Covid-19 and the Problem of Evil
No loving, all-powerful god would let this happen
The Covid-19 pandemic has inevitably revived one of Christianity’s bigger philosophical challenges: the “Problem of Evil,” which tries to reconcile a loving Heavenly Father with the tragedies that occur on Earth. This problem is often phrased with the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
Christians routinely answer this question with convoluted, tip-toe explanations about us humans living in a “fallen world,” coupled with the claim that our same free will that allows us to choose to love God also allows us to commit horrific acts upon each other — acts that God, for some reason, sees fit to allow.
For secularists, it’s very straightforward: either God was unable to prevent the Covid pandemic and all of its human suffering, or he didn’t know how to (or know how much damage the virus would cause), or he was cruel enough to allow this suffering to occur. Which, of course, assumes that he exists at all.
Since the basest assumptions about the Christian god are that he exists (obviously) and he can indeed do anything, the Christians’ challenge is to explain how God can allow suffering in the world while still getting to retain his status as omni-benevolent.
Duty to Act?
Imagine that you are walking down a city street, when you pass by an alley where a mugger is in the middle of beating and robbing a victim. You are (correctly) 100% certain that you can foil the act and protect the victim, all without harming the robber or the victim, and without getting hurt yourself. Instead, you choose to stand by and watch the violent act play out to completion, without intervening in any way. (In fact, you knew well in advance that the robbery would occur at that exact time and place.)
What does it say about your morals if this is how you respond? Is your failure to act immoral in itself? Or, if it is moral, can you make any sort of case that defends your inaction as morally equal, or even superior, to stopping the violence?
The Damage Report
With the “bystander” analogy in mind, here are examples of suffering just in the United States, which any existing gods have failed to prevent:
- 480,000 American lives (as I write this) could have been saved. And many of those hospitalized were denied the comfort of their loved ones in their last moments, due to social distancing mandates.
- Thousands of people who recover from the active infection still experience severe, lingering symptoms.
- 55 million people (as of August 6) lost work and filed for unemployment
- These millions of Americans, having lost sources of income, are at risk of eviction.
- Millions of additional Americans are at risk of hunger.
- Domestic violence incidents have increased, with many victims having nowhere to go under the stay-at-home orders.
- Despite the admirable efforts of our country’s teachers, many schoolchildren in online-only classes are receiving a substandard level of education that experts believe may harm their future academic performance and earnings potential over their lifetimes.
What Was God’s Plan?
Christians often assert that “God is in control,” and that “God has a plan.” In fact, I continue to see some of my Christian friends proclaiming on social media that “God is good, always.”
However, any suggestion that Christians might make about God’s involvement with the coronavirus will either raise more questions than it answers, and/or pose a serious challenge toward one form of Christian doctrine or another.
Did God personally create Sars-CoV-2? If so, why would he create a being that he knew would kill thousands and turn whole societies upside down? How could this virus possibly fit into God’s “perfect plan”? How on Earth could creating the virus lead to a more desirable global outcome than not creating the virus? Why couldn’t God have done nothing instead, in the instant that he instead created the virus?
Did God not create the virus himself, but instead passively allow it to evolve? If so, does that mean that God does not “intelligently design” all life on Earth? Does God not necessarily “knit us in our mother’s wombs,” as pro-life Christians so often claim? How do we know what life is created by God and what isn’t? (For that matter, if reproductive development of living beings can be fully explained by molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry, etc., how can we be sure God is involved at all?) And even if God did not create the virus himself, why (again) did he not intervene to stop it from spreading or (even better) existing?
Did God allow the pandemic to proceed in order to bring some type of greater good? I challenge any thinker to propose a “greater good” outcome that justifies the hundreds of thousands of casualties and massive psychological toll.
Of all years in our modern world, 2020 would have been an amazing year for any omnipotent beings to reveal themselves, step in to spare countless lives from various forms of harm, and make absolutely sure we knew that it was they who did it.
But alas — to quote Julia Sweeney, “the world behaves exactly as you would expect it would, if there were no Supreme Being.” The coronavirus spread wherever it could (barring our own safety measures), and the life-saving vaccines ended up being developed at exactly the rate that human science would allow.
Sometimes, the best solution to a problem is the simplest one — a solution that can be justified with real-world observation, and one that doesn’t rely on the existence of invisible, undetectable forces. The simplest solution to the Problem of Evil is that it is simply unsolvable: there is no reconciling our current worldwide crisis with an existing divine being who is all-capable, all-knowing, and all-good.
