The one great theological problem, it has often been said, is the problem of evil. How can there be a God who is all-good, all-powerful and all- knowing when at the same time there is so much suffering in a world that this God is said to watch over?
It is a problem that a single senseless death can pose but is now intensely forced on the minds of millions. Events since the morning of Sept. 11 have suddenly given a new resonance to the challenge posed by the title of a book published two years ago: "Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God."
The author, Marilyn McCord Adams, is an Episcopal priest. She has years of service at the altar and in the pulpit, but hers is not a book of pastoral counseling or personal reflection on tragic loss like Rabbi Howard Kushner's "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" or C. S. Lewis's "A Grief Observed."
She is also a philosopher of religion and the Horace Tracy Pitkin professor of historical theology at Yale's Divinity School and department of religious studies. And "Horrendous Evils," published by Cornell University Press, is a book written in the painstaking, methodical style of analytic philosophy.
It takes on the questions raised by David Hume in the 18th century, by John Stuart Mill in the 19th and by a host of contemporary thinkers whose names would be little recognized outside their trade. It surveys their arguments, parsing them out in numbered propositions, seeking hidden premises, insisting on ever finer distinctions and finally offering criticism and counterproposals.
To many nonphilosophers, this sort of analysis looks like logic-chopping. What is needed to address horrendous evil, they would say, is a prayer, a poem, a symphony, a sacred story about Adam and Eve in Eden or Job on his ash heap, a ritual, a curse, an outburst against God — or maybe just silence and a consoling embrace.
Professor Adams is not insensitive to that objection. "There is a difference between offering pastoral care at ground zero," she said in a phone conversation, "and what you say to someone two years from now."
Moreover, it is her own dissatisfaction with the usual strategies that philosophy and theology have adopted in the face of evil — strategies that she feels underestimate either the horror of evil or the goodness of God — that led her to mount her own philosophical alternative.
One of those strategies, of course, is to argue that the existence of God is logically impossible to reconcile with the existence of evil, or at least that evil renders God's existence highly improbable. Another strategy redefines the nature of God or the nature of evil: God is not really all-powerful, for example, or evil is really illusory.
A third strategy seeks reasons why God might permit evil. Leibniz insisted that a good, all-powerful God must have created the best of possible worlds and that the contrasting evil is somehow necessary to an overall pattern of good. More currently, philosophers have argued that granting humans the freedom to exercise their own will is a morally sufficient reason for God to withdraw irrevocably from intervening against specific evils. Or possibly evils are divinely permitted means toward the perfection of human souls.
It is these defenses of God that Professor Adams, as a believer, looks at in detail — and finds wanting.
Horrendous evils like torture, child abuse and mass murder, or even absurd calamities like a father's accidentally running over his own child, shatter the psyches and the lives of victims and survivors in ways that often appear irreparable.
Can one maintain that God permits these evils to afflict specific individuals for the sake of some global good, like preserving humankind's freedom in general? Does God permit evils so destructive of many individuals' potential for free conduct or psychological wholeness out of a respect for human freedom? Or maybe as part of a process of "soul making"?
To justify the existence of horrendous evils this way not only domesticates their horror, Professor Adams says, "it makes God a monster."
She proposes an entirely different approach. Instead of seeking reasons why a good God might permit evil, philosophy should seek an explanation of how God might "make good" on evil — that is, not only balancing each individual's suffering with some greater good for that person, as in heavenly reward, for example, but also integrating the experience of evil into each person's relation to God in some way that makes sense.
Her argument is almost impossible to condense. Suffice it to say that she turns to anthropology and aesthetics as a way of supplementing the moral categories that contemporary philosophy uses. More important, she challenges philosophy's efforts to remain "religion neutral" in its language and concepts rather than draw on the resources of religious traditions.
In her case, this blurring of the line between philosophy and theology means using not only philosophical concepts like immortality but also specifically Christian beliefs about incarnation and redemption — about God's becoming human, suffering and dying a humiliating death.
Would insight be gained by similar philosophical probing of other religious traditions? "I would encourage that, in fact," Professor Adams said. "One of my points against my guild is its restricted views." Responses to evil that are religiously "embedded," whether in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or other faiths, she said, will turn out to be much richer than philosophically neutral ones.
Toward the end of her book, Professor Adams returns to the accusation that her kind of analytic reasoning is an affront to those in the grip of suffering.
"There is a time to drop philosophical reflection, to forget about questions of meaning," she writes, and simply offer aid and consolation "in order to act to get the suffering to stop."
But sometimes the suffering does not stop, and many people "sooner or later, not at every stage but eventually, over and over, raise questions of meaning: of why God allowed it, of whether and how God could redeem it, of whether or how their lives could now be worth living, of what reason there is to go on."
In conversation, Professor Adams added that "actually I came to these ideas through preaching to people dying of AIDS." She had taught all the conflicting philosophical views about God and evil without having to reach a position of her own. But in the Los Angeles area in the 1980's, "I had to come up with something quickly, for people who might die in six weeks; I had to study and pray and struggle."
The book is an abstraction "from what I preached," she said. "The guts of what I had to say were there" in Los Angeles.