“According to the Christological lesson of the previous section, God has a reason not to reveal to typical humans now the full divine purpose in allowing unjust suffering and evil in human lives. Part of the reason is that typical humans would lack now the understanding needed to handle (a stament of) the purpose aright. They would fail, as in the case of the apostle Peter, to understand properly and therefore would tend toward counterproductive resistance to God and God’s purpose.”

Paul K. Moser, “Theodicy, Christology, and Divine Hiding,” 196

Continuing the posts on the problem of evil, I’d like to offer a few thoughts informed by my reading of Paul Moser’s article “Theodicy, Christology, and Divine Hiding: Neutralizing the Problem of Evil”.[1] For some years now, I have been an admirer of Moser’s work, and I was interested in what he had to say on the problem of evil. However, this post is not so much about Moser’s views, as about developing my own thought on the problem. That being said, I want to comment briefly on something he writes about John 11:3-4: “It may be tempting to generalize on the comment by Jesus, and thus to propose that all suffering and evil are ‘for God’s glory’. Such generalizing, however, would be a mistake.” First, we note that Moser does not discuss the somewhat similar episode at the start of John 9. Second, although Moser may be right about the generalizing, these passages do help us think of new (candidate) examples of goods that require evils (see my two previous posts). For instance, in a world without evil, there can be no defeat of evils nor triumph over them. There is no healing of the blind in a world without blindness; no resurrection in a world without death. One can dispute that such goods outweigh the evils required for them, but that they are required is difficult to deny.

Further, Moser’s article helped me see that there can be a theistic explanation of the fact, f, that we do not have or cannot offer a satisfactory theistic explanation of certain evils, on which this is intentional on the part of God. Among theists, it is fairly common to explain f (or something like it) in terms of the limitations of human knowledge or cognitive powers. But the idea (and this is not necessarily what Moser holds) that God could be intentionally withholding key information or perhaps even frustrating our explanatory efforts adds something interesting to the mix. Just as the existence of arguments for atheism can be explained by partial hiddenness theism (PHT), on which, God does not presently want God’s existence to be obvious to everyone, so can PHT explain why there are certain evils which resist our explanatory powers.

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[1] Paul K. Moser, “Theodicy, Christology, and Divine Hiding: Neutralizing the Problem of Evil,” The Expository Times 129, no. 5 (2018): 191-200.