Epicurean Paradox

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

It’s called the Epicurean Paradox, and it’s attributed to the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Epicurus died a couple of centuries before the birth of Jesus and Christianity, so if he really is the originator of this conundrum then it isn’t specifically aimed at the Church, but it is a philosophical question which still applies to our society today. I prefer a more pointed translation of the argument:

1. If God exists, he is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.
2. A perfectly good being would want to prevent all evils. An all knowing being would have known every way that evil could come into existence. An all-powerful being would have the power to stop evil from coming into existence.
3. Evil exists. Thus God is either not omnipotent, not omniscient, or not omnibenevolent.

I have commonly seen this logical problem treated as if it is unanswerable, but in fact it has been tackled by many philosophers and theologians throughout history. There are a lot of theodicies which attempt to solve the conundrum by arguing for the greater good of free will, but I think there’s a more simple solution to the equation. It was proposed originally by Augustine of Hippo and later refined by Thomas Aquinas: the solution to the Epicurean Paradox is that evil doesn’t exist.

It may sound heretical at first, but bear with me. Evil doesn’t exist in the same way that coldness doesn’t exist. When we say that something is cold we don’t mean that it possesses a certain quality of coldness, but that it lacks the property of heat. Coldness isn’t something, it is the absence of something. In the same way, evil is not a thing, it is a lack of something. When we say that something is good we are saying that it possesses some intangible quality of goodness. When we say that something is evil, what we mean is that it lacks goodness. Thomas Aquinas says it this way: “Evil is nothing else than a privation of that which a thing is naturally apt to have and ought to have. But a privation is not an essence, but a negation in a substance” (Suma Contra Gentiles III).

           As Christians we believe that the intangible quality of goodness we sense in creation is the presence of God. We also reject the pantheistic idea that everything is God. We believe that God is an individual entity that exists separately from creation. Thus it is possible to sense an absence of goodness (God’s presence) which we would call evil. Since God is metaphysical this absence is felt not in specific global locations but in certain situations where immorality is committed: murder, gossip, thievery, rape, gluttony, etc. Jesus touched on this truth in John chapter 3 when he uses the analogy of light and darkness. Darkness is not a real thing of itself—it is simply the absence of light.

A common misconception which has led to the popularity of the problem of evil is the belief that death is the ultimate evil. We think that death is the worst thing that could happen to anyone, and anytime we see death (especially unexpected death) we consider it evil. But this must be a misconception, for everything that is living at some point dies. To have a biological beginning and end is what separates us from inanimate objects. The duration of our existence may be of value to us, but to a Supreme Being outside of time the difference between a short life and a long one may be as trivial as the difference between being short or tall of stature. It would be impossible to judge such a thing with our present perception of chronology.

To say that death is evil is to say that God is absent when someone dies. But from the words of many dying people it would seem that this is not the case. Steven, the first martyr, declared that he could see God clearly as he expired, and from the records of martyrs that I have studied God’s presence seems to be a common theme despite many gruesome and brutal demises. People might look at a situation like a mass murder in a shopping center and say: “where was God?” Well He certainly wasn’t in the heart of the people doing the killing, but He could perhaps have been with the victims as they were dying. You can also apply this way of thinking to so called “natural evils” like earthquakes, floods, volcanos, etc. While we may find the destruction and decimation of natural disasters inconvenient and tragic, this doesn’t make them “evil.” God can still be present in them, and is often more present in tragedy than in peace.