God’s allowance of suffering doesn’t justify our failure to prevent it
There’s an idea that if God permits suffering as the best or only available means to bring about some greater good or thwart some greater evil, we might lose some motivation (though not all) to prevent suffering. After all, if we simply allow certain suffering to continue, it must somehow be for the benefit of the individual—otherwise, God would prevent it, right?
This line of thought has led some theists to propose that God actually allows pointless suffering—suffering that doesn’t directly lead to a greater good for the individual. The reasoning is that such suffering ensures we remain motivated to prevent it since there’s no guarantee a greater good will arise for the person enduring it. This isn’t to say there aren’t global reasons for God to permit suffering—such as creating the general conditions for greater goods—but rather that particular instances of suffering might not result in a greater good for the individual experiencing them.
In other words, for God, there can be a general reason for a policy of permitting suffering that:
Enables certain goods (or prevents certain evils) that would otherwise be unavailable.
Acknowledges that not every specific instance of suffering results in a greater good for each individual.
The implication of this, of course, is that some instances of suffering may seem arbitrary or pointless—because, in fact, they actually are. Yet, these can still justifiably exist because (following the thought of someone like Van Inwagen) a certain amount of suffering may be necessary to achieve logically dependent goods (or to prevent certain worse evils).1 A line must inevitably be drawn regarding how many instances of suffering occur. Wherever that line is drawn, God could always have prevented or allowed one more instance of suffering without materially affecting the overall balance of goods.
Think of it like this: you could make France fertile with 14,000,000 raindrops—or 13,999,999, or 14,000,001. The specific number of raindrops is (necessarily) arbitrary, but their collective contribution to fertility obviously is not. (Equally obviously, 14 raindrops won’t make France fertile).
So understood, arbitrariness becomes a necessary feature of creating such worlds. Interestingly, this arbitrariness might itself also facilitate the good of keeping humans motivated to alleviate suffering—or so a certain line of thought goes, as recently put forth by Perry Hendricks.
Frankly, I think Hendricks offers a very strong response to the problem of divine hiddenness. Why? Because he shows how theism might actually predict what he calls “pointless atheism”—non-resistant non-belief that doesn’t itself result in a greater good for the individual.
His idea, in a nutshell, builds on why God might allow pointless evils to keep us morally motivated, combined with the notion that it’s good for us to help others come to believe certain truths—including belief in God (a proposal set forth by other theists, like Swinburne). But we can’t help others come to believe unless there are people who don’t yet believe. In other words, unless there are (non-resistant) atheists.
So, yeah—with these assumptions in place, theism actually predicts non-resistant non-belief, which effectively sinks the problem of divine hiddenness.
Like I said, I think this is a powerful response, given certain assumptions; however, I’m not sure I buy the point about the absence of pointless evils being a necessary condition to maintain moral motivation to prevent suffering. Really, the idea that God allows pointless suffering just to keep us motivated to prevent it strikes me as… not well-motivated. It usually rests on a series of confusions.
In fact, I think Eleonore Stump rather masterfully dissolves this issue—and this is ironic, because Hendrix cites Stump’s work (footnote 19) as entailing that it would be better to let people remain in certain negative states, which Stump explicitly argues is not the case!
As Stump writes in Wandering (excuse the extended quotation; I think it’s warranted):
But this complaint rests on a confusion analogous to that underlying the immediately preceding complaint. On Aquinas’s view, ceteris paribus, one person (Paula) allowing some suffering on the part of another person (Jerome) that Paula could readily prevent or relieve is morally permissible only if Paula is justified in holding the true belief that the suffering is the best means, in the circumstances, for drawing Jerome closer to God in the process of justification or sanctification. Unless it is true that this suffering of Jerome’s serves this purpose, and Paula is justified in believing that it does, then, ceteris paribus, Paula’s permitting this suffering of Jerome’s is not morally permissible.
But, as I have been at pains to show, neither suffering nor the benefits defeating suffering are transparent. It is not true that a person has them if and only if he knows that he does. A fortiori, they are opaque to outside observers. In fact, unlike omniscient God, human beings are rarely in a position to see into the inner life of another person enough to know whether any particular suffering is likely to serve the purpose of justification or sanctification. And so it is also true that one human being (Paula) is rarely in a position to be morally justified in permitting the suffering of another human being (Jerome) when, ceteris paribus, Paula could readily prevent or relieve Jerome’s suffering.
The putative objector might rejoin here that the possession of a Thomistic theodicy, in effect, provides what one might otherwise not have—namely, the basis for concluding that any particular suffering will, in fact, serve the purpose of justification and sanctification. The theodicy gives what unaided human reason cannot. And so, the putative objector will claim, a Thomistic theodicy provides what I have just claimed human beings rarely have: moral justification for permitting the suffering of others.
But this rejoinder is also confused. On Aquinas’s theodicy, any particular suffering allowed by God will benefit the sufferer in the ways the theodicy explains. But when Paula considers whether she ought to try to prevent or relieve Jerome’s suffering, she cannot know whether the future suffering of Jerome that she is considering is suffering that God will allow. That is because, if Paula does not do what she can to alleviate that future suffering of Jerome’s, someone else might do so. In the biblical book of Esther, when Mordecai is trying to persuade Esther to speak to the King to try to prevent the genocide of the Jews officially proclaimed by the King, Mordecai says to Esther: ‘If you altogether hold your peace at this time [and do not speak to the King], then enlargement and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will be destroyed.’ As this speech indicates, Mordecai is assuming that God has multiple routes to the end of preventing the suffering of the Jews. If Esther does not contribute to the prevention of that suffering, Mordecai supposes, someone else will. That suffering of the Jews, therefore, will not be among the sufferings allowed by God, even if Esther fails to try to prevent it; and Esther will be punished by God (Mordecai thinks) for her morally wrong action of not trying to prevent that suffering herself.
Analogously, when Paula considers alleviating some future suffering for Jerome, she is not, at that time, in a position to know whether that suffering is among those God allows. Furthermore, even if it were to be the case that God did allow Jerome’s suffering, Paula would not thereby be retrospectively justified in having failed to prevent it. Since, at the time she failed to try to prevent it, she did not know it would be allowed by God, her failure to try to prevent it is not justified for her.
Therefore, although God is in an epistemic position to be justified if He allows suffering He could prevent, a human person, very generally, is not. From the fact that there is a morally sufficient reason for God to allow suffering, it does not follow that this reason also gives a human moral person license to allow suffering. Because God and human persons are not in the same epistemic condition as regards the permission or production of suffering, different moral judgments apply to God and human beings on this score. So, the cynical use of otherworldly rhetoric receives no validation from Aquinas’s position. Oppression of the poor by the rich is an injustice whose evil is in no way mitigated by the consideration of God’s reasons for allowing suffering.
Said differently, it’s our moral imperative to alleviate suffering/negative states of affairs—this comes directly from the morality of natural law and, as Stump points out, the epistemic conditions we find ourselves in. Plus, we can’t know when or if God intends to use us as instruments for alleviating someone’s suffering. It’s entirely possible that God intends for a person’s suffering to cease precisely through our actions—and that our intervention might bring about a greater good, such as the person experiencing an act of love that changes their heart.
When we understand these points—particularly that:
Our obligation to alleviate suffering remains intact because it is inherently good for us to do so, and our epistemic condition does not morally justify us in failing to prevent or alleviate suffering, and
We have no way of knowing whether our intervention might be exactly how God intends to alleviate someone’s suffering—
it becomes clear that we have plenty of motivation to take action against suffering.
Moreover, there’s no reason to think our actions could ultimately thwart God’s plans in any meaningful sense. If God determines that someone requires more suffering for a greater purpose, our efforts to intervene won’t override that decision. However, that doesn’t mean such action isn’t still good—for us, the other person, or both.
In fact, it’s entirely plausible that our attempts to alleviate or prevent suffering—combined with the person’s experience of suffering—are precisely what enable certain great goods to emerge, particularly relational goods.
Does this mean those who agree with Stump (like myself) can’t use Perry’s response to divine hiddenness? Not necessarily. They just can’t argue that arbitrary evils are necessary to keep us morally motivated. However, there could still be other reasons for such arbitrary evils, including non-resistant non-belief.
I also defend this line of thought in my book The Best Argument for God, with some modifications.