In his book “The Devil Goes Missing?” Anglican minister John Woolmer suggests it isn’t possible to have a coherent doctrine of a loving God without also having an understanding of, and a belief in, the existence of Satan.
He quotes approvingly from fellow Anglican Michael Green:
“I believe the Christian doctrines of God, of man and of salvation are utterly untenable without the existence of Satan…The fallen nature of man and of everything he does, the self-destructive tendencies of every civilisation history has known, the prevalence of disease, together with nature, red in tooth and claw, unite to point to an outside enemy. I would like to ask theologians who are sceptical about the devil how they can give a satisfactory account of God if Satan is a figment of the imagination. Without the devil’s existence, the doctrine of God, a God who could have made such a world and allowed such horrors to take place daily within it, is utterly monstrous. Such a God would be no loving Father. He would be a pitiless tyrant.”
Woolmer regards this as “a really important statement,” adding: “Remove Satan from our world view and we are inexorably challenged by the dark thought that God is at best incompetent, and at worst malicious. Human nature alone, however fallen, cannot really explain the horrors of Auschwitz, Stalin, Mao, Rwanda, Islamic State and all the rest.”
It seems to me that Green and Woolmer make several errors.
Firstly, events in the natural world appear to be the result of natural laws, not personal agency. The scientific evidence at our disposal – from fossil records, biological evolution, to cosmology – testifies to a universe which has developed over a very long time by a gradual process operating according to known laws of nature. These laws operate with uniform regularity. They certainly don’t appear to be the work of personal agents misusing their free-will. When a volcano erupts we are able to exhaust the reasons why in purely natural terms. Positing a personal agent for causing it is not something we either need to do or have any reason for doing.
Secondly, Woolmer and Green provide no reason why the moral evils of which they speak aren’t simply attributable to human agency. Why must we must posit a demonic influence behind Stalin or Mao? We know through our own experience that humans are capable of such evils. Surely the fact alluded to by Green himself – “the self-destructive tendencies of every civilisation history has known” – demonstrates that there is something dark in human nature itself quite apart from outside spiritual influence? We are moral creatures, and thus capable of the extremes of both good and evil. We are also natural creatures which can be broken – socially, psychologically, and emotionally – hence the existence of sociopaths, narcissists, and psychopaths. Moreover, we are learning all the time how humans can become broken: by culture, society, environment, upbringing, and genetic defect. If Woolmer and Green are going to put all this down to an outside agency they owe us some reason why it is that humans couldn’t possibly do such evil things off their own bat. As things stand, Green & Woolmer give us no such reason. Moreover, the bible itself frequently speaks of the nature of human beings in somewhat gloomy terms, and without chalking any of it up to demonic influence.
Thirdly, though they deny it, their view lapses into a quasi-dualistic position involving ultimate good and ultimate evil. Green in particular stresses that the devil is responsible for all manner of natural evils, not to mention the corruption of human civilisations. He appears to suggest that God had nothing to do with this and thus we must invoke the devil to make sense of it. However, is God not still sovereign? Green (and Woolmer) will say “of course he is,” and yet Green’s protestations are only valid if the devil is some kind of equal and opposite being to God. If God is truly sovereign, then the existence of the devil doesn’t solve the problem Green thinks it does, because we must still deal with “A God who could have made such a world.”
This brings us to the nub of this third error: their view doesn’t really solve the problem of evil and suffering in the way they think it does. Suppose it is true that the existence of Satan explains all manner of natural disasters, disease, the violence inherent in the natural world, and even the corruption of human civilisations. Where did Satan come from? If we want to avoid the kind of dualism we find in, say, Zoroastrianism wherein the forces of good under Ahura Mazda war constantly with the equal and opposite forces of evil under Angra Mainyu, then we must acknowledge that Satan himself was created by God. This brings us once again to the nub of the problem of evil: how evil and suffering exist in a world in which there is an omnipotent and omnibenevolent supreme power. God is still wholly responsible for the world.
We find here a problem faced by all theodicies that emphasise the fall as the reason for evil. Such theodicists seek to uphold the notion that God created all things good, but also that free creatures misused their free will, fell from grace, leading to all the evils in our world. It’s a neat way to uphold the goodness of God on the one hand and the guilt of the creature on the other. Except for a glaring problem, that is. Schleiermacher pointed out that this traditional picture was unintelligible. The problem is that we have unqualifiedly good beings, existing in the presence of God, inexplicably committing sin. If a creature sins, surely it was not flawless to begin with, and thus the creator – God – must share the responsibility for their fall. Schleiermacher adds: “the more perfect these good angels are supposed to have been, the less possible it is to find any motive but those presupposing a fall already, eg arrogance and envy.” In fact, this consideration led thinkers like Augustine to suppose that those angels who fell were simply predestined by God to do so. Had they shared the same blessedness of the good angels, they would never have fallen.
I find myself on the side of Schleiermacher here. God is not absolved of responsibility for evil by the existence and nature of Satan. On the contrary, He remains ultimately responsible for it, and thus we must look elsewhere for an explanation of evil, something Green and Woolmer don’t do.
This brings me to my final point: Green and Woolmer display an ignorance of the philosophical literature wherein many theistic philosophers present defences and theodicies that make sense of the enigma of evil without resorting to “the devil did it.” For instance, Swinburne argues at length that the world must be ordered the way it is for humans to operate with significant freedom. Alternatively, John Hick draws our attention to how evils are necessary for our development towards God-centred being. Others, such as Paul Helm, argue that God has greater goods in mind which necessitate the world we live in, or something like it, goods which we perhaps cannot know. Or, maybe, Stephen Wykstra and William Alston are correct to say we can’t know God’s morally sufficient reasons for causing or permitting the existence of evils around us, but if we otherwise have good grounds for believing God is good, then the existence of evil isn’t a defeater for theism.
Whatever reason there might be for believing in the existence of the devil and other demonic beings, their existence is not required for making sense of the existence of God or the nature of the world.
Stephen J. Graham
stephenjgraham 
I loved this piece. Agree with the main thrust of all your points. Point 2 – human agency – seems especially salient to me. I would challenge even the idea of calling it ‘evil’; in fact, all the very human foibles you can think of are readily explained via the social sciences, not only the ones you listed (narcissism etc.) but much more banal ones like selfishness, greed, pridefulness, envy, and things like fluctuating mental health. We’re biological robots, programmed genetically and epigenetically, and sociologically, and it doesn’t take us to be ‘broken’ to be what much more primitive observers saw as ‘evil.’ It just takes us to be what we are: human animals with behaviors that are underwritten by biology.
I agree that they aren’t solving the problem of evil, either, in the way that the other philosophers you mention are doing much robustly. I like Swinburne’s answer in particular; but I wonder if he can hold onto any coherent idea of a sin-free afterlife while solving it in the way he does.