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Does Evil Prove God Does Exist? The Problem of Evil and the Moral Argument

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Does Evil Prove God Does Exist? The Problem of Evil and the Moral Argument

The Problem of Evil is supposed to show that, because evil exists, God cannot exist. But what if it actually proves the opposite? What if the very premise the argument depends on — that evil is real — turns out to require God's existence rather than rule it out? Let's consider it, because we're switching to offense this episode.

A Reminder of the Argument

  1. If God exists, He could prevent evil.
  2. If God exists, He would prevent evil.
  3. So, if God exists, evil doesn't exist.
  4. Evil exists.
  5. So, God doesn't exist.

Notice premise (4) is bolder than it sounds. If this argument is sound, evil and God are strictly incompatible — so anyone asserting (4) is committing to being sure enough that evil is real to reject God's existence on that basis. So what does someone actually commit to when they claim "evil exists"?

Step One: The Claim Is Normative

Any claim that evil exists is automatically normative — it invokes a standard a thing either meets or fails to meet. "Adolf Hitler is evil" only makes sense if there's a standard for what a person should be like, and Hitler failed it. "Torturing babies for fun is evil" claims, at minimum, that there's a standard for action, and this action fails it. You can't coherently call something "evil" without invoking some standard it falls short of.

Step Two: The Standard Has to Be Objective

What kind of standard? It could be subjective — dependent on minds. Think of cultural norms: at my first flamenco performance in Spain, I learned that in ballet you sit in respectful silence, but in flamenco silence reads as an insult — the dancers expect you to shout encouragement throughout. Neither is "correct" in some deeper sense; it's just what a culture settled into. Or taboos: many Westerners recoil at eating cockroaches, though washed properly they're no more dangerous than shrimp. That's conditioning, not a fact about cockroaches.

Contrast objective standards, which exist independently of what anyone thinks: the laws of logic hold whether or not you agree with them; eating protein and exercising is objectively healthy for a human body (not for a tree), while breathing pure CO2 is objectively unhealthy for a human (fine for a tree). We didn't invent these; they're just there.

Here's the key move: premise (4) can't be appealing to a subjective standard, because the Problem of Evil is trying to show God — existing prior to and outside any human minds — fails to meet a moral standard. Subjective standards don't reach beyond the minds that made them. If God exists, He created all other minds; subjective morality is morality created by minds; so subjective morality didn't even exist at the moment God created everything, and only standards that exist can apply to an action. You might object that God should honor the standards He knows we'll eventually create — but that standard, at the point it would bind God's prior act of creation, either has to be objective already, or it didn't exist yet and can't obligate Him retroactively. There's also this: things existing only in minds are, in the relevant sense, imaginary, and purely imaginary things carry no real obligation — but premise (2) assumes real, binding obligation. So for the Problem of Evil to have any teeth, "evil exists" has to invoke an objective standard.

Step Three: The Standard Has to Be Obligatory

But objective standards alone (health, rationality) aren't automatically moral ones — you're not evil for being out of shape. Some philosophers try to reduce morality to one of these: eudaimonists, in the Aristotelian tradition, hold morality is just action promoting human flourishing (Hitler simply failed to flourish); Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) held morality is action in accord with rationality ("torture babies for fun" isn't a maxim you could rationally will everyone to follow).

But something's still missing. If you're caught committing genocide and say "but genocide doesn't promote my well-being," the obvious reply is "So?" We need an extra "should" layered on top — you should promote your well-being, you should act rationally. Call that extra layer obligation. So claiming evil exists commits you to an objective standard that carries genuine obligation on us — and, crucially, on God.

Step Four: Obligation Requires a Designer

Where does obligation — the "should" — come from? Imagine a row of novelty drinking birds tapping randomly at a keyboard for eons, and by sheer chance they type out a complete legal code for your country. Are you obligated to follow it? Obviously not — it's a pure accident with no author. Now imagine your fellow citizens deliberately draft the identical set of laws through a legislature. Now you are obligated. Same content, different result — because one is the deliberate product of an intelligent, authoritative agent and the other isn't. We're only obligated to a rule that's the product of an intelligent mind.

Here's a second way to see it. Imagine coding in JavaScript, deliberately designed by programmers, versus a hypothetical "Blavascript" that sprang from a random glitch but works just as reliably. Mess up in JavaScript, and a friend can say, "that's not the right way to do it" — there's an intended standard you're failing. Mess up in Blavascript, and all they can say is "that's not going to work" — "wrong" doesn't apply, because there was never a designed standard to violate. The very concept of wrongness, as opposed to mere malfunction, presupposes a designing mind behind the standard.

So: evil's existence requires an objective, obligatory standard, and obligatory standards require an intelligent designer.

Step Five: Why It Has to Be a Creator

One more wrinkle. Philosophers distinguish externalist systems, where obligation's source sits outside the obligated thing (a moral law "out there"), from internalist systems, where it's built into the thing's own nature (the Aristotelian idea that acting well means acting in line with your nature). Externalist systems face an infinite regress: why am I obligated to a law imposed from entirely outside me? If you answer "because a higher law says follow all moral laws," you can ask the same question about that law, forever. Internalist systems avoid the regress but lose the designer ingredient we just established is necessary — a nature that simply exists, with no author, doesn't obviously generate a "should" either.

The proposed resolution is creation — a unique kind of making. God doesn't build humans from pre-existing material the way a carpenter builds a chair; He creates the very nature of what it is to be human, then instantiates it in each of us. That gives us both ingredients: the externalist source (from outside us, generating real obligation) and the internalist location (built into our own nature, not an alien imposition). This is close to the approach philosopher Robert Adams takes in Finite and Infinite Goods (1999), grounding morality in God's nature as the standard of goodness itself. My own view blends divine command theory with an Aristotelian theory of natures, though the details of that blend aren't essential here.

The Full Argument

  1. If evil exists, an objective, obligatory standard exists.
  2. If it's obligatory, it was designed by an intelligent agent.
  3. If it's obligatory and designed, that agent was a creator who endowed the obligation (avoiding the externalist regress while keeping the internalist location).
  4. So, if evil exists, an intelligent creator exists.
  5. Evil exists.
  6. So, an intelligent creator (God) exists.

The Problem of Evil's own key premise, worked all the way through, seems to require the very God it was meant to disprove.

Objections

"This entails atheists can't be good or can't have coherent ethics." Not at all — this argument is about what makes moral claims true, not what a person needs to believe to act morally. I played high school basketball (poorly) with no idea the National Federation of State High School Associations even existed, let alone that they wrote the rulebook. I could play by those rules in total ignorance of their source, or make up my own pickup rules and even land on the same ones by accident. None of that disproves there's an actual governing body behind the official rules. Likewise, atheists being deeply moral doesn't disprove that morality's grounding requires God — it just shows you don't need to believe in the grounding to act in line with it.

"There is no such thing as morality — I'll deny (4) after all." Available in principle, but costly. If you asserted "evil exists" as part of the Problem of Evil, with no independent reason to doubt God beyond that argument, then denying evil exists purely to dodge the Moral Argument is special pleading. And there isn't much else to fall back on — the argument from science, for instance, at most supports agnosticism, not atheism.

"I'm not saying evil exists — just that if God existed, this would count as evil." Clever, but without God, most secular metaethics has no objective "way things should be," so there's no stable fact about what "would" count as evil under a counterfactual God. This collapses into: "if I were in charge, I wouldn't allow this because I don't like it — so if God existed, I imagine He'd share my distaste." That's a much weaker, subjective claim than the "evil exists" the Problem of Evil actually needs.

Why This Matters

What I find fascinating here is structural: this doesn't just defend theism against an attack, it takes the attacker's own ammunition and turns it around. The atheist needs premise (4) to be true in a fully robust, objective, obligatory sense — and that's exactly the kind of premise that seems to require the very thing she's trying to disprove.