Watterson on the existence of God

Of course, Watterson is tackling the problem of suffering in today’s comic strip.

In the philosophy of religion and theology, the problem of evil is the question of whether evil exists and, if so, why. The question particularly arises in religions that propose the existence of a deity who is omnibenevolent while simultaneously also being omnipotent, and omniscient; attempts to resolve the question under these contexts has historically been one of the prime concerns of theodicy.

OK, so what is a theodicy?

The term theodicy comes from the Greek (theós, “god”) and (díké, “justice”), meaning literally “the justice of God,” although a more appropriate phrase may be “to justify God” or “the justification of God”. The term was coined in 1710 by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in a work entitled Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal (“Theodicic Essays on the Benevolence of God, the Free will of man, and the Origin of Evil”).

The purpose of the essay was to show that the evil in the world does not conflict with the goodness of God, and that notwithstanding its many evils, the world is the best of all possible worlds. Leibniz wrote his Théodicée as a criticism of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, which had been written not long before; in this, Bayle, a well-known sceptic, had argued that the sufferings experienced in this earthly life prove that God could not be good and omnipotent.

An ancient author called Epicurus phrased it this way:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able, and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able, nor willing? Then why call him God?

Catch that Calvin is asking the questions about Santa Claus. However, at the very end, suddenly he switches over to God. This is typical of Watterson, he introduces an innocent sounding theme only to turn it on you at the very last minute. In fact, he gets in two swipes, one at Christians and one at secularists. To the secularists, Watterson points out that Christmas is a religious holiday. It is about the birth of Christ. It is not a winter break or a winter holiday. Even the name Christmas gives away its origins. However, remember that the whole comic is more directly pointed at Christians. Watterson reminds us that there are some serious questions about God that do need to be addressed and cannot simply be papered over with sweet testimonies about how God helped you. It is all too easy to answer with easy facts about some serious evil that is happening in the world right now.

The most often used theodicy is called the Free Will Defense. C.S. Lewis phrases it this way in his book, The Problem of Pain:

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them.

But, there is no greater master of the Free Will Defense than Dr. Alvin Plantinga of the University of Notre Dame. His Free Will Defense was so acute that philosophers have given up trying to argue that the current world is a contradiction of God’s omnipotence. He quite cogently argued that there is no necessary contradiction between God’s omnipotence and the current conditions on earth. In fact, he went farther and argued that a world is easily conceivable in which God is omnipotent but cannot both create free will and free creatures who never choose evil. Furthermore, it is possible that God, even being omnibenevolent, would desire to create a world which contains evil if moral goodness requires free moral creatures.

Now, that is very technical language. But, as a result of Dr. Plantinga’s arguments, philosophers today have given up arguing that the notion of an omnipotent god is logically inconsistent with the existence of evil. They will still argue that the presence of evil argues against the existence of God, but they argue from evidence, not from “logic.” In other words, Dr. Plantinga destroyed Epicurus’ argument.

There are several other defenses possible to the problem of evil, but I will leave it to the reader to look them up.