HistoricalChristian.Faith

Horrendous evils and the goodness of God — can only God defeat the worst evils?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: plausible — Marilyn McCord Adams’s theodicy has two halves that must be rated apart. Its diagnostic half is close to decisive and has reshaped the field: the very worst evils — the ones that give the participant prima facie reason to doubt her life could be a great good to her on the whole — are not defeated by the generic, “religion-neutral” goods (character, a completed cosmos, the world’s general moral seriousness) that the greater-good and soul-making theodicies trade in; those goods are simply the wrong size, and a theodicy that balances horrors against them can look obscene. Its constructive half — that horrors can be defeated, and defeated only by an incommensurate good, the beatific, face-to-face intimacy with God that integrates even the horror into the sufferer’s own redeemed life — is coherent, deeply Christian, and genuinely advocated, but it is short of consensus and leans on further commitments (that God guarantees every person such a good, and that a post-mortem beatific good can retroactively engulf a this-worldly horror) that are themselves disputed. So the negative critique is stronger than the positive cure: plausible as a theodicy, near-sound as a diagnosis of why the others fall short. · advanced by Marilyn McCord Adams (1989, 1999)

Related arguments: the sufferer’s own good — see also Eleonore Stump’s narrative theodicy, the other person-centred answer that locates the justifying good in the sufferer herself.

The claim

The analytic debate that Mackie began, Adams argued, had stayed too abstract — trading God against “evil” in general and passing over the concrete worst of it. She fixes attention instead on a distinguished class she names horrendous evils:

evils the participation in (the doing or suffering of) which gives one reason prima facie to doubt whether one’s life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to one on the whole.

— Marilyn McCord Adams, “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God”.¹ Her examples are the atrocities that seem to ruin a life from the inside — the torture of a child, the rape and mutilation of a person, the parent made to betray or destroy their own — evils whose victims (and sometimes whose perpetrators) are given reason to wish they had never been born. The problem such evils pose, she insists, is not the abstract logical or evidential one but a concrete one about individuals: how can the God who permits a person’s participation in a horror be good to that very person, so that her life is still, on balance, a great good to her?

Adams’s two-part answer turns on a distinction she takes from Roderick Chisholm. An evil may be balanced off — outweighed by a greater good added elsewhere in the whole, the way a pleasure may cancel a pain in a life’s ledger — without being defeated, which happens only when the evil is taken up into a good whole in such a way that its very presence contributes to the goodness of that whole. Horrors, she argues, are of a size that no balancing off by created goods can reach, and can be answered, if at all, only by defeat — and only one good is large enough to defeat them: God Himself.

the good of beatific face to face intimacy with God would engulf (in a sense analogous to Chisholmian balancing off) even the horrendous evils humans experience in this present life here below.²

Because God is an incommensurate good — not a large finite good among others but a good of a wholly different order — intimacy with Him can confer meaning and positive value even on horrendous suffering, integrating it organically into a life the sufferer can, in the end, recognize as a great good to her on the whole. The cure is Christological: God does not merely compensate the sufferer from outside but, in the incarnate and crucified Christ, identifies with human horror-participation from within it.

Who advances it

The argument is Adams’s own, first in her 1989 Aristotelian Society paper “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God” and then at book length in Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell University Press, 1999).³ It is deliberately positioned against the dominant analytic theodicies: the free-will defense, the soul-making theodicy, and the greater-good tradition all answer, she says, in the wrong currency — global, generic goods that leave the individual horror-participant unaddressed. Adams was an Episcopal priest as well as a philosopher, and her constructive answer is frankly confessional: it appeals not to “religion-neutral” premises a philosopher of any creed might accept but to the specific resources of Christianity — incarnation, cross, and beatific vision. On this timeline her critique already appears folded into the soul-making page as its sharpest defeater; here it is weighed as the positive theodicy it also is. Her nearest ally is Eleonore Stump, whose Thomistic narrative theodicy shares the person-centred conviction that the justifying good must accrue to the sufferer herself.

The evidence for

The diagnostic is powerful and widely conceded. Even critics of Adams’s cure grant the force of her critique. Set a child’s torture against “the greater moral seriousness of a world with real stakes” or “the perfection of the cosmic whole,” and the accounting does not merely fail to persuade — it looks like a category mistake, as though one had answered a bereavement with a sum of money. Horrors are not the kind of thing that a quantity of some other good, heaped high enough, can outweigh; their disvalue is not commensurable with the ordinary goods theodicies invoke. This is why she frames the reply as defeat rather than balancing-off: the good that answers a horror must take up that horror and give it positive meaning within the sufferer’s own life, not merely swamp it with unrelated goods elsewhere. The point lands hardest against exactly the theodicies that dominate the field.

It is continuous with the centre of Christian faith, not an ad hoc device. The claim that the ultimate good for a person is the vision of God, and that God in Christ enters and shares human suffering, is not a philosopher’s patch but the tradition’s own account of the highest human end and of the cross. If the beatific good really is incommensurate — a good beside which every created good is as nothing — then the resources for Adams’s “defeat” are already in the creed. Her theodicy thus draws on precisely the strand the generic theodicies set aside when they restrict themselves to religion-neutral goods.

It answers the sufferer, where the others answer the spectator. The greater-good and soul-making readings are, in structure, third-personal: they explain why a world with this evil is better than a world without it. Adams’s is first- and second-personal: it asks whether God is good to the person who suffered, and requires that the justifying good be one that person can, on the whole, own. This is what disarms the instrumentalization charge — on Adams’s account the sufferer is never a mere means to a good enjoyed by others, because the defeating good is her own.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The negative thesis — that horrendous evils are the wrong size to be defeated by generic, created goods, so that any theodicy resting on those goods alone fails to reach the worst of what it must explain — is close to decisive and has become a fixed point of the contemporary debate. So is the formal demand it grounds: that an answer to horrors must be person-centred (a good to the sufferer) and must defeat rather than merely outweigh. On these points Adams is not one contested voice among others; she reset the terms.

Where it is contested or overstated. The strain is all in the constructive half.

• The engulfing is asserted, not shown. That beatific intimacy with God is a good of incommensurate magnitude is a substantive theological claim; that such a good can engulf — retroactively take up and give positive sense to — a this-worldly horror is a further and harder one. Adams describes the mechanism (organic integration into a life-story the sufferer perceives as good) more than she demonstrates that it can bear the weight of the very worst cases; the reader is asked to grant that no horror is finally un-integrable, which is close to the conclusion in view.
• It leans on a near-universalism. Adams’s guarantee is strong: God’s goodness ensures that each horror-participant’s life is made a great good to that person on the whole. That commitment presses toward a universal beatific completion — every sufferer, in the end, brought to the intimacy that defeats her horror — and so rests, like Hick’s repair of soul-making, on the further contested doctrine of a universal restoration. Absent that, the guarantee is not secured for the very people the argument is about.
• It changes the question from permission to redemption. Adams answers “can God be good to the sufferer despite the horror?” more fully than “why did God permit the horror at all?” A defeat that lies wholly in the sufferer’s eventual beatitude shows that the life can still be a great good; it does not, by itself, show that permitting the horror was the only or best route to that good — so the “why not the same good with less horror?” question the evidential problem presses is left partly open. Adams is content to answer the individual-value question and treat the permission question as secondary; critics reply that the permission question is the problem of evil.

None of these is a refutation. The theology Adams invokes is available to a Christian, and the wiki does not discount a reading merely because it requires the resources of faith. But they are why the constructive theodicy is plausible rather than sound: it is coherent and attractive, not established, and it purchases its guarantee with commitments (incommensurate engulfing, effectively universal completion) that are themselves live questions elsewhere on this timeline.

Assessment

Plausible. Rate the two halves apart, as Adams’s own influence divides them. The diagnostic — that horrendous evils cannot be defeated by the generic goods of the greater-good and soul-making theodicies, which are the wrong size for the job, and that any answer must be a good to the sufferer that defeats rather than merely balances the horror — is near-sound and is now common ground; it is the strongest single reason those theodicies are rated only as components. The constructive answer — that the incommensurate good of beatific intimacy with God can engulf even a this-worldly horror and make the sufferer’s life a great good to her on the whole — is coherent, deeply Christian, and genuinely advocated, but short of consensus: it asserts the engulfing more than it shows it, leans toward a universal completion to secure its guarantee, and answers the value of the sufferer’s life more fully than it answers God’s permission of the horror. So the whole rates plausible — a powerful critique carrying a hopeful cure — and any presentation of it as a finished, self-standing solution to the problem of evil (rather than to the narrower, vital question of God’s goodness to the individual sufferer) overstates it.

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