Why do bad things happen to good people?

  1. Either God knows all particulars, and therefore knows all the individual acts of suffering that take place in this world
  2. Or God does not know particulars.

If 1 holds, then we have three possibilities:

  • (A) God arranges and manages human affairs well, perfectly and faultlessly;
  • (B) He is overcome by obstacles, and is too weak and powerless to manage human affairs;
  • (C) He knows [all things] and can arrange and manage them, but leaves and abandons them, as too base, low, and vile, or from jealousy

Now, the philosophical argument goes, 1(B) goes against God’s omnipotence, and 1(C) goes against God’s good-ness. So the only remaining options are 1(A) and 2. But

Since we, however, notice that events do not follow a certain order, that they cannot be determined by analogy, and are not in accordance with what is wanted, we conclude that God has no knowledge of them in any way or for any reason,

1(A) cannot be. Thus the only alternative left is 2: God does not know particulars. Indeed, this appears to have been the primary resolution to the problem of evil offered by mediaeval Arabic philosophers. On this point, however, Maimonides vehemently disagrees. “This is the argument which led the philosophers to speak such blasphemous words”.

He lists some of their egregious positions:

  • God cannot perceive individual species but only genii, since individual species can only be perceived by the senses
  • there are an infinite numnber of individuals, whereas knowledge requires the object-of-knowledge to be circumscribed, which cannot be done
  • if God knows things before they come to being, “this implies that there can be knowledge of a thing that does not exist”, or that “the knowledve of an object in potentia is identical with the knowledge of that same object in reality”, since God does not change.
  • some “went as far as to ontend that God knows nothing beside Himself, because they believe that God cannot have more than one knowledge”.

He mounts a many-pronged attack:

  • Firstly, he argues that by using this process of elimination, the philosophers ascribe an even greater imperfection to God (ignorance of particulars) than the imperfection which they held to be inadmissible (that God neglects or forgets things)
  • Secondly, he points out that the argument that ‘God cannot perceive individual species but only genii, since individual species can only be perceived by the senses’ falls flat, since God does not require senses to perceive at all

and leaves the rest to a later chapter.