TL;DR - Latter Day Saints need to answer different questions posed by the Problem of Evil due to their belief about divine omnipotence and creation.
Hi all - just a few thoughts I’ve been having during a busy term of school! I recently made the decision to pursue studying a Latter Day Saint Theodicy as my Religious Studies capstone at Lawrence, and I received a grant to do some studies out at the Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship in Utah at the close of this term. In preparation, I’ve been considering how Latter Day Saints think about the problem of evil differently, and in discussing this with my capstone advisor, the issue of omnipotence seems to come to the forefront; specifically, the nature of omnipotence as we attribute it to our God.
Omnipotence is a complicated issue for a thousand reasons. Could God create a rock so large that he couldn’t move? Can God create nonsense objects, such as a circular cube? Are there states of affairs that an omnipotent being cannot bring about? I'll admit that I haven't done much formal study into the complex nature of omnipotence, and at risk of oversimplification I’ll reduce the classical definition to Jesus’ statement to the people at the coasts of Judaea; “with God all things are possible”1.
Classical omnipotence holds that “with God nothing shall be impossible”2, and that God can bring to pass any state of affairs, or any state of affairs that is logically possible. This falls in line with the belief that God existed before and independently of all else, be it matter, intelligence, spirit, Lucifer, or evil. God created the earth and this universe ex nihilo, or out of nothing. As the ultimate pinnacle of perfection and power, God has absolute power and all is under him.
This view of omnipotence poses a catastrophic issue for anybody attempting to justify moral and natural evil. Why did God create evil? It remains the task of Catholic, Protestant, and other mainline defenders of Christian theism to answer this question; Creation ex nihilo affirms that God was the ultimate designer and creator of evil. About this issue, John Hick writes;
The problem of evil does not attack itself as a threat to any and every concept of deity. It arises only for a religion which insists that the object of its worship is at once perfectly good and unlimitedly powerful… We shall indeed have to take note of various deviations within the broad historical sweep of Christianity that have sought to limit its concept of God in such a way that it no longer provokes the problem of evil… [these religions] do not constitute the normative or historic Christian faith.3
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Saints is of these “deviations” from mainstream Christianity. LDS theology does not affirm creation ex nihilo, but rather creation ex materia, which suggests that there was existing matter or material which God organized in the creation process. In the Book of Abraham, a revelation about the life of the Old Testament prophet given to Joseph Smith, God states that “we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth”4.
David Paulsen writes eloquently about the way in which the doctrine of creation ex materia influences how we deal with the problem of evil.
Latter-day Saints reject the troublesome premise of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing), affirming rather that there are actualities that are coeternal with God. These coeternal actualities include intelligences (sometimes perceived as primal selves or persons), chaotic matter (or mass energy), and laws and principles (perhaps best regarded as the properties and relations of matter and intelligences). Given this plurality of uncreated entities, it does not follow, within an LDS worldview, that God is the ultimate source of evil. Evil is traceable, alternatively, to the choices of other autonomous agents (such as Lucifer, the Devil) who are also coeternal with God, and, perhaps, even to recalcitrant properties of uncreated chaotic matter.5
So, Latter Day Saints don’t face the same monumental challenge as other Christians in explaining how and why God created evil. In this view of theological metaphysics, rather than God existing outside of all his creations (including evil), God exists within a framework of eternal laws and truths. Therefore, Latter Day Saint omnipotence “must be understood not as the power to bring about any state of affairs absolutely, but rather as the power to bring about any state of affairs consistent with the natures of coeternal realities”6. In this view, classical omnipotence is replaced by a somewhat limited omnipotence informed by latter day revelation.
With this theology of omnipotence, the problem of moral evil becomes much less important. There is no need to hold God absolutely responsible for the atrocities of moral evil in the same way as one does when holding a belief in classical omnipotence. However, a question still remains in my mind as to why such gratuitous evils exist, and why God chooses to prevent certain evils while allowing for others. The issue of natural evil also remains a serious concern; the belief that evil and its causes are coeternal with God seems to apply only to moral evil. Cancer, birth defects, the Black Death, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters don’t seem to be eternal principles. Even in LDS theology, these are purposeful creations of God, and the question rises as to what their purpose is, and why they ravage the world in the way which they do.
1 - Matthew 19:26
2 - Luke 1:37
3 - Hick, Evil and the God of Love, pp. 3
4 - Abraham 3:24
5 - https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Evil
6 - https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Evil
Congrats on the grant to study at the Maxwell Institute! What a fun opportunity. It’s also cool that you are doing the capstone project on your Theodicy. I’ll follow with interest.
ReplyDeleteCould it be that through the agency / consciousness that God granted to us, WE are the origin of moral evil, without regard to whether creation was ex materia or ex nihilo? That the possibility of Evil logically follows from the existence of moral freedom combined with the existence of an objective Good? I don’t understand why Paulson needs to locate the origin of evil in uncreated agents.
Or does he? By “co-eternal” autonomous agents, does Paulson mean agents un-created by God, or is he allowing that Lucifer could be part of God’s creation while also being in another sense co-eternal with God, as is a pretty standard LDS interpretation of the creation of mankind. If the latter, then his point might be similar to what I am suggesting.