Several years ago, when I was attending Simon Fraser University, I attended the first lecture of a history of philosophy class. It was the first and the last lecture I attended for that class. During the lecture the professor told us that the problem of evil had pretty much destroyed the credibility of claims that God exists. This he mentioned almost in passing and didn’t give any support for his claim, although I can only assume that he tried later on in the course.

If you don’t know what the problem of evil is, it is the claim that, first, evil exists in the world and, second, that the existence of evil is incompatible with a perfect and all-powerful God. Thus, the theory says, God cannot exist.

One year later, I attended the first few courses of a contemporary meta-ethics course, and then quit that class as well. The first few classes were enough for me to grasp where the course was headed, even if I hadn’t yet fully grasped the concepts involved. Now that I have taken a similar course from the University of Waterloo, I can assure you that my first impressions of this course were not unfounded.

I recognized the professor as the same person I had heard talk about the problem of evil the year before. His sweaters were what gave him away. The few lectures I had with this professor have proved to be the most important of my short academic career. Not because he was wise, but on the contrary, because I understood that he had made an error. It is one that I have since encountered in other classes but have never heard clearly pointed out.

To understand what the error was I will have to tell you a bit about what the point of the meta-ethics course was, and what contemporary ethical theory has to say. I plan on an in-depth analysis of modern ethics on this site, but that will have to wait for the time being. Modern ethics should be understood as a search for a rational basis for determining value. “Good” and “bad” are the prime examples of terms that have to do with value. The problem modern ethics has is that while rational arguments usually have factual claims as premises, philosophers have not been able to outline a mechanism whereby premises that are factual claims can lead to valid conclusions about value. If you don’t get it, don’t worry, I’ll explain the problem in more detail another time.

I had always hoped that I would be able to be able to think of a clear argument against the problem of evil. What I have learned over time, however, is that good arguments are extremely difficult to dream up. It’s when I keep my eyes open that I sometimes see what the answers are to questions, but I have never thought up a good argument with my own ingenuity. In this case I saw how the problem of evil could be refuted, and I did so because this professor presented the problem of evil and modern ethical theory in such a way that the inconsistencies between them were blatant. The strange part is that I probably wouldn’t have been able to see these inconsistencies if I wouldn’t have dropped out of the classes. Go figure.

What the few short lectures I did have with this professor made me see was that the history of modern ethics is the argument against the problem of evil. Modern ethics shows that if you assume that there is no God, you will be left with definitions of value that are based on social construction. Yet it is essential to the problem of evil that, if it is a meaningful problem at all, value terms such as evil must have a factual basis. So my professor in one class asserted that evil is a factual reality in the world, and therefore that God’s existence entails a contradiction, and in the next class asserted that values are human constructions. He has to be wrong somewhere.

I will be discussing these matters further, but I intended this as a short introduction into some of the issues I will be discussing in the coming months. Hopefully, I will be able to clearly present the theories of modern ethics and a full discussion of the concept of value. Some of the things I will discuss, and I think are relevant to any discussion of the problem of evil, are the is-ought gap and the Euthyphro problem, among others. Again, if you haven’t heard of these, I will fill you in, so stay tuned.