from 40 Questions About Suffering and Evil
by Greg Welty
The previous Questions in this part of the book, “Apologetic Questions About Suffering and Evil,” illustrated apologetics as “defense.” This way of defending the faith focuses on answering the questions of unbelief. The intellectual problem of evil (Question 17) is an argument against the existence of God, and the appeals to theodicy (Questions 19, 21–26) and divine inscrutability (Questions 20, 27) are ways of showing that that argument against God is unsound. One of its central premises—which we have been calling “the claim”—is either false or unsupported.
But there are at least two other ways of doing Christian apologetics, which we can call apologetics as “proof” and apologetics as “offense.”[1] In apologetics as proof, the Christian tries to make a positive case for distinctive theistic or Christian claims, appealing to assumptions that Christians and non-Christians have in common, such as reason, sense experience, and moral intuition. (For instance, there might be a good historical argument for the resurrection of Christ, once we get rid of double standards in historical inquiry and consider the best explanation of the historical evidence.) In apologetics as offense, the Christian goes on the offensive against non-Christian worldviews (such as atheism, pantheism, pluralism, and the traditional non-Christian religions), seeking to show that the assumptions made in these worldviews are destructive of reasoning, knowledge, science, ethics, and so on. (For instance, the naturalistic evolutionary claim that our cognitive capacities were produced by way of a blind, purposeless process that was sensitive only to the conditions for survival might, if true, undermine our claim to know anything at all.)
This Question uses the topic of suffering and evil to briefly pursue apologetics as proof and apologetics as offense. Rather than defending God from the alleged implications of suffering and evil (i.e., apologetics as defense), we can attempt to argue for God by way of our recognition of evil in the world, particularly moral evil. That is apologetics as proof. And we can maintain that unbelieving worldviews undermine the rationality of recognizing moral evil as moral evil. That is apologetics as offense.
Apologetics as Proof: The Case for God from Moral Evil
Different Kinds of Moral Argument
There is a large body of work on the so-called “moral argument for God’s existence”.[2] There are several ways to sketch out this argument:
- Objective moral obligations exist, and it is implausible to suppose they exist in the absence of God.
- We make judgments about some actions being morally right, and other actions being morally wrong, and our capacity to make such discriminations is best explained by God’s giving us that capacity.
- The horror we feel when we observe or otherwise consider a particularly perverse case of evil is in some way tied to the fact that such an evil constitutes defiance of God.
Statement (1) is primarily a metaphysical argument: the existence of objective moral obligations requires God’s existence, perhaps because their absolute bindingness can only be grounded in a necessarily existing being like God. Statement (2) is primarily an epistemological argument: our knowledge of objective obligations requires God’s existence, perhaps because unless God produced (or guided the development of) our knowledge capacities, we would have little reason to think our judgments about moral obligation are true judgments (rather than being merely useful beliefs that help our species survive). Statement (3) is primarily, for lack of a better term, an existential argument for God’s existence. In seeing that horrifying evil is exceedingly appalling and wicked, we are seeing what is (ultimately) the defiance of an infinitely good and righteous Being (i.e., God); even worse, it is defiance perpetrated by (and often against) those created in the image of such an infinite Being, and that is a further reason for its appalling nature.
C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity
In his popular level, highly influential presentation of the moral argument for God’s existence—“Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe”—C. S. Lewis argues for three fundamental claims:
- The objective existence of the moral law
- The unique nature of the moral law
- The religious interpretation of the moral law
First, we know the moral law objectively exists because we presuppose it in our daily life:
Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and they cannot really get rid of it. . . . They know the Law of Nature.[3]
We appeal to it when we make moral accusations against others (“You should have kept your promise”), and when we defend ourselves from the moral accusations of others (“I agree people should keep their promises, but there were extenuating circumstances”). Both responses presuppose that a moral standard is already in place. As for allegedly differing moralities among different civilizations in history, these differences are often exaggerated. (In an appendix to The Abolition of Man, Lewis demonstrates the fundamental unity of moral codes throughout history, across religions and cultures.) In addition, these differences are not always differences over moral principle, but about what the facts are. (Our ancestors killed witches not because our ancestors had fundamentally different moral principles from us, but because they believed there were such things as witches.)
Second, the nature of the moral law is unique because it cannot be reduced to a description of how we in fact behave. It is not like laws of nature pertaining to gravity or genetics. Rather, in the moral law there is
something above and beyond the actual facts of human behavior. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something else—a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.[4]
In short, the moral law is a consciousness of how we ought to behave, regardless of how we do in fact behave.
Third, given these two points, the best interpretation of the moral law is the religious one: it is nothing less than God speaking to us. In figuring out what is the best interpretation of the phenomenon of conscience, we are guided in part by the previous two theses. Since the moral law has objective existence, there is something there to explain. And since the moral law has a unique nature, science cannot explain it. Science can only explain what is the case (what Lewis calls “third-person facts”), not what ought to be the case (what Lewis calls “first-person facts”).
On Lewis’s view, the moral law is best understood as the influence or command of a superior being who is trying to get us to behave in a certain way. Two things are being claimed here: the moral law is the voice of a person, and it is the voice of a moral superior. It is the voice of a person (and so grounded in mind, not matter):
I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know—because after all the only other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions.[5]
It is the voice of a moral superior, to whom we are called to submit:
We know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey.[6]
But if the voice of conscience is not the voice of a mindless universe, nor the voice of a moral equal (such as fellow humans), then whose voice is it? We have run out of nontheistic options, as it were. These considerations point in the direction of God.[7]
Apologetics as Offense: No Absolute Norms If There Is No Personal Absolute
What about apologetics as offense? Can we go on the offensive against unbelieving worldviews, showing that they have no good explanation of the phenomenon of conscience? At one level, this is an exceedingly difficult task. Different Christian philosophers say different things in their theistic accounts of morality:
Efforts by theistic ethicists to account for moral obligations range from natural law accounts to divine motivation theories; from divine will theories to divine command theories; from divine desire theories to divine attitude theories; and more besides.[8]
Likewise, there is
a range of secular ethical and meta-ethical approaches, both naturalistic and non-naturalistic, ranging from Philippa Foot’s natural law view, to Shafer-Landau’s non-naturalism, to supervenience accounts like Erik Wielenberg’s, to naturalistic ethical accounts like those of the Cornell realists, to various evolutionary approaches, to Korsgaardian constructivism, and more besides.[9]
Space permits interaction with just one of these approaches: the evolutionary one. On evolutionary “subjectivism,” there is no moral law, but evolution has fooled us into thinking that there is one, because such belief was useful to survival. An initial problem is that this means all our moral beliefs are false (though useful). But then why not think the same for all the other outputs of our cognitive faculties, also developed by evolution? Why does the availability of evolutionary explanation undermine conscience, but not perception or reasoning?
On evolutionary “objectivism,” there is a moral law, because evolution has taught us that we should promote the survival of our species. But if this is a truth we all know, is it not an incredible coincidence that a blind, purposeless process gave us the correct moral beliefs?[10] Beyond that, this is an inadequate an explanation of what I believe. I do not believe rape is wrong because it undermines the stability of the family unit and therefore species survival. I believe it is wrong because it violates the intrinsic dignity of a person. So this is not explaining the truth I think I know, but something else entirely. Finally, “promoting survival” is not the only thing involved in the evolutionary process. In fact, what is more characteristic of that process is the production of lots of senseless death. So why is that (I should produce senseless death) not the moral lesson I should learn from evolution? Why arbitrarily single out survival as the morally relevant thing?
Christian theologian John Frame offers a general account of what is going wrong here. He points out that many non-Christian accounts of moral obligations either offer an absolute being who is impersonal (Platonic forms, cosmic fate), or offer a personal being who is not absolute (pagan Greek and Roman gods). The former cannot explain why there are any obligations at all, since obligations arise in the context of personal relationships, whereas the latter fails to explain why our obligations are absolutely binding upon us. What is needed is the “personal Absolute” of Christianity.[11]
No Replacement for Apologetics as Defense!
It is important to see that neither apologetics as proof nor apologetics as offense, briefly pursued above, is a replacement for the apologetics as defense that has been pursued in all the earlier Questions of part 3. Even if we are right that moral evil is an indirect argument for God’s existence (apologetics as proof) and that unbelievers face a more difficult challenge than Christians in accounting for that moral evil as moral evil (apologetics as offense), the intellectual problem of evil still stands as a potential challenge that Christians must address on its own terms. It matters not if the critics of our faith are moral relativists or nihilists and cannot account for moral norms. What matters is whether the argument they present against God is a good one. The cogency of that argument does not rise or fall based on their personal beliefs. If they are right that God would prevent any evil he could prevent and that God can prevent any evil, then they have raised a problem for us, and we must challenge either the premises or logic of the argument. Changing the subject to whether they (as unbelievers) can account for evil does not by itself get around the argument raised against us. So, all three kinds of apologetics are needed on this topic.[12]
Summary
“Apologetics as proof ” seeks to argue for God’s existence from the existence of moral obligations, from our capacity to judge between right and wrong actions, and even from our recognition of horrendous evil. C. S. Lewis’s moral argument for God’s existence offers the religious interpretation of the moral law as the best interpretation of the phenomenon of conscience. “Apologetics as offense” seeks to argue not that unbelievers lack sincere moral beliefs, but that their other unbelieving assumptions make it very difficult to maintain or explain moral truth.
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[1] These three ways of doing apologetics, and my way of explaining them, come from John Frame, Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), 1–3. The entire book is structured around this tripartite division of apologetic labor.
[2] See David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundation of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); David Baggett and Marybeth Baggett, The Morals of the Story: Good News about A Good God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018); and David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, The Moral Argument: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). See also Mark Murphy, God & Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Angus Ritchie, From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of Our Ethical Commitments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Gregory E. Ganssle, “Evil as Evidence for Christianity,” in God and Evil: The Case for God in a World Filled with Pain, eds. Chad Meister and James K. Dew Jr. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 214–24; and C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[3] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001 [1952]), 8.
[4] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 21.
[5] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 25.
[6] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 23.
[7] No doubt Christian philosopher David Baggett is correct that, while Lewis’s presentation “may serve the purposes of popular apologetics . . . it is much too hasty to serve the purpose of subjecting secular ethical theory to robust critical scrutiny” (“An Abductive Moral Argument for God,” in The Plantinga Project: Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God, eds. Jerry L. Walls and Trent Dougherty [New York: Oxford University Press, 2018], 271). Still, one must start somewhere, and Baggett’s own work is a fine place to build on and extend Lewis’s argument. See the resources listed in footnote 2 above.
[8] Baggett, “An Abductive Moral Argument for God,” 274.
[9] Baggett, “An Abductive Moral Argument for God,” 272.
[10] J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2nd. ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 503.
[11] John Frame, Apologetics, 101–7.
[12] One way to put this point is to say that the intellectual problem of evil is a “reductio ad absurdum” against a Christian worldview. It attempts to “reduce to absurdity” Christian claims, by showing that what we believe about God’s goodness (he would prevent evil if he could) and God’s power (he can prevent any evil) should lead us to deny an evident fact (that there is evil). A reductio ad absurdum does not start from one’s own premises, but from an opponent’s premises. That’s why the personal beliefs of the critic are irrelevant to the cogency of the intellectual problem of evil.
This post is adapted from 40 Questions About Suffering and Evil by Greg Welty. This title is set to be released on September 24, 2024. If you are interested in adopting this book for a college or seminary course, please request a faculty examination copy. We will also consider requests for your blog or media outlets.
Multifaceted answers to the multifaceted challenges of suffering and evil
Both inside and outside the Christian faith, many difficult realities trouble human hearts and minds. By being equipped to answer questions about suffering and evil, Christians can persevere in faith, share their faith, and defend the faith when confronted with these inevitable challenges of living in a fallen world.
In 40 Questions About Suffering and Evil, Greg Welty shows the necessity of exploring our vocabulary around evil and suffering so we can clearly see and express the best questions. Welty explores vital ideas, backgrounds, and issues, answering questions like these:
- What is the difference between Moral Evil and Natural Evil?
- What is the Bible’s role in helping us understand suffering and evil?
- Does God will all suffering and evil?
- How is the gospel relevant to counseling those who suffer?
Welty provides biblically informed intellectual resources for answering significant questions about suffering and evil, exposing readers to a wide range of influential views articulated by Christians over the past two millennia.
