The Problem of Evil: Night Thoughts

 No one can remain a Christian or a believer in any so-called “personal” God for long without confronting this thorny, seemingly unsolvable problem. It has been formulated in many ways and been attacked from many positions, but in its simplest formulation it can be stated as a simple question: Why would an all-loving God create a world of pain and suffering?

To ask the question more fully from our own point of view: How can we justify belief in a loving God who watches us suffer and does nothing?

I can’t answer for God. But I can share my own thoughts, processed in the blender of my brain, the product of sixty years of reading and life.

I must jump right away to what matters: it is not suffering itself, but suffering that is, to use an economic metaphor, not paid for. Suffering that is earned, that is meted out in proportion to a crime, for example, is not hard to justify. But suffering that is in excess of deserts, something we all experience, whatever our actual crimes, is not. And we can’t fall back on lesson learned or good done in response, at least not on a personal level. The urge to know why the evil happened—the death of a child, by accident or disease or murder—the scenario of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor or Shirley Jackson’s Omelas—will and must always haunt us. We have to think that, whatever good suffering might do, in this world there is suffering in excess of that need. And in the leger of suffering, return rarely rarely covers expense. The lessons we learn from our suffering, the cautionary tale from grandma who died from smoking, feels so much less valuable to us than the lost years of grandma. However we account for it, some suffering, even some part of all suffering, is simply superfluous, and any mosquito bite that has no essential part in salvation history is unjustifiable—enough alone to bankrupt the pretense of a loving, parent God.

We have to think it.

On the other hand is this: once God allows evil in any degree into the world—any individual suffering in excess of crime, any individual suffering that does not lead in a necessary way to the redemption of the world—and in such a way that without it the world could not be redeemed (the ways of God, as Milton’s project goes, justified))—: once God opens that box, all evil comes pouring out. God is equally on the hook for hangnail and holocaust.

This must be faced.

What is the cost of eliminating what we call evil? To pose that question is to ask—again with our economic metaphor—what we get for evil. It’s certain that I cannot, that none of us can, imagine a world without evil. We do not know what we would be in that world. We know we would not be who we are. Love would not be love. There would be no art, not beauty, no depth of response to being. Nothing would be precious. I’ve never liked the economic metaphor, but I know no other way to think this out. The economic equation is as deep and as universal in humanity as the impulse to procreate. Everything we value would be lessened or would not even exist if what we call evil did not exist.

This is, I believe, why Blake embraced it, re-valued it, re-defined it. He may be the only one who every really understood it. But as I don’t yet understand Blake, I won’t stand on that assertion.

I know that the earliest biblical myth, the myth of Adam and Eve and Eden, is an attempt to explain this. It’s not a myth that I believe has been adequately understood. It is a myth that has been thoroughly abused by desperately frightened and power-hungry people since it was first written down.

Forget the gloss of the fall. Forget the idea that the eating of the fruit was the unleashing of evil, the sin for which all history has to pay, the sin for which Christ had to die to return us to grace.

The thing that was released was the knowledge of good and evil. So says the tale. Not the intellectual knowledge of good and evil, but actual, lived knowledge. Eating the fruit was a choice. We are all Adam, we are all Eve. This is our choice: to know good and evil. There is no good without evil. They are not distinct categories of being. Language creates the false distinction.

History is the playing out. Since we have to use language to accompany, clarify, develop—but at the same time befuddle—our knowledge, we must think about it this way: history is at once eternal repetition of the same, continuous development of knowledge, continuous fall toward cataclysm. Nietzsche, Hegel, John. Each of us takes a bite of the apple. We willingly choose to experience evil in order to know good. History progresses toward greater and greater understanding of and greater knowledge of good and evil. Good always increases. History runs toward the wars and the cataclysms that will finally undo the race. This is an end we will bring on ourselves through willful ignorance, selfishness, the nth degree of greed. Evil always increases.

If in the end, on the day we surely die, we know good and evil, we will know it not as philosophy, not as language, not as my flawed words here say it, but as actual knowledge, the knowledge of a redeemed soul.

The last word then turns my attention to Christ. I am not just a theist, I am also a Christian—hard as it is to say that when virtually everyone who uses the word seems to be so anti-Christ, when the admission puts me in the same circle with so much evil and so little good, so little that is in the spirit of Christ. I can’t do anything about that. I can say that I believe that actual Christians—not the greedy and power-hungry headline grabbers, not the hateful bludgeons, not the Crusaders or jihadists, but the actual seat-in-the-pew or, better, venue-of-kindness believers are by far the greater number. That is the circle to which I aspire. The Passion of Christ is the pivot or fulcrum, the turning point, or, to swap out metaphors, the fixed point on the arc of the knowledge of good and evil, or to switch again and return to the economic metaphor, the price God was willing to pay—perhaps the price God had to pay, but I don’t know how to use the language of necessity with the concept of perfect freedom—in response to the choice that set history in motion. Christ is that point whether you believe in Christ or not. (In this sense I follow Rene Girard.) History turned or paused. God inserted himself in his son—a scandal for the intellect that wants to keep “God” separate and separable from “human” as it wants to keep “good” distinct from “evil”—a particular stumbling block the author(s) of the Qur’an. Understandable from the point of view of concepts.