Transcription
Why did they have to die? Asmath, hey, why do we have to have you? Oh, we wouldn't dream of asking a question like that, sir. Yes, do we have evil?
Time Bandits is a 1981 film directed by Terry Gilliam and co-written by Gilliam and Michael Palin. An 11-year-old boy, Kevin, suddenly finds himself travelling across time with a group of robbers. The robbers have purloined a map of all the holes in time, and with this, they are able to slip in and out of various time periods with stolen riches. The thieves work for the Supreme Being who created the universe. Since the universe had to be made in seven days, the thieves claim that mistakes were made and the foundation has holes in it. Kevin and the robbers are pursued by the personification of evil. The map is extremely valuable and very dangerous in the wrong hands. In the end, Kevin and the robbers defeat evil, and the Supreme Being retrieves the map, revealing that he allowed the robbers to steal it in the first place as a test of his creation.
Kevin awakens in his room, at first giving the impression that this was all a dream, until he discovers the photographs he took on his adventure. His parents touch a piece of evil, and they explode. Towards the end of the film, Kevin asks the Supreme Being why evil must exist. He thinks about it for a moment and then says it has something to do with free will.
It's not too dissimilar to another Python-written film, The Meaning of Life, in which one of the great philosophical questions is given a purposefully unimpressive or unsatisfactory answer in the end. In philosophy, the question, "How can evil exist if God is good?" is called the problem of evil. I have discussed this from time to time before on this show, as the concept touches a lot of popular films. But Time Bandits wraps the whole movie around this question and even attempts to give an answer at the end, provided by none other than God himself.
To summarize, the problem of evil goes like this: God is all-knowing. God is all-powerful. God is All-good. Evil exists in the world. If the three criteria for God are true, how can the fourth statement also be true? If God is all-knowing, he would know when and where evil would happen. If God is all-powerful, he could always stop evil from happening. If God is all-good, he would want to stop evil from happening. Atheists sometimes use this alone as their proof texts that God cannot exist, and the very idea is a logical fallacy. Theists instead attempt to solve the problem of evil in a way that is satisfactory to their beliefs.
20th-century philosopher and theologian John Hick famously posited that the problem of evil can be solved by explaining that human beings require suffering in order to make them fully realized beings. This is sometimes called the necessity of suffering or the soul-making defense. Hick would say that Kevin suffers under the thumb of his materialistic parents because it is necessary for his growth. When Kevin meets Robin Hood at Nottingham, he sees something peculiar. As Robin redistributes the wealth to the poor, they receive not just riches but a punch in the face. Robin asks his companion if that is absolutely necessary, and he is told that it is. "Hick, the good must come from the bed. Suffering is necessary for a good life," he once wrote. The value judgment that is implicitly being invoked here is that one who has attained to goodness by meeting and eventually mastering temptations, and thus by rightly making responsible choices in concrete situations, is good in a richer and more valuable sense than would be one created ab initio in a state either of innocence or a virtue.
There are issues with this line of thinking, though. If suffering is necessary for a complete life or for a human being to earn their soul, or something, that does not explain why there is so much suffering. It does not logically resolve war, famine, disease, sexual abuse, and many other things. It is unthinkable that a God who is all-good was simply C genocide as basically a good thing for humanity. Theists generally do not believe such things. Logically, God could just as easily have a for in less egregious ways, like studying for a test or stubbing our toe on the bed.
In the film, Agamemnon says that killing, sometimes, it's necessary. But the being he killed was apparently a threat to his people. Innocent people being killed does not seem necessary. A subset of the necessity of suffering answer is the claim that human life is only a test for the afterlife. But that does not explain why non-human animals suffer. In the Abrahamic faiths, animals do not have souls and cannot ascend into heaven, so why would they suffer? The existence of suffering outside of a human being suggests suffering is not a test for heaven.
Another way to solve that logical problem of evil is to conclude that God is not what the Abrahamic faiths claim he is. That the criteria for God is somehow false. He is not one of the three features of God: not all-good, or all-powerful, or all-knowing. The logical problem was saying God is not all-knowing. But is all-powerful? Is that a being who is all-powerful could simply make himself all-knowing, or all-good, if he wanted, because omnipotence has no boundaries? So the easiest to take away is just that God is not omnipotent and cannot possibly be expected to stop all suffering. Napoleon, in the film, is able to conquer so much territory and kill so many people because God does not have the power to end all suffering. He does the best he can with what he has.
The character of evil in Time Bandits even claims that God did not create him. Evil says that he created himself, meaning God does not have complete control over him. There is a contradiction here, though. Theists sometimes reject the idea that God has great limits to his power because this would contradict God's ability to create the entire universe. Surely, a being who can fashion the cosmos out of nothing would also be able to say prevent the Titanic from sinking, or would be able to save the passengers.
The most famous answer to the problem of evil is that of the free will defense, which is referenced in Time Bandits. The idea is that being free simply means that we must have choices, and sometimes those choices lead accidentally or purpose in disaster. The free will defense posits that allowing us free will maximizes good, and that this is the best of all possible worlds. 20th-century philosopher Alvin Plantinga famously stated, "The existence of God is neither precluded nor rendered improbable by the existence of evil. Of course, suffering and misfortune may nonetheless constitute a problem for the theist, but the problem is not that his beliefs are logically or probabilistically incompatible. The free to will defense, however, shows that the existence of God is compatible both logically and probabilistically with the existence of evil. Thus, it solves the main philosophical problem of evil."
The great evil of the film is represented by materialism. The robbers use God's map to loot various time periods. Kevin's parents spend their days worrying whether or not their belongings, particularly their appliances, are good enough compared to the appliances of their neighbors. The personification of evil strongly believes in technology, always speaking about how computers are the wave of the future. Kevin warns them not to touch the piece of evil that is inside one of the parents' appliances, but they do anyway, exercising their free will, and it kills them. Time Bandits suggests that free will is the cause of all good and all evil.
The main issue with this line of thinking is that it only addresses evil that is created by human beings. What about suffering that is brought about by the natural world, like an earthquake that results in death, or a volcanic eruption that wipes out a city, or the various extinction-level events that have occurred throughout the course of Earth's history? These are natural evils. God has not bestowed free will on a volcano.
In the film, the Supreme Being's vague answer could be interpreted a number of ways. One could interpret it as God not willing to explain himself fully. The robbers warned Kevin about asking about the nature of evil, but Kevin does so anyway. It's a reasonable question. Another interpretation of this scene is that God himself does not know why evil exists. Maybe he doesn't have a good reason. Maybe the real reason God says what he does at the end of Time Bandits is because that's the best Terry Gilliam can determine of this. He once said, "The big questions are always there for us. Michael and I had saw and religious offerings, so he grew up believing and thinking about God and religion and good and evil. I can't get those out of my system. They're a part of me." The normal approach in a kid's film is to make the final character a wizard, but why not bring God into it?
Some theists do not believe it is necessary to understand why evil exists at the same time a benevolent God exists. They Russian that they will figure it out in the end or in the afterlife. But this way of thinking presupposes God and the afterlife, not to mention that it is a bit of a leap in logic to assume that there is justice in heaven when there is none on earth. It's like asking, "Is there a God?" and someone responds, "We don't know, but God does." An answer cannot be a paradox to the question, and as philosophical thinkers, we should not accept inconsistencies. A requirement of philosophy is honesty.
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