Evil As a Relevant Contemporary Subject
Philosophers think in terms of two broad categories of evil, natural and moral. Natural evil refers to unfortunate things happening in the physical world, apart from human action, such as earthquakes and famines. Moral evil refers to harmful events that human beings inflict on one another.
Unless people come face to face with evil, they may doubt that it exists. They may explain it away, perhaps by relabeling it as something else. But when something horrendous happens to them, especially at the hands of another person or group, such doubt often vanishes. Evil only becomes a serious problem when it becomes personal.
The theological “problem of evil” is this: Given the terrible and sometimes horrendous things that happen to people, how can an all-powerful God also be benevolent? Or, turning things around, how can a good God allow such awful things to happen if that God can stop them? How we respond to God in the face of evil in our lives may be the ultimate test of faith.
No one has ever come up with satisfactory answers to these questions, and it is possible that God has left us to struggle with the moral ambiguity built into the world. But two idea may help. Oxford chaplain Austin Farrer suggested that accidents are an essential aspect of human existence, and without them our lives would be strikingly different.
Simon Weil posited that God created nature so that everything in it has a function and must act according to its nature. It must act as it does and only humans make actual choices. Nature can be both beautiful and dangerous. God has intentionally put nature in our path so that faith would be grounded in the good that God is rather than the benefits nature provides.
Some people conclude that God is not the loving being Christians claim. Others allow that God loves us but is powerless to stop evil, including evil that occurs in nature, from earthquakes to diseases.
If we believe evil is real and not an out-dated idea that society should abandon, we can sort it into least two broad categories. We can think of it as anything that works against the well-being of people and the planet. For Christians, this would include everything contrary to the will of God. But we we can also conceptualize evil as anything people do that is so terrible and uncanny that we can make no sense of it, have no explanation for it, and find it impossible to account for. It is surrealistically unfathomable.
There are few if any better ways to understand someone than to note how that person addresses evil. Many noted thinkers have tried to explain evil in one way or another.
Some modern view of evil seem weak and ultimately inadequate. Although they may contribute to evil, they do not fully explain it. Evil is more than the result of low intelligence or education. Some of those who have done the most harm to others, such as Adolf Hitler, were both intelligent and educated. Defining evil as the absence of benevolence doesn’t help either because it ends in circular reasoning: certain people choose good over bad because they are benevolent, and we know they’re benevolent because they choose good. Neither does poverty completely explain evil because there are plenty of people who are very poor and very good. Medicalizing evil by treating it as entirely due to a mental disorder is equally inadequate. Sociopathy is not a mental disorder but a moral one.
Our decisions stem from a complex and often mysterious mixture of genetics, developmental history (life experience), surrounding circumstances, and freedom of choice, which can be affected by all three. It can also be affected by our prior choices. Because of this mysterious nature, even those we condemn for having done very bad things may have less freedom of choice than we assume.
No one has total or complete free will, and even the capacity to say no can be compromised under adverse enough physical conditions, such as torture. Still, human beings usually have at least some freedom to choose between right and wrong. Unless we take such freedom seriously, the belief that people are responsible for their actions becomes meaningless. So does any effort we might make to distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong.
To date, no terrorist has used a nuclear device to destroy a city or port, or even annihilate a culture or country. God may be restraining people from doing the great evil of which they are how capable.
The late British television celebrity, author, and commentator Malcolm Muggeridge became a Christian late in life. He believed that the darkness increasingly permeating western civilization was not due to overpopulation, unemployment, financial problems, or an energy crisis. It was because people have lost the ability to tell the difference between good and evil, along with the absence of a sense of moral order, without which there can and will be no enduring social, economic, or political stability.