Lonergan on 'the problem of evil and its solution'

[Hugh Williams]

Dear Listers,

A friend provides below something that now compels me, as we enter the solemnity of the paschal mystery, to share an additional and very brief condensed gloss/precise on Lonergan's treatment of 'the problem of evil and its solution'.

It occurs in the latter pages of Insight at a point when, I've been told, Lonergan was exhausted from what he had written before and so this section to some appears 'rushed/hurried' ...

I'm in no position to assess whether this section is 'hurried or rushed', what I can say is that it is, for me, one of the most comprehensive and in depth treatments of the topic I've read from a contemporary Christian thinker.

The problem of evil in Lonergan stems from human intelligence and its desire for God; more specifically, for Lonergan, our will desires the goodness of the love of God. However, our courses of action reflect ignorance and bad will, or ineffectual self-control and thus result in what Lonergan calls the social surd. This consists in our actual experience of ideologies, depressions, wars, environmental degradations which are rooted in competing group egoisms, totalitarian ambitions, and the spread of simple minded opportunism and violence. These in Lonergan's view are manifestations of a deeper and more prolonged cultural crisis located in our human domains of philosophical and theological practice. It is a situation (witness my friend's link below ...) of increasing absurdity, unintelligibility, and irrationality which most disturbingly is not taken as evidence of error and aberration but rather as evidence in favor of error and aberration.

This then is one way Lonergan characterizes the real problem of evil - the surd of sin and its lack of intelligibility. 

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Yet in our faith and in our tradition we hold that the order of the universe is a product of unrestricted understanding, power, and goodness - this we call God.

This God knows our plight and can remedy it, and wills to do so. Thus the fact of evil cannot be the whole story.

If God is good then there is not only the problem of evil ... there is a solution (I prefer the term resolution to solution; here I suppose I'm mixing in a little N. T. Wright...).

A satisfactory solution/resolution to the problem of evil depends on God's help. 

So, belief in God is also a help (so too, I would add, is overcoming obstacles to proper belief).

Since a solution/resolution exists our moral impotence is not the whole story.

The problem is potentially good in the sense of being a potency to a solution/resolution.

Thus the problem and solution/resolution are related from the viewpoint of intelligence and of the good, i.e., a proper theology .....

All of the above is in very general terms, more or less based upon Lonergan, an updated Christian account of (argument for) 

the mystery of God's grace in this world of ours such as it is today ...

Hugh

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My friend writes:

Have a look at the promotion of this precision drone weaponry. The question is how and who, or what AI algorithm separates the bad guys from the good. What are the criteria to eliminate the bad half of a city or ideology? Just imagine when this AI technology gets into the hands of criminal organizations. 

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/gt9TR5SCEuGmb6JE/?mibextid=oFDknk