Ravi Zecharias and the problem of evil

Ravi Zecharias recently appeared on The Sunday Special hosted by Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire. Here is a clip of Ravi talking about the infamous problem of evil for believers in traditional monotheism. (Everything below was originally written as YouTube comment, but it was too long so I decided to move it here. Keep in mind that this is not a formal academic essay, so I did not fill in the sorts of details and analyses that I would in something more formal. There are links added to highlighted words that will take you to more detailed expositions. Below is just a glorified YouTube comment...)

Ravi invites the audience to think more clearly about what it means to complain about the existence of "evil" in the first place. The skeptic (the person skeptical of theism) is absolutely right in denouncing evil wherever and whenever it occurs. But what is "evil"? Ravi's point seems to be that skeptics are highlighting examples of things/events/actions that they regard as objectively wrong-- they deviate from objectively binding standards. These things are wrong regardless of human opinion (e.g. rape). Ravi goes on to suggest that if something can be objectively wrong in this sense then it implies that things can be objectively good, and these together imply the existence of a standard that transcends human opinion or imagination, which (Ravi argues) implies some sort of higher order law. Ravi suggests that this in turn requires a moral law giver.

So Ravi turns the argument back against the skeptics as a way of unintentionally arguing for the existence of God, given the premise that actually-objective moral values exist.

Here the skeptic must be honest and acknowledge that the existence of actually-objective moral values cries out for explanation, either in terms of theism, Wielenberg's godless normative realism (i.e. "moral platonism"), or maybe something else. For the sake of argument, let's grant that monotheism definitely has an explanatory advantage here.

(Click here for a good debate on the Euthyphro dilemma, which IMO fails as a serious challenge to modified divine command theory). However, I would argue that Ravi et al (as brilliant as they may be) have missed a yet deeper problem involved here. A skeptic does not have to cite objectively-evil things in order to run a successful PoE argument. We don't need to ask about the co-existence of objective evil with the all-loving God of traditional monotheism. Instead, a skeptic could argue that that the existence of gratuitous suffering (not objective evil, but gratuitous suffering) is inconsistent with the God of traditional monotheism. The argument may still fail, but it's not vulnerable to Ravi's rebuttal here. Here's a different way of phrasing it: A skeptic needn't invoke objective moral evil, but instead may argue that there is an internal tension or an internal inconsistency within the system(s) of traditional monotheism-- this system says that God is simultaneously (1) all-loving or omnibenevolent, which arguably entails wanting the best for his creation and creatures, or at the very least entails that God would not want his creatures to suffer gratuitously (2) all-powerful, which prima facie seems to entail having the power to bring about the best for his creation and (3) omniscient, which seems to entail knowing how to bring about the best for his creation. Ravi adds (4) that God is all-sovereign which arguably is slightly different from (2). But this last point isn't too relevant. In any case, the internal inconsistency concerns the following: (5) Gratuitous suffering exists Notice that (5) doesn't require objective evil in order for the argument to go through. In other words, citing the problem of evil does not require that the skeptic is committed to the existence of objective moral values, and it's also not the case that the skeptic's lack of belief in objective moral values somehow weakens the skeptic's argument. The real issue (or at least another issue) is whether or not the system of traditional monotheism contains within itself an internal inconsistency or tension.
At this point Ravi may be inclined to argue that free will explains much of the suffering, even if it's gratuitous, because free will can be used for evil. (We can get into the intrinsic value of free will and how it applies to this debate if need be, but let's just grant this point to Ravi) In order for a person to be able to freely choose the good then he/she must by the same logic be able to choose bad, including the bad choices of inflicting suffering on others. God won't intervene because doing so would violate their sacred free will. To be fair, what I just wrote is a pathetic summary of the richer free will defenses in the literature, but my point is that for the sake of argument I am granting Ravi the free will defense as far as it goes. Let's just give it to him.

However, this too misses the mark, because it completely and utterly fails to account for the gratuitous suffering of conscious animals (non-human animals) that die slow and agonizing deaths in naturally-occurring forest fires, drownings, predation, etc. It also wouldn't explain the existence of naturally-occurring diseases from parasites, fungi, viruses, etc-- free will doesn't cause animal suffering or disease. Nor could any person's free will cause a six year old child to have bone cancer. At this point Ravi may wish to claim that Adam and Eve's sin caused these natural evils by directly changing the fabric of reality (somehow), resulting in a transformation of the laws of physics, etc. But Adam and Eve, even if they existed, were most certainly not the first human beings, period; the science here is persuasive to anyone except the most closed minded YECs. Extreme animal suffering and diseases were occurring long before (and still long after) humans first came on the scene, and, once more, no human's free will could explain naturally-occurring bone cancer in six year old children.

So, prima facie, there is an internal inconsistency in the concept of traditional monotheism as conceived and outlined by Ravi himself. One does not need to appeal to actually-objective moral evils to make the point. There may be a rebuttal to everything I just said, but Ravi didn't even address this deeper problem, which is unaffected by his analysis. tl;dr: Ravi's response doesn't account for why an all-powerful, all-loving, sovereign God would allow gratuitous suffering in nature -- animals suffering from naturally-occurring ailments and situations, human children getting leukemia, etc. Again, the skeptic doesn't have to label these things "objectively evil" in order for the argument to have force. The idea is rather that there is an internal inconsistency within the system of traditional monotheism, regardless of whether or not these instances of gratuitous suffering are objectively evil.