an existentialist solution to the problem of evil
The solution to the problem of evil I am comfortable with relies on an existentialist view of God. This solution is worked out from my understanding of Vladimir Lossky and Peter van Inwagen.
This solution rejects an understanding of God’s actions as determined by his objective essence, where he is objectively good and all powerful. Lossky and Inwagen abandon the essentialist approach accordong to which 'God is god-like, man is man-like, and then there is grace", which Gos bestows to humans. Eastern theology and Inwagen have an existentialist approach.
God is everlasting but temporal. He exists in time. He is free. It is impossible for any being to perfectly ‘foresee’ or ‘know’ in advance what a free being would freely choose to do tomorrow. Therefore God cannot “know” his own future actions either.
This means humans and God alike have to bear the existential dread that comes with responsibility. There are no objective anchors. As long as they are free, humans’ acts are not determined within an order established by God or by nature, but live in the void and with their own void.
The only possible anchor for beings with free will is subjective, and that is faith, their capacity to project their own being in the future. God Himself constantly struggles with and constantly overcomes His own existential void. He is able to plan by His faith. His nature cannot be objectively determined to be good if he is free. If God is constantly good, then he, by faith, must be constantly choosing to be so.
Therefore what makes God god, and raises him to his divine status is his faith, not any risk-free, immutable nature. If so, then God cannot give you that kind of nature either if you are to remain free.
God is constantly “saving” himself by faith, as it were. You too can save yourself by your faith. But you have to do what he is doing. Salvation is through deification. You come to be what God is, by doing what God does. At the least, you have something to learn from him and you have something to gain by cooperating with him.
What God does is to love us. So, to do what he does, we must love God back.
To love God back we need to be free to choose to not love.
This creates the possibility that I actually choose evil, and enact evil in the world I live in. It entails I should live in an indeterminate world made 'for me’ to experience and understand.
But why do other people have to suffer the evil I enact, the consequences of my wrong choice? Why can’t I choose evil in a tube, so to say? Why doesn’t God protect individual righteous persons from the consequences of my wrong choices? Why am I not protected, isolated from other people’s wrong choices?
This is because God’s nature is Trinitarian. The three persons love each ther. That is God’s nature. This is what God does. What God does is to love, to give himself. This is what we should imitate for our salvation because this is what works for God too. The godly persons love one another.
For humans to love one another humans, to actually manifest love towards each other and not just live in isolated experience machines where they experience love without actually loving anyone, we must live together. Therefore it takes a world ‘with all of us in it’ for us to live together.
Moreover, if each of us have to live in an indeterminate world, and that world has to be unique for all of us, it takes an indeterminate world with all of us in it, for us to live together free to choose evil. Hence, we must live in an indeterminate world, a world where each of us can choose evil and each of us can suffer each other’s evil.
*Peter van Inwagen 2005. “The Problem of Evil.” In William J. Wainwright, The Oxford handbook of philosophy of religion. Oxford University Press.
*Lossky, Vladimir 1978. Orthodox Theology. An introduction. tr by Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Press.