Perhaps it started with Rene Descartes. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes attempts to separate himself from both his senses and all his currently held opinions in order to get to the root of what he can call true. At the beginning of meditation two, Descartes runs into a problem: if he has separated himself from all senses, memories, and certainties, if nothing is true, then what has placed all these things in his mind?
Descartes writes,
“But how do I know there is not something else, over and above all those things that I have just reviewed … is there not some God … who instills these very thoughts in me?”
Descartes concludes that God, then, must be a deceiver, “supremely powerful and supremely sly and who is always trying to deliberately deceive [him].”
In the modern day, this kind of thought experiment has been popularized by philosopher Stephen Law, who dubbed it the Evil God Challenge, a call for Christian apologists to explain why belief in an all-good God is more reasonable than an all-evil God. This challenge, however, is paradoxical in its very claim.
When Descartes came up with the idea of a deceptive God (it is worth mentioning that he doesn’t hold on to this belief for the duration of his work), he got one thing right: the word “supremely.”
Within the world of Christian apologetics, we understand God as that which nothing greater can be conceived, the foundation of St. Anselm’s proof of His existence. The way that this paradigm looks, however, is informed by St. Aquinas’ proof: the five ways. In so much as God is greater than any conceivable thing, he is the superlative of all qualities.
Truly, among all things, there are some which can be said to be more or less good, true, or beautiful. These qualities, which we unconsciously apply to most things in our lives, are usually referred to, in modernity, to be “subjective,” or dependent upon the subject. Truly, in so much as you are valuing things with these qualities, they are subjective, but the modern fallacy in the use of this word is not understanding that all of these qualities (every quality, actually) have an object as well.
If you can say something is more or less good, that valuation implies how closely it resembles the maximum of good. Because good is a transcendental quality (more of my writing on transcendentals here), it, along with truth and beauty, can be rightly applied to every other quality. This means that, in some way, every quality is valued by the subject in so much as it resembles the maximum good. Of these qualities is existence, or being. So, if something is said to be maximally existent (perfectly being, or, you could say, omnipresent) it must also be maximally good.
That takes us, then to evil. If we can say that God is the superlative of every quality, doesn’t that include evil? The easy answer is no. Good and evil are in contrary opposition to one another, meaning evil as a concept can be best understood as the deprivation of good. Something, then, which is maximally evil is completely lacking in good. This is the inherent paradox within the Evil God Challenge: because Good is a transcendental quality which informs all others, a being completely lacking in good would then have to be completely lacking in being itself.
Thus, the only truly evil god is one that does not exist at all.
Still, even though it is more logically coherent to believe in a good God, many atheists would posit that the all-good God we profess cannot be the God of the Bible. One of the major questions these thinkers posit in favor of their belief that Christian God is not good is this: Why would God create humans if he knows some of them are going to Hell?
In the Christian tradition we recognize salvation as a free gift from God. If we accept this gift, we can be given redemption from the curse of sin through the sacrifice of Christ. However, if we choose not to accept that gift, which many do, we doom ourselves to eternal suffering (it is important here not to make the heresy of claiming we send ourselves to heaven or that God sends us to hell).
The economy of salvation aside, the Atheist thesis against the goodness of the Christian God is this: God is said to be omniscient, God is said to be all-good (sometimes this takes the form of all-loving), Hell is eternal suffering, eternal suffering is a great evil. So, how could an all-loving God create human beings knowing they are going to choose hell over Him, thus damning them to eternal suffering.
Though there are a few problems with this line of thinking, I’d like to focus on one, which works to disprove this theory no matter which way it is presented. First, though, we have to recognize that, yes, God does, in his infinite love, desire for every soul to join Him in Heaven. However, to say that he knows whether or not you’re going there before you are created is incorrect.
Before you accuse me of heresy, let’s look at what the word “omniscient” means. Omniscience is the possession of infinite knowledge, however, that knowledge cannot come into contradiction with reality. In other words, omniscience is the possession of infinite knowledge of what is possible.
For example, God cannot know what a four-sided triangle would look like, because a triangle is specifically defined as a shape with three sides. The two kinds of knowledge which God, in his omniscience, is classically said to possess, then, is intellectual knowledge and sensible knowledge. Intellectual knowledge, the knowledge which we usually refer to as a priori in so much as humans possess it, is knowledge of everything that is possible. Sensible knowledge, the knowledge which we usually refer to as a posteriori in so much as humans possess it, is the knowledge of what is currently happening and what can be gathered through the senses. This knowledge is also referred to as high knowledge and low knowledge, respectively.
The problem with this atheist thesis, then, is that it is dependent on God having middle knowledge, the knowledge of what humanity would do (independent from Him, as we have free will) in response to a choice which He makes.
Now, middle knowledge is not classically attributed to God, but it is the common opinion of theologians that God does have access to it; however, in this specific scenario, God’s middle knowledge would be based on a logical contradiction. If God were to see a man would choose hell and then not create him, God would have to know the outcome of a free will decision that nothing will never make.
This is illogical because the essence of a free will decision is that making the choice, one way or the other, is entirely possible.
Knowing the choice between Heaven and Hell that each man makes, then, is impossible if that man is never to be created. Since this is impossible, it no longer falls under abilities possessed by an omniscient being. Thus, it follows that a man must be created for God to know whether or not they are to be eternally damned.
Given the epistemological evidence, it seems much more reasonable and consistent to believe in a good God than an evil one and it is not, in any way, inconsistent to preach an all-good God along with the doctrine of hell simultaneously.
The next time an anti-Christian attacks you with similar sophistry, remember that Christianity is, and remains, the religion of common sense and sound reason.
