The Caravan to Enlightenment 2 by The Vessel

Today our caravan is going to take a little trip to the Problem of Evil. You will have to excuse me for the lack of humor in this post as I think my funny bone may have come spewing from one of various outlets during my recent stint as a partially digested oyster fountain. Anyway, being as that I can't think of anything humorous to say, on to the evil.

The Problem of Evil is, basically, the completely reasonable claim that to consider there to be an all-loving, all-powerful god who exists as the cause of the world as we know it, where evil not only exists but often flourishes, leads to a contradiction. All loving (at least as we use the term loving, which is actually the only way it can be used if we are to understand it) would require that the creator god desire that evil not exist and all powerful would require that the creator god had the ability to create an existence without evil. Therefor the existence of evil leads to the reasonable conclusion that this creator god does not exist. Its a simplified version of the argument, but plenty good enough for our purposes.

When confronted with this sound reasoning, most believers I know attempt to take the easiest road to avoid the contradiction and put forth the claim that evil does not actually exist, but that what we call evil is merely the lack of good. Let's start by examining this claim.

To say that evil does not exist but is merely the absence of good is completely arbitrary. It is, in fact, no better supported than to state that good does not exist but that it is merely the absence of evil. There is no basis to consider one as an actual existence that should not be extended to the other. Aside from this, to say that there is no such thing as evil leads us nowhere in our attempt to pardon a creator god from his responsibility for what we term evil acts.

The fact is, without evil, all acts are simply different degrees of good. Raping and murdering infants is good, just not as good as saving a kitten from a burning house (or saving a house from a burning kitten, depending). Without the existence of evil as a separate classification for acts, then what we term evil is more appropriately called less good. Because of this, when we lay out a scale of possible goods, what we find is that when we consider the rape and murder of one infant as compared to the rape and murder of a million, or the destruction of the entire human race, we see that infanticide is actually much closer to the ultimate good end of the scale than the least good end.

Now, to counter this undesirable circumstance one may try and draw a distinction by saying that what we term evils are acts that are not less good but acts that are devoid of good. Of course, this leaves us with the above mentioned infanticide being equivalent to taking a penny from someone's car ashtray without asking. Neither act can be defined as good so without the existence of evil on which to judge the scale of the act, and without being able to say that one is less good than the other, all acts that are not good are equally reprehensible. Thus the atrocities of Hitler are on equal footing with the cookie your child pilfered from the cookie jar.

Even beyond all this the problem does not go away simply because we re-word it to the 'Problem of Lesser Good' or the 'Problem of the Absence of Good'. The creator god would still be responsible for creating beings that commit such acts.

Due to these unavoidable circumstances, which are clearly counter to what we as human beings understand as the nature of good and evil, many of the more 'intellectual' of theists have abandoned such an absurd objection to the existence of evil and have instead focused their energies on trying to defend the position that evil is a necessity if man is to be freewilled. This objection to the Problem of Evil, however, is equally fraught with inconsistencies. To illustrate this let's first examine freewill, as it would necessarily exist in a god created universe, and see how free we actually are in such an existence.

With the Problem of Evil, freewill is the theists stronghold. When faced with the absurdity of the existence of atrocities such as rape and child abuse and genocide in a universe created by an all-loving, all-powerful creator god, the believer quickly seeks shelter behind the seemingly indestructible walls of the desirability of man being free to choose. However, the stronghold is in reality a house of straw and it takes nothing more than a weak breeze to bring it crashing to the ground.

To illustrate the problem with the evil is a necessity for freewill excuse I like to pretend I am driving down a highway (the sound effects I make as I'm doing this aren't crucial to the concept so vroooom or don't vroooom, its up to you)... Anyway...

Let's look at our existence as a highway. The road surface is our range of possible choices and our traveling down the road is our traveling through time. On this road there exists several lanes, these are the possible choices we can make at any moment in time. We can freely change from one lane to another, this is what we call freewill. But, this road does not exist in a vacuum. On either side of this road lay open fields, however, our access to these fields is restricted by walls. Though we can change lanes on the road, or make choices from a selection of possible choices over time, we can not leave the road, or choose beyond our narrow selection of possibilities. I, for instance, can not choose to flap my arms and fly to Mexico for a margarita at sunset. A mentally challenged person can not choose to be a genius. I can not choose to eat the Empire state building. In reality, when compared to the environment of possible choices I could make were my freewill unrestricted, the lanes of choices I can make within my restricted freewill are already severely limited.

What we can see from this highway analogy is that to appeal to the ability to choose evil as a necessity if we are to be freewilled is, again, completely arbitrary. I am restricted from doing a nearly infinite amount of things but that does not, according to the theist, impose on my freewill. Yet, to restrict me from doing just one more thing, let's say removing a lane on the highway that allows me to choose to harm another human being, they claim would destroy freewill. Obviously this freewill requirement is not a reality but a excuse created to allow for belief in an all-loving, all-powerful god despite the existence of evil.

In actuality, even if we were to allow that the existence of evil is necessary to give man a free choice (and that freewill could actually exist in a created universe (two huge allowances)) this still does not help the theist in their quest to remove god from responsibility for evil. The insurmountable problem for the theist is that even if the existence of evil is necessary to give man a free choice this does not mean that a creator god is not directly responsible for creating beings which will choose to do evil. Just because I have the free ability to choose to commit murder does not mean that by not committing murder I forfeit my freewill.

There are people in existence who, when faced with a choice between doing what is 'right' and doing what is 'wrong', will always try and do the 'right' thing. Let's take one such person named Sam and use him as an example.

No matter the circumstance Sam finds himself in he will always attempt to do what he thinks is the 'good' thing to do. This is not to say that Sam never makes a mistake, there is always the possibility that what he thinks to be good is not actually good (we will save the discussion about the actual existence of an objective good for another day), but his lack of absolute understanding is not his fault as that is the type of being he is (one that has incomplete understanding of existence, whether by creation or evolution). So even though Sam may make mistakes from time to time his decision is always to do good and therefor his actions, whether good or not, are performed with good intent. Now, since Sam never chooses to intentionally do evil, does this mean that Sam has no freewill? Of course not.

You see, even if freewill could exist in a god created universe and man had to have a choice between doing good and evil to exercise his freewill, there is no necessity in creating beings that will choose evil. By creating beings that will choose to do evil, this creator god is directly responsible for the evil that is done. There is no reason that a god responsible for all that exists would not have the power to create men, like Sam, who will only choose to do good even though they have the ability to choose to do evil. It is not a matter of removing the beings freewill, but simply a matter of only creating good beings.

But, some may protest, what is being overlooked is that the creator god did create man perfect in the being of Adam, but because of his freewill Adam choose to do evil and thus condemned all future men, as if this removes their god's responsibility. The flaw here is obvious. Adam could only make the choices god created him with the ability to make.

Look at it this way. Let's go to our god perspective again. Now, here we are about to create some little peach, or red, or brown, or yellow, or black, or tan (Mmmmm, a Black and Tan), or fluorescent, beings. Now, we have no criteria by which we must create these beings. We be being an all powerful being, so pretty much whatever we want to create we can create. What we have decided to create is a being called Adam who will be the pace-setter, if you will, for a bazzillion future beings. Being (how many times can I use this word in one paragraph?) as that we have no blueprint to follow in creating Adam, we can look at this creation process as our having the ability to select one Adam from an infinite (hypothetically) number of Adams (the principle is the same, if you can't follow the reasoning there just trust me, and don't use cutlery unsupervised). Now, can you imagine an Adam that would have chosen freely to not do evil? If so, then for you to create an Adam who will choose freely to eat the proverbial apple is no one's fault but your own. So, do the math. Who is to blame for the evil?

Well, that about does it for our journey into the problem of evil. It was a little longer than I'd planned and sadly, almost completely devoid of funny. Sorry about that. Hopefully I will find my sense of humor soon (though I imagine it will require a good washing) and this blog will return to its previous joviality. Until then, feel free to comment on your understanding of the existence of evil. Though I might have lost my funny, my argumentative is solidly intact (its made of titanium, you know).