I would describe my current view as skeptical theism, which means I don’t think any of us have enough knowledge to determine if an evil is gratuitous or not. To know that we would have to know every possible past and contingent future. I can’t say whether or not malaria is a necessary evil, because I don’t know how evolution could have occurred in every possible universe, nor do I know God’s plan for the future and how its existence might be used by him. That’s why I disagreed with Rope’s title, “Why Evolution Does Not Make the Problem of Evil Worse,” and thought that yours was more appropriate (“Why We Cannot Know Whether Evolution Makes the Problem of Evil Worse”).
I recently read a book, Theology of the Manifest by Steven Nemes, which attempted to cut through all the metaphysical bullshit that often plagues philosophy and theology (that you and @Roy have often complained about), and develop a purely phenomenological theology. I found his comments on the problem of evil at least interesting:
This version of the argument [from evil] is probabilistic in nature. The idea is that the existence of God is improbable in proportion to the probability that certain evils in the world are gratuitous as defined above. By way of response, some philosophers deny that the existence of gratuitous evils is actually incompatible with God’s perfect goodness. Interesting as that line of argument may be, the present work is sooner concerned with the epistemic status of the judgment that an evil is gratuitous. The position called “skeptical theism” denies that such evaluations of evils can be justified. This is also the line of attack to be taken here, although as approached from a specifically phenomenological perspective.
The question is whether a person can come to a justified judgment that some evil that takes place in the world is gratuitous. It was noted earlier (§2) that a judgment is typically formed on the basis of an appearance; people form judgments as a way of expressing how things seem to them. Someone might therefore propose that certain evils seem gratuitous. Perhaps one just intuitively “sees” that they are gratuitous, or perhaps the reason why they seem gratuitous could be that the concerted effort to discover or to conceive of a justification for them has until now fallen short. Nothing one can see or imagine seems adequate to the task of justifying the evil with which one is presented in the World. Indeed, prolonged reflection on the evils one can find in reality serves for many people only to strengthen the conviction that they are gratuitous. Nothing in fact can make sense of why they happen. It would be one thing if one had an impression only once and under less than certain circumstances; such judgments do not have a firm basis, being founded upon a limited interaction with their object. It is another thing altogether for the same impression to remain after repeated investigation.
This line of reasoning may seem persuasive to some, but it can be seen to be phenomenologically confused in light of the earlier elucidated transcendental structure of experience (§6). Simply put, it is not in fact possible for an evil to appear to be gratuitous stricto sensu. To understand this point, consider what Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes:
For each object, just as for each painting in an art gallery, there is an optimal distance from which it asks to be seen—an orientation through which it presents more of itself—beneath or beyond which we merely have a confused perception due to excess or lack. Hence, we tend toward the maximum of visibility and we seek, just as when using a microscope, a better focus point, which is obtained through a certain equilibrium between the interior and the exterior horizons.
As he says, for every object there is an optimal position from which it demands to be seen. It must therefore be specified from what “position” the gratuity of an evil could appear. Consider how to say that an evil is gratuitous is to say that it is not justified by anything that comes before it, simultaneously with it, or after it in time. The gratuity of an evil is consequently a relation that it bears (or perhaps rather the lack of a certain sort of relation) to all other events in time. And yet, as was pointed out earlier (§§2, 5), relations cannot appear except through the givenness of the relata. The necessary “position” from which such a quality could appear is therefore an essentially transhistorical one located outside of the flow of time; only thence could all events be given at once. Yet it is obvious that such a perspective is impossible for human beings to assume. The awareness of an evil takes place through the mediation of one’s lived body, which is always subject to the flow of time. This lived body is not an instrument through which one becomes aware of things, but rather what one is; one is this lived body that sees, hears, and feels. There can therefore be no escaping the limitations it imposes on one’s vision of things, since one cannot escape oneself. This is how it is impossible for the gratuity of an evil to appear stricto sensu.
Because it is impossible for the gratuity of an evil to appear, this supposed experience of the gratuity of evils must be reinterpreted. The same thing seems to be happening here as in the case of Plantinga’s doxastic experiences mentioned earlier (§5). One’s felt inability to see the meaning or justification of an evil is being projected onto the evil itself as a real property under the name of “gratuity.” One cannot see what good the evil serves or why it is necessary, and this inability to see the justification is interpreted as its nonexistence. And yet these are two different things. Suppose one cannot lift a weight; it does not follow that it is unliftable tout court, but only that it is unliftable-to-one, which is another way of saying that one is unable to lift it. Similarly, from the fact that one is not and cannot be in a position to see the justification of an evil in relation to the rest of history, it does not follow that such a justification does not exist. Indeed, because such a relation is the sort of thing one could never see in principle, given the inhibiting limitations of one’s lived body subject to the flow of time, it becomes clear that what is appearing in such experiences is not actually the gratuity of the evil but only one’s inability to make sense of it. One is “running into” the limitations of one’s sight.
Incidentally, this also seems to be the theodicy (or lack of theodicy?) held by some of the biblical authors, including the author of the book of Job.
), that the “optimal position” to view the gratuity of an evil event is rather closer than a “transhistoric” view – the latter would appear likely to give a false impression that ‘none of this matters in the long run’.