How To Be An Agnostic
complains to his brother Alyosha, that he cannot understand
how the world will ever fi nd the harmony, promised in reli-
gion, of a divinely ordained reconciliation of evil with good. He
takes the extreme case of a tortured child. He knows that God’s
ways are way beyond the power of human understanding, but
he simply cannot conceive of a moment when he could forgive
the torturer of such a child. He runs through various arguments
that are put to dissolve the problem. A philosopher might intel-
lectually side-step the issue by saying that the problem of suffer-
ing is really a subset of the problem of how someone can know
of another’s experience. A humanitarian might say that the
problem of evil must be resolved in forgiveness of even the most
heinous crimes, for only then can suffering stop. But Ivan resists
such ‘solutions’. Even if the child forgave the torturer – even if
the child’s mother forgave him – the tears of the child would
remain spilt, screaming out for atonement. He cannot help but
feel that creation is not worth it, if it costs the suffering of that
child.
Various other answers are offered to the problem of evil.
A philosopher might say that evil is necessary if human beings
are to be moral and free. The argument here is that the corollary
of a world without evil is a world in which everything people
did would automatically be good. This, though, would mean we
could not make moral choices – something that would lessen
our humanity and make us little more than virtuous robots.
Similarly, if someone else argued that any divinity worth its salt
should intervene to save people from suffering, the implication
would be that there were no consequences of human beings
doing evil, since God would prevent it. This would morally
infantilise us.
But for all these apparently unassailable arguments, the suffer-
ing, the evil and the revulsion of what happened to that child
remain. The problem persists, as does the hurdle it represents
for belief in God. This is arguably one message of the book of
Job in the Bible, the story of the man who suffered foul calami-
ties and foul disease, apparently at the behest of God. Although