Evil

The fact of suffering in the world begs the question of whether something called ‘evil’ exists, and why an all-loving and all-powerful God appears to tolerate its existence.

Any examination of human life reveals the existence of extreme cruelty and suffering, which we call ‘evil’. Some suffering appears to be directly connected with our well-being, such as the pain that deters us from touching fire. And other forms of suffering appear to be ‘necessary’ for our survival as a species, such as the labour pains that precede birth. But other kinds of suffering appear to be random: in the same hospital one happy couple can be celebrating the birth of their healthy child, while another couple are grieving after the death of their sick infant. Whether we are religious or not, it is very natural to ask whether the tragedy of the world means anything. Is there perhaps some ‘evil force’ at work in the world? And if so, how could a God permit this force to exist? Western, Christian thinking has thrown up five classic responses:

1. The Tragic Response: The reality of suffering could lead us to reject the existence of any good God, or indeed, any real goodness in the world. As it says on the T-shirt: ‘Life is shit and then you die.’ This is a very bleak response to suffering, but also a very real one that most theologians ignore. Christian theologians tend to assume that we must reach a Christian solution to the problem of evil. The truth is that the fact of evil quite often leads to the conclusion that there is no God and that we are on our own in a dangerous and meaningless universe.

2. The Trusting Response. The opposite response would be to make a complete act of trust in God’s benevolent, divine rule over human affairs. Childhood leukaemia may look tragic to us, but from God’s superior perspective, even the most hideous suffering could be serving a good purpose. If God is a good God, and we believe this utterly, then we should not question him, but rather accept life, praising and thanking him for every event. ‘The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: Blessed be the name of the Lord’ (Job 1:21).

3. The Dualistic Response. The presence of both goodness and suffering in the world could suggest that the world is governed by a Star Wars-type battle between good and evil forces: God and Satan, for example. The Gnostics tried to explain evil by positing the existence of a corrupt God, but orthodox Christianity has generally rejected such dualisms.

Having said that, traditional Christianity has been rather confused about dualism, because it has also argued for the reality of the devil. Unless we argue that the devil is mysteriously doing God’s work (and some theology comes close to saying this), then the existence of the devil would require a theory of theological and moral dualism.

4. The Non-existence-of-Evil Response. This response derives from Platonic philosophy and argues that ‘evil’ is not a positive reality but the absence of good. The argument starts by equating reality with ‘goodness’ or ‘God’. If we accept that the only ‘real’ things in the world are the good things made by God, then evil cannot logically exist. This means that evil is only apparent. A paralysed person does not possess a positive reality called ‘paralysis’ but suffers from the absence of movement. Thus evil is defined negatively as that which is ‘not good’ or ‘not God’. Both Augustine and Aquinas argued in this way that evil was unreal. Whatever the logical attractions of this approach, we must surely doubt whether it is really satisfactory to say, for example, that the Holocaust was only the absence of good.

5. The Moral Response. A final argument sees life as a kind of ‘school of morals’ in which we humans have to suffer in order to learn. God wants us to be truly free, so he gives us the freedom even to do evil. The suffering of others gives us opportunities for compassion, and our own suffering gives us the opportunity to show dignity in the face of tragedy. While it is true that we can learn from suffering, the Moral Response paints a bizarre picture of God as a vicious schoolmaster devising mind-boggling (but educational) forms of pain for his students. It would be hard to worship such a deity, who seems incompatible with the Christian image of a God of Love.

These five responses are all ‘religious’ reactions to evil. So it could be argued that evil is only a problem if we start out with a belief in God. An atheist could say that suffering is simply a fact that must be dealt with practically (or not dealt with at all), but that suffering does not imply the existence of ‘evil’. This view, if correct, would make evil a pseudo-problem, artificially created by religious people.

This ‘secular’ view is in fact a cold-blooded version of the Tragic Response. The problem of evil can be expressed in secular form as the question of why suffering exists at all, and how we should respond to it. The secularist may balk at the word ‘evil’, but would presumably accept some other general classification of pain and suffering. Even without positing the existence of God, the question of the purpose of suffering still stands, even if only to be dismissed with the response that suffering has no purpose. In responding thus, of course, the secularist has provided an answer to the problem of evil.

THINKERS

St Augustine (354–430) offers what is probably the most famous analysis of evil in his Confessions, which conclude that evil does not exist. (See ‘The Privatio Boni Argument’ below.)

René Descartes (1596–1650) posed the possibility that God was in fact an evil demon replacing the real world with a dream of reality. Descartes quickly rejected this possibility, saying that it would be contradictory for God to do anything so sneaky.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81) tells the story of Jesus and ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ (in The Brother Karamazov), which reflects upon the paradoxes of human freedom and suffering. The Grand Inquisitor blames Jesus for giving us freedom and so sowing the seeds of the destruction of his own kingdom.

Georg Hegel (1770–1831) argued that ‘the negative aspects of existence’ can only make sense once we have understood ‘the ultimate design of the world’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History).

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) argued in The Theodicy (1710) that God created not a perfect world, but ‘the best of all possible worlds’.

Justin Martyr (c. 100–185) argued that God made the world from pre-existing matter and that this accounts for the presence of evil (the unorthodox ‘Gnostic’ view).

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are imagined categories that do not really exist. Instead, the world is a play of forces which has no moral meaning. Good and bad events do not ‘mean’ anything, and we should accept life as it comes. This acceptance of life is the secret of true human happiness.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) took the view that humanity had corrupted God’s perfect creation: ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of Nature; everything degenerates in the hands of men’ (Emile).

Alexander Pope (1688–1744), in his Essay on Man, argued that we cannot understand the mind of God and should concentrate on understanding and improving the human world: ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,/ the proper study of mankind is man.’

Elie Wiesel (1928– ): a Jewish thinker whose play The Trial of God brings God to account for his alleged cruelty and indifference to the suffering of his people.

IDEAS

Manichaeism: an early Gnostic heresy (famously refuted by Augustine in his Confessions) which ascribed evil to the existence of a lesser god of matter.

Moral evil is the suffering produced by human actions. It can be blamed on humanity, although this begs the question asked by St Augustine: Who planted this seed of evil intention within us?

Natural evil is the suffering produced within nature itself.

Natural disasters often provoke public debate about the existence of evil. The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 killed several thousand people and sparked responses from philosophers all over Europe: Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau and Goethe. In the Aberfan Disaster of 1966, 116 children were killed when a mud-slide smothered their school shortly after morning prayers. The tragedy prompted national reflections on the existence of God. The Tsunami Disaster of 2004 killed 250,000 people, causing people world-wide to ask about the meaning of natural evil.

The Privatio Boni Argument (literally ‘privation of good’) says that evil is just the absence of good.

Process Theology argues that God is still in the process of forming a perfect creation and that evil is slowly being worked out of existence.

Theodicy is the attempt ‘to justify the ways of God to man’.

BOOKS

Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton University Press, 2002)

John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (Palgrave Macmillan, 1985)