Emanuele Tullio
Central European University
I put forward a new solution to the problem of Evil on behalf on classical Theism. I shall focus on natural evil – the kind of evil which does not result from an agent’s free will and free choices, e.g. illnesses. Natural evil, in rough outline, poses a serious challenge to Theism in that the presence of natural evil seems at odds with the existence of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent being. Several solutions have been put forward, either in the form of Theodicies explaining why the presence of natural evil in some way coheres with the nature of God (e.g. late Plantinga’s Felix Culpa Theodicy), or in the form of considerations about our knowledge of God’s intentions and our lack of understanding of them (e.g. Hendricks’ recent version of Skeptical Theism). My own solution is intended to pile up to the Theodicies available to theists. But by contrast to the Theodicies currently on the market, it relies on a revisionary understanding of how natural evil relates to a subject’s well-being.
The starting point is that well-being is composed of many dimensions, e.g. being rich, being beautiful, achieving goals and so on. A crucial observation is that, in a standard theistic world, there is an additional dimension which piles up to the ordinary ones recognized by well-being theorists: the dimension of salvation. In this context, salvation is described as a transition from the spatiotemporal world to an afterlife where the life of a subject continues in some robust sense (though salvation is a term derived from the Christian tradition, the account is meant to stay neutral on whether afterlife must be characterized following some religious tradition or not). Crucially, afterlife must be characterized as a place where natural evil does not occur. In the resulting picture, transitioning from the world to afterlife is a phenomenon which relieves from the principled exposure to worldly pains and suffering.
With these background assumptions my account comes in two steps. In the first step, I defend the apparently striking claim that the impact of salvation on well-being increases proportionally to the presence and the magnitude of natural evils. I contend that transitioning into afterlife after a life in a world filled with horrendous evils is – relative to the dimension of salvation – better than transitioning into afterlife after a life in a world where such evils don’t occur or occur with less magnitude. I do this by showing that salvation should be modelled on the example of the phenomenon of relief, whereby the impact and benefit of relief increase proportionally to the threaten posed by the object of relief. In the second step, I defend the claim that theists should hold that salvation is, indeed, the most important dimension of well-being, on the grounds that it assures to a subject access to afterlife. In the resulting picture the presence of natural evil is not at odds with an omnibenevolent and omnipotent being for there are effects brought about by natural evil which are beneficial to the most important dimension of well-being – salvation. In this setting, it just follows from God’s nature that a world with natural evil must exists: a truly omnibenevolent and omnipotent entity must indeed bring about the kind of world which has the most beneficial effect on the most important dimension of well-being. In a slogan: the presence of natural evil is explained away by its impact on the value of salvation. Of course, atheists are free to reject the account on the grounds that there is nothing like afterlife and salvation, but then they must do so on their independent motives of skepticism towards theism – which should be motivated by something different from the argument from evil.
To conclude, I briefly review a number of reservations about the account. First, I consider how my account relates to utilitarianism in ethics, arguing that it does not entail that human subjects are justified in threatening their peers in order to bring about their relief. Second, I clarify how my account relates to monist and dualist conceptions of afterlife, arguing that, although it is more easily coupled with a monist conception such as the one grazed in Sider’s (2002), it can be squared also with dualist conceptions. Third, I analyze how the account relates to qualitative and non-qualitative facts about human suffering, arguing that it can account for the fact that natural evil is distributed disproportionally across subjects.
References
Cutter, B., & Swenson, P. (2025). ‘The Omission Theodicy’. In Oxford Studies for the Philosophy of Religion.
Hendricks, P. (2024). Skeptical Theism. Palgrave Macmillan.
Plantinga, A. (2004), ‘Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa’. In Peter Van Inwagen, Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil. Eedermans: 1-25.
Sider, T. (2002), ‘Hell and Vagueness’. Faith and Philosophy 19 (1): 58-68.
Chair: Petr Jošt
Time: 05 September, 14:40 – 15:10
Location: SR 1.005
SOPhiA 2026 