Consider a London businessman thinking whether to send his ten sons to Cambridge or to Oxford. He arrived at an important realization after leafing through the flyers. On one hand, if he sends his sons to Cambridge, they will definitely make significant progress in the sciences and in virtue, so that their merit will inevitably elevate them to honorable occupations for the rest of their lives. If he sends his boys to Oxford, on the other hand, they will eventually become decadent, will turn into rascals, and they will consequently pass from one mischief to another until the law will have to put them in order, condemning them to a number of punishments. But the father, who never doubts the truth of these predictions, still ended up with a decision to send the boys to Oxford.
You might be wondering if this merchant's ideas run counter to logic. Does he want the lads to be miserable and wicked? Does he act contrary to goodness and love of virtue?
The scenario of the merchant mentioned above is not excerpted from a Cambridge undergraduate prospectus, but such is a version of the problem of evil: the age-old question of how an all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful God could allow the presence of evil in the world. It was a controversial French philosopher, Pierre Bayle who lived as a refugee in Rotterdam, who formulated this in the early eighteenth century according to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The problem of evil until today still brings forward in philosophical and theological discussions; however, this is quite often deemed as antiquarian, no longer an essential subject matter for a secular age. 'We' of the modern Western world, not like Bayle and his contemporaries, are unlikely to see natural disasters as a form of 'natural' evil, but rather as a manifestation of bad luck. And even moral evil is every so often diminished to genetics or circumstances. Criminals are intrinsically conditioned by genes or traumas. The question is: who is ultimately to be blamed for anything? However in recent years, it appears that Bayle's ideas have made a not premeditated comeback, in a philosophical milieu that is actually entirely different, and all at once, peculiarly related. This is the controversy on anti-natalism: whether having children is ethically acceptable according to Oxford University Press.
This appears like a subject that could not apparently be further away from the problem of evil, but essentially the two problems are more closely related than what it may seem at first look. In any case, the long-established problem of evil is fundamentally an endeavor to deal with an ethics of creation: how could an omniscient God be justified in creating a being that is destined to experience suffering? Having this in mind, it is possibly not so surprising that Bayle made use of the example of 'bad parenting' in making his point. God, after all, should be the perfect parent, and accordingly, a perfect parent would not create a child knowing that this child would inevitably suffer. One might even go beyond: on this point, a perfect parent would never decide not to (pro)create.
The step from the problem of evil-which entails the ethics of creation-, at this juncture, to the problem of parenting-which entails the ethics of procreation-may be smaller that it appears. This becomes clear then, if Bayle is compared to another, more recent philosopher, such as David Benatar who had enthused extensive outrage by arguing that procreation is never morally acceptable; that it is unarguably true for every individual that it would really have been better never to have been.
Bayle could not actually have approved more. Both Bayle and Benatar argue along similar lines in raising their extremely controversial notions. But both philosophers agree on the point that there is evidently more suffering in the world than there is happiness to compensate. The absolute evidence of our own experience is more than enough to prove their point that it is considerably better not to create a being vulnerable to such misfortunes. But if this evidence does not appear to be convincing, both philosophers argue that even the smallest likelihood of such suffering should undeniably convince a truthfully responsible prospective parent-be it human or divine-to stop from creating/procreating. Following logic, we may even take risks in our own lives without being justified in putting such risks and their consequences, on another individual, even if that being does not yet exist.
When confronted with philosophers like Benatar or Bayle, it is rather tempting to dismiss their arguments as simply preposterous or heretical or even contrary to common sense. This was an inadequate response to Bayle, and an insufficient response to Benatar. The problem of evil will always continue to linger in philosophy, religion and humanity. But regardless of their shapes and guises, the problem of evil still has in store for us. It is truly the test of every age if taken seriously.
