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Under the Auspices of the Wisconsin-Alpha Chapter of Phi Sigma Tau
By Errol E. Harris, D.Litt.
MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS MILWAUKEE 1977
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-72325
Copyright 1977 Marquette University
ISBN 0-87462-142-8
PRINTED IN U.S.A.
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Prefatory
The Wisconsin Alpha Chapter of Phi Sigma Tau, the National Honor Society for Philosophy at Marquette University, each year invites a scholar to lecture in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas. This year the lecture was delivered on Sunday, February 27.
The 1977 Aquinas Lecture, The Problem of Evil, was delivered in Todd Wehr Chemistry by Professor Errol E. Harris, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Marquette University.
Professor Harris was born February 19, 1908 in Kimberley, South Africa. He earned the B.A. in 1927 and the M.A. in 1929 at Rhodes University College, Grahamstown, South Africa. In 1933 he earned the B.Litt. at Magdalen College, Oxford, and in 1951 the D.Litt. at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, S.A. He began teaching at Fort Hare University College in 1930 and then from 1937 to 1942 he was education officer in the British Colonial Service in Basutoland and Zanzibar. During World War II he served first in the
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South African Information Service and then in the British Army Educational Corps. After the war he returned to South Africa and taught at the University of Witwatersrand. In 1953 he was made head of the department of philosophy in that university. Professor Harris came to the United States in 1956 and served as Visiting Professor at Yale University and then as Professor at Connecticut College until 1962, except for the year 1959-1960 when he was acting head of the Department of Logic and Metaphysics at University of Edinburgh, Scotland. From 1962 to 1966 he was Roy Roberts Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas and in 1966 Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University; he became the John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy in 1974. Professor Harris is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University in the current year.
Professor Harris was the Terry Lecturer (Yale, 1957), the Heinz Werner Lecturer (Clark, 1973) and the Machette Lecturer (Tulane, 1975). He served as president of
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the Metaphysical Society of America in 1968-69.
Professor Harris' study and interest range over the philosophy of science, the theory of knowledge, political philosophy, metaphysics, and the history of modern philosophy. Among his numerous publications are: The Survival of Political Man (1950); Nature, Mind and Modern Science (1954); Revelation through Reason (1958); The Foundations of Metaphysics in Science (1965); Annihilation and Utopia (1966); Hypothesis and Perception (1970); Salvation from Despair, A Reappraisal of Spinoza's Philosophy (1973); Perceptual Assurance and the Reality of the World (1974); and some 40 articles in many journals.
To these distinguished publications Phi Sigma Tau is pleased to add The Problem of Evil.
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The Problem of Evil
I. The Problem for Theology
"The treatment of evil by theology," writes Brand Blanshard, "seems to me an intellectual disgrace."1 My aim in this lecture is to ensure, so far as I am able, that the same indictment shall not be brought against philosophy. In so doing, I hope incidentally to show cause why, in the case of at least two outstanding theologians, it may not justly be brought against all theology, which at least has been aware of the problem virtually from its earliest beginnings.
Since biblical times the experience of evil has presented theists and theologians with what seems an insuperable obstacle to belief in the existence of a benevolent and all-powerful God. Unmerited misfortune and suffering, catastrophic disasters, and human malevolence have always seemed irreconcilable with an omnipotent creator of supreme justice and mercy. With
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this mystery Job and his admonitors wrestled; and their reasonings and protestations were finally silenced only by a declaration of the inscrutability of divine wisdom. But in that pronouncement the question is begged, for to accede to divine wisdom we must understand the principle of its justice, and what remains inscrutable to us we recognize neither as wise nor sensible. There must be some securer foundation for faith in the justice of the inscrutable than its unintelligibility.
In his progress to conversion St. Augustine encountered and overcame this hurdle; but his solution of the difficulty has proved less convincing to many than his statement of the problem:
Whence, then, is evil, since God who is good made all things good? It was the greater and supreme Good who made these lesser goods, but Creator and Creation are alike good. Whence then comes evil?... Could he who was omnipotent be unable to change matter wholly so that no evil might remain in it? Indeed why did He choose to make anything
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