Lester Start’s Works

1THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND GOOD

07/10/88

L. J. Start

First Baptist Kalamazoo

How can we account for so much evil in a world created by a good God? The question forms the old yet ever new problem of evil. I am sure I have preached in this theme more than once. I know I have discussed it many times in my classes in the philosophy of religion. The theme is a part of me. And for personal reasons, too, as well as academic. My father was a Baptist as was his father and his grandfather, but my mother was a Christian Scientist. And early on I was introduced to and later rebelled against the teaching that evil is unreal, that there is no evil at all in the Divine Mind which is the essence of reality. Although I always appreciated the focus on the power of God, the teaching of the unreality of evil struck me then, and still does, as not taking the very real evils of this world seriously enough.

I am reminded of the story of a Hindu guru who was teaching his disciples the doctrine that the material world was all maya or unreal — an illusion. Suddenly a tiger came out of the forest and the guru was the first one up a tree. “Oh master,” said one of the students, “If all is illusion, why did you climb the tree when the tiger came?” “That I climbed the tree,” said the guru, “is also an illusion.”

There is a sense in the mystical tradition of religion in which the denial of evil is profoundly true. As the third century mystic Plotinus taught, evil is to good as darkness is to light. It is not a real or positive entity in itself; evil is the absence of, the negation of good, just as darkness is the absence of light. It is nothing positive or real in itself. This is true in a deep sense, but it is not very convincing to the child afraid of the dark. “There’s really nothing there,” we say, to reassure. But there really is — it’s really dark. There is a continuing uneasiness in the face of this sense of the absence of anything real that most of us cannot ever escape. It isn’t fear. Fear is always fear of something. Rather, it is dread. “What are you worried about?” someone might ask. “What are you afraid of?” “Nothing,” we say. But the uneasiness persists, because it is nothing — the nothingness, the emptiness that haunts our being we sense. And this is dread. Even in this sense, evil is very real.

And so we still have the problem of evil. It is found already in Genesis where we read that God created the heavens and the earth. After each day of the creation’s work, we read, “And God saw that it was good”. And yet He put the serpent in the garden, the source of our evils and woes.

And if we look about us we see evils; not everything is good. There are the hideous evils of man’s own making: for example, the horror of that civilian plane shot down in the Persian Gulf. But there are also evils that seem to be a part of God’s own order of creation: drought, famine, earthquakes, floods — for example, that train in India derailing on a bridge weakened by the monsoon.

This is the classic dilemma. Either God is not all-good or not all-powerful. Either He wills the good but cannot achieve it, in which case He is not all-powerful; or He does not will the good, and so is not all-good. The existence of evil reflects on His goodness or His power. But we do not want to restrict or sacrifice either the one or the other.

There are some classic solutions. One is illustrated by the line the comic Flip Wilson made popular: “the devil made me do it”. Some have argued for a cosmic evil power of darkness, co-equal with the God of Light, that is responsible for evil. How comforting it was, says Augustine who embraced this kind of teaching before his conversion, to be able to say, “Not I, but the sin in me” caused the evil act. But Satan is not such a power in our Biblical tradition — notice how in the book of Job he is under the full control of God. It may be comforting to say, “The devil got into me”, but our belief in one God makes such an excuse untenable, such a solution to evil unacceptable.

It has been argued that if only we take a larger point of view we would see that evil is really necessary and essentially good. As Alexander Pope put it poetically: “All nature is but art unknown to thee; all chance, direction which thou canst not see; all discord, harmony not understood; all partial evil universal good.” This sounds impressive. True, dissonances in music are essential to harmonic resolutions, and shadows in a painting point up its highlights. Fine, but why are some lives always dissonant? Why are some always shadows instead of highlights?

This in no way solves the problem of the distribution of evil. Our question remains. Why is there evil in a world made by a good God?

The traditional answer is the Biblical teaching that all suffering, the evil we are most concerned about, is the result of sin. The children of Israel were liberated by God through Moses who then gave them God’s commandments to live by. But again and again they were unfaithful; they worshipped the Baals in the land of Canaan; they made burnt offerings to brazen idols; and they suffered for it, God using Israel’s enemies to punish them. Whenever the people, or individuals, become unfaithful to God, when they no longer follow His commandments or obey the rules of righteousness, then evil befalls them. Thus the basic dogma: evil and suffering is the result of sin.

Now this is a pretty good dogma. When we think of it, we see that there is a moral purpose of God that cannot be violated with impunity; that repression, exploitation, injustice cannot ultimately win out in a just world. The mills of the gods grind slowly, perhaps, but they grind exceedingly fine. God’s promise of the freedom of the spirit cannot be destroyed.

And when we think about it, this is a pretty good world except where mankind messes it up. Most of the suffering we experience is due to man’s inhumanity, hate, greed, oppression, violence. Mankind’s moral evil is the main cause of human suffering. Even when we blame nature for calamities (we call them acts of God!) there is often some human sin of omission or commission responsible. If that railroad track in India were properly maintained, it might have withstood the rain and not derail. If the drains in the roof of that building in Texas were kept clear, perhaps the weight of the water would not have crushed it. If the living quarters on that oil rig were located somewhere not directly over the well — perhaps –. There are so many ifs about the Persian Gulf tragedy, there is no point to begin.

Certainly God can’t be held responsible. And even larger calamities like the current drought may quite possibly be connected to man-made wholesale destruction of more and more rain forests in Brazil.

The problem still remains, however, especially when we see how often the innocent are the ones to suffer and, as the Psalmist says, how the wicked triumph. This is where the dogma wears thin. The Psalmist asks the question: why do the righteous suffer? Job argues the issue. After all, as both God and Satan agree, Job is a righteous man. But how he suffered! Agreed, it was a test here. But the larger point remains: is suffering always the result of sin?

Jesus obviously had questions about the dogma when He was asked, “Who sinned, this blind man or his parents, that he was born blind?” I don’t think He rejected it necessarily. When He said, “It is not that this man sinned or his parents, but that God’s power might be displayed in curing him”, He may very well be saying that when evil comes, it is more important to do something about it, rather than to speculate on why it happened. He may be saying that evil is a practical, not a theoretical question. And when one considers it, it is the theologian, not the religious leader, who worries about explanations. The religious leader is concerned to do something about the world he finds in trouble. Jesus tells us that in the world we will find tribulation. He does not go to say, “Now, let me explain why this is so.” He says, “but I have overcome the world.”

The Buddha, the great Asian religious leader, similarly saw religion as the practical problem of dealing with suffering. Theoretical discussions he found irrelevant. “When one is wounded by an arrow,” he said, “it is idle to wonder whence it came, or why it came; the important thing is to remove it.” Similarly Jesus refused to speculate on the possible cause of the man’s blindness, but proceeded to heal him. The problem of evil is not a theoretical question requiring a rational answer. It is a practical one. Evil exists so that with the creative power of God we do something about it.

With this shift of focus in mind, seeing evil as a practical rather than a theoretical problem, we can see more clearly, perhaps, if not why there is evil, why in spite of evil there is good.

First of all, we must remember how closely we are related to each other so that the actions of one or some do have an effect on others. We are not isolated, as someone has said, like empty bottles standing in the rain. We flow into each other. We affect each other’s existence, more and more as the globe shrinks in our modern world. “No man is an island,” said John Donne. As Paul said, “We are all members of one body.”

Increasingly we must think in terms of sharing the resources of the bountiful world of God, and in seeing our responsibilities as stewards of this bounty — in preserving it from toxic wastes and exploitation. And we must stop thinking only of ourselves. For example, our governors and senators argue about pulling the plug on Lake Michigan to feed the Mississippi, with little or no consideration of Canada’s rights and concerns and interests in the Great Lakes.

We affect one another whether we acknowledge it or not. That is why it is silly to say, as some do with a sense of virtue, “I am responsible to myself alone”, or “I am free to choose my own values”. Responsibility, value are ethical and social terms. They apply to our relationships to others. To be responsible to oneself alone is to be irresponsible. It is like having concern for oneself alone; it is to be unconcerned for others.

We are not alone. Our deeds to affect others. And what suffering comes from this! This is why innocent children can be shot down in a civilian aircraft, or drowned in a train wreck, or born with Aids.

Yet there is something new in the Biblical view of this process unlike the Greek or Chinese. It is not a kind of pendulum swinging between opposite forces in a perpetual harmonic tension. In the Bible God emerges as a part of the process by inserting Himself into history. Biblical religion is unique in seeing God as involved in human affairs. This is why progress is a western concept. God has a purpose for man and the world. Only Islam which draws heavily from the Bible has a similar teaching of God in history (which helps explain the historic conflicts between the cross and the crescent). Greeks thought of history as repeating cycles. Chinese thought is rooted in the dynamic but stable pattern of nature.

As we have seen, God is in history, guiding and leading His people to the promised land. And what more vivid expression of God in history could we have than the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. God was made flesh and dwelt among us. Through Christ, God’s power is at hand among us to bring about that which is good.

This is the thrust of the story of the man born blind. The occasions for evil and suffering are also occasions for good. We should trust in the creative love of God and not fear the evils that beset us. God needs our hands to help bring good out of evil. Evil exists so that we do something about it and so share in the power of creative love that Jesus has revealed. After all, we do not want a theory to explain the darkness of evil but the light of the love of Christ to overcome it. It is always better to light a candle of faith than to curse the darkness.