How Could a Good Superman Allow So Much Evil?

by Micah Tillman

Hurricane season has begun. The Dark Knight is setting box office records. The messiah has departed our shores. And USA Today has just printed Michael Novak's "Reconciling Evil with Faith."

Responding to James Wood's New Yorker piece, "Holiday in Hellmouth," Novak argues that the right response to the problem of evil is not "less faith, more reason." It's more reason.

It's not that the question, "Why would a good god allow evil?" lacks an answer. It's that those who think the answer is, "A good god couldn't," lack an education.

"[The world's] shocking brutalities rock the shallow faith of those whose beliefs are rooted in sentiment and inheritance, rather than in reasoned argument. Many Christians are poorly educated in their religion; their formal schooling teaches them nothing about it."

And many of the world's great thinkers would agree with Novak — in a way. If people only understood more about God, they wouldn't be so angry at Him about the state of the world.

God, if you only knew it, is more like Batman or Spider-Man than what the Church wants you to think. God's not all-knowing and all-powerful, but He does the best He can.

After all, you've seen the personal problems being a superhero creates for Spidey or the Dark Knight. "How could a good god allow so much evil?" is, to these thinkers, like asking, "How could a good Batman allow so much evil?"

It's not so much He allows it all, but that He can't stop it all.

Other thinkers disagree with Novak, of course. They think the more educated you are, the more you realize Superman doesn't exist. If you educate yourself about, for instance, the natural disasters that cause so much suffering every year, you'll see.

Thinking Gods and Superheroes are fictional, then, other people turn to Obamas. If the supernatural won't help, and the superhuman don't exist, that still leaves us us. Maybe we are the ones we've been waiting for, and have just been waiting for someone to lead us. (?)

So don't just vote, educate yourself, Jack told us last week. The uninformed who enter the voting booth violate their own duty. They defile a sacred space.

Even if our studies lead us to an Obama, however, they'll hopefully also teach us that we can't expect more of him than we can of X-Men. Obamas may be able to stop most evil, most of the time. But not even an Obama can stop all evil, all the time.

These responses to the problem of evil by limiting your idea of the divine, however, wouldn't sit right with Novak. And they don't sit right with me either.

It's true, as everyone seems to agree, that more education is the key. But it's education about what it would mean to be a creator god, not necessarily education about what it means to be a Christian or a superhero or an Obama.

And just as I argued last week — that a full understanding of democratic mythology leads you to some pretty shocking conclusions — a full understanding of the nature of creator gods leads to some pretty shocking conclusions as well.

In creating space and time, a creator god would be non-spatial and a-temporal. After all, space-time's being would depend on its creator's being, not vice versa.

Now imagine asking the questions, "Why would God allow evil?" or "What reason could God have for letting evil happen?" of such an a-temporal creator. What do the words "why" and "reason" mean in this context?

For humans, to have a reason — a "why" — for something is a time issue. First you have your reason for acting. Then you act.

But if you act first, without first having a reason, you've acted "for no (good) reason."

And since our words derive their meaning from our human context, what meaning will they have when we start to use them in a creator context?

An a-temporal being can't first have a reason and then act. You can't know what it was thinking — "ahead of time" — which lead it to the conclusion that going ahead with a certain course of action (or inaction) would be justified. There is no "ahead of time" for such a being.

Or, rather, terms like "ahead of time," "simultaneous," "while," "after," etc. have no meaning when used of such a being.

In fact, I'd argue that the questions through which we express the problem of evil aren't questions at all. They have no sense (meaning). They're like, "Why is Symphony more tree than orange?"

Answering such "questions" would be a bit like discovering that "42" is the answer to life, the universe, and everything is — only to realize that "life, the universe, and everything" isn't a question.

So, to turn our questions into actual questions — to give them sense — people reduce God to the level of a superhero or an Obama. With this new God, the question suddenly gains meaning and can be answered.

Whether it's worthwhile to change God to get an answer is a question I can't answer for anyone but myself.

But just like the proper response to, "How do we fix government?" isn't to elect a new politician, but to ask what government is — and the proper response to, "Why should I vote?" is to ask what voters are — the proper response to, "Why does God allow evil?" is to ask what God is.

To clarify our answers we must first clarify our questions.

Micah Tillman (micahtillman.com) is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.