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Tyron E. Byrd-Dubail

Essay on the Problem of Evil, what it means about God, and the Rationalist Defenses

English w/ Conc. Nonfiction Writing, Southern New Hampshire University

PHL-210

Prof. Diane O’Leary

Feb. 17th, 2023

I : Introduction

The problem of evil lies as follows: If God is all good/ loving, all knowing, and all

powerful, then why does evil exist? If evil exists and He can do nothing about it, then we must

conclude that he is not all powerful. If evil exists and He can do something about it (=all

powerful) but does not, then we must conclude that He is not all loving. If evil exists and he can

do something about it and he is all good / loving, then He must not know, and thusly not be all

knowing. (Solomon et al., 2017)

The problem of evil has been a topic since Greek antiquity. The first formal modern

exploration of this issue is generally attributed to David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, historian,

and essayist who lived from 1711-1776. “His major philosophical works- A Treatise of Human

Nature (1739-1740), Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding (1748), concerning the

Principles of Morals (1751), as well as his posthumously published Dialogues concerning

Natural Religion (1779) remain deeply and widely influential. (Morris & Brown, 2019) The

oldest formulation of the problem of evil is ascribed to Epicurus, by proxy of Hume, who

attributes to him the following quotation, “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He

is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing?

Whence then is evil? (Rivis-Tipei, 2020).”

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, first published in 1779 (Morris & Brown,

2019) Hume utilizes a dialogue format to explore a conversation between two characters,

Cleanthes and Demea, personifications of the prevailing philosophical thoughts at the time,

through whose conversations he introduces the problem of evil. Cleanthes represents the

“Dominant, progressive strain, consisting primarily of theologians in the British Royal Society,
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who were fascinated by probability and the previous century’s impressive successes in

experimental natural philosophy (Morris & Brown, 2019).” Demea plays antagonist, suggesting

to Cleanthes that any attempt to quantify God is inherently reductive, “demeaning God’s mystery

and majesty (Morris & Brown, 2019)”. Demea accuses Cleanthes of “anthropomorphism,” while

Cleanthes dubs Demea “a mystic,” (Morris & Brown, 2019). At the end of the dialogue, there is

a statement, “the idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good Being, arises

from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities

of goodness and wisdom. (EHU 2.6/19).”

Scholars have later interpreted this as Demea being “The champion of these conservative

traditionalists,” since he argues parallels from a cosmological argument of God, first proposed by

St. Thomas Aquinas in his proof Five Ways, a series of rational approaches to religion expanding

off of concepts introduced by Aristotle. (Solomon et al., 2017) The Cosmological argument

summarized is that “Everything has to be cause by or created from something else (Solomon et

al., 2017),” which Aristotle called “a prime mover,” in reference to God. Deists have argued over

whether God plays an active part in the management of the universe post creation, to which St.

Thomas Aquinas stipulated that he thinks of God as a first cause in the creation of the universe

and also its day to day management/ the safeguarding of its existence. “We see that things which

lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting

always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that

they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot

move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and

intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore, some intelligent being

exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.15
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(Solomon et al., 2017)”. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (1266-1273) would go on to

partially inspire Hume’s response via Dialogues on Natural Religion. (Solomon et al., 2017)

II : Thesis

Cartography, a brief overview of three Rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz; and

their respective defenses against the problem of evil and what it infers about God; followed by

my position that the problem of evil does not mean that God does not exist, that if God exists, he

is neither transcendent or immanent, is not omnipotent or omniscient, it doesn’t matter if he

created the universe or just is the universe, and he doesn’t care about human beings. God doesn’t

have emotions and is unknowable to us. I did start to find new belief in God while crafting this

essay but I am now ambivalent about whether or not God exists. Any inference due to the

problem of evil is one that, in my utilitarian viewpoint that parallels Camus (who thought that

there is “no guarantee that justice will ever be realized, that life is ‘absurd’, and that any meaning

to be found in life must come from our struggling against the unfairness and irrationality we find

in it), does not matter compared to what you do in response to evil.

III : Writer #1, René Descartes

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. He

is known as, “the father of modern philosophy,” and one of the greatest writers of the

Renaissance. He was the first of the Rationalists. “Descartes was a radical voluntarist who

thought that all truth, including what we take to be necessary truth, depends on the will of God.

Care needs to be taken in how this view is expressed, for Descartes did not hold simply that what

we take to be necessary in fact is contingent. He held that actually necessary truth depends on
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God’s unconstrained will, such that even propositions that are logically contradictory might have

been simultaneously true. Reason itself thus seems no longer reliable, and experience would

seem to be the only way of determining which of the worlds even beyond logic such a powerful

and unconstrained God has created.” (Dea et al., 2017)

Descartes believed that rational, intuitive reflection on the nature of reality could be

utilized to derive further truths about reality. “Rationalists generally develop their view in two

steps. First, they argue that there are cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge

outstrips the information that sense experience can provide. Second, they construct accounts of

how reason, in some form or other, provides that additional information about the external world.

… One view, generally associated with Descartes (Rules, Rule II and Rule III, pp. 1–4), is that

what we know by intuition is certain, beyond even the slightest doubt, while what we believe, or

even know, on the basis of sense experience is at least somewhat uncertain. (Markie & Folescu,

2021)”.

Descartes basically argued that the human intellect is weaker than we assume, possessing

a limited power that can not extend to the greater boundaries of reality outside of our very

narrow perspective. While he accredited much ability to intellect, he did not extend this

confidence to the problem of evil and what it meant about God. “From all this, I perceive that the

cause of my errors is neither the God-given power of willing, considered in itself, for it is

extremely extensive and perfect of its kind; nor the power of understanding, for whatever I

understand, since my understanding is a gift of God, most certainly I understand it correctly, nor

is there any possibility of my being deceived in this. So what is the origin of my errors? It can

only be this: that, since the range of the will is greater than that of the intellect, I do not confine it

within the same limits, but extend it even to matters I do not understand; and since it is
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indifferent to these, it easily falls away from the true and the good, and this is both how I come to

be deceived and how I come to sin. (Descartes, 2008: 42) (Rivis-Tipei, 2020).” Furthermore,

Descartes argues for “Cartesian Dualism,” that is that there are “two kinds of substance [sic.] :

thinking things, or minds, and extended things, or bodies.” (Dea et al., 2017) He thought that the

mind and body formed a composite, laying ground to the mind-body problem and creating an

intersectionality to the problem of evil and God. Notably, he thought God was a differing

substance from mind or body. “In the Principles, Descartes defined “substance” as a thing that

exists such that its existence does not depend on any other thing. He immediately added that,

strictly speaking, the term applies only to God, who, as uncreated, alone depends on nothing else

to exist (Dea et al., 2017).”

While he does not specifically address the problem of evil, it is considered by Brian

Calvert that “The Fourth Meditation can be regarded, without undue distortion, as dealing with a

limited version of the problem of evil is not, it seems to me, a contentious proposition (Calvert

1972).” Calvert asserts that Descartes selects one feature of the triad mentioned by Hume

(“error”), and discusses “whether this particular feature is consistent with the existence of an all-

powerful, perfect, non-deceiving deity. (Calvert 1972). Calvert also stipulates that Descartes

again addresses error in Synopsis of the Meditations, where Descartes says, “Error committed in

the pursuit of good and evil- but only of that which occurs in the judgement and discernment of

the true and false; and that I do not intend to speak of beliefs which belong to faith or to the

conduct of life, but of those which pertain to speculative truth. … (Descartes, 1960).” Descartes

argues more directly that “man misuses the faculties which God has given him, and so the

responsibility for the occurrence of error is attributable to man and not to God, (Descartes,

1960)” an argument implementing the ‘free will solution,’ which is that “God creates us with
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free will, the ability to do what we want to do. Accordingly, we have created the evil and

suffering in the world ourselves, and it is no reflection of God’s goodness.” (Solomon et al.,

2017) One of the difficulties of quantifying Descartes’ views on the problem of evil is that on the

surface level, the free will argument alludes to moral evil, but Descartes answers this by saying,

“If we make a judgement (use our free will) in the absence of clear and distinct ideas (that is, an

inability to extend our perspective to the realm of God), we misuse our freedom; errors are liable

to occur, and often do (Calvert, 1972).” Descartes’ conclusion to the problem of evil, including

natural evil, would appear to thusly be that humans are incapable of truly perceiving evil, due to

limitations placed upon them by the gift of free will. Descartes’ ideas gave birth to rationalism,

the idea that knowledge is acquired through reason, and directly inspire Spinoza and Leibniz.

IV : Writer #2, Benedict Spinoza

Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Dutch rationalist born to refugees of the Spanish

Inquisition in the Jewish diaspora of Amsterdam. “He was thoroughly educated in both Jewish

and medieval Christian philosophy, but his unconventional opinions cause him to be banished

from his native Amsterdam. His books were banned, and he spent much of his life working as a

lens grinder (Solomon et al., 2017).” One of the trademarks of Spinoza is his consideration of

substance, which he termed “Deus sive Natura” (God, in other words, nature) (Dea et al., 2017).

“Spinoza’s philosophy is first and foremost a philosophy of necessity. In the context of this

philosophy, good and evil are relative notions, devoid of rational meaning. They can only exist

by reference to a purpose. Good and evil are defined by their relation to the exigencies of reason.

Good is what promotes knowledge. It is a superior form of knowledge, the philosophical one, the

knowledge of substance, identical with God or Nature. In Spinoza’s system, evil is an “illusion”
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that results from ignorance (Ricoeur, 1974: 311-312). In particular, Spinoza completely

abandons the “suspect argumentation of theodicy” (Ibidem: 312). Benefits and catastrophes, he

points out, happen without discrimination to both the good and the bad, both believers and

unbelievers (Rivis-Tipei, 2020).”

Like Descartes, Spinoza concludes that evil is an illusion that rises from our limited

perspective. Unlike Descartes, Spinoza did not believe that there two substances which compose

the subjective reality (body and mind) and a third undescribed (or perhaps, substanceless-ness)

that composes God, positing instead that God is everything, and everything is God. Thusly, there

is one substance and its modes, a monist idea that infers the inter-connectedness of everything

and was rejected by many of his peers who “saw that it eliminated any and all distinction

between creator, God, and His Creation (Dea et al., 2017).” Spinoza further detailed “substance”

exists because it does, which is an ontological argument, that is a “philosophical argument for

rational belief in God posited by 11th century monk Saint Anselm (Solomon et al., 2017).”

Ontological arguments rest on an axis that: 1) We can not conceive of God except as infinite and

perfect; 2) A being who had all perfections except for the perfection of existence, would not be

perfect; and 3) Therefore the most perfect being necessarily exists.” Phrased more simply, “to

prove by logic alone that, from the very idea we have of God, it is necessary that God exists.”

Thusly, Descartes and Spinoza, despite their disagreement on the nature of substance,

predominantly overlap in agreeance that humans can not perceive evil, but diverge upon God as

an actor. Spinoza suggests God is an actor “creating the universe from the outside through an act

of will,” (Dea et al., 2017) but perceived him as immanent (not outside of us or distinct from the

Universe), unlike Descartes who viewed God as transcendent (beyond the ordinary world of

human experience.) (Solomon et al., 2017). Thusly, while the two both conclude that humans can
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not understand evil, there is a difference: To Descartes, humans are failing to understand

something beyond the world of human experience (God lies outside), while to Spinoza, humans

are failing to understand something that they are a piece of the overall organism inside of (You

are a piece of God, and vice versa). Spinoza’s idea built off the foundation established by

Descartes and he would in turn inspire Leibniz, directly an intentional meeting and indirectly as a

contemporary.

V : Writer #3, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a philosopher, meta-physicist, logistician,

and mathematician from Leipzig. He is one of the most gifted polymaths to have ever lived,

much to the frustration of many of his peers. “When one compares the talents one has with those

of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some

forgotten corner (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 678) (Look, 2013).” His education was “chiefly

scholastic in nature, though he was also exposed to elements of Renaissance humanism.” When

he was a student, the philosophies of Descartes had not yet had significant impact on syllabus,

and Leibniz would be an emergent thinker in a new discipline (Look, 2013). “Unlike most of the

great philosophers of the period, Leibniz did not write a magnum opus; there is no single work

that can be said to contain the core of his thought. While he did produce two books, Theodicy

(1710) and the New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (finished in 1704 but not

published until 1765), prospective students of Leibniz's philosophy must piece together his ideas

from his myriad writings: essays published in scholarly and popular journals, unpublished works

left abandoned by their author, and his many letters. (Look, 2013).
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Leibniz was critical of Descartes, due to the principles of Cartesian duality specifically

pertaining to the corporeal substance. Leibniz was attracted to the “mechanical philosophy”

(Look, 2013) of Descartes, but perceived two major issues with the rectification of this idea.

Problem 1: If the essence of body is “extension” (Look, 2013) [sic.? of matter], then Descartes is

“endorsing the view that matter is infinitely divisible.” If this were the case, he posits, then that

would mean that there is “in its nature, no source of activity (Look, 2013),” which means that the

bodily objects of the world cannot count as substances. Basically, Leibniz assumed if matter was

infinitely divisible, that, having no quality of inherent one-ness, an ability to be something other

than one was proof of the non-corporeal aspect of substance.

Leibniz argues directly and overtly for the existence of God in his Discourse on

Metaphysics, which presents his argument as thus: “God is perfect. Power and knowledge are

perfections, and insofar as they belong to God, they do not have limits; When it follows that

God, possessing supreme and infinite wisdom, acts in the most perfect manner, not only

metaphysically, but also morally speaking (Look, 2013).” As a result, one can directly conclude

that Leibniz argues on an axiom of “least of all evils,” based upon his accreditation of the triad to

God and resultant reality, including what humans perceive as evil. “Indeed, when it comes to the

creation of the world, the “sufficient reason” for God's choice of this world is that this world is

the “best” of all possible worlds; in other words, in this case the Principle of Sufficient Reason is

essentially the Principle of the Best (Look, 2013).” Based on notions of truth and metaphysics

which originate in Aristotle’s Organon (cf. Posterior Analytics I.4), Leibniz concludes “in every

true affirmative proposition, whether necessary or contingent, universal or particular, the notion

of the predicate is in some way included in that of the subject. Praedicatum inest subjecto;

otherwise I do not know what truth is” (G II 56/L 337) (Look, 2013).” Leibniz goes on to state
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principles of identity and contradiction that he uses as axioms for his reason: “a proposition

cannot be true and false at the same time, and that therefore A is A and cannot be A.” He

continues to make six posits:

(1) No two substances can resemble each other completely and be distinct. (PII)

(2) A substance can only begin in creation and end in annihilation.

(3) A substance is not divisible.

(4) One substance cannot be constructed from two.

(5) The number of substances does not naturally increase and decrease.

(6) Every substance is like a complete world and like a mirror of God or of the whole universe,

which each expresses in its own way.

At this point, it gets very difficult to derive exactly what Leibniz means when he is not

speaking directly. “Leibniz is not as clear as one would like him to be, for at this point in his

career it is possible to read him as seeing that something is a substance so long as it has a soul or

a substantial form, whereas later in his career it seems more clearly to be the case that the only

substances are souls or soul-like entities, the monads. In other words, Leibniz can be interpreted

as advocating, at least in this period, a kind of Aristotelian hylomorphism, in which substances

are composites of matter and form. This has been the subject of debate in the field, but this entry

cannot adjudicate the matter (For more on this dispute, see Look 2010.) (Look, 2013).”

Thusly, Leibniz’s views were subject to change based upon his relative experience

throughout life, and his former ardency in multiple substances progresses towards monism,

which he accredits to “soul like entities,” his vague description of his rationalization of monads

(Look, 2013), settling on the concept of indivisibility as his underlying belief for what constitutes
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“substance.” “Nevertheless, in declaring that a substance is necessarily indivisible, Leibniz

renders it impossible for a body, or matter alone, to be a substance. Thus, Cartesian corporeal

substance, the essence of which is simply extension, cannot exist as substance. Put differently,

Leibniz's argument is that nothing that is divisible is a substance; a Cartesian chunk of matter is

divisible; therefore, a Cartesian chunk of matter is not a substance (Look, 2013).”

Leibniz writes, “I hold that philosophy cannot be better reestablished and reduced to

something precise, than by recognizing only substances or complete beings endowed with a true

unity, together with the different states that succeed one another; everything else is only

phenomena, abstractions, or relations” (G II 101/AG 89). If this is the case, then aggregates of

simple substances are merely phenomena and fail to have the reality of the underlying simples.

Further, the bodies of natural philosophy, the bodies of the world we observe around us, would

seem to be in some sense mere phenomena (Look, 2013).” One can not help but be reminded of

the search in Cosmological fields for the grand unifying theory, which seems adjacent to

Leibniz’s reckoning of substances.

“Leibniz sets out a series of distinctions for human knowledge or cognition (cognitio):

knowledge is either obscure or clear; clear knowledge is either confused or distinct; distinct

knowledge is either inadequate or adequate; and adequate knowledge is either symbolic or

intuitive. Now, according to Leibniz, clear knowledge means being able to recognize something

that is represented to us, for example, a rose; and knowledge is both clear and distinct when one

can enumerate marks sufficient to distinguish a rose from other things. When one can give such

an enumeration, one possesses a distinct notion or concept and is thus able to give a nominal

definition of the thing. Further, if all the marks that form part of a distinct notion are themselves
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distinctly known, then the cognition is adequate. And, finally, if a notion is complex and we are

able to consider all its component notions simultaneously, then our knowledge of it is intuitive.

Ultimately, Leibniz holds that human beings have intuitive knowledge only of primary notions

and propositions, whereas God, of course, has intuitive knowledge of all things.” One is

reminded of an old Buddhist kaon, that, roughly paraphrased suggests: “When I began studying

Buddhism, I thought that a mountain was a mountain, then I learned that a mountain was the sum

of all the qualities that makes a mountain: trees, birds, animals, rocks, the sky, and so on. Once I

had studied Buddhism for a long time and no longer was a novice, I realized that all there is to a

mountain, is to be a mountain.” Leibniz wrote so much that it becomes difficult to “resolve all of

his writings and simpler truths until we reach the primitives (G VI 612/AG 217) (Look, 2013),”

to borrow a turn of phrase from the polymath himself.

At his simplest, Leibniz is a rationalist and directly contradicted empiricist philosophers

before his time. He upholds to “the principle of sufficient reasons,” and accepts “innate ideas and

denies that the mind is at birth a tabula rasa, or blank slate (Look, 2013)”. He was a believer of

platonic knowledge, that is that knowledge can be derived the existence of innate ideas, and

directly cites such ideas, referring explicitly to Plato’s “fundamental questioning of the origin of

ideas (A VI vi 48/RB 48) (Look, 2013).” Leibniz remains firm throughout his life that the human

mind and soul is immateria. Leibniz also posited that “perception can not be explained in

mechanical or materialistic terms,” and directly argues against machine intelligence, a few

hundred years before this would be a real consideration.

Like Spinoza, Leibniz based his ideas on the existence of God on the ontological

argument. Leibniz and Spinoza were contemporaries and discussed such ideas; having met once
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in the 1670’s while Leibniz was on the way to Hanover (Look, 2013). Put most simply, Leibniz

argues that because the status quo exists (Quod ens perfectissimum existit) that it exists and is the

most perfect order. “Leibniz is then able to claim that there can be no inconsistency among

perfections, since a perfection, in being simple and positive, is unanalyzable and incapable of

being enclosed by limits. That is, if A and B are perfections, then the proposition “A and B are

incompatible” cannot be demonstrated because A and B are simples, nor can the proposition be

known per se. Therefore, it is possible that any and all perfections are in fact compatible. And,

therefore, Leibniz reasons, a subject of all perfections, or an ens perfectissimum, is indeed

possible (Look, 2013). If one is understanding correctly, his posit is basically, “Because only one

watch exists, and there is no other watch to compare it to, that watch is a (most) perfect watch.”

Is is, therefore; it is.

His argument is specifically:

“(1) God is a being having all perfections. (Definition)

(2) A perfection is a simple and absolute property. (Definition)

(3) Existence is a perfection.

(4) If existence is part of the essence of a thing, then it is a necessary being.

(5) If it is possible for a necessary being to exist, then a necessary being does

exist.

(6) It is possible for a being to have all perfections. (Look, 2013)”

Unlike Spinoza, Leibniz also appeals to the cosmological argument, that is that

everything was caused by or made by something else, that there must have been a first cause,

which Aristotle referred to as, “the prime mover,” and St. Thomas Aquinas stipulated was God.
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(Solomon et al., 2017) He touches on this in Theodicy, one of his best known works for the

phrase coined eponymously (Theodicy/ theodicies: an attempt to justify or defend God in the

face of evil by answering the triad: God is all good, powerful, and knowledgeable.) In a separate

essay, Leibniz argues the following, using a fool as a device:

“(1) God is omnipotent and omniscient and benevolent and the free creator of

the world. (Definition)

(2) Things could have been otherwise–i.e., there are other possible worlds.

(Premise)

(3) Suppose this world is not the best of all possible worlds. (I.e., “The world

could be better.”)

(4) If this world is not the best of all possible worlds, then at least one of the

following must be the case:

 God was not powerful enough to bring about a better world; or

 God did not know how this world would develop after his creation of it (i.e.

God lacked foreknowledge); or

 God did not wish this world to be the best; or

 God did not create the world; or

 there were no other possible worlds from which God could choose.

(5) But, any one or more of the disjuncts of (4) contradicts (1) or (2).

(6) Therefore, this world is the best of all possible worlds. (Look, 2013)”

“He [Sic. Leibniz] tells us in the Discourse on Metaphysics, first, that “…the happiness

of minds is the principal aim of God…” (A VI iv 1537/AG 38) and, second, that “God has
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chosen the most perfect world, that is, the one which is at the same time the simplest in

hypotheses and the richest in phenomena” (A VI iv 1538/AG 39). So, is this world of genocide

and natural disaster better than a world containing only onemultifoliate rose? Yes, because the

former is a world in which an infinity of minds perceive and reflect on the diversity of

phenomena caused by a modest number of simple laws. To the more difficult question whether

there is a better world with perhaps a little less genocide and natural disaster Leibniz can only

respond that, if so, God would have brought it into actuality. And this, of course, is to say that

there really is no better possible world (Look, 2013).”

In summarization of Leibniz, perhaps it is easiest to conclude that his approaches to the

question of evil are ontological, cosmological, rationalist, monist, and based in the least of all

evils approach argument.

VI : My Views

My beliefs in the question of evil and God are complicated and have changed many times

since starting this. If one had asked me two years ago what I think about the problem of evil and

what it infers about God, I would have told you that I don’t believe in any God and doubt that

God exists.

I grew up believing in God, until my parents divorced and my mother remarried someone

in an Christian Cult that warped any concept of God to manipulate others, and who told me

frequently that I was going to hell; while they pretended to speak in tongues and have seizures. I

tried to find a healthy application of religion during this time and many people told me I was

going to hell because I wasn’t their religion. One could conclude that I encountered moral evil

and concluded from it that God does not exist in any way that I recognize.
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As the situation progressed, I wound up a homeless teenager. I tried to go to college to

spare me from my degrading future and was denied out of spite the FAFSA classification that

covered my homelessness, so I went into the military. The superintendent that mocked me for

being the son of a drunk, who he accused of trying to fraud the state, was another encounter with

moral evil that in my naivety and failure to adequate protect myself, further eroded any belief in

God due to the question of moral evil. In the military, I had an abusive and toxic command to a

degree of severity that it broke many people and embroiled me deeply into an NCIS investigation

fighting structural power embedded into the upper rank structures, which was a pyrrhic victory

that cost my career but saved lives. I was right by 2016. More moral evil.

I also during this time witnessed multitudinous examples of what life for people is like in

the poorest countries in the world: children pickpocketing and robbing each other if they are

larger; beggars sitting on the roadside, desperation personified without arms, legs, or having

disfigured bodies. I responded to typhoons, tsunamis, and earthquakes and have witnessed the

scale of devastation unleashed from natural evil, and how it affects the poorest people in the

world; and this further reinforced in me that God doesn’t exist. I have been homeless after I

crashed and burned trying to move to Honolulu with friends because I had no family and had to

make it with no contacts and rebuilt a life from that. While in this position, I found out that for

every homeless person that just abuses drugs, there is also an old Chinese woman whose husband

died and she didn’t have a sound financial position afterwards, or a kind old man who got into a

car wreck with his wife, who died; and his TBI prevents him from understanding the value of

money and he can’t keep a job not because of temperament issues but orientation issues. I have

found through the story of my father that you can save lives thirteen years and the second you

don’t, you will be abandoned if you no longer do that and not a single person will check on you.
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My experiences at 24, losing my job without any person willing to help me pivot in the same

employer to IT, or to help me access a network that would allow me placement anywhere else

echoed this, after serving my community for years. Community is about convenience, man is a

social creature, and I have found no qualities of god in community.

In the United States, people with too much medical debt don’t get to rent apartments that

have livable conditions, and you can wind up homeless. I know this from experience. It can be so

bad that a plane ride to another country changes your entire fate and causes your native country

to perceive you entirely differently based upon their old metrics, because they are no longer

parameters that bind you but assess you differently out of different context, while the sum is

unchanged. It doesn’t matter if you served your country, nobody cares, nobody can do anything,

your life as an exile will be preferable.

If God knows, and is all powerful, he doesn’t care. If He knows, and is good; then he is

not all powerful. If he is all powerful and all good, then maybe he has never heard my father’s

story or those of some of the individuals I have met who honestly just deserved better. It doesn’t

really matter which possibility it is because the end sum is the same, and from the programmatic/

functional viewpoint; this means that the modulation in-between is just not at all anything

cognizant or powerful. It’s just causal Boolean gates through which we pass.

When I was younger, people used to invest in me more, but the older I get, the amount of

people willing to stop and take time to interact with me constructively without fiscal payment

has diminished pretty much to 0 and I believe that people expect you to, by the age of 30; be

already polished, even if you are simply a formerly homeless teenager who is trying to hide the

gaping holes in their education. Even if you lack of any access to structural resources, lost any

positive relationship with your body at a square knee at twenty four years old, and have spent the
 19

rest of time since then being increasingly harassed by people when formerly you had always

experienced validation. Over and over my life has proven to be mostly random, without cause,

full of moral and natural evil despite the amount of work in the opposite direction you do (if

anything people who can not refrain from helping are taken advantage of the most frequently),

and there is little apparent benefit to caring about other people, investing in them, or sparing

them from finite amounts of suffering if able to do so. I think that the only meaning comes from

what you give to it, based upon what you feel like giving, and why. “To believe in God simply as

an initial creative force is to believe much less than most would take to be required, even for

what many of us would consider the most rudimentary theistic belief. A God who is conceived of

as an impersonal force, indifferent to the concerns of human beings, is not a God to be

worshipped, not a God who gives meaning to our lives. In many people’s opinion (both theists

and atheists), such a force is not worthy of the name “God” at all. (Solomon et al., 2017)”

If you asked me a week ago, I would have said that after my experiences in the war (no

Atheists in foxholes), writing this and trying to formulate counter arguments against God, and

after starting to question my faith everything in my life started working out as if there was a deity

overhead finally un-punishing me for losing my belief; that I am starting to believe and feel some

sense of energy inside me that I have not perceived in decades. But if you ask me now, I simply

do not care, I am indeterminate, I don’t see the point one way or another and it is a moot question

for someone like me. The problem of moral and natural evil is too great to overcome, and there

are no deterministic statements one can make about substance, because even though we know

certain types of matter are divisible, and that right now we perceive a lowest subatomic level

somewhere around quarks; the other perspective is that this is subject to change and any

supposition is based on one’s personal understanding, not actual truth; just assumed truth. This
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contradicts Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; who thought that from this you could infer greater

truth (Look, 2013).

I have been completely blind and paralyzed and regained much of my sight and motor

ability. During this time I thought of the parable of Saul/ Paul, how I had lost my faith, the small

mistakes that had accrued in my life the less good influences that I had; for the first time in a

long time I prayed to any and all gods, on all radio channels so to speak; but when I was spared

from my condition the suffering of life on the other end was so great that I found no respite, no

cause to belief, and I hung up the phone. After the past year, witnessing events at scales

incomprehensible and the first healthy expression of faith that I had been exposed to in a long

time, and being confronted with this question in class, I reformulated all of that. Then everything

began to crash and now, I am questioning if my emergent faith was just the unjustified reaches of

someone with no healthy authority present in their life for fifteen years formulating counter

arguments against faith while things so large as to be perceived as divine providence began to

manifest themselves, and in that I fell into delusion. At this moment, my belief is a coin flipping

through the air but my interest to where it will land is completely removed. We will see a week

from now, a year from now, five years from now. If things go well, which right now I am

bleeding conviction, I could wind up a deist. If not, it is just another cruel joke. I have suffered

too much in life to care. I can believe, not believe, what I do believe is that none of it matters.

I don’t deny evil. I think it’s the least of all evils only in the way that standing neck deep

in water while it goes up is “standing in the least water” that you could be standing in at that

time, provided the room was infinitely large and without boundary, devoid of anything to climb

to. There could certainly be more evil, that’s for sure, everyone could express their negative

freedom right now and punch someone else in the nose, but they don’t; at least most of the time,
 21

so there is some conclusion of ‘the least,’ but that doesn’t mean it will stay a static quality, just

that the present, inherently a static quality that generates movement, like the peak of a wave

carrying a surfer. I don’t think it’s absurd to conclude that we have free will, I’ve seen TBI’s

change many people in ways that destroyed their entire lives. Maybe we have some, but that

doesn’t mean that a brick to the face can’t take it away (Solomon et al., 2017).

Like Camus, I think life is absurd. There is no guarantee of justice. I think some people

are bad people but born in the right places and accomplish great damage to others for many

innate reasons. Some people are good people but are crushed by the absolute cruelty of life until

they have no position with which to leverage goodness to any meaningful result. Moral evil and

natural evil is everywhere. While what you do sometimes has connection to what happens to you

the truth is that many things occur without reason, and you could just as likely tomorrow have a

stroke and wake up a rather changed person. My belief is closer to Voltaire, than the rationalists;

who I think spend far too much time attributing one thing or another to a derivative property of

the divisibility or indivisibility of something. Voltaire suggested that God is just a hypothesis for

physics, and that it is “as absurd to say of God that God is just or unjust as to say that God is blue

or square (Solomon et al., 2017).”

This would indicate that rationalism is a counterargument to my stance, on several

accounts. The rationalists agreed that you could infer posits about God from “rational, intuitive

reflection” (Dea et Al., 2017). This is contrary to my perception and that of theologians like Karl

Rahner, who despite their belief in God compared to my lack, says that God is an absolute

mystery that we can’t understand and that we can not understand God as a person in our finite

sense.” (Solomon et al., 2017) Rationalists like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz are worried

about if things are 1 or 0 and what this infers about god and evil. I am more concerned that from
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1 and 0; you can derive all real numbers and through constructs derived from these describe all

things in perfect language if one was sufficiently capable, but that nobody is. If God is 1 and not

0, this denies God omnipotency, and vice versa for if God is 0; but not if God is all numbers.

VII : Conclusion

In conclusion, that is a cartographic synopsis of the problem of evil as inquired by David

Hume, in extension of an old Epicuran philosophical question on the nature of God; as addressed

by three rationalist writers: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. René Descartes was the father of

philosophical rationalism, not a monist, and separated man’s ability to perceive and the

substance of reality. He severed truth and perception in his attempt to answer the problem of evil,

concluding that man can not know evil and thusly not judge it; a conclusion he attributes to free

will, which both is the root of moral and natural evil, by allowing us to ‘incorrectly’ perceive

‘natural evil’ as ‘evil,’ instead of a process belonging to God which we are incapable of judging,

invoking the free will argument. Spinoza was a monist and utilized ontological arguments,

favoring tautology to reckon that the set of all sets is the most perfect set and that a subset can

not judge the perfection of a set above it due to the impossibility of a piece of a corpus to

perceive itself within the whole that it is a part of (amongst many other arguments too

multitudinous to address in a single portion of essay). Leibniz argued both for and against

monism at different parts of his life, made arguments ontological and cosmological, and built

intense metaphysical frameworks in math to found his arguments. All three writers discussed the

nature of substance at great lengths and the implications it had upon the nature of reality, the

problem of evil, and God. While they disagreed about the nature of such substances, all three

agreed on concepts of rational reflection to derive greater truths about the problem of evil, God,
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and what it means about reality. They all defied formerly empiricist ideas such as the idea that

people are born tabula rasa, and all believed that truths can be known a priori.

My viewpoint is contradictory, that the problem of evil concludes the non-existence of

god, that the indivisibility or divisibility of substance to infer things about god denies him

omnipotency, a major part of the triad (if he exists); which I rectify by suggesting that by

denying either system and proposing a system modelled after of computers, which were invented

so far after the lives of the Rationalists that I doubt they ever considered such a stance, not

having seen the ability of recursive iteration expressed within; which hypothetically resolves

God’s omnipotency, as well as infers that God is perhaps neither transcendent or immanent, but

that you can choose which of these filters you apply based on utensil purpose. Perhaps Descartes

would surmise that this is “misuses the faculties which God has given… and so responsibility for

the occurrence of error is attributable to man” (Descartes, 1960).

The ongoing discussion of the problem of evil is one that can never be meaningfully

solved except for individual notion during the course of one’s life as they settle into frameworks

of argument and synthesize belief. One’s belief in a construct addressing the problem of evil may

be unsolved as readily one day to the next, if an individual is confronted with drastic enough

stimuli to spark conflict and reflection upon their beliefs. As for society, until every human and

animal stressor is solved or eliminated, an impossibility of equilibrium, it will never be solved

and for that reason has driven conversation since antiquity. Its relevance today is just as

legitimate as it was during the time of Epicurus or John Hume, and possibly more so as we find

ourselves increasingly affected by emergent pressures that technology created by man,

sometimes in the image of man, manifest; recalling arguments Leibniz made about the
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indivisibility of experience (he posited that no machine, however intelligent, can have

experience) (Look, 2013).

In final summation: The debate of what ‘substance’ is played a far greater role in the

discussion of the problem of evil and what it means about God and reality than one might

anticipate, and the frustration of Leibniz’s peers was deeply understandable.

References

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Philosophy. Retrieved February 17, 2023, from
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Rivis-Tipei, I. (2020). The Problem of Natural Evil Part One: Evil in Philosophical
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Dea, S., Walsh, J., & Lennon, T. M. (2017, November 6). Continental rationalism. Stanford
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