Authored by: Payton Alexander.

There  is something terribly wrong with the world of Christian apologetics when it offers only one answer to the Problem of Evil.  Obviously, though there are a couple different kinds of theodicy offered these days, I am speaking of the Free Will Defense, but that is only because it’s the most common.

Indeed, the answer most Christians will give when faced with the Problem of Evil is something like, “Well, God gave us free will”, and that will be the start of all the nonsense.  The ultimate problems will then usually center around whether we are actually free, or why God would give us free will in the first place.

But I’m just introducing the problem, at this point.

The free will defense is so disputable, and there are so many places where even Christians will disagree on it.  Indeed, as a theodicy, I’m not confident in its ability to explain away natural evils.  We will bicker back and forth, demanding Scriptural support for its premises and conclusions, so I don’t think it’s a very productive answer.  Not that I don’t advocate its use, mind you. In Plantinga’s formulation, I think it is a perfectly legitimate piece of theology.

However, there is a colder and more heartless answer to the Problem of Evil than Alvin Plantinga’s famous appeals to love and freedom.  It offers no emotional relief to the oppressed, or the poor, or the meek at all.  It is St. Augustine’s privatio boni, or the “privation of good”.  It attempts to dismantle the Problem of Evil not by redefining God, or even by redefining man: it solves the problem by redefining evil itself.

What is the nature of good and evil?

Regardless of what image the above subtitle may conjure up, don’t get to thinking that the question of relativism vs. objectivism will have any bearing on this argument.  The privatio boni is a description of the relationship between good and evil, not the broader nature of morality as a whole.

The argument works in metaphors.  So, let’s begin by discussing light and shadow as a metaphor for the problem.  In a way, shadows do not really exist.  They are phenomenal, and not noumenal, which is to say they are not things in themselves.  They are mere phenomena of something else, which in this case is light.  A shadow, or more properly, darkness, is the absence of light; it is the non-existence of a thing.  Shadows can be said to exist in the sense that “nothings” exist.  To put it bluntly, a shadow is just another kind of nothing.

After all, there is no such thing as a flash-dark, though there are flashlights.  See, when I shine a light on my hand so as to cast a shadow on the wall, such that the circle of light is 60% light and 40% shadow, for example, is the flashlight producing both light and darkness?  Does its bulb produce 60% light and 40% darkness?  Of course not!

Now, you might say that of course it is not the flashlight’s fault that there is a shadow on the wall, but rather the hand’s.  Indeed, this is true.  But what is this shadow like?  Is this new hand-shaped patch on the wall any darker than it was before the light was ever shone around it? Again, of course not!

If anything, the patch is going to be just a little bit brighter, since light has been added to the room.  It is simply not physically possible for the wall to get any darker by shining a light on it in some places.  It may appear to be so, but that really is just our perception.  It only appears darker because the surroundings have just become brighter.

The flashlight is producing nothing but light, and the hand is producing no darkness.  Yet still, as I write this, the thought occurs to me that there is a deeper meaning to that phrase: The flashlight produces nothing but light.  If the darkness is nothing, the flashlight is indeed producing ‘a kind of nothing’ but light; darkness but light.  But that’s just a grammatical twist, and doesn’t matter to my argument.

So I would say, in conclusion, that it is not the flashlight’s fault that there is darkness on the wall, and that the hand hasn’t made any darkness either, so there is no darkness being made.  Therefore, I would say the same of good and evil.  Evil is but the absence of good, and doesn’t really exist.  So if God has created the world, He is like the flashlight.  There is, on the wall, a great circle of shadows, but all He has done is created good!  The evil, just as darkness is the lack of light, is the absence of the good God has created, and so it is precisely what He has not created.  Just as there is no contradiction between my own shadow and the existence of the sun, there is no contradiction between the existence of a perfect God and an evil creation.

In St. Augustine’s own words.

St. Augustine originally explained this doctrine in his Enchiridion, a piece of which I have pasted below:

And in the universe, even that which is called evil, when it is regulated and put in its own place, only enhances our admiration of the good; for we enjoy and value the good more when we compare it with the evil. For the Almighty God, who, as even the heathen acknowledge, has supreme power over all things, being Himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil. For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present—namely, the diseases and wounds—go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance,—the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils—that is, privations of the good which we call health—are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

—St. Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion of Augustine, Chapter 11: What is called Evil in the Universe is But the Absence of Good

See, the point that Augustine is making is that since our perceptions are based on contrast, we see things like light and dark as opposites.  However, a basic study of optics would show this kind of ‘symmetry’ to be merely imagined.  Darkness is not the polar opposite of light, but the absence thereof.  Augustine establishes this concept in the idea of sickness in the body, which lines up very nicely with his extension of the metaphor to include vices in the soul.  He concludes that evil is insubstantial, and that good and evil are really asymmetrical, no matter how we may see them.

Conclusion: How is this a theodicy?

Now, look back on what I said in the first section of this paper regarding the nature of good and evil in general, and consider this in the context of what Augustine says about the soul.  The idea is that while Augustine considers the issue of vices in the soul to be like sicknesses of the flesh, and I suppose them to be like shadows in the light, we can extend the metaphor to include all evil in the world.  The extension goes like this: Augustine extends concept of sicknesses in the body to vices in the soul, and I extend the concept of shadows in the light (or sicknesses in the body, whichever) to evils in the world.  In doing so, we formulate the privatio boni into a successful theodicy, and the Problem of Evil is rendered useless.