Unification theology, as presented in the Divine Principle and elsewhere, gives an elaborate account of the origin of evil. It asserts that evil originated in the fall of man, and claims that this fall was instigated by the being who became Satan through the process. Divine Principle discusses the question of God's role in the origin of evil, but does this in a novel way: it presents a number of reasons why God did not intervene in the process of the fall to prevent the occurrence of evil. Unification theology does not, however, present an explicit theodicy, although it has a basis on which a theodicy can be constructed, and Unification theologians have presented many reflections on and developments of this matter.

Unification theology does modify or limit the power of God, or at least limit God's power to contravene human choice and action, and in that it has affinities with process theology. It also asserts that the humans were immature and growing toward perfection when they fell, and that their growth to perfection was something for which they were partly responsible. Their situation presented them with moral choices which they had to resolve in the right way in order that their growth could take place. In this, Unification theology is quite similar to Irenaean theodicy. (Note 15)

Unificationism's handling of the problem of theodicy seems to me, however, to be at its core and in its motivation much more like what Dostoevsky gives us than what is given in any of the received Christian (or other) theological or philosophical accounts. Unification piety based on the oral tradition and common practice seem to me to adopt something very much like Dostoevsky's solution to the problem of seeming divine evil. This piety and oral tradition present many stories of people and their lives and actions -- especially stories about Rev. Moon and his faithful disciples -- and shows that they have overcome adversity, empathized with the suffering of God and of humans, and have accomplished many feats of faith and action, and thereby spread goodness and well-being. These lives have had that effect in spite of adversity and of seemingly hostile circumstances and providence.

It is accurate to say, in fact, that the dramatic story of God's desire, His suffering, His hope, and His history (i.e. the history of His interaction with humans, with Satan, and with the world) is the central matter of Rev. Moon's preaching and teaching, and that this preaching and teaching forms the core of Unification piety and the impetus for the dynamism of the Unification Church and its members and activities. Most Unification members would probably testify to having had some personal experience of God's suffering, suffering that came about because of the fall and because of repeated instances of evil. This gives Unification piety an enormous impetus toward working to relieve God's suffering through solving, eliminating, or doing away with evil and its consequences.

In addition, Unification doctrine and piety have an enormous emphasis on and certainty of the immanent eschaton, an eschaton, however, which can be achieved only through human work, effort and sacrifice. The stories of people who have achieved something in advancing this present immanent eschaton are, then, of very great importance both in assuring Unification Church members that the eschaton is at hand and can be brought about, as well as in spurring them on to more and greater feats of faith, sacrifice, endurance and accomplishment.

Unification theology claims that God is not responsible for the moral evils that befall us, and indeed that God does all that is possible to avoid them, but God is bound by the choices made by humans. It asserts that God's creation of man and His giving the characteristics and circumstances that were given to humans was an act of love, love which would also risk being hurt. Much of this doctrine is, in practice, conveyed in the form of stories about Biblical and other characters, and about God. This has been called a process of "re-mythologization." (Note 16)

The task of Unification piety and practice, then, is to persuade humans to make the choices that will lead to God's victory, which will, it is asserted, also lead to human well being. Those choices must conform to God's will and principle in order that goodness result. Unificationism asserts that God's heart and will and purpose can be known -- it seems to say that this can be done through God's prophets, through divine revelation, and so on, but it is somewhat vague about how we may distinguish between veridical and false representations of the divine -- and that religions have the task of truly apprehending these and of making them known to all people. It also asserts, however, that to do this and to carry out the divinely appointed task and mission, people and religions must unite on and work on and achieve a higher dimension than has heretofore occurred. The stories told in the oral tradition have the function of reinforcing these challenges and possibilities.

The existence of evil often seems to be such clear evidence of either the evil or the powerlessness of God and/or religion that many people have concluded that God and/or religion cannot or should not be defended. But the alternative to alliance with God is rebellion, and rebellion, as Dostoevsky suggests and as historical events in the twentieth century seem to demonstrate, (Note 17) leads to much worse consequences, even in the dimension over which the rebellion took place. So we are warranted in concluding, I think, that God's goodness is at least greater than the goodness of any person who presumes to base goodness on some human perception, i.e. we can conclude that theistic humanism is better and offers greater hope than anti-theistic or atheistic humanism.

Here I have not discussed the problem of good or acceptable versus bad or unacceptable religions, except incidentally in connection with Dostoevsky's contrast of Fathers Zosima and Ferapont. It is surely clear to everyone that some religions, or even some things from all of them, must be rejected as indefensible. A fuller discussion of the problem of theodicy would need to separate between indictments of religion and indictments of God, discuss the issue of how to distinguish or separate good from bad religions or religious practices, and discuss the problem of whether the existence of false or bad religion and religious practices means that God should be charged with evil or failure. Solving that problem would almost certainly require discussion of the problem of revelation, with an attempt to answer the question of how we might distinguish between true or reliable revelations and false or unreliable ones. (Note 18)

A thorough solution to the problem of theodicy and the goodness of God and religion may not be possible. The problem of natural evil seems to me to be especially resistant to solution. I do think that Unification theology -- or, more accurately, an extended Unification doctrine based on Unification theology and other Unification doctrines, but expanded and further developed -- offers some promise of being able to answer many of the most serious and important indictments of God and of religion. For the most part, however, this still remains as a task to be achieved, rather than an accomplishment to be celebrated.

Parts of this paper are revisions of sections taken from my earlier papers: "Is God Good and Can God be Defended?" presented in Theme Group Three, "In Defense of God," at the New ERA Conference "God: The Contemporary Discussion, III," Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico, December 30, 1983, to January 4, 1984; "Dramatic Art and Religion," presented in Theme Group Three, "Religious Art; Images of the Divine," at the New ERA Conference on "God: The Contemporary Discussion, IV," in Seoul, Korea, August 9-15, 1984; and "Unification Thought and Religious Knowledge," presented in Committee VII of ICUS XIII, Washington, D.C., September 2-5, 1984.

Young Oon Kim presents an excellent introduction to the problems of theodicy in her An Introduction to Theology (New York: The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, 1983), pp. 67-71.

1. A few philosophers and theologians, such as Alvin Plantinga, have argued otherwise, claiming that there is not any necessary logical contradiction in asserting the conjunction of all those claims or clauses. What is at stake in those discussions is an investigation of how the rather cryptic and compressed assertions in each of those clauses is to be understood or "unpacked." In particular, those discussions usually argue that for God to be fully loving and powerful and competent does not necessarily logically require Him to solve every evil that exists. See Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1967).

Among other discussions of these issues are the various papers in Nelson Pike, ed., God and Evil (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964); Edward H. Madden and Peter H. Hare, Evil and the Concept of God (Springfield, Il: Charles C. Thomas, Publishers, 1968); Nelson Pike, "God and Evil: A Reconsideration," Ethics, LXVIII (1958), p. 119; Terence Penelhum, "Divine Goodness and the Problem of Evil," Religious Studies, II (1966), p. 107; Edward H. Madden and Peter H. Hare, "Evil and Inconclusiveness," Sophia, XI (1972), pp. 10 ff.; Austin Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961); and Dewey J. Hoitenga, Jr., "Logic and the Problem of Evil," American Philosophical Quarterly, IV (1967), pp. 121, 122.

2. The most thorough presentation of the process account of limited divine power occurs in Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes (Albany: The State University of New York Press, 1984); see also David Ray Griffin, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976).

3. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 2nd. ed., 1977); see also Hick's article, "The Problem of Evil," in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1967), 3:136-141. My account here of Augustine, Leibniz and Irenaeus is based on Hick's presentation.

4. Hick, for one, favors the Irenaean account.

5. Anselm's discussion of this is contained in De Casu Diaboli. An English edition is Anselm of Canterbury, Truth Freedom and Evil: Three Philosophical Dialogues, trans. and ed. by Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Harper Torchbooks, 1967), pp. 145-196.

6. Some philosophers and theologians have questioned whether there really is or should be such a distinction. Without entering into that discussion, I will assume here that the distinction can be upheld.

7. The term 'falsification' is used here instead of a reference to lack of verification because the verificationist program has been shown conclusively to be defective, but the requirement for falsifiability, while it has been attacked as also untenable, may be considered to be a minimum requirement for something to be truly scientific. The locus classicus for discussions of falsifiability as a counterproposal to verifiability is the writings of Karl Popper, especially his The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1959; New York: Basic Books, 1959).

All of Popper's subsequent books have dealt with this issue at length and expanded or refined his previous views. The best introduction to and summary of Popper's work occurs in his own "Autobiography of Karl Popper," in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Popper, The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. XIV, in 2 Books (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974), bk. 1, pp. 3-181. An excellent account -- so good that I consider it essential -- of the downfall of the verificationist program and its replacement with a critical (falsificationist) theory is given in Walter B. Weimer, Notes on the Methodology of Scientific Research (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1979).

A seminal discussion of and expansion of Popper's falsificationist program occurs in Imre Lakatos's article, "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs," in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (London & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

8. Evidence for this claim seems to me to be ubiquitous and overwhelming. Darwin, Marx (with Lenin) and Freud are the most important intellectual fathers of modernity, and each of them rejects religious answers or solutions to the problem at hand; Marx and Freud also seem to reject God. Much of the film and drama of the twentieth century is explicitly anti-religious, cf. Christopher Durang's drama, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All For You, and the films of Eisenstein, Bunuel, Cocteau, Hawks, Bergman, Fellini, Coppola, Altman, Fassbinder, and many others, including all the current "youth-market" films coming from Hollywood. The whole tenor of Western culture in the twentieth century is overwhelmingly secular, despite some important counterexamples.

9. Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. vii.

10. One edition of the Dostoevsky novel is the Norton Critical Edition: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, ed. by Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1976); all citations here are from that edition. This edition also contains critical commentaries on the novel, including that of Camus. An English edition of Camus's work is Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. from the French L'Homme Revolte by Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956).

11. Dostoevsky's work is parochial and anti-modern, however. For that reason it is not really a good answer to the dramatist's problem in the twentieth century. In this century it is almost impossible to produce a dramatic work -- theater, film, or novel -- which is of great intellectual and aesthetic merit and at the same time religion-affirming or God-affirming. Most religion-affirming or God-affirming drama in this century has been sappy and embarrassing.

12. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. by Anthony Bower (New York: Knopf, 1956). The section of The Rebel dealing with The Brothers Karamazov is reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition, op. cit., and my citations are from that edition, pp. 836, 837.

13. Nathan Rosen, "Style and Structure in The Brothers Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor and the Russian Monk)" in Russian Literature Triquarterly, I, (1971), 1, 352-365. Reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition, op. cit., pp. 841-851. My presentation here of Dostoevsky's points in reply to Ivan's accusations of God owes very much to Rosen.

14. But see note #11 above on this problem. Since Dostoevsky's work is from and of the nineteenth century, it may offer little help to the dramatist of the present day.

15. There is a growing literature on Unification theodicy. Besides Young Oon Kim's various books, there are presentations on and discussions of this issue in several of the conference proceedings from conferences sponsored by New ERA and the Unification Theological Seminary. One is by Stephen Deddens, "Toward a Unification Theodicy," presented at the New ERA Conference, "God: The Contemporary Discussion, II," Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, December 30, 1982 to January 4, 1983.

Jonathan Wells has written an important (but unpublished) work on the topic; see also his "Fall of Man Lecture," in Darrol Bryant, ed., Proceedings of the Virgin Islands' Seminar on Unification Theology (Barrytown, NY: The Unification Theological Seminary, 1980), pp. 47-55, and the discussions following on pp. 55-59, and pp. 70-79.

Other Unification theologians have also written and spoken on this question. See, for example, my papers and the papers of Dagfinn Aslid, Klaus Lindner, Andrew Wilson and Anthony Guerra, as well as the transcript of various discussions in Frank K. Flinn, ed., Hermeneutics & Horizons: The Shape of the Future (Barrytown, NY: The Unification Theological Seminary, 1982). 30. See Frank K. Flinn, "The New Religions and the Second Naivete: Beyond Demystification and Demythologization," in Ten Theologians Respond to the Unification Church, Herbert Richardson, ed. (Barrytown, NY: The Unification Theological Seminary, 1981), pp. 41-59.

16. See Frank K. Flinn, "The New Religions and the Second Naivete: Beyond Demystification and Demythologization," in Ten Theologians Respond to the Unification Church, Herbert Richardson, ed., (Barrytown NY: The Unification Theological Seminary, 1981), 41-59.

17. I have not discussed the history of twentieth century rebellion against God and religion in this paper. The greatest evils of the twentieth century have been perpetrated, I believe, by the Nazis, the Fascists, and the Communists, all of whom owe their paternity to Lenin, who was virulently opposed to religion and to divinity. One could say that Dostoevsky was remarkably prescient in foreseeing that the rebellion he spoke of leads directly to Leninism.

It is also true that very great evils have been committed by devout religious believers, even while using religious texts or themes to justify what was being done, such as the instigation of apartheid in South Africa by devout followers of the Dutch Reformed Church. I think it is accurate to say, however, that an impartial weighing of the scope and amount of evil committed would conclude that far greater evil has been committed by those who have explicitly rejected religion and God than by those who claim to be religious or to be following the divine will. All this is, however, a topic that requires a great deal of exploration. It must be left for another time.

18. I have tried to discuss the problem of false versus true revelation and suggest how they might be distinguished in my "Millennial and Utopian Religion: Totalitarian or Free?" in Joseph Bettis and S.K. Johannesen, eds., The Return of the Millennium (Barrytown, NY: New ERA Books, the International Religious Foundation, Inc., 1984), pp. 119-136.

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