Research Links You Can Use If You Should Decided to Write an Essay About Theodicy
Judaism Suffering and the Problem of Evil
The Problem of Evil in a Nutshell
Stanford's Take on the Problem of Evil
Elie Wiesel's Relationship with God
The Theme of Theodicy in Elie Wiesel's Night
Theodicy asks the question: How can God reconcile his assumed all-powerfulness or omnipotence with his assumed all-goodness or benevolence when there is so much evil and suffering in the world?
Why wouldn't a good God, who is all-powerful, intervene and stop evil and suffering from happening on the large scale that it does?
Some religious thinkers or theologians justify evil in this world, saying God is just in allowing it, by arguing that God must give us free will and use evil and suffering to "teach us lessons."
The implication is the following:
We incite our own suffering with our sinfulness. Therefore, our suffering is punishment from God.
We are innocent, but we must endure suffering because suffering is a tool toward gaining more wisdom.
Suffering is an opportunity to grow as a person; therefore, suffering is a gift (and punishment at the same time?) from God (for every example that evidences this, I can find an example that has the oppositive effect, namely, senseless suffering)
Criticism of Theodicy
Critics show that these arguments breakdown when we consider evil and suffering on such a massive scale that it would be cruel and unfair to say that people are being punished by earthquakes, tsunamis, genocide, etc. Not only are they not being punished for any "sins," there is no "lesson" to be learned. Their deaths are senseless.
Another Way of Looking at Theodicy Is Asking the Question: Can We Reconcile Suffering with a Belief in God?
Scholar Bart D. Ehrman tackles this question in his book God's Problem.
As he explored this question in his youth as a devout Christian, he gradually realized he could not answer the question to his satisfaction and he lost his faith, as does the boy in Night (though Wiesel is said to have recovered his faith in a different form).
God does not intervene to feed a hungry child, Ehrman writes. A child dies of starvation every 5 seconds. There is no lesson to be learned from this suffering, no theory of free will that justifies it. A starving child or baby is not being punished for sins. The child is innocent. Nor does a starving baby learn any lesson or wisdom from starvation. Theodicy is a failed and outrageous argument when placed against these examples.
More examples
God does not intervene to save the 11 million killed during the Holocaust. Many babies were thrown into burning ovens while they were still alive. God does not intervene.
God did not intervene when during American slavery when slaves were separated from loved ones, mother and child, wife and husband, and so on.
It would be obscene to say, as some theologians do, that God is using suffering to punish disobedient sinners. In fact, much human suffering is senseless and pointless.
We could could example after example of senseless suffering, the kind of cruel, pointless suffering that has no meaning and we could conclude from these examples that there is no way to reconcile a just, benevolent, all-powerful God with the amount of suffering in the world.
The Dangerous Implications of Failed Theodicy
If we agree that theodicy, the attempt to justify God in the face of suffering, is not convincing, where does that leave us? What are the implications?
If we reject God, we are deluded if we think we are going to reject religion. All of us are religious whether we know it or not.
Alfred North Whitehead defined religion as what you do in private. In other words, where your heart lies your religion lies also. Where your obsession lies, so does your religion.
There are many religions that belong to the self-described "non religious":
humanitarian
self-interested altruist
money
pleasure (hedonism)
nihilism, the belief in nothing
Me
conformity and obedience
mediocrity ("I'll just get by doing the bare minimum")
my favorite sports team
self-pity
victimization
revenge ("I don't get mad; I get even.")
consumer technology
Materialism is a religion:
Apple products
Mini Cooper
Prius
BMW
Mercedes
So Wiesel had to replace one religion for another:
His faith changed from unquestioning to questioning and angry. His anger doesn't show a rejection of God but a hunger for justice, which he believes comes from God.
For those in the concentration camps who lost faith in God, where did they go from there?
For some, having no faith in God meant "anything goes." The thinking is, "If there is no God, there's nothing for me to do but give in to my basest appetites, to indulge my whims and desires, to do whatever the hell I want, because life doesn't amount to a hill of beans."
For some, thinking the above thoughts appears liberating: "Lucky me, I just discovered that there are no rules, there is no morality, there's nothing I have to do. Therefore, I can do anything I want. I'm free. I have complete freedom."
But what is "freedom"?
And here lies the danger of rejecting God, according to some, because life experience teaches us that "freedom" is equivalent to self-indulgence and immorality and that the self-indulgent, those who live in accordance with there pleasures, are not free at all but slaves to the hedonic treadmill, the futile grasp of pleasure which becomes more and more elusive and numbing, resulting in despair, anguish, and nihilism.
Nihilism is living life as if there is no meaning, as if nothing matters, as if nothing is at stake. If nothing matters, just live life for pleasure till you die.
That is nihilism in a nutshell.
Wiesel saw what happened to people who embraced nihilism after they suffered living in the concentration camps and he saw that nihilism is not a viable response.
Nihilism is the rejection of morality and meaning often prompted by no longer believing in God. Wiesel was tempted to be a nihilist but he rejected nihilism. Why?
Seven problems with nihilism:
One. Just because we feel God is indifferent to suffering doesn't mean we should be indifferent to it. Our humanity depends on not being indifferent.
The problem with applying failed theodicy is faulty comparison. If we reject an all-powerful God who does not intervene in the world's suffering, we should not apply God's presumed indifference with our moral behavior because we're human; no one ever said we were all-powerful or that we were indifferent.
In fact, the purpose of life is struggle in the face of inexplicable evil and suffering. That is meaning. That is also Wiesel's message.
Two. We can look at the woeful consequences of nihilism and hedonism: numbing and despair. Self-centered pleasure seeking always puts us on the hedonic treadmill, meaning we soon become numb to the stimulation that used to give us pleasure. We increase the stimulation more and more but this proves feeble and self-destructive.
Three. We cannot be nihilists because we are equipped with sympathy and empathy.
Most of us, in fact, with the exception of sociopaths and clinical narcissists, have sympathy and empathy, and these qualities compel us to reach out toward the suffering. Societies that flourish are built on trust, which cannot exist without empathy.
Four. Nihilism leads to misery. In contrast, helping others, self-interested altruism, helps us attain more happiness than nihilism. In fact, people who help others rank highest on the Happiness Index. There is a certain "selfish altruism" or "self-interested altruism" in helping others.
Wise people know that helping others makes them happy.
Five. Happiness is increased, not from nihilism, a false freedom, but from social reciprocity ("You help me and I help you"). Cultures that flourish have high levels of social reciprocity and self-interested altruism. See Elizabeth S. Anderson essay on this topic. Here is another link to the same essay.
Six. Elie Wiesel's Night is implicitly anti-nihilist because in writing the book there is a message:
It is necessary to expose evil and to expose the truth. It is necessary to record an accurate version of history. There is real history and fake history. There is truth and falsehood, but the nihilist doesn't care. For the nihilist, there is no truth or falsehood. Everything is the same old B.S.
But there is truth and the truth matters. For example, in Wiesel's memoir Moishe the Beadle has seen the truth, the evil of the Nazis, and no one believes him. Their disbelief and denial comes at their own peril.
Likewise, Wiesel's memoir, an account of an evil that takes place, is ignored or denied at our own peril. Wiesel, who lost his faith in his childhood God, still believes in truth and in telling the truth. He is no nihilist.
Seven. If in losing your faith, you go the opposite direction, embracing nihilism, you are committing an either/or fallacy. "Either I embrace my definition of God and religion or I throw morals out the window." This is lame. You can lose your faith in a particular God or religion but maintain morals. Why would you abolish morals? Would you marry someone with no morals? Of course not. Morals are the foundation of trust.
How Would McMahon Write an Essay for Night If He Were an English 1A Student?
I would probably do one of these two strategies:
Thesis One:
While clearly the God of Wiesel's childhood failed him completely, his memoir Night is not a book of nihilism and despair. To the contrary, Night is a moral force evidenced in four powerful ways. First, as a powerful narrative, the memoir offers first-hand testimony, which is crucial for us to remember the Holocaust, an antidote to forgetting. Second, Wiesel's book evidences a desire to prevent us from being apathetic but to be vigilent about the possibility of this type of evil recurring. Third, Night contradicts those anti-Jewish Holocaust deniers who assert their pseudo-history on the world. And finally, Wiesel's book offers testimony that evil can exist on a grand scale that cannot be defined or explained away by psychology and science.
Thesis Two:
My research into the various explanations for the evil behind Hitler and Nazism has made me conclude that the use of science and psychology to explain evil in fact denies evil and as such is harmful for our understanding evil. The scientific and psychological explanations are wrong for several reasons, not the least of which are they are compelled by the fear to look at raw evil in the face; they are often influenced by the arrogance of science and psychology that thinks it can come up with an explanation for all things, including evil; they often resort to absurd over simplifications to come up with their explanations; and perhaps worst of all their explanations often implicitly excuse the evil behavior by, one, arguing that no behavior can be truly evil (but simply misguided) and that, two, this misguided behavior is born from victimization so that we portray the evil doers as victims of forces they cannot control.
Some Research Paper Reminders
1. Use the 80-20 Rule: Eighty percent of the essay should be written in your own voice; twenty percent should be quotations, paraphrases, and summaries of your research.
2. Use headers.
3. Use Times New Roman 12 font with black ink and double-space.
4. Do not 4-space between paragraphs.
5. Every new paragraph should have a five-space indent.
6. Your essay should be stapled in the upper left corner. Don't put your essay inside a plastic sheath or folder.
7. Use MLA Works Cited: Use the book, my blog, and 2 other sources of your choice.
8. Because the book is a memoir, you'll use the past tense when summarizing the narrative, but you'll use present tense when writing your argument:
In Night, Wiesel saw so much suffering he began to question his faith. We see that the loss of faith presents a meaning of life crisis. How can we replace the religion of our childhood with a new faith that fits our new vision of the world?
Writing Commons Checklist with Format Video
2-page checklist you can print for your records
One. Using the Toulmin model, write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion that the evil witnessed in Elie Wiesel's Night eradicates the philosophical notion of theodicy (the reconciliation of an all-loving, all-powerful God to the existence of evil).
For an argumentative paper such as this one, refer to the Chapters on writing arguments in How to Write Anything, pages 66-95.
Three. Related to the above essay prompt, some might argue that the fate of the people in Elie's town was that they suffered from a "failure of imagination." Or more specifically when presented with the evil of the Nazis, they could not believe or comprehend such evil. Therefore, they could not prepare for it.
In this context, write a cause and effect analysis of the way we tend to deny evil and how this capacity for denial results in our destruction. You might compare the evil rendered in Night with the denial that preceded the 9/11 attacks. Or you could use another example.
Four. In the context of Night, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the question if Hitler and his minions were crazy sociopaths or sane evil, manipulating agents. Or both. Explain.
It might help for you recognize that a sociopath is not delusional but does evil without any pangs of conscience while a psychopath is delusional. Must a person be one or the other? Can a person be both?
Five. Write a literary analysis of Night by showing how the book uses literary motifs (night or darkness, fire as hell, fear, and corpses as the walking dead) to develop the narrative structure. For help with this prompt, you might refer to the chapter on literary analysis in How to Write Anything on pages 184-212.
Is There Redemption in a Book That Shows So Much Evil?
Two. Using the Toulmin model, write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion that the evil witnessed in Night bears moral witness to the truth and points to "freedom from the prison" and this moral agency gives Night its redeeming value.
In other words, we must have accounts that bear witness to evil in order that we don't make the error of denying evil and history and to insure accountability for those responsible. Otherwise, we will rewrite history and these revisionists histories are false.
Some however would argue that the evil evident in the book serves no purpose other than for us to embrace a nihilistic worldview; therefore, they would argue, the book has no redeeming value.
In the above essay prompt, you would be well served to evaluate the book's redeeming value by looking at its value in terms of using a criteria. We see how to apply a criteria or standard on pages 112-114 in How to Write Anything.
Here's a sample criteria or standard I would apply to the above essay prompt:
1. Is the book true?
2. Is the book moral?
3. Does the book contain a moral lesson we can use to better our lives?
4. Does the book connect with a wide audience by appealing to universal concerns?
Evidence That Night Is Not Just Preaching the Gospel of Nihilism: It is a stunning achievement.
The book gives us a picture of unspeakable evil, a teenage boy’s firsthand account of the Holocaust, one that some people cannot comprehend or believe.
This is "evil off the grid" that cannot be explained with words or exposition. Rather, we need a narrative, a rendering, a showing of evil.
In other words, Wiesel has done the impossible: He's used words to describe the unspeakable.
Through this first-person narrative, we experience the horror of loss and evil as seen through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy, a boy who, before being taken away to a concentration camp, believes in the wisdom of his father and the justice of God.
These beliefs are challenged, or rather abolished, as Wiesel sees evil take over the world in the face of a silent God. He sees a world surrendering to evil as his father, an image of strength, can only watch on helplessly.
Another achievement of the book is the way it makes us examine the nature of evil. We often attempt to reduce evil to a theory to create the illusion of control but in reading Night we see that evil has an element of mystery that is unexplainable.
Many people want to explain evil, reduce it to a scientific explanation because they can't accept evil, they can't accept an evil force and because they want to further their own theory as part of their self-interest.
Night the memoir is not a theory about evil; it’s a boy’s experience of evil, an evil of such magnitude that his faith is changed forever. He recreates the ordeal of going through evil no one could have imagined and what this ordeal did to his faith.
Night Is a Necessary Book Because to This Day There Are Those Who Deny the Holocaust.
Book Consulted: Denying History by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman
One. The Doctrine of the Deniers
Six million Jews did not die.
The German state did not have a policy to exterminate Jews with the gas chambers
Legit, mainstream historians are “revisionists,” those who rewrite history to push an agenda, the “pro-Jew” agenda.
The Jews invented the lie of the Holocaust to use their victimization as a power play over others.
Two. Anticipating the Deniers
After World War II during the liberation of those imprisoned in the concentration camps General Dwight D. Eisenhower foresaw that people would deny or not believe the horrors of the Holocaust so he ordered a gathering of evidence and documentation in every conceivable way.
Eisenhower knew that cynics would dismiss the Holocaust in part by saying “the winners write history but it’s not an accurate history.”
Three. What Is History?
There are three types or “tiers” according to Michael Shermer.
Historical Objectivity, Historical Relativism, Historical Science.
First Tier: Historical Objectivity, let the facts speak for themselves and do no interject opinion. It consists of 7 principles:
- History exists outside the minds of historians.
- Historians discover the past as astronomers discover the cosmos.
- Historians can know and describe the past.
- Historians can be unbiased.
- One historical event leads to another in a series of cause and effect.
- Historians can discover this cause and effect objectively.
- Historians must show the past “as it actually happened.”
According to Shermer, the problem with the first tier is it denies something called interpretation. You simply don’t just record events. You must interpret them. The first tier woefully ignores this fact. Because we are always interpreting events, the first tier DOES NOT EVEN EXIST. IT’S A MYTH.
The Second Tier: Historical Relativism, the Seven Principles
- History only exists in the minds of historians.
- Historians construct the past the way a sculptor constructs a figure out of marble.
- Historians construct the past with partial documentation that always gives only a partial, incomplete, and therefore unreliable history.
- Historians can never purge themselves of bias, unconscious or otherwise.
- There is no logical cause and effect between contingent historical events.
- Historians impose their own causal structure on history to give themselves the illusion of order.
- Historians cannot show history; only one flawed interpretation of it. Therefore, one version of history is just as valid as the next one. All versions of history are valid, which means none are.
Problems with the Historical Relativism Approach.
If relativism is true, we can know nothing, and if we can know nothing, then communication is stupid, feeble, and not worth trying.
If nothing can be known, then there is no meaning, only nihilism, the belief that our existence amounts to nothing.
The historical relativist suffers a paradox: As soon as he “makes history,” he contradicts his belief that there can be no real history. He has in effect admitted the futility of his own mission.
The Third Tier: Historical Science, the Seven Principles
- History exists both outside and inside the heads of historians.
- Historians both discover and describe the past the way a natural scientist discovers and describes natural phenomena.
- Historians can discover and describe a defined portion of the past through the available data.
- Since historians will always be partly biased, the real question is the quality and degree of the bias. By what methods and with what evidence do scientists arrive at a particular conclusion? And in what cultural context? And with whose funds?
- The past does have a causal structure that we can see with scientific evidence.
- Recognizing the objective nature of discovery and the subjective nature of description, historians can discover and describe the causal structure.
- Historians’ job is to present this past as provisional interpretation of “what actually happened” based on current available evidence , much as natural scientists do with evidence from the natural world.
It is only this final tier, the historical one, according to Shermer, that is legit and without contradictions.
Using Historical Science to Authenticate the Holocaust
We have a “convergence of evidence” that shows the Holocaust really did exist. This evidence includes:
- Written documents.
- Eyewitness testimony
- Photographs
- The camps themselves
- Inferential evidence: population demographics, for example.
The Conditions That Pointed to the Extermination Camps Many Years Before
Nazis developed sterilization and euthenasia programs in the 1930 targeting undesirables. They also used secret murder and deportation as tools to get rid of undesirables.
Link to Common Signal Phrases for In-Text Citations
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