human or natural form, do not grow stronger, do not make any sense of it, do not get closer to God because of it, it does not strengthen their spiritual lives. Quite the opposite.

Christian responses to the problem of evil mostly seem like a terrible lot of unhappy emotional and intellectual squirming – maybe God is good but he could not create an evil-free world just like he could not create a square circle. Because it’s a logical impossibility. Hmmmm – don’t like that one ? Okay, maybe Evil is like a law of physics which even God who created physics cannot monkey around with like the speed of light. Or – the usual one - there would be absolutely no point in creating a world with no evil in it because then we would not get to participate in God’s Free Will Test – those that pass the test get to step up to the next level, those that don’t don’t. If there’s no free will there’s no point to the game and no fun to be had at all. (Whose fun? Don’t ask.)

I was interested in the thing about misotheism which is where some believers don’t believe that God is perfectly good. This reminded me of the old Gnostics of the first century who thought this world was created by a minor god who’d sort of gone rogue, and our task was to bypass that nasty minor god to get back in touch with the top God who was the evil one’s boss. Leaving that weird idea aside, it’s surely not outrageous to suggest that all these attributes of God (perfectly good, omniscient, eternal, etc) granted by classical theism (Jewish, Christian and Islamic) might just be completely wrong. God might not be like that AT ALL. For example, he might be completely indifferent to the human race! (What an absurd idea – how could God be indifferent to the wondrous human race?)

Hindu and Buddhist concepts of karma and rebirth are examined in one chapter. According to the author, my crude idea of the law of karma was exactly right – your suffering in this life is the bad karma you created for yourself in one of your previous lives. What a vicious idea! Even our polite professor can’t stomach that :

It is troubling to affirm a moral system in which we understand raped and murdered people to be themselves morally culpable for such acts of brutality.

And why not take it one step further – if I’m your friendly neighbourhood serial killer I can tell my next victim well, don’t judge me, I’m just the instrument of your terrible karma! And don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll be paying for this murder in some future life!

The last chapter is about a possible Afterlife in which all are reconciled, things are so nice there that you’ll forgive your tormentors and you’ll wonder why you ever fussed so much about being tortured to death in a prison cell. I wanted to ask the professor if he actually believed this but he just coyly said he wasn’t saying yes and he wasn’t saying no but wouldn’t it be loverly.

[Chad A. Pentecost · Rating 4 out of 5]

thought provoking

This book had me thinking hard about evil and way that I can combat it. I won’t list those ways because amazon will probably censure me again. Denying freedom of speech is an evil that amazon perpetrates so I will just say that if you are a deep thinker, this book may be for you.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The blurbs on the back of this book call it clear, lucid, succinct, and fair-minded as it summarizes the back-and-forth arguments about evil from theistic, atheistic, and non-theistic (Hindu and Buddhist) positions. That seems like a fair description to me. There certainly is much here that I had never thought of before, and the book left me with the impression that there is no intellectual position about evil which does not have reasonable arguments to be made against it. The author makes clear in his preface that he is a Christian, a professor of philosophy, and a bit of a skeptic. He finishes with a welcome list of practical things any individual might do to try to reduce evil in the world. Unfortunately the book has a number of evidences of incomplete revision and editing, with sentences like "Some Nietzsche think not; others disagree." And the author is capable of sentences like "...all, or at least most all, of the cells in the human body are replaced roughly every seven years." But this is nit-picking. A very readable, fair, and complete introduction.

[Alex]

Chad Meister offers a pretty short and sweet introduction the Problem of Evil in this book. He also discusses and criticizes Buddhist and Hindu perspectives on evil. Here are some brief critiques of some of what he says:

Meister claims that there is a 'problem of good' for the atheist. And he seems to think that atheists are committed to the view that objective moral values and duties were just spewed forth in the Big Bang (pp. 76). But the atheist need not hold that moral values and duties were "spewed" forth in the Big Bang; the atheist can just hold that that moral propositions are necessary truths that are part of the basic fabric of the universe, in the same way that logical propositions are necessary truths that are part of the basic fabric of the universe. Indeed, Meister cites atheist philosophers like Walter Sinnot Armstrong who believe just this (although they do not make the analogy with logical truths, at least not in Meister's book).

Furthermore, Meister seems to be inconsistent. For in one section he seems to endorse the moral argument for God's existence, and hence that morality is in fact dependent on God (pp.75), but in the last section of the book, he claims that “whether or not God exists or not, we have a moral responsibility to act” (pp.106).

Meister also makes some factual errors. For example, he says that Christians, Jews, and Muslims interpret certain passages of their scripture that refer to God as 'Father'(pp. 61). But the Muslim scripture--viz., the Qur'an--does not refer to God as ‘Father’. In fact, the Qur'an implies that God is a Father of no one (cf. Q 5:18; Q 112:3). But this is not a big error.

All in all, I think that this is a good introductory level book on the problem of evil, written by someone who is a theist.