The Problem of Evil Revisited

The problem of evil is an age old paradox which has haunted human beings who believe in an all knowing, all loving, and all powerful God for centuries. For even the most faithful of us it can be a source of doubt and despair, and can make us wonder if our fears that a.) we are all alone in the universe or b.) God might be a bastard are true. The paradox, in question form, goes something like this: “If God is all knowing, all powerful, and all loving, why does He/She/It let bad things happen to me/my family/good people/people in general?”

From the “I know God exists” crowd we usually get a few basic responses to this question:
1.) “Shut up!”
2.) “Do not try to understand God, for it would be like an ant attempting to understand…blah blah blah”
3.) “God uses evil and bad things as a test.”
4.) “Humanity’s sinning is the source of all evil, even hurricanes…don’t ask me how.”

Now these responses usually satisfy the odd annoying kid in Sunday school and those who already have faith that an all knowing/loving/powerful God exists. The rest of us, however, are left twisting in the wind on this question as those responses either only work if you assume God exists in the first place (2), assume a God that is not actually all powerful (4), or assume a God that is not all loving of all humans (3). Don’t get too depressed though, as I think I may have an alternate way of thinking about the problem of evil.

To begin, I’ll ask you to engage in a thought experiment. Imagine, for a moment, if every second of your day was filled with an orgasm. This, you would imagine, would be much better than your current life, where orgasms occupy a very small amount of your time. However, if you knew nothing but a life with orgasms, wouldn’t that just mean that having an orgasm would be roughly equivalent to how you feel without pain in your present state? I’d imagine that after a few generations of people lived in the orgasmic every day, those people would think their lives no more charmed than you or I do. This means of course, that we’re a very hard species to please. Any universe created by God for human beings would inevitably involve us thinking that evil existed in it. Sure the hurricanes and natural disasters that we see might be pretty terrible, but could you honestly say that you would feel worse in your current state after having your house be blown away than being deprived of orgasms for a year in the orgasm world?

One way we could avoid evil in our world is if there was no good, that is, if there was no variation in our lives from moment to moment or from day to day. That seems inherently undesirable, and worse than the world we have now, even if the net utility of the world or of our lives is negative.The only other way I think to avoid evil though, is if human beings were somehow detached from viewing the world in terms of more=better. That is, if human beings somehow didn’t derive their happiness from the material happenings of the world they could gain a different perspective and not be trapped into being despaired by the bad deviations from the mean.

You might ask, well why doesn’t God just make us understand that? Well we could be made into more enlightened beings I guess, but, then again, I think we’d be deprived of the benefits of being human. Some of the more rewarding parts of my life have been when I feel I’ve grown as a person, or did something great through hard work. Somehow, being given enlightenment doesn’t seem more desirable than becoming enlightened through thought and experience. If God exists, though, I think he has shown us a way around the problem of evil by encouraging us to get around materialism. After all, that is the core lesson of most of the major religions is that we must reject viewing our lives as good or bad based on what happens around us on Earth.If anything suggests that God exists, I think this does. After all, it seems illogical for any movement in any species to not drive for more food, sex, and riches, the things which make it easier for us to have more and more children and out-compete other species. But where every natural instinct within us drives for more stuff, there still remains a strange voice which whispers to us that none of it matters and that we should strive for happiness based on other things.

In a world dominated by evil, it’s one of the few places I see a loving God.