by Peter Kreeft
Perhaps the problem cannot be solved at all. Or perhaps it is not a problem but a mystery. Or perhaps there is a solution after all, a partial solution, even on the rational level. Let us look more carefully by considering the argument of Job’s three friends. Here it is:
1. Faith premise: God is just.
2. Rational premise: Justice means rewarding the good and punishing the evil.
3. Commonsense premise: Rewards make you happy; punishments make you unhappy.
4. Experiential premise: job is unhappy. Conclusion: Job is evil.
This argument, when unpacked logically, has four different premises from four different sources. The first premise comes from faith, from the nonnegotiable core of Jewish faith in God’s emeth, God’s truth and justice and reliability. It is the faith that God is real, just, good, reliable, and all powerful and rules his world justly. That is the premise Job questions. Everyone who suffers as Job suffered naturally tends to question this premise, whether they successfully resist this temptation or not. We must credit Job’s three friends with at least enough faith to resist this temptation. They may malign Job, and that may be as blameworthy as maligning God, but at least they do not malign God. Job flirts with this again and again. He says God invents grievances against him without cause, that if God and Job showed up in court before a neutral judge, Job would win his case—the only reason he is losing is not God’s justice but God’s power. This is maligning God indeed, indirectly calling him an unjust tyrant, Job (and we) must hold on to the first premise, God’s justice.
The second premise unpacks the meaning of the key term in the first premise, the term just. If God is just, what does that mean? Well, justice means rewarding the good and punishing the evil, not vice versa. It means giving each his due, his “just deserts”. This is a premise not from faith but from reason, from rational ethics. It is as basic to ethics as the first premise is to faith. Without a trustable God, there is no religious faith, and without a meaningful justice that discriminates between good and evil and assigns appropriate rewards and punishments, there is no ethics. So far none of the premises seems questionable or modifiable.
The third premise unpacks the predicate of the second, as the second did to the first. If justice means rewards and punishments, in what do rewards and punishments consist? Obviously, many things in the concrete and particular, from money to honor and from execution to fines. But the one thing all rewards have in common is that they give to the person who deserves them something to make him happy, while the one thing all punishments have in common is that they give to the punished person o make himg to make him unhappy. If prisons were spas, they would not be punishments. If money were a disease, it would not be a reward. That is the point of the story of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox, from the Uncle Remus stories. Br’er Fox had tried to catch Br’er Rabbit for years in every conceivable way and never caught him, because Br’er Rabbit was so clever. But one day Br’er Fox caught him. He held him by the ears and said, “Now, Br’er Rabbit, you can choose how you is goin’ to die. Do you want to be skinned, roasted, or boiled in oil?” Br’er Rabbit replied,
“You can skin me if you like, and you can roast me if you like, or you can boil me in oil if you like, but please, please, don’t throw me in that horrible briar patch!” Br’er Fox saw the gleam of terror in Br’er Rabbit’s eye and said, “You know, Br’er Rabbit, that’s just exactly what I’m gonna do.” And he flung Br’er Rabbit gleefully and hatefully into the briar patch. But instead of pieces of dead rabbit, what Br’er Fox saw in the briar patch was Br’er Rabbit running through the briars laughing, “Fooled you again, Br’er Fox! I was born and bred in a briar patch!” The only reason the story works is the assumption that punishments are supposed to harm you or make you miserable. No one questions this premise. It comes from common sense.
The fourth premise is that Job is unhappy. This premise comes from experience and is even more obvious than the ones before it. Indeed, each of the lour premises is more obvious and undeniable than the one before it—which means that only the first, the faith premise, is really in question. No one is tempted to deny the other three premises, but job is tempted to deny the first. The only other possibility seems to be to draw the logical conclusion, as the three friends do, that Job is miserable because he is suffering deserved punishment, that is, that Job is a great sinner.
But the reader knows this is wrong. God himself said so, to the devil. The reader also knows that it is wrong to deny the first premise. Yet the first premise, God’s justice, coupled with three other apparently utterly undeniable premises, logically necessitates the conclusion. What a puzzle!
Let us play a game the book of Job does not play. Let us do some logic. We have translated the existential problem of evil into the logical problem of evil, so we had better solve it on the logical level. (The book, of course, solves it only on the level on which it raises it, the existential level, the lived level. The drama is resolved—how, we shall see later.)
There are three and only three ways to answer any logical argument (as we saw in discussing the argument in Ecclesiastes).
If the terms are not ambiguous, if the premises arc not false, and if the process of argumentation is not logically fallacious, then the conclusion has been proved true and there is no way to oppose it except simply to assert your own bullheaded obstinacy, to say, “You proved your point to be true, but I just won’t admit it is true.” That, of course, says nothing at all about the argument or the conclusion, but it says something about you.
None of the four premises is simply false, and the conclusion logically follows from the premises, but each of the premises contains an ambiguous term. That is how the logical form of the problem of evil can be answered.
The first premise states that God is good and trustable. But the goodness of God cannot mean exactly the same thing as the goodness of man, because God is not man. A good man is not the same as a good dog; for the same reason, the goodness of God is not the same as the goodnesof man. The reason is that goodness is proportionate to being. God’s being is divine and infinite; man’s is finite and human; a dog’s is finite and doggy. Each has a goodness proportionate to its nature. For instance, it is not evil for a dog to be sexually promiscuous, as it is for a man. A dog’s goodness (“good doggie”), if carried over into a man, would not be goodness but imperfection, regression to merely animal instinct. So it must be with human and divine goodness. The term is analogical, not univocal: its meanings are not wholly or exactly the same but modified, partly the same and partly different. If we were to do, or try to do, some of the things God does, we would not be good but bad. For instance, if a human father deliberately let his child be run over by a car when he could have run into the road to save him, he is not a good father. But God can save us, by miracle, every time we are threatened; yet he does not save us from all harm. Yet he is good in not saving us from all harm, for he sees, in his infinite wisdom, just what sufferings we need for our ultimate fulfillment and wisdom and happiness in the long run, and he sees the spiritual spoiledness that would result from our being saved from every calamity, Human fathers have only a tiny bit of this kind of foresight; that is why it would be wrong for them to play God and let their children suffer, except in a few cases where the human father’s knowledge is fairly certain. For instance, it would be wrong for any human father to let his child die because he thought that if the child lived he would not go on to moral and spiritual progress but would regress and eventually die in a worse state. For no earthly father knows such things, as God does. But it would be right for an earthly father to send his child to an unusually difficult school, one that caused the child to sweat at studies and have twice the homework, if the father knew the child was bright and the school was worthwhile. So for us to be good and trustworthy is usually (but not always) for us to save each other from suffering, but this cannot apply to God in the same way. The marching orders for the infantry do not apply to the general, who makes the overa
ll strategy.
This does not mean that God is amoral, or that goodness is simply a creature, not an attribute of the Creator, something God arbitrarily makes and could have made differently, just as he could have made the sky red instead of blue. No, “God is love” and God is also just, but what these moral perfections mean in God exceeds what they mean in us just as goodness in us exceeds goodness in a dog.
The ambiguous term in the second premise is the term justice. For us, justice means equality, or at least equal opportunity. It means something almost mathematical. “We are all equal before the law. But this is not the deepest meaning of justice. There is a justice in music, a harmony and proportion and relatedness that make for beauty, but it is not equality. It is something much more mysterious, more heavy with meaning, and more wonderful. “By justice the stars are strong”, says the poet. The Greeks spoke of a cosmic justice (dīkē), “the music of the spheres”. This is closer to the divine justice. Is it “just” in the simply mathematical sense that half the human race lacks a womb? Is it just that men have stronger upper body muscles than women? Is it just, even, that men are superior to monkeys? (I make an exception for those men who do not think they are superior to monkeys, as a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
The highest and most mysterious form of divine justice we have ever heard of is, precisely, the Gospel, the astonishing events of God’s lowering himself to become a man and dying on a Cross for us. Saint Paul calk this Gospel “the righteousness of God” in Romans. But this “righteousness”, or justice, centers on the most unjus thing that ever happened in history: deicide, the murder of the man who least deserved it, the most innocent, the only innocent, suffering for the guilty. And this is God’s justice*. Obviously, justice there is something other than justice here. Here, it is rewarding the good and punishing the evil. There, it is “all we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Is 53:6).
In premise three, the ambiguous term is happy. Rewards arc in the form of happiness—common sense is right to say that, of course. But perhaps common sense is not very clear about what happiness means. We tend to identify it (1) with something immediate and present, not future, long range, or eternal, and (2) with a conscious subjective feeling of satisfaction of desire rather than with an objective fact. Perhaps Job is not happy yet, but he is happy in the end; and perhaps Job docs not feet happy but is happy nevertheless.
To see the second point, consider the analogy of health. We can be healthy without feeling healthy, as when we have a nagging headache but nothing else is wrong with us. The little headache takes up the center of our consciousness, and we feel as if we are going to die, hut the objective fact is that we arc very healthy. Our feelings are an imperfect indication of our health. Alternatively, we may be victims of some dread, fatal disease and doomed to die in two minutes yet feel perfectly healthy. Feelings are not an infallible indicator of fact.
Well, what is true on the bodily level can be true on the spiritual level, too. A Pharisee can feel morally and spiritually healthy, when in fact he is so rotten that gentle Jesus calls him a tomb full of dead men’s bones. A saint can be going through “the dark night of the soul” and feel totally dried up inside, while in fact God is perfecting him like an artist perfecting his masterpiece.
Job may be happy in the sense of being blessed without being happy in the sense of being satisfied. Job is God’s masterpiece, and his sufferings make him even more of a masterpiece. His objective happiness, or perfection, or blessedness (which includes his wisdom and courage and maturity) is in fact attained precisely by means of his subjective unhappiness, or suffering.
Finally, the fourth premise contains the ambiguous term unhappy, or miserable, which is ambiguous in exactly the way happy was ambiguous in the third premise. Job is really blessed in his sufferings, as Christ promised in his Beatitudes: “Blessed are those who mourn. . . blessed are you when men revile you.” It makes no sense at all, in the shallow and obvious sense of “happiness”, to say, “Happy arc you who mourn.” But in the deeper, older sense of happiness (blessedness), Job is deeply happy there on his dung heap. He is suffering and not satisfied, but he is blessed and not rejected.
The other ambiguity of the term happy also applies to the fourth premise. Job may be short-range unhappy, bur he is long-range happy, even in the sense of satisfaction. Job is satisfied at the end (and we will explore why later). He is in a drama, a story, after all, and only in the earlier acts, the earlier chapters. How can you understand the point of Act II until you get to Act V? The problem of evil, as lived rather than as thought, is a problem in a story, in time, and Scripture’s one-word answer to the problem is “wait”.
When Saint Thomas Aquinas stated in the Summa the problem of evil as one of the two objections to the existence of God, he remembered what many philosophers forget: that the solur perfod’s solution, is concrete, not abstract; dramatic, not schematic; an event in time, not a timeless truth. Saint Thomas, as we saw, stated the problem as follows:“ ‘God’ means infinite goodness. But if one of two contraries is infinite, the other is totally destroyed. Yet evil exists [and is not destroyed]. Therefore God [infinite goodness] does not exist.” And he answered it as follows: “As Augustine says, Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.” In other words, life, like Job, is like a fairy tale. To get to live happily ever after, you have to go through the dung heap. Evil is only temporary; good is eternal. Once again, in a word, “wait”.
But wait in faith. Jesus told Martha, before he raised her brother Lazarus from the dead, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” Seeing is not believing, but believing is seeing, eventually. Job does not wait patiently, but he waits. Job’s faith is not sunny and serene, but it is faith. It is not without doubts. (Indeed, his doubts came from his faith. When faith is full, it is open and can include doubts; when it is weak, it cannot tolerate doubts.) But Job remains a hero of faith. He waits in faith, and he sees the glory of God. He is blessed in the very waiting, in the dung, in the agony; and he is doubly blessed in the finding, in the end.
2. The Problem of Faith versus Experience
So far, we have only scratched the surface. The problem of evil is only the most obvious problem in Job, the one all the books talk about. But deeper than this there are other levels, like underground caves or even cities, whole realms of mystery and meaning less amenable to clear analysis and simple solution. A second level of problem is the conflict not between faith and reason, as in the problem of evil, but between faith and experience, Job’s faith and his experience. Here we have not a philosophical puzzle but a child’s tears. Throughout Scripture and throughout Job’s life, God approaches with a “sales pitch”: “Trust me.” God’s emeth, or fidelity, is here not a datum in a logical puzzle but a lifeline, and the rope seems to have broken. Throughout the Bible the promise is always that fidelity to God will be rewarded by God’s fidelity to you and to his promises of reward. The righteous prosper; the wicked perish. So Job buys into this advertisement, this faith. He stakes his whole life on righteousness, obedience, fidelity, piety—and what is his reward? Loss of his possessions, his children, his wife’s loyalty, his friends’ respect, his health, and even, it seems, his identity and his God (as we shall see in two subsequent, even deeper levels). Worst of all is God’s abandonment, Job’s “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” experience. “I cried out, and the Lord heard me and answered me from his holy mountain”—this is the constant theme of the Psalms. But Job’s experience seems to falsify it. God may be there, but he is not there for Job.
Here is what Job’s experience seems to teach him about God. God seems like the father in the following cruel joke. A father said to his little son, “Son, I want to teach you one of life’s most important lessons: how to trust your father. Get up on t
hat five-foot-high wall and jump into my arms. I’ll catch you.” “But Daddy, I’m afraid. Don’t make me climb up there.” “I know you’re afraid, son. But I want you to do this for me.” “All right, Daddy. Here I come. . . . Wheel You caught me!” “Of course I caught you. I promised, didn’t I?” “Can we go home now?” “No, I want you to jump from that ten-foot-high wall now.” “Ooh, Daddy, I’m scaredousnes “Trust me.” “OK. Here I come. . . . Whee! You caught me again!” “Of course I did.” “Can we go home now?” “After just one more time. This time, jump from that twenty-foot-high wall.” “Ooh, Daddy, I’m so scared.” “Trust me.” “OK. Here I come. . . ” And the father stepped back at the last minute and let the boy slam against the sidewalk. From a pool of blood and tears came the question, “Daddy, Daddy, why did you do that?” The answer: “To teach you life’s most important lesson, Son: Never trust anybody, not even your father.”
It is a bad joke, and a cruel joke, but that is what life looks like to Job. He had trusted God, and now God stepped back and let him down with a crash. Job’s faith says that if you trust God, you will be rewarded. Job’s experience says the opposite. Job must have been a remarkable man of faith to have held on to his faith (though just barely) in the teeth of such apparently conclusive refutation from experience.
Job is traditionally regarded as a hero of faith. This shows that faith, for an Old Testament Jew (and also for a New Testament Christian) is more fundamental than the old Baltimore Catechism’s definition of it (though that in turn is much deeper than most modern textbooks describe it): “An act of the intellect, prompted by the will, by which we believe what God has revealed on the authority of the One who revealed it”. Faith for Job is not primarily an act of the intellect but of the guts or the heart. Faith here is emeth, fidelity, trustability, promise keeping, reliability. Job is a culture hero, for he tests the fundamental value of his culture, emeth, in his life as in a test tube. He stakes his life on it; indeed, he gives up much of his life for it. But the ironic question is: Who is testing whom? It seems to Job as if job’s experience is testing God’s fidelity, but in fact, as the reader knows from that peep behind the scenes in chapter 1, it is God who is testing Job’s fidelity.