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Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God
If you thought nothing new could come of the stalled, stale debates in analytic philosophy over the problem of evil, think again. With characteristic elegance and precision, Marilyn McCord Adams decisively advances the discussion by including overlooked problems―notably, the horrendous evils of her title―and overlooked resources―from the Bible and the history of Christian thought. ― Kathryn Tanner, University of Chicago When confronted by horrendous evil, even the most pious believer may question not only life's worth but also God's power and goodness. A distinguished philosopher and a practicing minister, Marilyn McCord Adams has written a highly original work on a fundamental dilemma of Christian thought—how to reconcile faith in God with the evils that afflict human beings. Adams argues that much of the discussion in analytic philosophy of religion over the last forty years has offered too narrow an understanding of the problem. The ground rules accepted for the discussion have usually led philosophers to avert their gaze from the worst—horrendous—evils and their devastating impact on human lives. They have agreed to debate the issue on the basis of religion-neutral values, and have focused on morals, an approach that—Adams claims—is inadequate for formulating and solving the problem of horrendous evils. She emphasizes instead the fruitfulness of other evaluative categories such as purity and defilement, honor and shame, and aesthetics. If redirected, philosophical reflection on evil can, Adams's book demonstrates, provide a valuable approach not only to theories of God and evil but also to pastoral care.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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May 10, 2022
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?
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?
February 6, 2023
This book is not for the faint of heart, that is, its not for those who do not possess a deep interest in philosophy. While somewhat on the popular level, Adams engages with many other philosophers in dealing with the problem of evil, specifically focusing on “horrendous evils.”
It’s a great book. I could try to write a halfway decent review, but I do not think I could do a better job than this reviewer:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My big takeaway is that horrendous evils are only defeated through universal salvation. In other words, evil must be defeated in each individual life but for God to do good for each individual, each must be saved in the end.
Adams does not go into detail on this for her work is philosophical rather than primarily theological. Actually, she argues that the debates around God and evil too often remain in the abstract and she brings in tools from Christian theology to make her argument. I think an interesting extension of Adams’ argument could be hitting hard on the universal salvation aspect.
Much ink has been spilt by Christians trying to argue that evil does not prove God does not exist. Yet, the existence of an unending hell would, by far, be the greatest evil we could imagine. What could be the source of more suffering than image-bearing creatures suffering forever? The existence of an unending hell proves that God is not Loving or is just Weak - we are left either with a God who does not want to save all (and is thus quite vicious and immoral, compared to any decent human parent) or unable to save all. The only solution to the problem of evil that makes any coherent sense is that God saves all.
I’d like to read a book that makes that argument on a popular level, and uses Adam’s book to do so. I hope someone else writes it one day…
It’s a great book. I could try to write a halfway decent review, but I do not think I could do a better job than this reviewer:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My big takeaway is that horrendous evils are only defeated through universal salvation. In other words, evil must be defeated in each individual life but for God to do good for each individual, each must be saved in the end.
Adams does not go into detail on this for her work is philosophical rather than primarily theological. Actually, she argues that the debates around God and evil too often remain in the abstract and she brings in tools from Christian theology to make her argument. I think an interesting extension of Adams’ argument could be hitting hard on the universal salvation aspect.
Much ink has been spilt by Christians trying to argue that evil does not prove God does not exist. Yet, the existence of an unending hell would, by far, be the greatest evil we could imagine. What could be the source of more suffering than image-bearing creatures suffering forever? The existence of an unending hell proves that God is not Loving or is just Weak - we are left either with a God who does not want to save all (and is thus quite vicious and immoral, compared to any decent human parent) or unable to save all. The only solution to the problem of evil that makes any coherent sense is that God saves all.
I’d like to read a book that makes that argument on a popular level, and uses Adam’s book to do so. I hope someone else writes it one day…
December 8, 2018
Adams’ proposal is interesting, but ultimately I’m afraid it strays too far from the biblical witness for me to endorse. Her proposal is that God’s goodness so defeats evil in the end that each person will be grateful to God for their life. The thing that distinguishes her is that this is not a “greater good” theodicy, because she maintains there is an unbroachable (for humans) metaphysical gap between God and creation; a scale of value necessary for “greater good” language simply cannot be employed to make sense of suffering because that would put us and God on the same moral plane. The purchase of such a position is that God really is powerful enough to conquer evil in a final way. But I think this account fails on two fronts. First, she claims that the problem of evil is that we are human. We suffer and are defiled because we straddle a metaphysical gap ourselves. We are not of a single kind (think Leviticus). Ultimately, I’m not satisfied by an account of suffering/evil that says our problem is we’re human. It simply can’t be that we have to overcome our creaturely status to overcome suffering. Second, because God and humans are not on the same moral plane, she says God does not forgive us for sins. We can’t offend a God we do not share a horizon with (even if that God reaches out to us). This just unravels too much of scripture’s plot for me to endorse. She’s got some provocative thoughts in here though, and approaches the topic with both pastoral sensibilities and mental rigor.
June 3, 2024
A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE “LOGICAL” PROBLEM OF “HORRENDOUS” EVILS
Marilyn McCord Adams (1943–2017) was an American philosopher and Episcopal priest, who taught at Yale Divinity School and the University of Oxford.
She wrote in the Introduction of this 1999 book, “After many years of teaching through the syllabus of these materials, I began to feel the discussion had bogged down… I began to look for a diagnosis of what was going wrong. My own nutshell answer is that the debate was carried on at too high a level of abstraction… Further, our philosophical propensity for generic solutions… has permitted us to ignore the worst evils in particular… and so avoid confronting the problems they pose… This book is addressed to a broad readership that includes both analytic philosophers of religion and Christian philosophers. I live in both worlds.” (Pg. 2-4)
She outlines, “in this book, “I restrict my attention to discussions of the ‘logical’ problem [of evil] for twin reasons. First, my strategy for solving the special problem posed by horrendous evils is simpler within the framework of the logical problem… Second… debate about whether certain sorts of evil are plainly pointless quickly returns to territory shared with the logical problem: namely, whether there are any (many) reasons compossible with omnipotent, omniscient, perfect goodness for permitting (producing) evils of that kind.” (Pg. 15-16)
She explains, “Among the evils that infect this world, some are worse than others. I want to try to capture the most pernicious of them within the category of ‘horrendous evils,’ which I define… as ‘evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) constitutes 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.’ The class of paradigm horrors includes both individual and massive collective suffering, and it encompasses the appalling evils mentioned by Plantinga.” (Pg. 26)
She summarizes, “My question thus becomes, ‘what would it take for Divine power and agency to be able to guarantee created persons lives that are great goods to them on the whole, and to defeat their participation in horrors not just globally, but within the context of their individual lives?” (Pg. 80)
She points out, “Divine Patronage of Dubious Quality?... God’ Bible-story clients fare badly more often than not. At the beginning of Exodus, God has not serviced His patron-client contract with Israel for four hundred years, with the result that Israel’s children are slaves in Egypt under a pharaoh who did not know Joseph… Israel splits from Judah… only to be overrun by Assyria, some generations before Judah falls to Babylon… then to the Greeks, then… to the Romans who eventually raze Jerusalem for the second time… Jesus dies a ritually cursed death… And Jesus predicts the same fate, daily cross-bearing, for His disciples. Such a track record makes reasonable, yea urgent, the questions, whether Divine patronage is a blessing or a curse, whether clients are not fools to ‘sign on.’ Thus, both problems of symbolic evil are raised by the Bible itself!” (Pg. 113-114)
She suggests, “The importance of cosmic aesthetic excellence---including the regularity of natural and psychological laws---is not that it defeats horrors… Rather, like the elegant composition of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ or Grünewald’s crucifixion, or the rhythms of color and stroke in Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’… cosmic order houses horrors in a stable frame with the result that we can face them and hear the outrageous truths that they tell… This truth-telling capacity endows horrors with a positive symbolic value that cannot be taken from them…” (Pg. 151)
She clarifies, “my view does not make participation in horrors necessary for the individual’s incommensurate good. A horror-free life that ended in beatific intimacy with God would also be one in which the individual enjoyed incommensurate good. My contention is rather that by virtue of endowing horrors with a good aspect. Divine identification makes the victim’s experience of horrors so meaningful that one would not retrospectively wish it away, enables the perpetrator to accept his/her participation in horrors as part of a good and worthwhile life. Nor is participation in horrors merely instrumental related to the beatific end, as God’s necessary or chosen means for educating one into beatitude. As a point of identification with God it is partially constitutive of the relationship that makes one’ life overwhelmingly worth living and, so, is meaningful apart from any putative causal or educational consequences.” (Pg. 167)
She summarizes, “In concentrating on the logical problem of horrendous evil, I have also been attempting to exploit the explanatory power of expanded theisms without assuming the obligation to convince atheologians of their truth.” (Pg. 178) She continues, “In this book, I have been arguing that allegedly more economical approaches to evil, those with supposedly less controversial assumptions… pay compensating prices in explanatory power; while more expanded theisms are better able to explain how God can defeat horrors, precisely because of their richer assumptions. Once again, nothing is free in philosophy!” (Pg. 180)
She recapitulates, “Throughout the book, I have in effect insisted upon approaching the logical problem of evil from the viewpoint of participants in horrendous evils…. I have preserved a certain incommensurability among horrors… But I make no apology for the assumption that the Latin American poor and the European bourgeois are like meaning-makers, even if as members of different cultures they might have dissimilar values and symbolize them in highly varied ways… my principal plea is the modest one that philosophical reflection and strategic political action, that focus on the individual and attention to the social, that consideration of what we ought and what God is able to do are not really in competition for complementary.” (Pg. 196-197)
She concludes, “Naturally, I hope to have convinced many readers of my central theses---that horrendous evils can be defeated by the Goodness of God within the framework of the individual participant’s life and that Christian belief contains many resources with which to explain how this can be so. But I have also intended---like horrors themselves---to disrupt: in this case, a family of discussions. There is so much to be learned about the meaning of suffering and the Goodness of God, why should we ever stop where we are? If along the way I have said something to offend almost everybody, I can take satisfaction that my effort has succeeded in its aporetic aims!” (Pg. 208)
This book will be of great interest to those seriously studying Christian Apologetics, philosophical theology, and the Problem of Evil.
Marilyn McCord Adams (1943–2017) was an American philosopher and Episcopal priest, who taught at Yale Divinity School and the University of Oxford.
She wrote in the Introduction of this 1999 book, “After many years of teaching through the syllabus of these materials, I began to feel the discussion had bogged down… I began to look for a diagnosis of what was going wrong. My own nutshell answer is that the debate was carried on at too high a level of abstraction… Further, our philosophical propensity for generic solutions… has permitted us to ignore the worst evils in particular… and so avoid confronting the problems they pose… This book is addressed to a broad readership that includes both analytic philosophers of religion and Christian philosophers. I live in both worlds.” (Pg. 2-4)
She outlines, “in this book, “I restrict my attention to discussions of the ‘logical’ problem [of evil] for twin reasons. First, my strategy for solving the special problem posed by horrendous evils is simpler within the framework of the logical problem… Second… debate about whether certain sorts of evil are plainly pointless quickly returns to territory shared with the logical problem: namely, whether there are any (many) reasons compossible with omnipotent, omniscient, perfect goodness for permitting (producing) evils of that kind.” (Pg. 15-16)
She explains, “Among the evils that infect this world, some are worse than others. I want to try to capture the most pernicious of them within the category of ‘horrendous evils,’ which I define… as ‘evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) constitutes 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.’ The class of paradigm horrors includes both individual and massive collective suffering, and it encompasses the appalling evils mentioned by Plantinga.” (Pg. 26)
She summarizes, “My question thus becomes, ‘what would it take for Divine power and agency to be able to guarantee created persons lives that are great goods to them on the whole, and to defeat their participation in horrors not just globally, but within the context of their individual lives?” (Pg. 80)
She points out, “Divine Patronage of Dubious Quality?... God’ Bible-story clients fare badly more often than not. At the beginning of Exodus, God has not serviced His patron-client contract with Israel for four hundred years, with the result that Israel’s children are slaves in Egypt under a pharaoh who did not know Joseph… Israel splits from Judah… only to be overrun by Assyria, some generations before Judah falls to Babylon… then to the Greeks, then… to the Romans who eventually raze Jerusalem for the second time… Jesus dies a ritually cursed death… And Jesus predicts the same fate, daily cross-bearing, for His disciples. Such a track record makes reasonable, yea urgent, the questions, whether Divine patronage is a blessing or a curse, whether clients are not fools to ‘sign on.’ Thus, both problems of symbolic evil are raised by the Bible itself!” (Pg. 113-114)
She suggests, “The importance of cosmic aesthetic excellence---including the regularity of natural and psychological laws---is not that it defeats horrors… Rather, like the elegant composition of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ or Grünewald’s crucifixion, or the rhythms of color and stroke in Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’… cosmic order houses horrors in a stable frame with the result that we can face them and hear the outrageous truths that they tell… This truth-telling capacity endows horrors with a positive symbolic value that cannot be taken from them…” (Pg. 151)
She clarifies, “my view does not make participation in horrors necessary for the individual’s incommensurate good. A horror-free life that ended in beatific intimacy with God would also be one in which the individual enjoyed incommensurate good. My contention is rather that by virtue of endowing horrors with a good aspect. Divine identification makes the victim’s experience of horrors so meaningful that one would not retrospectively wish it away, enables the perpetrator to accept his/her participation in horrors as part of a good and worthwhile life. Nor is participation in horrors merely instrumental related to the beatific end, as God’s necessary or chosen means for educating one into beatitude. As a point of identification with God it is partially constitutive of the relationship that makes one’ life overwhelmingly worth living and, so, is meaningful apart from any putative causal or educational consequences.” (Pg. 167)
She summarizes, “In concentrating on the logical problem of horrendous evil, I have also been attempting to exploit the explanatory power of expanded theisms without assuming the obligation to convince atheologians of their truth.” (Pg. 178) She continues, “In this book, I have been arguing that allegedly more economical approaches to evil, those with supposedly less controversial assumptions… pay compensating prices in explanatory power; while more expanded theisms are better able to explain how God can defeat horrors, precisely because of their richer assumptions. Once again, nothing is free in philosophy!” (Pg. 180)
She recapitulates, “Throughout the book, I have in effect insisted upon approaching the logical problem of evil from the viewpoint of participants in horrendous evils…. I have preserved a certain incommensurability among horrors… But I make no apology for the assumption that the Latin American poor and the European bourgeois are like meaning-makers, even if as members of different cultures they might have dissimilar values and symbolize them in highly varied ways… my principal plea is the modest one that philosophical reflection and strategic political action, that focus on the individual and attention to the social, that consideration of what we ought and what God is able to do are not really in competition for complementary.” (Pg. 196-197)
She concludes, “Naturally, I hope to have convinced many readers of my central theses---that horrendous evils can be defeated by the Goodness of God within the framework of the individual participant’s life and that Christian belief contains many resources with which to explain how this can be so. But I have also intended---like horrors themselves---to disrupt: in this case, a family of discussions. There is so much to be learned about the meaning of suffering and the Goodness of God, why should we ever stop where we are? If along the way I have said something to offend almost everybody, I can take satisfaction that my effort has succeeded in its aporetic aims!” (Pg. 208)
This book will be of great interest to those seriously studying Christian Apologetics, philosophical theology, and the Problem of Evil.
March 21, 2014
A profound philosophical text on the subject of evil, though not for the novice philosopher or theologian. Marilyn McCord Adams deconstructs the multifaceted perspectives in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of religion in accordance with the subject of evil and the reconciliation of faith in god via recognition whether symbolically or literally of the Christ figure. Potential Companions or primers to this reading: THE MORAL LANDSCAPE by Sam Harris, POWER OF MYTH and THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES by Joseph Campbell, INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION by Bruce Davies (specifically the chapters covering evil and arguments for the existence of god)and various writings by Thomas Merton primarily found in the THOMAS MERTON READER.
June 20, 2013
Adams tackles the question of how Christian theology can maintain the goodness of God in the face of horrendous evils, particularly those that seem to destroy an individual's ability to lead a meaningful life. She combines keen analytic philosophy and deep engagement with the Christian tradition. She pushes beyond both utilitarian calculation (on balance is there more good than evil in the universe) and an absolute free will position (no evil is too great a price to pay for free will).
August 2, 2017
Great book. I always appreciate Adams' insightfulness as she dissects complex topics. What I think she best accomplished, however, was her re-framing horrendous evils to Christ whereby the individual can rediscover the goodness in their life.
November 12, 2018
November 12th, 2018 edit: I'm coming back to raise my rating up to five stars because I now actually understand what's going on.
August 16, 2023
This work is another original and creative formulation of the logical problem of evil by Adams which she coined as the problem of "horrendous evil". She reformulated it to apply to Mackie's formulation of the logical problem of evil, namely, the two propositions (1) God is omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good (2) Evil exists in the world, are logically contradictory. A missing premise is (3) There is no morally sufficient reason (msr) for God to allow evil. Adams gave this formulation a tweak. Instead of just any evil, consider the notion of "horrendous evil" which can make the situation incompatible with God exist.
Adams defines horrendous evils as the evils the participation in which (as victims or perpetrators) constitute prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant's life could be a great good to him/her on the whole.” One might say, horrendous evils are the kind that is so egregious that can make a person wish they had never been born. They are evils that devalue the humanity of their participants. They are not necessarily evils committed by conscious decisions, such as genocide. Examples she gave include a father running over his daughter by mistake, the mother in Sophie's Choice who was forced by Auschwitz's doctor to choose which girl to gas first, as well as non-human action related mass casualty events in natural disaster or accident (building collapse). The idea is that there are evils so dehumanizing that God has no msr to allow even if he allows some evil.
For the approach to this version of the problem of evil, Adams thinks it is misguided to find a msr that God has to disarm this problem. This is because doing so presumes limited human cognitive capacity can know a possible msr an omniscient God may use. Any speculated msr may just be suspected partial reason as full reason, thereby attributing mistaken reasoning to God. Instead of finding msr, Adams thinks it is logically possible for God to be good to participants in spite of the horrendous evil. Instead of finding a msr, consider God expressing goodness to participants of horrendous evil that would balance off or defeat the horrors making the participants lives worth living. That is, God's goodness can defeat horrendous evil whether he has msr to allow it. Adams invokes such goodness from Chaldcedonian Christology that God incarnated himself with a human nature in Christ to be participants in horror to share with human in suffering for expressing God's goodness. God suffering as participant is both as victim and perpetrator. As victim, christ was betrayed by his own people and suffered a horrible and dehumanizing death. As perpetrator, his death by crucifixion is ritualistic cursed and blasphemous. Such soteriogical undertaking as horror participants expressed goodness that would defeat horrors for participants of horrendous evil making their lives as a whole worth living and rehumanising them.
Adams also considered other expression of the goodness of God. showing how God might overcome horrendous evil: 1) Divine Suffering and Symbolic Defeat in Rolt and Hartshorne 2) Suffering as a Vision into the Inner Life of God in Simone Weil 3) Divine Gratitude, Heavenly Bliss in Julian of Norwich ; 4) Jurgen Moltmann: Crucified God, Trinitarian Solidarity. Despite the expression of divine goodness proposed here, it is unclear how Adams Chaldcedonian solution meets her objective/subject (recognised by participants). Christ suffering in human nature in both victim and perpetrator role may "objectively" meets sufficient goodness rendered. It seems unclear how token suffering of different kinds share some common goodness currency for the victims of a particular suffering, say some father who ran over his daughter, to recognise or grasp God's suffering in christ surely balancing off what the father and daughter experienced. In that case, it would suggest objective goodness fulfillment is sufficient to show God's goodness as victorious over horrendous suffering whether the participants can grasp or not.
Adams work offers an interesting angle to rethink the logical problem of evil and summarises nicely different similar approaches from recent treatments to address the problem, making a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion in the problem of evil.
Adams defines horrendous evils as the evils the participation in which (as victims or perpetrators) constitute prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant's life could be a great good to him/her on the whole.” One might say, horrendous evils are the kind that is so egregious that can make a person wish they had never been born. They are evils that devalue the humanity of their participants. They are not necessarily evils committed by conscious decisions, such as genocide. Examples she gave include a father running over his daughter by mistake, the mother in Sophie's Choice who was forced by Auschwitz's doctor to choose which girl to gas first, as well as non-human action related mass casualty events in natural disaster or accident (building collapse). The idea is that there are evils so dehumanizing that God has no msr to allow even if he allows some evil.
For the approach to this version of the problem of evil, Adams thinks it is misguided to find a msr that God has to disarm this problem. This is because doing so presumes limited human cognitive capacity can know a possible msr an omniscient God may use. Any speculated msr may just be suspected partial reason as full reason, thereby attributing mistaken reasoning to God. Instead of finding msr, Adams thinks it is logically possible for God to be good to participants in spite of the horrendous evil. Instead of finding a msr, consider God expressing goodness to participants of horrendous evil that would balance off or defeat the horrors making the participants lives worth living. That is, God's goodness can defeat horrendous evil whether he has msr to allow it. Adams invokes such goodness from Chaldcedonian Christology that God incarnated himself with a human nature in Christ to be participants in horror to share with human in suffering for expressing God's goodness. God suffering as participant is both as victim and perpetrator. As victim, christ was betrayed by his own people and suffered a horrible and dehumanizing death. As perpetrator, his death by crucifixion is ritualistic cursed and blasphemous. Such soteriogical undertaking as horror participants expressed goodness that would defeat horrors for participants of horrendous evil making their lives as a whole worth living and rehumanising them.
Adams also considered other expression of the goodness of God. showing how God might overcome horrendous evil: 1) Divine Suffering and Symbolic Defeat in Rolt and Hartshorne 2) Suffering as a Vision into the Inner Life of God in Simone Weil 3) Divine Gratitude, Heavenly Bliss in Julian of Norwich ; 4) Jurgen Moltmann: Crucified God, Trinitarian Solidarity. Despite the expression of divine goodness proposed here, it is unclear how Adams Chaldcedonian solution meets her objective/subject (recognised by participants). Christ suffering in human nature in both victim and perpetrator role may "objectively" meets sufficient goodness rendered. It seems unclear how token suffering of different kinds share some common goodness currency for the victims of a particular suffering, say some father who ran over his daughter, to recognise or grasp God's suffering in christ surely balancing off what the father and daughter experienced. In that case, it would suggest objective goodness fulfillment is sufficient to show God's goodness as victorious over horrendous suffering whether the participants can grasp or not.
Adams work offers an interesting angle to rethink the logical problem of evil and summarises nicely different similar approaches from recent treatments to address the problem, making a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion in the problem of evil.
January 6, 2023
This book left me incredibly conflicted. While there were some elements I came away with that I found philosophically encouraging and energizing, many of her arguments stray far from the authority of Scripture.
What I liked:
Her skills in argumentation are strong at times and her ultimate argument that the cross of Christ and soteriology is the best answer to the problem of horrendous evil was excellent.
Her recognition of there not being one valid answer and providing multiple potential solutions to the problem to point out the flaws in Mackie's argumentation.
What I disliked:
Many of her views are near or essentially heretical: universalism and her argument that because humans and God operate on separate moral planes, to say that God will hold humans responsible for their moral actions is akin to saying a mother should hold a child responsible for filling its diaper. This is simply wrong and goes against all of Scripture.
She also makes many assumptions that she expects the reader to go along with, without every justifying her reasoning for her said premises. For example, her argument that in order for God to be good that he must provide each and every human with an ultimate positive meaning to their life. Further than this, the human must recognize this themselves. These views result in her universalist standing.
Finally, although I'm sure she could butcher me in an argument, she demonstrates in her writing why many avoid philosophy. Her language is far too unnecessarily wordy and makes it an absolute labor to work through. Many of the chapters in the book don't even feel like they contribute to her greater point, but just thoughts she wanted to include on the nature of God. I recognize that she may not be writing for the general public, but if she wants people to engage in her philosophical argumentation, she should do better.
What I liked:
Her skills in argumentation are strong at times and her ultimate argument that the cross of Christ and soteriology is the best answer to the problem of horrendous evil was excellent.
Her recognition of there not being one valid answer and providing multiple potential solutions to the problem to point out the flaws in Mackie's argumentation.
What I disliked:
Many of her views are near or essentially heretical: universalism and her argument that because humans and God operate on separate moral planes, to say that God will hold humans responsible for their moral actions is akin to saying a mother should hold a child responsible for filling its diaper. This is simply wrong and goes against all of Scripture.
She also makes many assumptions that she expects the reader to go along with, without every justifying her reasoning for her said premises. For example, her argument that in order for God to be good that he must provide each and every human with an ultimate positive meaning to their life. Further than this, the human must recognize this themselves. These views result in her universalist standing.
Finally, although I'm sure she could butcher me in an argument, she demonstrates in her writing why many avoid philosophy. Her language is far too unnecessarily wordy and makes it an absolute labor to work through. Many of the chapters in the book don't even feel like they contribute to her greater point, but just thoughts she wanted to include on the nature of God. I recognize that she may not be writing for the general public, but if she wants people to engage in her philosophical argumentation, she should do better.
September 25, 2024
This is hard to review. It was hard for me to read and make sense of. I am not a fan of her writing style. It felt like she gestured at too many other authors and other discussions rather than just weaving the thoughts in directly where relevant. Generally it wasn’t plain-speaking and head-on enough for me. But I do suspect I might read it again now that I know what it is and what to expect from it. There were a lot of interesting nuggets in it. Lots of interesting biblical commentary especially.
April 10, 2020
History Final paper :(
October 7, 2022
A dense, philosophical survey of theodicy arguments; it's not uninteresting, but does feel like listening in on part of a much larger (but extremely academic) conversation.
February 15, 2024
This book could have been a short article--most of the book is wasted on things other than the explanation of how God defeats evil.
Read
May 14, 2025I don't love the style of analytic philosophy, but I thought this was a broadly worthwhile treatment of the problem of evil, despite strongly disagreeing with Adams on divine passibility.
July 12, 2014
raises important new dimensions of the problem of evil debate, but fails to deliver a satisfying conclusion. The questions raised are certainly relevant: how do believers account for those horrendous evils that have seemingly little or no redeeming value. e.g. the Holocaust (what benefit has resulted from the deaths of 8 million Jews, Gypsies and Slavs?) Her response to the questions though are little more than lukewarm expressions of compassion that avoid any direct answers or substantive solutions.
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