BACK in the 1980s Kenneth Surin, an up-and-coming US academic, caused something of a stir with Theology and the Problem of Evil, an impassioned critique of human suffering’s being subject to theoretical debates that can distract from the need for practical action.
This latest contribution to the genre offers an analytical cost/benefit analysis that, in spite of Swinburne’s attempts to earth it in case studies, is, none the less, vulnerable to Surin’s critique.
Perhaps a debate between two professors of philosophy, from the Universities of Notre Dame and Oxford respectively, is always likely to be more analytically detached than practically engaged; but it is difficult not to feel ill at ease with this format.
Sterba acknowledges that some evil in the world is compatible with God’s being good, for example, to ensure that human beings are genuinely free when it comes to moral choices. But a good God would limit the nature and extent of such evil so as to prevent horrendous forms of evil that went beyond what was absolutely necessary to secure our freedom. Clearly, such horrendous moral and natural evils do occur and, as all-powerful, God is responsible for permitting them. Such permissiveness, Sterba says, is logically incompatible with the God of traditional theism.
On the other hand, Swinburne deploys elements of both free-will and soul-making theodicies to argue that as, for example, parents and political states have the right to permit their offspring and citizens to suffer if that is necessary to secure some good for them and for others, so God, as an omnipotent benefactor, has an even greater right to permit even the most horrendous suffering if that is the only logically possible way to secure great goods for us for others.
In response, Sterba has little difficulty challenging the validity of this argument, given that the consequential goods brought about by such horrendous evils do not seem necessarily to benefit those who suffer them.
Swinburne counters this with an appeal to the possibility of life after death as the context within which God can compensate those for whom great suffering has not brought good outcomes in this life.
This may have more than just a whiff of “pie in the sky when you die” about it, but, as the title of this book makes clear, it is about what a good God could logically do about so much suffering, and life after death cannot be logically declared to be outwith the ability of an omnipotent God. Sterba is entitled to be sceptical about such post-mortem existence, but Swinburne is equally entitled to deploy it as a debating point.
On the other hand, Sterba’s repeated insistence that a good God must directly intervene to prevent the occurrence of the most horrendous evils raises a host of issues relating to divine action, providence, and human free will with which he needs to engage rather more than is evidenced here.
These are serious academics engaging in a serious way with serious issues, but with a degree of detachment which some readers may find unhelpful.
The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.
Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering? A debate
James Sterba and Richard Swinburne
OUP £14.99
(978-0-19-284855-0)
Church Times Bookshop £13.49