Theodicies and Solutions to the Problem of Suffering

Overview

Recall questions on the Augustinian and Irenaean theodicies, Hick's soul-making, process theodicy, and the free will defence.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Distinguish a theodicy from a defence.

   Model answer

   A theodicy tries to justify God by giving the actual reason a good and powerful God permits suffering. A defence is far more modest: it aims only to show that the believer is not contradicting themselves, by describing a possible reason without claiming it is the true one. The distinction matters because a defence answers the logical problem while leaving the evidential one untouched, and because a theodicy takes on the much heavier task of saying what suffering is actually for.

2. 2

   On what does the Augustinian account rest?

   Model answer

   On the conviction that everything God made was good, and that he made it out of nothing, so there is no independent evil principle standing alongside him. Evil therefore cannot be a thing at all. Augustine treats it as a privation, a lack in something that ought to be whole, as blindness is not a substance but the absence of sight. On this view God did not create evil, because there is no such stuff to create; what exists is good creation gone wrong.

3. 3

   Where does Augustine say the wrongness came from?

   Model answer

   From the misuse of free will by creatures who possessed it: first the angels who turned away from God, then the first human beings. Free will is itself a good, but a good that can be turned from the highest good towards lesser ones. Augustine held that the whole human race was somehow present in that first sin and shares its consequences, so human nature is now disordered and inclined to go wrong, which is why the damage is inherited rather than committed afresh by each person.

4. 4

   How does the Augustinian account explain natural evil?

   Model answer

   As part of the same disorder: when the creature turned away, the harmony of creation was broken, so the physical world is out of joint too, and disease and disaster follow. Augustine also argues that some apparent evils look evil only from our narrow standpoint, and that the whole, seen as God sees it, is beautifully ordered. Both moves attract heavy criticism, the first because it makes earthquakes a punishment, the second because it seems to tell sufferers that their suffering merely appears bad.

5. 5

   Why is the Augustinian type called soul-deciding, and what part does reconciliation play?

   Model answer

   Because on this account the present life is where each person's eternal destiny is settled: we are not being gradually improved, we are choosing. That gives judgement a central place and makes the stakes of this life absolute. Reconciliation is the other half of the picture: what human beings cannot repair, God repairs in Christ, so for Christians in this tradition the cross answers the fall rather than following it as an afterthought, and some go so far as to call the original fault a happy one for the redemption it drew out.

6. 6

   Outline the main objections to the Augustinian theodicy.

   Model answer

   Schleiermacher's, that a perfect world cannot go wrong of its own accord, since if it did it was not perfect, so the fault traces back to the maker. That the account requires a historical first pair falling from an original perfection, which sits badly with an evolutionary picture in which suffering and death long precede human beings. That inherited guilt is unjust, since nobody can be culpable for an ancestor's act. And that a God who consigns anyone to endless punishment is not obviously good.

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