John Milbank on proving God & the problem of Evil

Below are portions of John Milbank’s response to Stephen Law’s criticism, the entire thing can be read HERE , Milbank talks proof of God, Goodness, and the problem of evil :

"So is there any evidence for this God? Not in the way there is evidence that my house, in which I am now sitting at my desk, hammering out this piece on my laptop, evidentially exists. Rather in the way that the entire world exists and being itself and the ‘thingness of things’, ie ‘reality’ exists. The trouble is, then, that there is just too much evidence that God exists and this is the trap which he sets (if Stephen will forgive me), for the intelligent but unwise – the ‘foolish in their hearts’ of whom the Psalmist speaks. For if everything speaks of God, all things symbolise him, then in a sense indeed nothing does – that is to say, literally no-thing does.

So we are talking about a saturated evidence for God – the world is so soaked in this evidence that no particular aspect or item of the world bespeaks God more decisively than any other, albeit it may do so with more intensity. Is this, as Stephen terms it, ‘pseudo-profound’ evasion on my part? No, because the ‘saturated evidence’ is not really and seriously deniable, save by sophistry. There is a mystery of being and of reality. Reading them as the action of a personal or tri-personal God is one serious attempt at solving the riddle of our existence, though not, of course, the only one and not the only religious one. Nonetheless it is clear that if one does adopt this interpretation, then one is not offering a hypothesis about something within the world, subject to evidence and testing, but a thesis about the world as such, about its universal and transcendental dimensions. How can a proposal that seeks to account for the ‘everythingness of everything’ be subject to proposed counter-instances? It cannot.

The crucial point to make here is that being is not the only transcendental – the only term applying to anything whatsoever and not just to a particular kind of thing. Some other terms like this are equally ‘grey’ – like ‘thing’ and ‘anything’ and ‘unity’ or ‘numerable’. But others are more highly coloured – everything that exists is also ‘true’ because it is the case and holds as such, ‘beautiful’ because without some harmony, even of an ash-heap, nothing at all would be apparent to us. And finally it is also ‘good’ as the God of Genesis sees his creation, because anything we see as evil we immediately see as deficient or distorted, or as lacking in a fullness of existence that it ‘should’ have. Without question the default position is immediately to receive any existing thing not as neutrally grey, as if we were metaphysically colour-blind, but as positively good.

Therefore it is not an ascertainable amount of evidence that gradually accrues to evidence God – a mighty pile of fine facts of benignity – but the saturated transcendental universality of goodness. This includes the fact that the most contaminated thing could not exist at all without some germ of benevolence – the always remaining possibility to imagine that such a dire reality could have been or could even now be made to be better, like wasted Europe after World War Two.

How does all this then relate to Law’s crunch point about the disprovability of an omnipotent good God? The riposte is easy, entirely traditional and follows from what has been said so far. For religious believers, the existence of good things in the world is not evidence of a good power lying behind the world. Rather it is immediately the experience of good as the outflowing to us of a gift – as neoplatonism taught and as any traditional person or child experiences when they look at nature. Equally, the thought of a good to be done is again immediately the thought of the need to impress somewhat upon the world a higher, more real and hidden ideal order. As Prince Charles rightly stresses in his book Harmony, this is again as true for most tribal societies and ancient civilisations as it was for Plato. Therefore to see the good is not to infer God but to receive him.

Again, evil was not first observed and then causally considered, rather it was immediately perceived as a failure of causality, a failure of emanative transmission, a deficiency of reason, a weakening of the good and so of being itself, since existence and its various modes were regarded as inherently benign and wonderful. It follows that there was no problem of evil because evil was, by definition the inexplicable, the monstrous, even the impossible. At the intellectual level this was the mystery of ‘privation’ or of lack, at the popular level of the perversely demonic. In neither case was this seen as evidence against God who is wholly the provider of good (albeit in sometimes mysterious and torturous ways) but rather of cosmic, spiritual and human enmity against God. As Kenneth Surin now long ago pointed out, evil did not in the past pose a theoretical challenge but a practical one. How might it be extirpated? How might we be redeemed?

…insofar as we perceive evil as evil and not just as a fantasised projection of our inconvenience or discomfort, then we also perceive the reality of the good as also not our mere projection but as a true arrival from an ‘elsewhere’. The latter must be presupposed else we would imagine that we had exhausted the plenitude of goodness which in fact defines it.

Even were the world one vast concentration camp, the fact of their remaining one last believer, one last good person, would still carry infinitely more evidential weight for the reality of God than the all-pervasive horizon of accumulating contaminated dust. Indeed, to a certain extent this is just how some Christians do truly perceive a fallen world. Yet for all Christians, the star and stable of Bethlehem vastly outshine the darkness of the Herodian midnight in which the world has always tended to dwell.

It follows that the logic of the evidence of faith is not that of the logic of the laboratory. This evidence is at once so omnipresent as not to be able to be singled out as evidence for one thing or state of affairs rather than another, and yet equally so very particular that just one instance or exception can establish a universal truth or rule. This is all in keeping with the fact that, as Aquinas points out, God exceeds any contrast between universal and individual, abstraction and exemplification. 

How does this relate to the question of theodicy? Clearly the ‘evidence’ for good necessarily outweighs that from evil. But can any amount of evil be compatible with God’s omnipotence? By the logic of privation it can. All being is, just as being, good, and so all action is good and all power. By definition, evil is inhibition of being: an inhibition of action and so of potency. Evil is weakness, a house divided against itself which cannot eventually stand, as Jesus teaches in the gospels. Thus, by definition also, evil is an attempt to deny and resist divine omnipotence which is co-terminous with God’s infinity of act. It is not, then, that the circumstance of evil calls into question divine omnipotence, but that evil ‘impossibly’ attempts to deny and resist it. Only, by contrast, were evil to be wrongly granted real positive force and power would there be any question as to why God authored or allowed instances of malice and suffering.

The question must then be rephrased. How is the impossible possible – the denial of power, action, being and reason, besides the denial of goodness? Here lies a mystery that religion tends (rationally) to recognise as such. Christianity speaks of a ‘fall’. This is meant pre- or meta-historically. The Fall is exactly like a malign transcendental – again not a thing, but a kind of meta-event that taints and stains the entire radiance of being.

Here, after all, is the simple empiricism of Christianity: the world is clearly primarily good if one understands anything whatsoever about ontological priority. (It is usually here important not to be a certain kind of analytic philosopher.) But equally clearly it is tragically riddled with inexplicable natural and cultural evil.

Quite simply then, the doctrines of Creation and Fall tell it as it obviously is. That this obviousness became historically hidden is itself a ruse of fallenness. Thus revelation – everywhere, but supremely with the arrival of God himself as human – was needed in order to disinter the most evident, to unhide the obvious once again. But now for us today to miss this evidence is a further mystery and a further human disaster.

Naturally though, Stephen can still object: if evil is ‘impossible’ in a created universe, then does not the fact that it has nonetheless arisen to despoil existence suggest that we are after all subject to a kind of ‘transcendental illusion’ – that being as good is somehow secretly hollowed out by nullity: an appealing apple that is rotten to the core? Here the religious view is forced to switch from the register of ontology to that of narrative: in particular, the ‘apocalyptic’ perspective as exemplified in the books of Daniel, Enoch (outside the Bible) and the Apocalypse of John (or ‘Revelation’ which brings the Christian Bible to a close). Apocalypse discloses eternal reality to be also (as the German 19th-century romantic idealist philosopher Schelling saw) an eternal ‘Victory’ closing up and closing off history in a struggle that is at once temporal and eternal. 

If God is good and omnipotent, then indeed we have to have faith that evil will be eschatologically overcome and all creatures be restored and redeemed. It is this apocatastasis which the New Testament and many of the Greek Church Fathers teach – the eternity rather than the penultimate character of hell being a disastrous later misreading, itself arguably responsible for the aberrant view that both punishment and then evil itself can have any positive and so seriously ontological aspect.

But is this faith simply irrational? No, because in the face of the baffling and intolerable mystery of evil, we can only proffer hope – hope which is always hope beyond hope, flying in the face of any possible evidence to believe that if good is indeed good, which is to say a reality lurking in all real things as such, then evil must be unnecessary, overcomable and both eternally and eventually, if for now invisibly, indeed overcome.

This hope is naturally linked to our experience that, by enduring evil and forgiving it and seeking to find again the elusive harmony between people, the damage inflicted by evil can be repaired."