This book defends what we propose to call antitheodicism through historical and systematic discussions of what we find its most interesting versions, both literary and philosophical. Generally, we may say that theodicies seek a justification, legitimation, and/or excusing of an omnipotent, omniscient, and absolutely benevolent God’s allowing the world (His creation) to contain evil and for allowing humans and other sentient beings to suffer. Classical formulations can be found, for example, in Augustine’s appeal to God’s having created human beings with the freedom of the will as the reason why there is evil, articulated in his Confessiones and De civitate Dei, and in G.W. Leibniz’s view, formulated in his famous Théodicée (1710). According to Leibniz, God could not have created any better world than the one he, as omnipotent and absolutely good, did create; hence, we live in the best possible world, and while there is some evil there, it is necessary for the overall good. 1 By antitheodicism we mean the rejection of any such, or indeed any, theodicies, or better, of the very project of theodicy.
Our study is based on a somewhat unusual double perspective provided by literary criticism and theory, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other hand, for approaching the problem of evil and suffering through a critical analysis of certain (philosophical and/or theological) texts and characters constructed and represented in them, beginning with Kant’s 1791 Theodicy Essay and its most important pre-text, the Book of Job, and moving on to modern philosophy and literature. This methodology opens a novel perspective on the issue of theodicy versus antitheodicy. Our approach differs from the more standard ways of examining philosophical ideas expressed in literature (e.g., in works of such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, and Siri Hustvedt, among many others). In the cases discussed here, the use of literary figures and characters in a philosophical argument, rather than vice versa, is central. Our discussion of the problem of evil and (anti-)theodicy seeks to show that certain ways of writing—especially of authoring a theodicy—could themselves be argued to exemplify moral vices and thereby to contribute to evil, instead of excusing or justifying it. That is, even intellectually outstanding academic contributions to the problem of evil may be vulnerable to devastating ethical critique. 2
Theodicies: Still Going Strong
The mainstream approach to the problem of evil in contemporary Anglo-American (broadly analytic) philosophy of religion is, arguably, strongly theodicist. By “theodicism” we may refer to all those attempts to deal with the problem of evil that regard theodicy as a desideratum of an acceptable theistic position, irrespective of whether they end up defending theism or rejecting it. 3 The theodicist can, then, be an atheist, insofar as he or she concludes that God does not exist (or probably does not exist, or that there is no justification for the belief that God exists) precisely because the theodicist desideratum cannot be fulfilled. Also those who offer a mere “defense”—instead of a theodicy proper—can be regarded as theodicists in the sense that they also seek to defend God and account for God’s justice by arguing that, for all we know, God could have ethically acceptable reasons to allow the world to contain evil, even on the massive scale familiar to us. 4 Accordingly, the theodicist project in contemporary philosophy of religion (which we obviously cannot review in any detail here) is not restricted to those thinkers who offer us explicit theodicies, such as Richard Swinburne (defending a version of the “free will theodicy”) and John Hick (“soul-making theodicy”)—in most cases with an admirable history going back to, say, Augustine and Irenaeus, respectively—but also includes those philosophers who provide us with mere “defenses”. The latter include, for example, Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, according to whom the “free will defense” must be carefully distinguished from any “free will theodicy”. The theodicist project includes even those philosophers, such as Marilyn McCord Adams, who reject all standard theodicies as morally unacceptable “instrumental” justifications of evil but still appeal to something like postmortem “beatific” metaphysical divine compensation for the injustices and sufferings of the empirical world. 5
Moreover, theodicism and evidentialism are closely connected. As mainstream philosophy of religion today is relatively strongly evidentialist (in a broad sense), it is also understandable that it is strongly theodicist whenever dealing with the problem of evil. That is, evil is in most cases seen as an empirical premise challenging the theistic belief in an argumentative exchange searching evidence in support of, or against, the theistic hypothesis. This is so irrespective of whether the problem of evil is regarded as a logical or as an evidential problem. 6 Just like theodicism is a normative view according to which any rationally acceptable theism ought to formulate a theodicy (or at least take steps toward the direction of a theodicy by formulating a skeptical defense), evidentialism is a normative epistemological view according to which any rationally acceptable theism ought to be defended by means of evidence.
Theodicism is, then, a specific dimension of evidentialism: it tells us how we should discuss the problem of evil when evil is regarded as a piece of evidence against theism that the theist needs to deal with. Note, however, that we are not claiming that there is any straightforward logical entailment relation between theodicism and evidentialism. We may in principle allow the possibility of positions that are theodicist and antievidentialist, or antitheodicist and evidentialist, because evidentialism could be locally, rather than globally, applied, and it is not necessary to apply it to the problem of evil even if one embraces theodicism. But in most cases the two do go very well together and are natural companions. Therefore, our criticism of theodicism is relevant (though by no means decisive) against evidentialism in general.
This book adds relatively little to the detailed assessment of the above-mentioned and other theodicies and defenses going on in mainstream analytic philosophy of religion addressing the “argument from evil”. 7 Indeed, we are not examining here the argument from evil at all, that is, the problem of evil understood as an argument against theism based on the empirical premise that there is evil in the world. A reader who seeks new formulations of, say, the free will defense or its counterarguments will be disappointed, as will anyone who hopes we could illuminate the notion of divine intervention or the metaphysics of postmortem existence that could compensate earthly sufferings. Those discussions in analytic philosophy of religion in particular are full of intellectually extremely sharp contributions, as well as entanglements of philosophical and theological approaches. Much of that, however, is irrelevant to our concerns in this book—except as a background to which we will react critically. We will therefore also not claim to do justice to all those discussions and the nuances in the theodicies and defenses that have been put forward or in the criticisms launched against them; our criticism of theodicies is not exhaustive, as several relevant contributions are inevitably neglected. Philosophers like D.Z. Phillips and Richard Bernstein have already done enough to lay theodicies to rest, and we will definitely refer to their and others’ contributions in due course. What we will primarily criticize here is the theodicist way of thinking in general. This is a metalevel undertaking—or, if you will, a transcendental examination of how certain concepts in our lives are so much as possible, of how we are able to view the world in certain (ethical) ways at all. Thus, we also hope to appreciate the fact that in many cases it is an individual’s life—experiences of suffering, one’s own or others’—that may lead him or her to see the meaninglessness of (all) suffering and to view theodicies as insincere or even morally scandalous. 8
We will, therefore, examine how to be an antitheodicist—how to take evil seriously—and how this influences one’s entire way of being a moral agent. We will, in particular, show how an interplay of literature and philosophy can crucially enrich such an examination.
We will not only argue that antitheodicism is needed to counter theodicies (both theological and secular), but also, more specifically, examine the ways in which the antitheodicist is able to offer an essentially moral argument against theodicism, based on the idea that theodicies fail to adequately recognize or acknowledge the meaninglessness of suffering and typically treat suffering human beings (or, by extension, non-human sufferers) as mere means to some alleged overall good. In a sense, the concept of suffering is more important for our purposes in this book than the more abstract concept of evil—to the extent that while we occasionally just speak about “the problem of evil” for the sake of brevity, we always primarily mean “the problem of unnecessary suffering”. As Ingolf Dalferth puts it, suffering is the locus or context (Ort) of evil; whenever there is evil, there is someone’s (or something’s) suffering of some kind. 9 Acknowledging the reality of evil is always to acknowledge some concrete form of suffering. Indeed, a key antitheodicist point is actually that when the problem of evil is discussed at an abstract intellectual level focusing on the concept of evil rather than concrete sufferings, we have already taken the first wrong steps.
The actual antitheodicist arguments will unfold starting from the idea that theodicies are morally inadequate, or even immoral, responses to evil and suffering—failures of acknowledging suffering and the suffering other. While we cannot in a single inquiry offer full philosophical support for this premise—that would be an enormous task requiring a thoroughgoing critical analysis of not only all actual but presumably also all possible theodicies, and there is certainly no shortage of relevant scholarship in this regard—we will show through our carefully selected literary and philosophical examples what it means to be seriously committed to the view that theodicies are immoral. We will, accordingly, seek to demonstrate how one can, or should, be an antitheodicist.
There are several different ways in which theodicies may be seen as failures of acknowledgment. They may fail to recognize or acknowledge (1) the suffering individual (e.g., the victim of evil, individual or collective); (2) the sufferer’s experience of his or her suffering; (3) the sincerity 10 of that experience, or his or her communication, report, or account of it; or (4) the sufferer himself or herself as sincere (as exemplifying sincerity) and as, thus, an intellectually and morally integrated subject. All of these are different versions of failing to acknowledge what can be simply called “the reality of suffering”. All of them will be illuminated through our literary examples in particular. Furthermore, as we will suggest in Chap. 6, it is also possible—or perhaps even unavoidable—to fail to acknowledge (5) the impossibility of ever fully acknowledging another human being’s, especially the sufferer’s, individual perspective on the world (and on his or her suffering). Acknowledgment, we will argue, is most vitally needed when it is also necessarily limited.
In emphasizing the fundamental importance of moral acknowledgment of others’ suffering, we will throughout this book search for an adequate moral language for addressing the problem of suffering. We will obviously be sharply critical of theodicist attempts to find meaning in evil and suffering, but our criticism, we want to emphasize, is primarily directed at our own—and by extension anyone’s—theodicist temptations rather than the specific authors of theodicies we will comment upon. 11 Our transcendental criticism of theodicies is therefore above all self-criticism, or criticism of the general human tendency that we ourselves undoubtedly exemplify as much as anyone else to either intentionally or unintentionally legitimize and excuse human suffering. We must speak of evil, because, as Susan Neiman wisely notes, “[t]o abandon talk of evil is to leave that weapon in the hands of those who are least equipped to use it”. 12 By attempting to throw light on how we believe evil and suffering ought to be discussed, we take ourselves to be engaged in a task comparable to Neiman’s defense of “moral clarity”, an attempt to reclaim moral concepts without which we “will lose our souls”. 13 A transcendental attempt to argue for certain necessary conditions for the possibility of occupying the moral poin...