1) Evil is a deeper problem than the existence of bad things, bad people, mortality. Once you come down from the abstraction of philosophical questioning, you find in each evil a wrenching mystery. To give some current examples: this life cut short by fleeting exposure to a virus, that willingness to live in lies in order to maintain the only world one can imagine true, this devastation of one population by the heedlessness of another far away, that murderous scapegoating and dehumanization... I've always thought that "evil" is overrated. Whatever its origins, it's interesting only because it is succesful. For me the true horror is the good things that evil destroys, and the scandal is why it succeeds. How is it that charlatans gain a following? Why is good susceptible to becoming the victim of evil - and its agent? Good is corruptible because it is good: open, resonant, available, eager for connection.
2) Perhaps because evil confronts us with this porousness of the good, it is tempting to distance oneself from both. Modern western thought is focused unsustainably on evil rather than good, but its understanding of the problem of evil draws from hellenistic sources. Like its hellenistic forebears, it works out different ways of coming to terms with a disappointing world without being hurt by it. While religion isn't the only or even perhaps best way to allow oneself to be be heartbroken over evil, the truest response to evil is to let our hearts break.
3) What our hearts break over isn't the existence of evil but the precarious miracle of good - that is, goods. We relate differently to that miracle post-Darwin (goodbye argument from design) and post-Margulis (goodbye indifferent universe of competition), but the precarity and the miraculousness of life are perhaps clearer than they have ever been - or can be, if we can resist the commoditizing consciousness of consumer capitalist culture.
4) Traditions, including those we term "religious," can help us lean into the awareness of the fragile and irreplaceable good. They teach us how to open our hearts to breaking, and not to flee into fantasies of invulnerability, permanence or oblivion.
All this is what I mean by "the problem of good," a problem in an urgent new way in the Anthropocene...
Yesterday:
So what is the problem of evil again? My musings on a problem of good take for granted that people are familiar with it, but it's been a while since I've had occasion to spell it out.
In its narrowest sense, the problem of evil is a topic in monotheistic philosophy of religion. The classic formulation comes in David Hume, referring back to the hellenistic philosopher Epicurus.
Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered.
Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent.
Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?
(Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)
"Evil," as Aquinas argued, has always been the greatest challenge to faith in God. This articulation of the problem, sometimes referred to as the "trilemma," juxtaposes the reality of evil with the supposed omnipotence and benevolence of God, and seems to leave only unattractive options: an impotent God, a malevolent God, or none at all! This stark "problem of evil" is a perennial favorite of philosophy of religion classes, meeting students struggling with the claims of religious traditions. A friend in graduate school put it succinctly: the problem of evil is the main reason people leave religions - or at least change their affiliation.
Philosophers of religion have teased out a "logical" and "evidential" version of the challenge, but my approach has always been a little different. With William James I've never thought that people believe because of philosophical arguments, though arguments may help some live into beliefs they're already inclined toward. And from Robert Merrihew and Marilyn McCord Adams I know that for theistic believers, the trilemma constitutes not an ultimatum - which of these is false? - but a mystery - how can they all be true? God is for them no less a reality than evil is. How can both be real? It's a different project, which the Adamses called "aporetic." This has inspired my understanding that part of what religious traditions do is let us abide with important questions, especially the ones we can't seem to answer. On the problem of evil they provide things like the Book of Job, which is everything but an answer. Traditions keep difficult questions open (at least some of the time!). It's not that one or more of the trilemma premisses may have to go, but that each seems a squib for more profound, and more existentially involving, realities. The glib atheist who concludes "no God, no problem!" seems out of touch with the true claims of all these realities, including even evil.
One can go in a few directions from here. One is into the other resources which traditions generate and are generated by as they allow us to abide with otherwise overpowering mysteries. These range from narratives to liturgies to contemplative practices - all of which overlap in practice. I've explored this most fully in connection with the Book of Job where I'm always at pains to emphasize that what readers find in Job (already a tangle of stories and ideas) is shaped by what other texts or stories they are committed to. Genesis? Psalms? Ecclesiastes? The Gospels? Oral and apocryphal traditions? Jewish and Christian interpretations of Job differ and should differ. Jewish and Christian traditions aren't "monolithic, impermeable, tightly systematic, and unitary wholes" (to borrow Thatamanil's words) anyway but congeries of overlapping communities, shifting canons of practice and thought and ongoing conversation. Each of these conversations, like the diverse early Christian communities, has its own set of other questions and commitments, its own tools for approaching challenges of various sorts. Until modern times none would have thought to understand the Book of Job by itself - or to understand the mystery of evil through Epicurus' old questions. Evil is no simple reality or, to put it another way, if evil is real then reality is more mysterious than we thought. Traditions marshall all the resources they can find for these challenges, leaving the thin air of philosophical fiddles with the trilemma far behind.
Emboldened by the wealth of materials proffered by biblical traditions, one might go in a second direction and question "Epicurus' old questions." Hume traces them to Epicurus, although (as I argued a long time ago) it makes more sense to see it as Skeptical than Epicurean. In either case, it's a hellenistic question, not only not a part of biblical monotheism but not part of the monotheistic world at all. It's certainly interesting that this philosophical formulation emerged in the space where these different ways of responding to late antique polytheism overlapped. (Stoic responses to it clearly shaped emerging Christian thought.) We'll see in the next paragraph that it suggests this may be a general or generalizable problem. But for the moment it's useful to tag it as emerging in a space where the gods seem distant, where human must decide what relation to take to them. The gods Epicurus has in mind, after all, are indifferent to things they can't change, and serve for us as models for a similar detachment. This isn't the space most monotheists occupy, or wasn't until the early modern period, when hellenistic forms of thinking reemerged in a big way (in part as a lingua franca for a Christian world divided against itself). Susan Neiman has argued that the problem of evil is the defining concern of modern western thought - a sign of the importance of this hellenistic revival. But one might also say that hellenistic philosophies aren't, well, very deep. Therapeutically powerful but existentially thin. It may be that not only the gods but the evils they describe are a little too conjectural. All promise to help one avoid getting one's heart broken by life, but it may be that such heartbreak is the beginning of true humanity.
A third direction one might go is to say that the problem is not only not exclusive to monotheism but may be broader than theism or even religion itself. What is the problem, then? Philosophers of religion distinguish moral and natural evils - wickedness and suffering - but the greatest intellectual challenge may be the perennial mismatch between these, however we understand them, and the greatest existential demand for the Anthropocene the increasing impossibility of distinguishing them. Max Weber took this idea and ran with it, appropriating the term "theodicy" for the problem spurring religious intellectuals on, in every tradition. Intellectuals, he argued, work to make of experience a "meaningful cosmos," refining and deepening the assumptions of their traditions as they do so. He thought there were a few "rationally satisfying" solutions sprinkled across the world religions, but that none of these was existentially bearable. All made one want to exit this "ethically irrational" world, perhaps into the maw of mysticism. The world may or not be "ethically irrational" in this way but clearly much religious creativity (and retrenchment) can be traced to the effort to shore up systems of practice and belief in the face of painful realities. And it does seem that these realities can be described, to a point, in general terms. These general terms make comparative religion possible, even as they construct "religions" in ways the hellenistic philosophers might have recognized. And they suggest that the problem of evil is not a problem only for religious folks. There is something in the reality of evil - in the reality of a reality which contains evil - which wrenches every human attempt to find meaning, a home in the world.
But of course, and so we come finally to the problem of good, it may be that challenges of wickedness, suffering and bad things happening to good people aren't the only challenge to thought, the only thing that might touch the heart in a profound way. With or without Weber's help it's clear that deep pondering on the varieties and processes of "evils" point one to ontological abysses - and peaks. This is more than run of the mill duhkha. How can evils do such harm? Where do they come from? There are other conundra, too. How can good nevertheless come out of evil, as it so often does? As moderns, fed the thin gruel of Neo-hellenistic philosophy for a few centuries, we almost need to be backed into the problem of good. You know, this one:
If there be a God, from whence proceed so many evils?
And if there be no God, from whence cometh any good?
(Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy)
This is no more an argument for the existence of divinity than Epicurus' old questions are arguments against it. It points rather to a second set of reasons for wonder. It reminds us that, although we accept them as a matter of course, the existence of things for evil to despoil isn't obvious. Boethius ends up going in a more hellenistic direction: none of these things should matter as much to as as they customarily do, compared to eternal things. But the question is a profound one. Excavating it is my project, which begins with wondering why it needs excavating in the first place. If evils are so evident that we assume they can be defined in a general and generalizable way comprehensible to people of every and no faith tradition, why not also goods?
A whole bunch of problems rear their heads at this point: awareness of deep cultural difference and the ways it has been silenced by universalizing discourses, as well as a batch of skepticisms regarding the ontological bona fides of our judgments of good. Aren't they just things we like? Don't cultures have greatly differing understandings of the good? Anyway, aren't any and all the things someone might choose to call good just things produced by the random and morally neutral processes of evolution - and inseparale from whatever we might deem evil? The hellenistic temptations are strong to conclude that, in the end, nothing really matters. Except for evil! Can we make evil matter without letting the goods it compromises matter in the same way?
I've heard a sort of hellenistic response to the Anthropocene from some students: it's good to know that though the human story end Earth will survive, that life will endure. Things come and things go, that's the way of the world. Geological time scales make it hard to see things any other way. Sure, we get sentimental about our vanishingly thin slice of history, but really it's no big deal. A shame, but not a problem. Maybe, in fact, it's time for us to go. Also in its way hellenistic is the apparently contrasting thought that, though life as we know it (especially non-human life) is doomed, humanity will find a way to adjust, whether on this planet or somewhere else.
But, but, but, one wants to say, how dare we come to terms with the great destruction we have unleashed? The potential extinction of other species matters because their existence does. Whether we understand this in terms of the beauty or ingenuity of individual species or their valued place in ecosystems, the deeper reality is their existence at all, the existence of life, which, now, belatedly, again we are learning not to take for granted.
