Problem of Evil 3

6.3 What is Evil?
If we are going to ask why God allows evil to exist and take place, we need to define exactly what it is in the first place. At this point, someone might suggest a highly theological definition such as that evil is whatever does not conform to the will of God or glorify God. Then it is only appropriate for the world to suffer, because it does not conform completely to God's will. Indeed, one might even argue that God's love shows itself in the fact that God does not simply obliterate the whole world.

Perhaps that is the answer. But to start with such a definition will keep us from hearing other approaches to the subject Christians have made. A more neutral way to start is to make a distinction between what we might call natural evil and moral evil. Natural evil, if we should even call it evil, refers to adverse things that happen in the world to create pain and misfortune that do not happen because of some person or being's intention.

A person trips and breaks her leg. That person experiences pain and inconvenience, but perhaps no person or being has caused it. It is certainly possible that some angel or demon, that God or Satan might directly cause people to break their legs. If so, then we would not categorize such an event as natural evil but as moral evil, "bad" things that result on the basis of some being's intentionality.

On a most basic human level, we categorize things as "good" or "bad" by whether they bring us pleasure or pain, benefit or harm. Such pleasures and pains can quickly come into conflict with each another. The pleasure someone gets from a night of drinking might issue in a painful headache the next morning. By the same token, the pain of pulling out a splinter might avoid the greater pain of a later infection.

In this "street level" discussion, evil is not a thing, like a piece of coal. It is a description of something that happens. We often talk about evil as if it were a thing, as if there were such a thing as "pure evil." Christians from time to time have even talked about us having a "evil nature" that might be removed or suppressed.

But evil would not seem to be a thing that you could look at or remove from a person surgically. In that sense, God did not create a thing we call "evil." He created the possibility of evil happening but not evil as a thing.

Other Christians have considered evil the absence of a thing, not a thing in itself but the absence of good. Augustine said that there was no efficient cause of evil but only a deficient one. Some thing does not cause evil but the absence of some thing, namely, good. He could thus say that "we were made for you, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their peace in you." <1> The absence of God's presence results in evil.

Augustine may have a helpful thought here, if we take his words to say that people do evil because they are lacking something. However, if we take his language straightforwardly, he seems to treat good as a thing. To do so seems to skew the discussion in similar ways to considering evil a thing.

[box, Augustine and Neoplatonism]

It seems more accurate and more helpful to think of good and evil not as nouns but as adjectives, as descriptions of events rather than as things in themselves. Paul says of eating foods that "I am convinced that no food is unclean of itself, but if anyone thinks it is unclean, then it is unclean" (Rom. 14). We might infer from Paul's discussion of when to eat and when not to eat certain things that immoral action is primarily a function of context.

For example, to have sex is not sinful in itself, as an act. However, it becomes a sinful action in various contexts--with someone who is not your spouse, for example. The Bible does not even treat killing as an evil action in itself. The Bible does not prohibit killing in battle or as an act of capital punishment. It is rather the context of such killing that makes it evil. <2>

Some Christians have wondered how it is that Adam, the first human, could have been tempted when he was a perfect human. This explanation for evil accounts for Adam's temptation even though he had no evil drive inside him. His drive was to excel and to learn. What was wrong was not the drive, but the context in which Adam expressed that drive--toward something he was forbidden to eat. <3>

We might suggest that even if a particular action proved to be wrong in every circumstance, it was only so because no context existed in which it could be considered right. It would still not be the action itself that was wrong but the context in which it was done. This perspective is a matter of debate among Christian philosophers, but it is possible. Its advantage is that it implies God did not create any aspect of the creation that was evil. Rather, he created the possibility that morally neutral actions might take place in the wrong contexts, thus making them evil because of human will.

So it is certainly true that pleasure and pain seem to be good and bad on a "street level." Yet is not clear that in themselves they map directly to good and bad. It would seem rather that good and bad are more a matter of the context of pleasure and pain. With this idea in mind, we proceed to some of the explanations that various Christians have made throughout history for the existence of evil in a world governed by a loving God.

<1> Confessions.

<2> Some would certainly argue that the new covenant works itself out in a way that makes it always wrong to kill today. Someone might argue that it is impossible ever to kill with a right attitude and thus that Christians cannot kill anyone under any circumstance today.

<3> Not all Christians of course take the story of Adam literally, although Christians have historically.