Greg Ganssle, a member of Yale University's Campus Crusade for Christ, told a crowd of more than 60 people in 13 Carpenter Hall last night that the existence of evil does not mean that God does not exist.
In his speech titled "The Problem of Evil," Ganssle argued that despite evil's pervasiveness, God still subsists. The audience was primarily students, including some philosophy and English majors.
Ganssle's allusions to the popular 1980s film "The Princess Bride," outlandish examples of world evils and unusual arguments about fleas and elephants kept the audience interested throughout the lecture and drew laughter numerous times.
Ganssle said that his goals for the lecture were to explain current philosophical arguments about evil and then to defend theism and the existence of God. He began by stating, "Every sentence of this lecture will be controversial."
Ganssle introduced the audience to the two fundamental arguments regarding the problem of evil: deductive and evidential. He spent the first half of the lecture talking about the deductive arguments, frequently citing John Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence."
The deductive argument, Ganssle explained, introduces an inherent contradiction: the fact that God exists and is wholly good and the fact that evil exists. Appending to the argument, Ganssle said Mackie mentioned additional premises: there are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do, and a good being always eliminates evil as far as it can.
From these statements, Ganssle said Mackie proceeded to logically deduce that God eliminates all evil because he is good, God is powerful enough to eliminate all evil and God eliminates all evil. Therefore, Mackie surmised, there is evil and there is no evil, an obvious contradiction.
Of course, Ganssle said, he did not agree with Mackie's argument. He said the idea that God eliminates all evil as far as He can is not true. Ganssle instead said that a good thing always eliminates evil only when it has a good reason to eliminate the evil.
"Sometimes, I don't let [my daughter] have a Kit Kat bar because she shouldn't eat candy before breakfast," he said. "So, she hurls herself into a spiral of depression that only television can solve."
Ganssle argued that sometimes evil is necessary to allow children to mature. "We tell our kids, 'No' all of the time," he said. "But as good parents, we allow evil to be present in our kids lives."
Additionally, Ganssle said, evil is a natural product of God's creation of free will -- the ability to choose between moral alternatives "without being under compulsion to choose one or the other." He also said that evil creates much of life's meaning, including the concepts of moral responsibility, personal accomplishments and relationships.
Ganssle then continued explaining the evidential argument about evil. This argument, he said, states that if there is unjustified evil, God does not exist. Also, there is probably unjustified evil in the world; therefore, God probably does not exist.
He clarified this point of view by stating, "It seems as though God could have no good reason to allow this evil, and it is probably true that God has no reason to allow it."
Again, as a believer in God, Ganssle said he does not agree with this argument. "It seems like there are no elephants in this room, so there probably are no elephants in this room," he said. He said this was obviously true.
"But, it seems like there are no Carbon-14 atoms in this room. However, I am not so sure," Ganssle said.
Finally, Ganssle discussed the idea of a random universe without God, the problem of labeling evil without a God and mankind's faith in human nature. "Do you lock your rooms?" Ganssle asked. "Why? Do you think God is going to rip you off?" He continued to argue that mankind's moral evil should not shake a person's faith in God.
Ganssle closed the lecture by stating, "Evil is a problem for everybody, not just those who believe in God."
After the lecture, Ganssle answered questions from the audience.
"Why would God allow a young girl to get raped? Why would God use this little person for some master plan?" asked Joshua Papsdorf '98, a philosophy major. "Doesn't he know? Isn't he responsible?"
After some explanation, Ganssle replied, "That is a hard question. I have no idea how God makes that connection. I only know that he is trying to get multiple goals."
Ganssle, who is Christian, graduated from the University of Maryland, earned his Masters of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island and wrote a dissertation about God's relation to time to obtain his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Syracuse University.
