Artistic Analogy
Summary
Some people have claimed that there is an analogy between a work of art and the world.
Just as a piece of music usually involves discords which are subsequently resolved or a painting typically has large areas of darker as well as lighter pigment. In a similar way, so the argument goes, evil contributes to the overall harmony or beauty of the world. This view is also open to at least a couple of objections.
It is hard to understand how somebody dying in agony could be said to have been contributing to the overall harmony of the world.
If the analogy with a work of art is really the explanation of why God permits so much evil, then this is almost an admission that evil cannot satisfactorily be explained since it puts the understanding of evil beyond a merely human comprehension. It is only from God’s viewpoint that the harmony could be observed and appreciated.
If this is what is meant when theists say that God is all-good, then it is a very different use of the word ‘good’ from our usual one.
A God who allows such suffering for merely aesthetic purposes–in order to appreciate it in the way one appreciates a work of art, sounds more like a sadist than the all-good deity described by Theists.
