Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God

In Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, Marilyn McCord Adams is responding to J. L. Mackie's 1955 article “Evil and Omnipotence,” which argued that theism is irrational because “the existence of evil is logically incompatible with that of an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God.” For Mackie, the fact that evil exists challenges the existence of God. Adams argued that the ongoing debate Mackie's article instigated regarding the logical problem of evil stayed too abstract, avoiding responsibility to a particular tradition and ignoring the worst evils in particular, which Adams calls horrendous evils.

Adams defines horrendous evils as: “evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) constitute prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant's life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to him/her on the whole.” One might say, horrendous evils are the kind that can make a person wish they had never been born. Or, if talking about a person who committed horrendous evils, we might wish that person had never been born. It is the “life-ruining potential” of horrendous evils that put them in this category because they have the power “to degrade the individual by devouring the possibility of positive personal meaning in one swift gulp.” This means the big question is why does God allow horrendous evils to happen and what does God do about them?

Adams argues that one does not have to provide a “logically possible morally sufficient reason why God does not prevent” horrendous evil to show that God is “logically compossible with horrendous evils.” Attempting to provide a sufficient reason for why God does not prevent horrendous evil is misguided because of our limitations as finite humans. And attempting to think of plausible or sufficient reasons can lead to trying to use “credible partial reasons why as total explanations, thereby exacerbating the problem of evil by attributing perverse motives to God.” Therefore, instead of seeking sufficient reasons for why horrendous evils exist, Adams chooses to show how despite the existence of horrendous evils, it is “logically possible for God to be good to participants in horrors.”

Adams' central thesis is that horrendous evils “require defeat” by the goodness of God and that they can be defeated by the Goodness of God within the framework of the individual participant's life, and that Christian belief contains resources that can explain how this can be true. At one point she says it is her conviction “that only religious value-theories are rich enough to defeat horrendous evils.” For Adams, if we can find a logically possible scenario where God is good to each created person by insuring each person a life that is a great good to them on the whole and by defeating their participation in horrors within the context of the world and that individual's life, then we have successfully explained how God and evil both exist. Her strategy for this is to identify how “created participation in horrors can be integrated into the participants' relation to God.” For a person's life to be considered a great good to them on the whole, that individual must be able to “recognize and appropriate meanings sufficient to render it worth living.” For this to be the case, salvation must be universal. God must be good to every created person: “Given the ruinous power of horrors, [...] it would be cruel for God to create (allow to evolve) human beings with such radical vulnerability to horrors unless Divine power stood able, and Divine love willing, to redeem.”

In chapter eight, Adams discusses different ways of showing how God might overcome horrendous ruin: 1) Divine Suffering and Symbolic Defeat; 2) Suffering as a Vision into the Inner Life of God; 3) Divine Gratitude, Heavenly Bliss; 4) Chalcedonian Christology as a Christian Solution to the Problem of Horrors; 5) Jurgen Moltmann: Crucified God, Trinitarian Solidarity.

She begins by talking about Rolt and Hartshorne's ideas about how Divine suffering provides symbolic defeat of evil: “for Rolt, exemplar goodness is suffering love, love which finds self-fulfillment through suffering.” Because God suffers with us our suffering can, at least sometimes, be symbolically defeated within the context of our individual lives, but the problem for Adams is that this is not a universal given. Hartshorne says, “God pays creatures the respect of compassion: God literally suffers with creatures by feeling everything they feel.” Adams says this would translate to not only the “symbolic balancing off but also the objective, symbolic defeat of created suffering.” Rolt and Hartshorne both see Divine suffering as “an expression of solidarity, of cost sharing in the expensive project of cosmic ordering, as a manifestation of Divine love.” Later, Adams brings in Moltmann who also sees God suffering with us as key to defending Divine righteousness in the face of evil. Moltmann's focus is Christological, seeing Divine solidarity with humans in the incarnation and culminating in the cross of Christ.

In talking about suffering as a vision into the inner life of God Adams draws from Simone Weil. Weil believed the Divine embrace would “balance off” the negative aspects of affliction and the horrendous aspect would be defeated. Adams goes further than Weil saying that not only does horrendous suffering have “an objective good-making aspect (cognitive contact with the Divine),” but that after this life on earth, God makes it so that a person's relationship with God will “resolve into beatific intimacy so that the “sufferings of this present life” are concretely balanced off.” Adams then discusses Julian of Norwich's “postmortem happy ending” where God will compensate us for what we have undergone. Adams frequently refers to the “size gap” between God and humans and points to Julian's understanding of that concept in this section as well.

Adams draws from all three of these schemes, especially the last two, to show how the central Christian doctrines of Christology and the Trinity show how God defeats horrendous evil. Adams says she has a Chalcedonian Christology which understands that Jesus Christ was both fully God and fully human, and she says Julian of Norwich's understanding of at-one-ment and identification is also what she is drawing on to show how the work of Christ “sheds light on Divine defeat of horrendous evils in the lives of all participants.”

So how does God defeat horrendous evil? Because of God's great love for humans and God's desire for union with us, God entered creation in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus, God participates with us in the horrors of human life as a victim who was betrayed by one of his friends and crucified, which made Him “ritually cursed” and “symbolically a blasphemer.” So God, in Christ, also identified with the perpetrators of horrors. Adams argues that God's “identification with human participation in horrors confers a positive aspect on such experiences by integrating them into the participant's relationship with God.” She emphasizes that it is only retrospectively, from the time when “all is well”, that “human victims of horrors will recognize those experiences as points of identification with the crucified God, and not wish them away from their life histories.” The fact that God became “a blasphemy and a curse for us” will allow those who committed horrors to accept forgiveness and forgive themselves because they will see how nothing they did separated them from the love of God, and they will know God has also “compensated their victims (once again through Divine identification and beatific relationship). So God will not only “engulf and defeat,” but “force horrors to make positive contributions to God's redemptive plan.”

At the end of the book, Adams says “she hopes to have persuaded many readers that even horrendous evils can be defeated by the goodness of God. I do find more comfort in Adams' work than in many of the other theodicies I have read. But it is hard for me to imagine that once all evils are defeated we will be glad the evil existed in the first place, and not wish that the evil things had never happened.

Adams certainly took a different approach to the conversation and changed the terms of the debate. Instead of trying to answer the question: How can a perfectly good God permit evil? She changed the question to: How can a perfectly good God redeem evil? One might think this is cheating, but Adams makes a strong argument that it is not necessary to answer why God permits evil so long as one can show how God can guarantee to both those who suffer and those who participate in horrendous evils, a life which is a great good to them, on the whole. I am left wondering if Adams is justified in not answering the original question. As mentioned earlier, Adams said we cannot know or think of plausible reasons why God would permit such horrors, and she often appeals to that “size gap” between humans and God. But failure to find a solution to the problem does not make the problem go away. If God can defeat evil and redeem it all in the end, why could God not have prevented it, to begin with?