Faith, Logic, and the Problem of Evil

One of the courses I taught at the University of Wisconsin was a seminar on the problem of evil. Over the semester, students encountered classical philosophical and literary treatments of the question. We read the Book of Job, selections from Voltaire and Rousseau, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.

What always struck me, year after year, was how difficult it was to find thinkers who tried to engage this problem without offering simplistic or avoidant answers.

Decades before Elie Wiesel’s play The Trial of God (1979) would attempt to grapple with these questions explicitly, Chaim Grade’s short story “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” first published in Yiddish in 1952, entered this terrain with remarkable force. (The work is available in new English translation by Ruth Wisse which I cite here, and an old film adaptation from 1992.)

Born in Vilna in 1910, Grade, the foremost Yiddish writer of the twentieth century, was educated at the Novardok Yeshivah in Bialystok, a center of the Mussar movement. Although he famously broke with his religious past and became a secular writer, his intellectual and ethical struggle with faith remained with him for the rest of his life and served as an enduring source of inspiration for his work.

Grade’s story opens difficult questions that refuse easy reconciliation. How can an omnipotent and benevolent God allow the suffering of the innocent? Does unjustified evil drain the universe of meaning? Is there a limit to human responsibility? And can Western reason still present itself as a ground for moral life after Auschwitz? To explore these questions, Grade sets his drama on a park bench in postwar Paris.

“My Quarrel” unfolds as a heated conversation between two old acquaintances who encounter one another after the war: Chaim Vilner and Hersh Rasseyner. Vilner, who is Grade’s partial alter ego, has abandoned religious life and embraced Western culture. Hersh Rasseyner has rejected modernity entirely, clinging with renewed intensity to Jewish tradition.

Both men survived the Holocaust. Yet they emerge with opposite conclusions.

Vilner’s faith in God has been shattered, but he still believes in Western culture, in its reason, philosophy, and art. Hersh, by contrast, has lost all faith in humanity and its cultural accomplishments, yet his belief in God has only deepened.

Vilner confronts Hersh directly:

And you, Reb Hersh, do you still believe in God’s particular providence for the Jews? … A miracle happened to you, Reb Hersh, and you were saved. But how about the rest? Can you still believe? (p. 36)

Vilner’s objection echoes the classic philosophical problem of evil. To believe in God after the Holocaust, he argues, requires morally untenable assumptions about divine justice.

Philosophically, the problem is often framed as a triad:

1. God is omnipotent

2. God is benevolent

3. Evil exists

As a fundamental premise of Aristotelian logic, which has shaped much of Western thought, only two of these claims can be true at once. This is known as the law of the excluded middle: either a proposition is true or its negation is true, but both cannot be true at the same time. Applied to theology, when one begins with the premise of a benevolent and omnipotent God, this produces a stark dilemma. Either God exists or evil exists, but not both. If a good God exists, then evil must not. Alternatively, if evil exists, then a good God must not. This framework has long structured Western approaches to the problem of evil.

For many religious thinkers, especially in the Christian tradition, who wished to preserve faith, evil was minimized and denied. Skeptics and atheists, by contrast, accepted the reality of evil and rejected the existence of a benevolent or omnipotent God.

This logic is closely associated with Leibniz’s claim that ours is “the best of all possible worlds” – a position according to which every apparent evil is ultimately justified by its place in a rationally ordered whole.

The debate between Hersh and Vilner can be read alongside an earlier philosophical confrontation between Voltaire and Rousseau following the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.

The Lisbon Earthquake was a catastrophic natural disaster that destroyed much of the city and killed tens of thousands, exposing the fragility of Enlightenment confidence in reason and providence.

Voltaire’s searing satire of Leibnizian optimism, titled Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, rejects the idea that suffering can be dismissed as illusory or necessary for a greater good:

Say, will you eternal laws maintain,
Which God to cruelties like these constrain?
While you these facts with horror view,
Will you maintain that death to their crimes was due?
Can you then impute a sinful deed
On babes who on their mother’s bosoms bleed?
Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found
Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?

Voltaire’s protest targets any attempt to explain away innocent suffering through moral or metaphysical rationalization. Vilner adopts Voltaire’s position. He refuses to declare God’s judgment just. “I can’t and I won’t,” he insists (p. 36).

Rousseau’s response to Voltaire, however, is both ethical and pragmatic. He argues that Voltaire’s pessimism only deepens despair and strips suffering of the consolation faith provides. The optimism and consolation provided by faith, even if metaphysically uncertain, is both moral and existentially necessary.

Hersh echoes Rousseau’s reasoning: “How else could I endure without Him in this murderous world?” (p. 36)

Faith, for Hersh, is precondition for survival.

The Book of Job

At this point, it is necessary to return to the Book of Job.

The Book of Job stages one of the most unsettling narratives in the Bible. Job is introduced as a righteous man, “blameless and upright,” who fears God and turns away from evil. Yet despite his innocence, he is struck by overwhelming catastrophe. In rapid succession, he loses his children, his wealth, and his health. Sitting in ashes, afflicted and bewildered, Job becomes the object of moral scrutiny by his friends.

Job’s friends insist that Job’s suffering must be deserved. If Job is suffering, it means that he must have done something wrong. This logic preserves a tidy universe in which God is just and the world is morally intelligible. Job, however, refuses this explanation. He knows he is innocent, and he will not accept guilt simply to preserve theological coherence. He demands an answer from God. And God eventually responds, but not by offering a moral accounting. Instead, Job is drawn into a confrontation with the limits of human understanding, without being asked to deny either his suffering or his faith.

In The Great Partnership, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks turns to the Book of Job as a response to the problem of evil in which the “law of the excluded middle” does not hold.

Rabbi Sacks argues that Abrahamic spiritualty challenges the Greek framework in which the problem of evil is usually presented. It conforms neither to radical acceptance of evil nor to its denial, and in doing so, it resists the law of the excluded middle.

As he writes: “Abrahamic monotheism is not a religion of acceptance. It is a religion of protest. It does not try to vindicate the sufferings of the world. That is the way of Job’s comforters, not Job.” (The Great Partnership, 240)

The response Sacks describes holds both sides at once. God exists and evil exists. The more powerfully one experiences the reality of God, the more fiercely one protests the reality of evil.

This is why, in the Abrahamic tradition, Sacks explains, it is not the skeptics or cynics who cry out, but the giants of faith like Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Job. They do not abandon God. Instead, they argue with Him, and sometimes…they even manage to reconcile.

Grade likewise offers us no philosophical reconciliation. Nor should he. Instead, after exhausting the argument, Hersh and Vilner accept their irreconcilable differences and end in a warm embrace. The philosophical questions remain unanswered. But the ethical posture shifts from judgment to recognition, and to the acceptance of responsibility for the human other.

A version of this essay previously appeared in The Lehrhaus.