Toward a Cross-Cultural Theodicy: Sri Ramakrishna’s Vedantic Response to the Problem of Evil

• In Event: Imagining Origins and Futures: Habitats of Religion and Cross-Cultural Experiments from Modern East and South Asia

Abstract

One especially current topic in the philosophy of religion is the problem of evil: how can an omnipotent and loving God exist if there is so much evil and suffering in the world? Western philosophers of religion have tended to discuss the problem of evil from within a narrowly Christian context, while neglecting non-Western religious perspectives. I propose to broaden the discussion by considering the sophisticated Vedantic theodicy of the nineteenth-century Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886). Sri Ramakrishna’s Vedantic response to the problem of evil has three main components. First, Sri Ramakrishna appeals to the traditional Vedantic doctrines of karma and reincarnation: since one’s suffering in this life is due to one’s own behavior in past lives, God is not to blame. Second, he claims that it is impossible for finite creatures to understand God’s inscrutable ways. Third, Sri Ramakrishna provides a highly original solution to the problem of evil based on his own panentheistic spiritual experience: he claims that nothing exists but God and that evil is a necessary part of God’s “sportive play” (lila) in the universe. I will bring Sri Ramakrishna’s multi-pronged Vedantic theodicy into dialogue with the theodical strategies of prominent Western philosophers of religion, including John Hick, David Ray Griffin, and Stephen Wykstra. Numerous philosophers have begun to nurture the hope that the philosophy of religion will become a genuinely cross-cultural enterprise in the future. This paper takes a small but important step toward realising this hope by sketching the contours of a cross-cultural theodicy.

Author

• Ayon Maharaj, Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University, Belur