Solving The Problem of Evil

June 2008

I was brought up as an atheist by my parents but I attended a Christian primary school. I remember my father catching me at a very early age praying. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Praying to Jesus to help me at School" I replied. "Study", he said, "it will do much more good!"
 
In fact my father had been a devout Christian in his youth, and had at one time even considered the priesthood as a carer. Later he had abandoned Christianity, as so many intellectuals do, because of the problem of evil.

Indeed, the presence of evil, pain and suffering in our world is the most persistent argument raised against theism. The argument runs as follows:

1. If God is perfectly loving, He must wish to abolish evil
2. If He is all powerful, He must be able to abolish evil
3. But evil exists. Therefore, an all powerful, loving God does not exist

The conventional Christian response is:

1. God created a world of free will
2. Although God therefore made evil possible, man makes evil actual
3. Eventually God will defeat evil

Nevertheless, although these points about free will and the future have some value, these arguments fail to explain why a loving parent would create (or allow into existence) a Darwinian world, which, in its very essence, is about selfishness, competition and the survival of fittest rather than the most loving. Arguing that evil is the result of man’s free will alone is not enough, a Darwinian world of flesh eating animals, disease, disability, earthquakes, inequality and heartless competition demands a better explanation.

We must accept the usual argument:

1. God is the author of everything
2. Evil is something
3. Therefore God is the author of evil

And even extend it to:

Why did a loving intelligent and all powerful God create a dog eat dog world in which pain and suffering are both extreme and integral? Why, as Richard Dawkins points out, does God appear to be "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: an ... unjust... bloodthirsty... capriciously malevolent bully".

How then to properly answer the problem of evil?

In fact God brought this terrible world in existence in order to educate the souls who inhabit it. By creating a primitive world of Darwinian competition, God created a school in which man can learn to overcome selfish and instinctive behaviour and discover his loving intelligent divinity. Like the child who can not understand why his parents would cast him from the loving home into a competitive school, man can not understand why God has created this world to educate him. Also, like the child who lives entirely in the moment and has little concept of time, man can not understand that what he feels is a lifetime is not even a blink of God's eye. Like the child who does not understand that the bruises he takes will heal, man does not understand that death is an illusion. A perfect world, like a school without hardship, can not educate. One day man will learn to conquer Earth completely, to cure all disease and fashion this little world in any way he pleases, indeed compared to the primitives he has already made much progress. Nevertheless, man's ultimate purpose is boundless self development, so his life in School Earth hardly matters. In essence God created a world of evil in order to teach man, over the very long term, to turn away from ignorance and embrace virtue.

Although this answer is in fact well known and fairly obvious, it is nevertheless incompatible with Christianity, and therefore has been given insufficient attention by most Western thinkers.

Most obviously this answer is incompatible with Christianity because if we accept that God deliberately created an evil, selfish and painful world, then he could hardly send its people to an eternal hell for transgressing when they get there! However, the model of an eternity spent in either heaven or hell dependent on the choices made during an infinitesimally short preceding human life is clearly absurd anyway.

The real emotive conflict between Christianity and this solution to the problem of evil is the modern Christian view that: (a) The world is good (b) All good men are equal and their lives sacred (c) God is a loving parental force which cares for mankind rather as a kindly shepard cares for his flock.

Taking these points in turn: (a) In fact Christian dogma does not insist that the word is good, eg the fate of polar bears and whales was utterly irrelevant to the early Church, but a belief in the goodness of nature has probably become a feature of modern Christian morality. However, the world is not good, rather is it a place of evil designed by God to teach goodness. For example, some eastern religions speak of the mortal world as the negative plane, the world of illusion and attachment, a trap from which our purpose is to escape.  (b) Early Christians may not have considered human life especially sacred (Spanish Inquisition, Crusades), but again I am concerned here only with modern Christian morality. Yet the idea of evolving fragile human life defies both equality and sanctity. We begin life as the worm, we evolve into the eagle, capable of feeding on worms (the herd and the superman is another analogy). Worms die, worms suffer, worms are weak, worms are stupid, worms are selfish, worms are to all appearances as evil and primitive as the terrible world they inhabit. (c) Even early Christians probably believed in this, you have to go back to Judaism or Greek Mythology to find heartless gods. However, our analysis shows that God is not a loving father, rather a ruthless philosopher king prepared to subject his people to any level of pain of suffering, and to destroy untold numbers of them, in order to improve their efficiency over the very very long term. Does God care when human die in a Tsunami any more that we humans care when we stand on a cockroach?

The vast cold gulf between humanity and God is the source of the paradox of evil. It also motivated, for example, Einstein's pessimistic speculation that: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." The Christians say "God is love", "Love thy neighbour", "God loves each of us as if there were only one of us" etc. Impossible declares the intellectual. "God is Dead" cried Nietzsche. But God is reborn if we conceive of him as a boundlessly powerful, intelligent and detached Philosopher King instead of an infinitely loving and nurturing Queen. This King is not a bloodthirsty malevolent bully, but he is so infinitely detached from the humble human condition that the death of a man barely registers. His world is not capricious in the macrocosm, but at the infinitely microscopic level of evolving primitive human life there is primarily Brownian Motion.

In the Republic Plato speculates how one might go about building the perfect human society which imparts maximum virtue to its people at large. His many ideas include a human genetic breeding program - much to the horror of modern readers seeped in Christian Morality. But if Christianity has been discredited by the Problem Of Evil why do we retain the humanitarian values it inspired? It's a realisation of monumental proportions - Christianity was wrong, our entire values system is wrong, God is alive, but he lives in another form!! Try to conceive of another God with a completely different essence and morality.

Confucius spoke of a yin/yang duality underlying all philosophy and psychology. Plato spoke of the Mortal-Immortal duality. The passive feminine yin viewpoint is egalitarian and nurturing, the yang viewpoint is competitive and detached. In Christianity we have the idea of divine redemption, heaven, equality, utopia, sacred human life etc. In the East we have the exact reverse - self redemption, reincarnation, the spiritual ascent of man from the worm to the eagle which can feed on worms. Confucius, Plato and Nietzsche described the Yang. Their philosophy is not sadistic, more idealistic in a very remote sense which is detached from the current human condition or individual. The yang concerns itself with the abstract potential, the yin with the here and now. In political debate one example of the duality is socialism/capitalism.

Times are changing. The loving human God of Christianity and Christian morality is dead, and a new masculine conception of God and morality is developing. "God despises the weak and tortures and kills his flock until they grow strong" could be the new motto. This will shake the world. A tide of idealism and intellectual rigour will sweep away the death fearing cowardly democracies. The battle between the two visions has raged many times, today China leads the charge.

I write this article as a first introduction to metaphysics for the novice intellectual. As well as the problem of evil we have touched upon the purpose of life and the vital male-female duality.