The Good, the Bad and the Evil

One of the things that seems most apt to discourage people about religion is the problem of “theodicy,” or how to reconcile the idea of a good and just god with a world in which evil exists. One way people look at this question was expressed in the title of a bestselling book of a couple of decades ago: “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?”

Part of the reason people and churches have such a hard time with this issue is that the question isn’t expressed very well; the terms are ill-defined. Part of the fault for that lies with fundamentalists of the Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell stripe, who tell us, for example, that Hurricane Hugo was God’s way of punishing New Orleans for its stubborn immorality.

What that sort of claim fails to recognize is that there are two kinds of good, and two kinds of bad: practical and ethical. On a practical level, Hugo was very bad for New Orleans, but whether New Orleans’ prior behavior was ethically bad is a subject that’s open to debate.

Another example may serve to clarify the distinction: Somewhere in the cold, snowy forest, a wolf catches a rabbit and eats it. This is very good for the wolf, very bad for the rabbit, and for the same reason in both cases: because life is good; that is, to have life, to be alive, is good. So for the rabbit to lose its life is as bad as it gets, on a practical level, while for the wolf, eating the rabbit helps sustain its own life, so that’s good.

As a loose definition, let’s say a “practical good” is anything that produces, sustains or improves life for whatever living thing has this good, while a “practical bad” is anything that injures or otherwise causes suffering in or shortens the life of the living thing that has that.

Where the moral or ethical dimension enters the fray is in the question of intent. No rational observer, for example, would suggest that our wolf killed our rabbit purely with the intent to harm it. Rather, the wolf’s intent (as far as that word can apply to a four-legged mammal) was to get a meal by the only means available to it; harming the rabbit was its only option.

As for Hurricane Hugo, no rational person would claim that a hurricane is capable of forming an intention to target a particular coastal region. Less easily dismissed, perhaps, is the notion that God – who presumably is capable of forming an intention – conjured up this storm and used it to express his displeasure toward the ostensibly loose morals of the Big Easy.

Leaving that aside for the moment, however, we might look around to see who else is capable of forming intentions of a similar type, for good or ill. And that would be us, of course: human beings.

To summarize: Practical goods or ills can come about because of purely natural events or processes, but moral goods or ills come about only through the decisions and actions of human beings (and perhaps gods).

Ancient religious writings tend to refer willy-nilly to harmful things as “evil” or “ill” or the like, without distinguishing the accidental or practical from the intentional and immoral. To avoid confusion, I’ll use the words “bad” or “ill” to refer to harm caused by natural processes, broadly speaking (which can include some psychological and social processes), and the word “evil” to designate the deliberate or unconscionably reckless infliction of harm by entities capable of thinking.

Now we can break the question of theodicy down into two parts.

First, why would a good and just god create a world in which natural events or processes sometimes cause harm to living things?

The answer to that one is quite obvious: because no other kind of world can produce or support life. For example, an atmosphere that enables living things like those on Earth to breathe, and therefore to live, must be dynamic; if it were to cease moving and changing, it would rapidly become unbreathable. Similarly with the Earth’s waters: Stop them from flowing, and they would quickly become poisonous. To put it a bit crudely, the occasional hurricane or tornado or flood is the price we must pay for having life in the first place.

Many traditional religious or philosophical systems acknowledge this as fundamental to the nature of the cosmos: Hinduism, with its cycles of creation and destruction; Buddhism, with its key recognition of “impermanence” as the essential character of material existence; Greek philosophy, with Heraclitus’ famous teaching that “Nothing is constant save change” and the idea that all physical things are either coming to be or passing away; and of course Taoism, with its teaching of the interplay of yin and yang and its Book of Changes. But in systems that posit a deity who’s prone to fits of anger, we find an inexplicable belief that storms or whirlwinds or deluges are somehow unnatural, and are visited upon the world only to chastise a rebarbative humanity – a bizarre projection of moral concerns onto the purely practical.

Now for the second part of the question: Why would a good and just god create beings who can intentionally cause harm to other beings for no good reason; that is, who are capable of doing evil (as defined above)?

Let’s return to the wolf and rabbit I mentioned earlier. The reason the wolf’s killing of the rabbit contains no moral or ethical component, as I said, is because the wolf has no capacity to form a different intention: If the wolf wants to live, it must eat the occasional rabbit. It cannot choose not to harm the rabbit.

But now suppose a different sort of creature, one that can choose not to harm rabbits, even when it’s hungry; in other words, a creature that can choose to bestow something good (life) instead of bestowing something bad (the loss of life). Being capable of making that choice is what renders this creature a moral or ethical being; if the choice were taken away, if this creature were allowed only to do good, then it would be no more a moral being than the wolf.

So to answer the second question, if beings are to exist who can intentionally do good for other beings, then they also must have the ability to do evil, and the responsibility for choosing the one over the other is theirs, not God’s. Or as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “The line between good and evil runs straight through the middle of each human heart.”

What I’m saying, in sum, is that as far as good and bad, or good and evil, are concerned, we can leave God out of the question, even if we want to credit him or her or it as First Cause: We exist because the cosmos is the kind of constantly moving, changing thing it is, and wishing it were otherwise would be to wish ourselves out of existence. What we should be wishing instead is that we and those around us would prefer to contribute to the good in each other’s lives instead of adding to each other's suffering; in other words, that we might approach life and our fellow beings with goodwill, not ill-will.

Ill-will, then, is about as purely evil as anything can be said to be. Conversely, pure goodwill – unselfishly wishing good for others, without seeking or expecting any sort of reward or payback, out of nothing but the love of humankind (that’s “philanthropos” in Greek) – is, as far as I can see, the highest good of which a human being is capable.