From Whence Comes Evil?

The question, “From whence comes evil?” was framed by, among others, the Gnostics of the first few centuries A.D. It remains a question unsatisfactorily answered today. Every one of us has been evil’s victim on countless occasions, and as questioning beings, we are entitled to ask, “Why?”

My own attempt would begin with the assertion that evil is a value judgement, not an objective quality. My reasons for this have been set out elsewhere and need not bore the reader here. Thus, in a one sense, we are required for ‘evil’ to exist, as without a conscious judger there could be no such thing. But this is a little misleading, since it suggests that we are evil’s author and creator. Thus it is more helpful to think of us as adjudicators of which things are bad and which things aren’t. More strictly, despite the fact that evil is entirely subjective, its subjective reality is not diminished by this in the slightest. I am perfectly capable of suffering from bereavement, feeling pain, and the like, and to claim that this evil is obviated just because it is subjective is a grave misunderstanding. Thus, without contradiction, it is possible to rephrase the question more elegantly as, “Why do we suffer?”

If, like me, you do not subscribe to the bearded white male in the sky, possessor of supreme omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence, then you do not have a problem with the answer to this. Nature is a blind force, despite its magnificence, which cares not the slightest for you or I, and goes neither out of its way to harm nor help us. Thus it is hardly surprising that we may fall foul of it on occasion. Bad things happen because… well, why shouldn’t they? It is inevitable that, from time to time, what we want and what nature does will clash.

Conventional God-is-all-good theology has a problem, however - a big problem. In fact, it is a problem that shakes the very foundations of conventional theology, for it turns out that the triumvirate of omniscience, omnipotence and complete benevolence are logically unsustainable when confronted with even the most basic of facts about the world. In all its glory, then, the problem is this:

If God is totally good, he can’t want us to suffer. If he is omniscient, he knows that we suffer. And if he is omnipotent, he is capable of stopping the suffering. Yet we suffer. Therefore, God can’t be all of these things.

As I said, those of us who do not believe in this God nonsense have no such problem – nature is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. And it is certainly not supremely benevolent. Tennyson charged nature with being “red in tooth and claw”, and Darwin himself remarked to a friend:

“What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blunderingly low and horridly cruel works of nature.”

But this description would not do for the Divine One, and so conventional theology has offered some tawdry ‘rebuttals’. In order of increasing desperation, I have labelled them the “we actually did it” argument, the “It serves us right” argument, and the “It’ll make a man of you” argument. There is also the perennial religious answer to any argument out of its depth, and I have labelled it the “ostrich” argument. So with this forewarning, take a deep breath and read on…


1. The ‘We Actually Did It” argument
Subscribers to this jaundiced view are of the opinion that we (human beings) are the cause of all the cosmos’ evil. God, being supremely good, created a wholly good world without any evil. He also gave us free will. And it is from our choosing to do wrong things (in particular, eating an apple) that all evil stems.

The most fundamental objection is that there doesn’t seem to be any rational case for saying that we have free will! Once again, though, I have covered this enormously interesting ground elsewhere, and must refrain from repeating myself. Suffice it to say that if the notion of free will is illusory, then this argument is left in tatters.

And even if we did have free will, it seems highly doubtful that an omnipotent creator should be incapable of creating free agents of such moral fibre that they choose to do only good. After all, we all choose good some of the time, and some do so more than others. Why not extrapolate this principle and simply make free-willed creations so perfect that they do only good? It would certainly save on the damnation. After all, this is the claim made for Jesus, his son and creation. Why not make us that way, then? Unless you mean to contend that Jesus wasn’t free…? Or, even if humans were left (and you know by Whom) with a permanent predisposition to do some evil, the rest of us could certainly be insulated from this evil. Why should we suffer from the evil of others?

The most obvious objection, though, is that we can’t possibly be the origin off everything that goes wrong! Take an earthquake, for instance. How (in God’s name?) did we cause that? Furthermore, while we may have a hand in some things, it is patently absurd (not to mention presumptuous) to claim that we have caused every single heatwave, flood, common cold, flat tyre and pimple (not to mention, of course, death!) since the dawn of time. This is… well, nonsense. Utter nonsense. Let’s move on.


2. The “It Serves Us Right” argument
This argument states that the evil we experience is actually our just punishment for the sins we have committed. Interestingly, it must still finger God as evil’s originator here, unless the argument is combined with the first misconception above. It’s just that we deserve the evil.

Once again the objection to this childish (and tragic) argument is obvious to anyone whose head is not numbed by propaganda. If suffering is a just punishment for our sins, why then do tyrannical dictators live out their lives in luxury while their abject subjects starve? Imagine a year-old child who is starving because his mother was killed. It would take a psychopath to honestly look this child in the eye and proclaim that starvation was its just deserts! Yet bizarrely, some still think that this argument holds water. The point is that to anyone with the remotest connection to reality, the vast majority of punishments meted out don’t match the crime committed. Lord, thy scalpel is blunt!

A horrendous offshoot of this is the contention that because ‘Adam’ ‘sinned’ ‘in the beginning’, children are born with original sin. Thus anything bad that happens to them is justified, since they are ‘sinners’! Just what is being postulated here? Some form of ‘sin transmission’ through the semen?[1] Putting minor scientific quibbles aside, this notion is irretrievably atrocious! Think about it – since when is someone, let alone an innocent child, responsible for some sin committed by someone else? Imagined the injustice of imprisoning you because your great-great-uncle cursed sometime in 1843!

The ‘justified punishment’ argument rests, if it to have any plausibility, on an incredible sense of callousness. Indeed it would do well to reflect, for a moment, on religion’s powerful ability to anaesthetise otherwise good people against suffering and injustice. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, they may not mean to do harm, but the harm doesn’t interest them.

Once again, let us move on…


3. The “It’ll Make A Man of You” Argument
Evil may be a bad thing, but the good that comes from it justifies it – so says this argument. Evil’s place is thus defended on the grounds that it can teach us to be virtuous. For instance, the death of my parents may cause me to appreciate people all the more while they are alive.

It is interesting to point out that, once again, God’s grubby pawprints identify him as the cause of the evil here, be it justified or otherwise (unless the first ‘argument’ is used). Brushing that aside, it is certainly possible for good things to come from bad ones. I personally take some comfort from the realisation that some of the most painful events of my life have in fact contributed in a positive way to my development. But to let God off the hook in this way is fallacious. If he is omnipotent, it would certainly be possible for him to give me the wisdom, etc. that I gained through my blood, sweat and tears – but without the blood, sweat and tears. I might have to go through all the suffering in this world in order to become more wise, etc., but there is no reason why the world should work this way in the first place! We have simply not dissected things out enough if we believe that God is forced to give us the good with a measure of bad. Why could we not become wise without suffering? God is supposed to be omnipotent after all – and so by definition he must be able to accomplish this feat! Once again, thy scalpel needs sharpening, O Lord…

Like the second argument above, this argument all-too-often spills into the callous heartlessness of which religious people are particularly prone. The Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne, in a spine-chilling passage, writes:

Suppose that one less person had been burnt by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Then there would have been less opportunity for courage and sympathy.

As Richard Dawkins remarks on this terrifying character, “Richard Swinburne is the recently retired holder of one of Britain’s most prestigious professorships of theology, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. If it’s a theologian you want, they don’t come much more distinguished. Perhaps you don’t want a theologian.” Indeed. But even if you shared Swinburne’s psychopathic detachment, you would still be left with the impossible task of explaining why the supposedly omnipotent God was incapable of providing sufficient “opportunity for courage” without resorting to the torching of civilians. And so another argument falls.


4. The “Ostriches Don’t Need To Think” Argument
Rather than concede the argument at this point, the theologian is at last forced back to the last ground any religious person holds: God works in mysterious ways. I’ll say! It is really the most desperate of ploys, and what it equates to is, “Come what may, I have faith in God’s goodness and power. No evil, no matter how great, can convince me that it isn’t actually good in disguise.” Well yes, if you stick your head in the sand like an ostrich, you will indeed see no evil. This is the sort of argument made from the heart after the head has packed up and left, and its flaws are obvious. If I don’t need any good reason for believing that God is good (“I’m just going to believe”) then the belief is as likely as the belief that invisible fairies wrote this essay in collusion with a unicorn and the Yeti. There is as much evidence for the first belief as for the second. In fact, I would argue that faeries, unicorns and the Yeti are more likely, since even though they aren’t supported by the facts, there at least aren’t strong logical arguments against their existence! I doubt whether the theologian would see this implication though, but then he’s hardly been chosen for his ability to follow an argument.


Conclusion
The problem of evil is not, by itself, a proof against God’s existence. Strictly speaking, it is just a proof against God being omnipotent and omniscient and completely benevolent. At least one of the three cardinal characteristics must be jettisoned if we are to preserve any semblance of reason on the issue.

That these issues aren’t more widely and publicly discussed within churchgoing communities is hardly surprising. Religion, in common with other extremisms, does not encourage a questioning frame of mind. Quite the opposite - accepting statements without any good reason to do so is in fact taken as a virtue! It’s labelled ‘faith’. Alone among Jesus’ disciples, the biblical Doubting Thomas takes the only rational position (in the absence of any corroborating evidence) and remains sceptical about the highly unlikely resurrection story. For his logical, scientific spirit, he is actually condemned by none other than Jesus himself.

The arguments set out above are, in my opinion, utterly compelling. It is one of the few areas in philosophy where one can be rather forthright. To someone on the atheist side of the deistic spectrum, the arguments should serve to embolden. To someone on the opposite side, they should at very least show that the conventional idea of God (in the Judeo-Christian sense) must be abandoned.

But I don’t hold out too much hope of this – I predict the ostrich reaction, deployed as ever as a defence against actually growing up.


[1] I spoke too soon. I have subsequently discovered that this was exactly what St Augustine postulated. I’m just speechless. Utterly speechless.

Special acknowledgment: Though inevitably many sources have been used for this essay, it would be remiss not to particularly mention the chapter “Does God exist?” from Stephen Law’s book “The Philosophy Gym”. Its clear elucidation of several of the arguments mentioned in this essay was a (shall we say) godsend.