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Christianity, Evil and Moral Lethargy

Tragedy at NIU

At 3 p.m. on February 14, Steven Kazmierczak carried a shotgun and three pistols into a lecture hall adjacent to the building I was in and opened fire on people he had never met. He killed five people and injured several others. The Virginia Tech shooting was worse. Still, parents have lost their children. Siblings have lost their brothers and sisters. Best friends are gone forever. Young men and women lay in hospital beds with holes in their bodies. The whole town is stressed out, to say the least. Even for those of us with no personal connection to the deceased, things have changed.

Every week, 25,000 of us walk past the lecture hall where Kazmierczak opened fire. His shots were completely random; his victims were variables. Kazmierczak would have been just as happy to kill me or my friends or any of the anonymous students I walk beside every day.

There's nothing special about NIU, either. And there was nothing special about Virginia Tech, for that matter. These places don't attract indiscriminate killers any more than CU Boulder does, or Asbury College does, or your school does. Because the shootings were random — because any victim would have done just as well as any other in the minds of their killers — there is a real sense in which Kazmierczak and the Virginia Tech gunman targeted you and me just as much as they targeted the people they actually shot.

This is scary if anything is, and one can't help but wonder why God would allow the world to slip into such a depraved state.

What I'm Up to in This Series

In a series on the problem of evil that I wrote several years ago, I argued that, while tragedies like these are a deep and complicated practical problem,¹ they aren't an intellectual problem at all. There, I argued that, contrary to the claims of many atheists and some agnostics, evils like the NIU shooting are neither logically incompatible with God's existence nor evidence for God's nonexistence.

It has recently been brought to my attention, however, that my argument may lead to unacceptable consequences.² According to this objection, if my response to the problem of evil is correct, then Christians must deny that we have any moral obligation to help people in need.

It goes without saying that this would be a pretty bad thing for Christian belief. It also goes without saying that Christians need a response to the problem of evil. So, in this series I am going to say where I think the objection goes wrong. But first, a few points by way of review.

The Evidential Argument from Evil

Adapting it to fit current events, a popular argument for the irrationality of belief in God goes as follows.³

According to orthodox Christianity, God is omniscient, omnipotent and morally perfect. So, if God exists, then an omniscient, omnipotent and morally perfect being exists. But an omniscient being would have known that Kazmierczak was going to shoot strangers in Cole Hall, an omnipotent being could have stopped him from shooting strangers in Cole Hall, and a morally perfect being would have wanted to stop him from shooting strangers in Cole Hall. Surely, then, an omniscient, omnipotent, morally perfect being would have stopped Kazmierczak from shooting strangers in Cole Hall.

The shooting happened, though, and now an inestimable number of people are suffering. So, it seems pretty clear that there isn't any omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect being. But if this is the case, then there is no God. Because it seems highly unlikely that God would have allowed the shooting at NIU, the fact that the shooting actually happened is powerful evidence that God doesn't exist.

Or so the argument goes.

Skeptical Theism

In "Human Hubris and the Problem of Evil," I argued that this argument doesn't work. Because God is omniscient and omnipotent, there is an enormous gap between God and us in terms of knowledge and power. Given the enormity of this gap, however, we should expect God to be able to do things we can't imagine, and do them in ways we can't imagine.

But then it seems clear that we humans aren't in any position at all to say what goods God might bring about via a given instance of evil. More specifically, it seems clear that we're in no position to say what goods God might bring about via a shooting like the one at NIU. But if we are in no position to say what goods God might bring about via a shooting like the one at NIU, then we have no basis for any confidence that a being like God would have stopped Kazmierczak from shooting strangers in Cole Hall.

The fact that Kazmierczak did shoot strangers in Cole Hall therefore gives us little (if any) evidence that God does not exist.

Because this response expresses skepticism about our ability to predict the behavior of a being like God, call it the response from "skeptical theism."

The (Supposed) Problem with Skeptical Theism

As it's stated above, skeptical theism might seem like a terribly unsatisfying response to the evidential argument from evil. This, however, is a function of the fact that it is severely abbreviated above; it is not a function of any defect in the response itself. What I want to point out here, though, is something skeptical theism entails.

If it's really true that we have no idea what goods God might bring about via a given evil, then, whenever we see something bad about to happen, we will be unable to tell whether or not God plans to actualize some greater good by letting that thing happen.⁴ This claim seems harmless enough, but, in conjunction with an assumption that seems obviously correct, it gives us problems. Here's the assumption:

We should never interfere with God's plans. At the very least, we could never be morally blameworthy for not interfering with God's plans.

You can probably see where this is going. To make the problem we're about to run into fully explicit, though, suppose we learn that someone in our class (call him "Smith") intends to copy the NIU and Virginia Tech shootings, and suppose that all we have to do to stop him is make an anonymous call to campus police. With a simple phone call, we can save countless lives, and we can do so without violating any moral rules or putting anybody at risk.

In this case, it seems entirely beyond doubt that we should stop Smith. It also seems beyond doubt that, if we fail to stop Smith, we will deserve the strongest moral criticism.

But now we seem to have gotten ourselves into a bind. On the one hand, we obviously have a moral obligation to stop Smith. On the other hand, we don't know how Smith's plans fit into God's plans,⁵ and it seems clear that, whatever God's plans are, we shouldn't interfere with them. (At the very least, it seems clear that, whatever God's plans are, it would be morally permissible for us to not interfere with them.) So, there's considerable tension between some of our beliefs.

Picking up on this tension, Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy forward a version of the following argument against skeptical theism:⁶

1. For all we know, God plans on actualizing some greater good by allowing Smith to copy the NIU and Virginia Tech shootings.

2. It is always morally permissible for us to not interfere with God's plans.

Therefore,

3. For all we know, it would be morally permissible for us to not interfere with Smith's copying the NIU and Virginia Tech shootings.

(1) and (2) entail (3), which is just to say that, if (1) and (2) are true, then (3) must be true too. But (3) is obviously false. The problem is, it looks like theists are committed to (1) and (2).

Not Out of the Woods Yet

Those of us who believe in God, then, face the following problem:

According to the evidential argument from evil, atrocities like the NIU murders give us powerful evidence that God does not exist. But if we have powerful evidence that God doesn't exist, then our belief in God is irrational. So, those of us who believe in God need some response to the evidential argument from evil. The right response looks like skeptical theism.⁷ But skeptical theism entails (1). This isn't a problem by itself, but (2) looks true too, and (1) and (2) entail (3), which is obviously false.

Put simply, then, it looks like those of us who believe in God are forced to choose between the following unpalatable options:

Option 1: Reject skeptical theism.

Option 2: Reject (2), the claim that it is always morally permissible for us to not interfere with God's plans.

Option 3: Accept (3), the claim that, for all we know, it would be morally permissible for us to not interfere with Smith's copying the NIU and Virginia Tech shootings.

Option 1 looks pretty bad. Not only does skeptical theism fit very well with the biblical picture of God (see the final chapters of Job, for example), rejecting skeptical theism also leaves us with no response to the evidential argument from evil. But in this case, we would be forced to concede that events like the NIU murders are powerful evidence that God does not exist, and it looks like our belief in God would be irrational.

Option 2 looks bad too. Rejecting (2) amounts to embracing the claim that it is sometimes immoral to go along with God's plans. But God is morally perfect, so this wouldn't be an easy claim to swallow. How, after all, could it ever be immoral to knowingly follow the plans of a morally perfect being?

Finally, option 3 looks downright terrible. The thought of our idly sitting by while Smith destroys the lives of our classmates is morally repugnant. That we would have a moral obligation to stop Smith seems as obvious as that two plus two equals four. Embracing option 3 looks completely crazy.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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How would you respond to these three options?

Join the discussion!

But these appear to be all the options there are. To all appearances, then, there is something deeply problematic with Christian belief, and we ought to reject it.

I will address this claim in my next article.