"The" Question for LDS Theists about Evil
TL;DR - Rather than answering the question “Why did God create Evil?”, Latter Day Saints need to answer the question “Does God have power to vanquish Evil?”. Scholar James McLachlan argues that the solution for the Latter Day Saint is that Evil, and all that associate with it, will shrivel away and dissipate in face of the loving goodness of the Kingdom of God which will eventually fill the earth. McLachlan places emphasis on the importance of community within LDS theology, and how obedience to eternal principles will lead people to join together. This raises a concern to me that too much emphasis is placed on human agency and individual power, which diminishes God’s role in the world which He has created.
Why am I starting this off with an epic picture of St. Michel spearing Satan? You'll have to wait and see! I want to base this post off of some comments made in response to my last post. Thank you to Stephen Lyndsay for these good points!
Could 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.
In short, I believe that Paulsen and other LDS scholars (Truman Madsen and James McLachlan) try to locate the origin of evil in a realm outside of God’s creations because otherwise, one has to deal with the notion that God has created evil in one form or another. As I understand, if I hold the belief that evil exists internally within the realm of God’s creations, it is within his domain of responsibility. However if it exists externally, we have no need to hold God responsible for the existence of evil; it would seem that there’s honestly not much he can do about it (an issue which I’ll address later in this post).
I think that Paulsen is actually arguing exactly to the point of your second question, which I’ll rephrase as a statement; the possibility of Evil logically follows from the existence of moral freedom combined with the existence of an objective Good. However, while you might be positing that moral freedom and objective Good are creations of God, Paulsen seems to argue that principles such as objective Good, and perhaps agency, exist independent of God. We can think of these as cosmic natural laws. If we posit that God created the concepts of agency and Good, then we need to hold him responsible for the evil which results from their existence, even if the moral evil came about by human agents acting independently of God’s desires and wishes.
Whatever combination of creation and organization occurred in God’s creation of our world, from a theodical point of view it’s incredibly helpful to locate the origin of Evil in some place outside of the realm of God’s creation and responsibility. That way, when evil - as a cosmic principle - inevitably finds its place in the world and moral evil occurs, God is not the one who indirectly, by creation, causes the evil-doing.
So, to summarize David Paulsen’s argument, we as Latter Day Saints hold a view where;
P1- There are elements, principles, and chaotic matter which coexist eternally with God.
P2- Evil and its various formations can be traced back to these coeternal elements.
P3- God’s omnipotence is that he has all power to work within the bounds of eternal laws of reality.
C1- Evil cannot be attributed to God as it does not exist solely within the realm of his creation.
C2- God is not utterly transcendent in that he does not have absolute power over evil. He can only bring to pass states of affairs in accordance with eternal laws.
It is this final conclusion which I wish to discuss here. As I stated in my previous post, Latter Day Saints have different issues to worry about (in regards to the Problem of Evil) than most theists. Most theologians, believing that evil exists within the realm of God’s creation, need to justify why it is that God allows for evil in a world which he created absolutely. Latter Day Saints circumvent this question because of our belief in principles (such as Evil), laws, matter, and beings which are co-eternal with God. The true issue for Latter Day Saints is whether or not the God we believe in seems to have the kind of power needed to fulfill His promises of the eventual victory of Good over Evil. James McLachlan states this well when he writes that “The problems that arise for Mormons have more to do with the possible eschatological triumph over evil and suffering than with whether or not God is responsible for it”1.
Essentially the question is; If God didn’t create evil, and to some extent it exists independently of him and his omnipotence, how do we know that He will end up winning the fight against chaos and evil in the end? How do we know that, like in Raphael's painting I started out with, Godly power (in the form of St. Michael) could actually pin down and skewer Evil? In the stunning visual terms of John the Revelator, how do we know that Jesus, “the bright and morning star”2, and “the armies which were in heaven [that] followed him upon white horses”3 will be able to vanquish “the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies” which are “gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army”4?
One possible answer comes from James McLachlan in his essay “The Problem of Evil in Mormon Thought”. His argument is that “evil, born of chaos and egoism, will show itself to be ultimately unworkable and eventually destroy itself”5. He goes on to write that “the sources of evil and suffering and chaos arise with individuation and life”6. I’ll admit that this sounds a lot like the concept of suffering that I’ve been learning about in a course of East Asian Buddhism this term - maybe Bodhidarma and Dogen were onto something...
McLachlan’s argument is that the eventual triumph of Good over Evil will be a triumph of communal obedience over isolated individual disobedience. Those who follow the eternal laws of the universe, the laws of God, will find themselves drawn to each other in the process of building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. They will be strong, creative, loving, and constantly growing and progressing, as plants which bloom together in the presence of the natural resources needed for photosynthesis. Those who live in disobedience to these eternal realities will find themselves “withering toward, but never achieving, nothingness”7, much like a plant alone and away from water, nutrients, and sunlight. Evil in God’s world is much like a piece of ice in the heat of the sun; while it may exist for a while, eventually it will die away. Evil will eschatologically work itself out of the Kingdom of God.
McLachlan’s argument reminds me of Frederic Farrar’s discussion of Christ’s cleansing of the temple. Farrar asks why it is that the moneychangers immediately left without an argument or fight when a young, unknown Galilean came into the Temple, scattered their money, drove away their animals, and uttered his blistering condemnation, “make not my Father's house an house of merchandise”8. Farrar claims that it is “because sin is weakness; because there is in the world nothing so abject as a guilty conscience, nothing so invincible as the sweeping tide of a Godlike indignation against all that is base and wrong... Vice cannot stand for one moment before Virtue's uplifted arm”9. Good, and all that accompanies it, will always stand victorious in any fight against Evil and its accomplices.
While I find this argument compelling, it strongly diminishes God’s role in the world which He has created. It places an extraordinary emphasis on human capability at the expense of curtailing God’s role. It would seem that Christ’s magnificent Atonement was the only thing, besides creating the world, that needed to come from a place of divinity. Everything else is left up to sheer human will. While the LDS view of God is a deeply personal one, as God learned and grew in the same way in which we do, it seems that this view of God is far more hands off than in the theology of other denominations, especially in Lutheran and Protestant theology where mankind can do nothing without divine assistance. The ramifications of this hands-off theological position may be notable or not, I haven’t yet fully decided.
Here are a few other questions which McLachlan’s argument doesn’t fully answer. What is the explanation for natural evils? How do we explain God’s occasional intervening in the world in conjunction with his withholding of intervention at other times (for example, God’s giving of divine manna10 and water11 to the Israelites after their exodus from Egypt, yet withholding of these resources to millions of people, especially children, who die each year12)? Why is it that God could not have created a world in which humans could not conceive of or perform certain evils which seems to be especially gratuitous? How do we explain the gratuitous suffering of animals?
1 - “The Problem of Evil in Mormon Thought”, 286
2 - Revelation 22:16
3 - Revelation 19:14
4 - Revelation 19:19.
5 - McLachlan, 286
6 - McLachlan, 287
7 - McLachlan, 287
8 - John 2:16, KJV
9 - Life of Christ, pp. 151-152
10 - Exodus 16:14-35
11 - Exodus 17:5-7
12 - https://www.worldhunger.org/world-child-hunger-facts/
Looking forward to where you take it from here! I hope my comments are more helpful than annoying. :)
ReplyDeleteFor me it would be more satisfying to get rid of the requirements that 1) evil not be traceable to God, and 2) that evil is completely absent at some future state. Both of these seem unnecessary to me, and seems to require a lot of logical gymnastics.
On 1), why are we afraid to consider that God knew some of His creations would use their free will in mortality to do evil and that by creating them (us, with bodies) he would increase the amount of evil in existence? I am ok with this. I don't have fully articulated thoughts about why, but I think we underestimate the blessing of pure existence for beings with agency. (On a similar note, when I read Freakonomics years ago, I was appalled by the pro-abortion argument that counts as a positive the number of likely criminals who aren't out there committing crimes because their chance at life was snuffed out prematurely. If God had decided to abort the whole Earth idea in the premortal life, I suspect that would have been a greater evil than the sum of all the evil that exists here.)
On 2), what if some beings continue existing and continue being evil? Judgement doesn't wipe away the evil of evil things in Alma's description. Evil people presumably will not receive the power that goes with exaltation, so their evil will be muted but perhaps not erased. And if (speculatively for LDS theology) there are future generations of posterity in the eternities, maybe we have something of a continuing cycle rather than a completion in which evil is overcome once and forever. I don't see a need for complete erasure of evil in the end.
I'm not saying I'm right. I could be totally wrong. But I think these requirements should be rigorously probed rather than assumed. One benefit of removing these requirements is that as I see it, one might not need to distinguish between moral evil and natural evil, potentially enabling a more elegant solution in the end.
I'll also add that I just listened on audiobook to an essay in CS Lewis' God in the Dock, on animal pain. And Lewis' comments were extremely unsatisfying. It seemed like as genius as we was, he just had no idea. So I'm excited to see where you go with it!
These are really good points. I think that, after a week of studies and meetings with folks at the Maxwell Institute, I'm leaning more towards a view where evil can to traced to God in some way, because that this enables him to have absolute power. I think that the arguments that I describe (by Paulsen and McLachlan) have issues in explaining miracles and the stories of scripture, assuming a moderate hermeneutic. I struggle to see how it could be that if there are cosmic/natural laws, God could have power to crush the enemies of Israel in the Old Testament, create water from rock, heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out devils, etc., I think that you raise a good point in emphasizing the goodness and blessing of just being able to exist, as well as receiving a physical body.
DeleteOn the second point you make, I suppose I was thinking of it eschatologically in the sense of the judgment, dies irae, end of times. I struggle to see how the God portrayed as limited in power yet loving, compassionate, caring, and essentially human (a view propounded by Terryl and Fiona Givens, among others) will be able to bring about a thousand years of righteousness and the abolition of secret combinations. How do we know that this God can bind Satan's power (Revelation 20:1-3), bring about the millennium, then eventually expel the devil from earth forever (D&C 88:112-115)? I think it might require a reframing of evil and omnipotence different than McLachlan and Paulsen's view to maintain that God can keep Satan away from earth, I'm not totally sure.
You raise a good point with cyclical generations and the continuity of the possibility of evil through those generations - it's away of thinking about evil's legacy and propagation that I hadn't considered. This is probably a way in which LDS thinking about Evil and mainstream thinking about Evil differ; perhaps it's the case that Latter Day Saints see evil as always being present. It's not something that God will "overcome" in the Book of Revelation battle sense, but rather as something which can be controlled by righteousness, though there's always the possibility for it to arise.
I would say that God has the power to crush the enemies of Israel, bind Satan, and prevent every sin and sorrow, but also that He has the wisdom to know when not to. Or from a different perspective, if maximal personal growth on Earth and maximal prevention of all sorrow are logically incompatible, then, the universe being rational, He doesn't have power to make both happen simultaneously. There may be a divine optimization problem (thinking like an engineer) by which growth can occur at a high level in combination with some degree of elimination of sorrows. I do think he guides and steers the world more than we know, often on a very personal level, but also on a civilizational level.
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