FEATURED ESSAY: The Problem of Evil by Cheska Borja

 

The philosophical problem of evil is how can evil exist in a universe created by an all-powerful God? If God is the ground of all being, how can there be evil created by a concept of the all-good? His goodness must permeate every atom of the universe. Therefore, from whence does evil come?

Some have compared evil to darkness. If God is light that shines upon all things, the things themselves upon which the light shines cast shadows. That shadow is evil, or the absence of light, the absence of God. This answer is not satisfactory even if it is poetic. It contradicts the nature of God as all-powerful and all-pervasive.

In the Old Testament apocryphal story of Job, God allowed the Devil to cast evil upon Job in order to test the latter’s faith. Job had been faithful in his religious duties and had been blessed with fortune, family and health. When the Devil told God that Job was faithful only because he was also fortunate, God told the Devil “Try him out. Give him bad fortune.” So the Devil took away Job’s fortune, many of his family and his health. When his neighbours saw what happened to Job, they told him “What happened to your God? You remained faithful to him but he has given you all these misfortunes.” Job answered back that he remained faithful to God despite everything.

But when Job confronted God, he asked Him “Why have you done this to me? I have been faithful in all of my duties and I have trusted in you. What you are doing to me does not make sense.” God answered back, “Who are you to question Me? Where were you when I laid down the foundations of the universe?”

The story has two unusual points. First, in this story, there exists a devil in conversation with God. The devil is the embodiment of evil. In this legend, there exists a devil in the presence of God. Second point is that God allows evil to befall on man as a means of testing his faith. Third, God scolds Job for questioning His sense.

What this story tells us therefore is that evil exists in the world even in the presence of God. But God allows evil to befall man and God defies logic and sense.

All throughout the Old and the New Testament, the chosen people bewail their misfortune despite the fact that they are the chosen people of God. The story of Job resonates most in the plight of the six million Jews that were murdered by the Nazis in the Second World War. This is one solution to the problem of evil but it is of little comfort especially to those who died in the Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel exclaims in his novel, “As for me, I have ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.”  But Akiba Drumer explains, perhaps in reply, “God is testing us. He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming our base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if He punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more…”

Another solution to evil is that it is a product of man’s free will. In the story of the Garden of Eden, man was given free will in that he had the power to choose whether or not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Free will must be understood to commit error, commit sin, commit evil. Without the capacity to commit sin, one does not have the capacity to do good. Where there is no free will, there is no good. So free will presupposes the capacity to do evil. Robots or people that are pre-programmed do one thing and not another cannot be said to have free will. Free will presupposes choice and choice presupposes the option to choose wrongly.

The Greeks have a variation of this free will. They do not understand free will so much as sin as they see it as ignorance. Evil arises when people cannot see the good and therefore do not pursue it. Where, in the Bible, sin is a product of perversity or rebelliousness. In the Greek tradition, error lies in ignorance. But whether in the Hebraic or the Greek tradition, the idea of evil or sin is connected to the idea of the flawed nature of man, that is either his perversity or his ignorance. And certainly in the case of the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews, the perversity of the Nazi regime, or its ignorance, can be seen as the cause of the suffering.

But this evades another question. What of the evil in the form of great natural calamities, over which man has no control? Nuclear devastation may be man-made but volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, none of these can be traced to man’s doing. Therefore the idea that man’s free will or ignorance is the cause of evil does not explain satisfactorily the phenomenon of evil.

The idea of Leviathan and Behemoth as extraordinary entities of nature much greater than man but not identical with God is used to explain evil of a mammoth scale, beyond the control man but not an instrument of God’s will. These biblical concepts allow an explanation of great natural disasters that are beyond good and evil. They are natural phenomena, not man-made of God-willed events. This is a partial solution to the problem of the phenomenon of evil. But still it does not fully explain how such evil can exist in a universe created by God because it suggests that the attribute of omnipotence of God should be re-examined. God may have created the universe but, to follow the theology of the Deists, after God created the universe, He allowed the universe to take its course without his intervention. This is not traditional Catholic but it partially explains the phenomenon of evil in the universe created by an almighty God.

In conclusion, the problem of the phenomenon of evil cannot be resolved without confronting the attribute of omnipotence of God. This attribute clashes logically with the fact of evil. And the two explanations available, man’s free will and the entities of Leviathan and Behemoth, detract from the doctrine of omnipotence. There is simply no going around this logical track unless one denies the fact of evil in the world.

Another alternative is to consider reason or our sense of justice and fairness to be purely human concepts that cannot be applied to God who is beyond nature. Logic does not apply to Him since logic is a mere creation of His. We mortals cannot question the puzzles of creation since we were not present at the creation itself. Akiba Drumer again says, “Man is too insignificant, too limited to even try to comprehend God’s mysterious ways. But what can someone like myself do? I’m neither a sage nor a just man. I am not a saint. I’m a simple creature of flesh and bone.” It is either that we change the concept of God or that we accept that He is beyond human understanding.