The problem of evil.
Most religions of the world are
fundamentally convinced of the existence of the principle or forces of good and
evil. History is filled with empirical
evidence of the noble and adverse consequences of both, perhaps more of the
adversity of evil than the nobility of good.
Human existence has overtly and covertly been under the constant
harassment of evil in its different forms since the beginning of human history,
and the many attempts to resolve the crisis have either proved fruitless or
have not gone far enough.
It is clear that something is drastically
wrong with the human being, how did we become so evil when we could become so
good? Jesus asked, Luke 11:13
(NIV) “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give
good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the
Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Why do we honour the pain of wars with such
fancy and lofty epaulettes? How do we
resolve the moral crisis of doing to others what we don’t want done to us?
Without evil and its consequences in many
directions and on many levels media screens would practically be blank and
printing presses would simply rust because there would virtually be no news to
report. The United Nations would have no problems to solve, and our prisons
would be empty. There would have been no
Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Apartheid’s prime assassins Eugene de Kock and Dr. Wouter Basson would
be angels, and we would not be tiptoeing around the edges of World War 3.
In some mad sense evil makes the world go
round, even if it robs us of the harmony we cry out for so badly. If there is good, why does it seem like the
forces of evil are winning? In our
human-best we all want an environment of good instead of evil, how then are we
so inclined to evil more than we are to good?
Naturally,
there are more questions than answers, and sometimes our inability to provide
answers to some of life’s most perplexing questions drives us to an unaesthetic
acceptance and complacency of the situation around us.
The
irony of history is that whenever we do not have the answers to the questions
that harass us we create solutions that become tomorrow’s problems. In the end we find ourselves trapped in the
middle of a perpetual and costly hurricane of confusion from which we cannot
liberate ourselves.
Is there hope for the deliverance
of humanity?
Niebuhr says (1941:167), “The Christian
view of the goodness of creation is solidly anchored in a very simple word of
scripture.” And he quotes, Genesis 1:31(NIV) “God saw all that he
had made, and it was very good.” Augustine
alludes to a similar notion (Handbook on Faith.
Chap III):
For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator, who is the one and the true God.
We
did not know evil until we were tempted to reach out for the forbidden. In this narrative sin was introduced at
humanity’s point of disobedience, our naughtiness was our insistence to test
the validity of the serpent’s hypothesis.
Our challenge ever since is to unseat God and become God ourselves. We introduced the death of humanity where we
sought to introduce the death of God (Nietzsche).
Evil is a condition of the human heart.
Evil
was introduced at the point of the knowledge of the existence of good and
evil. It is therefore a condition of the
human heart introduced at the point of human disobedience, Jeremiah
17:9(NIV) “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond
cure. Who can understand it?
“ Not
only was the couple aware of their choice and its consequences, they proceeded
to act on the negative suggestions of their new consciousness.
It
is this awareness that led to the action of disobedience, and it is the action
that introduced evil into human society.
The root of human anxiety is the choice that the individual must make in
the tension presented by his/her knowledge of good and evil. This is the link between evil and human
anxiety—evil is a choice we make.
In
the thought of Niebuhr the human heart is the source of all evil because it is
constantly harassed by curiosity and greed.
We are constantly in search of ways to have more and to explore new
territory, that desire when it is fully blown and perverted is the mother of
all evil.
Since
our knowledge of good and evil, we are bent more to the side of evil than we
are to the side of good, as recorded in scripture, Ge 6:5 “The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on
the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart
was only evil all the time.”
Until
we can confront these questions squarely and honestly, the recurrent
existential cry of frustration will always echo in the corridors of human
existence, Romans 7:24 “Oh! What a miserable
person I am! Who will free me from this
life that is dominated by sin and death?”
Perhaps a deeper question is, can we confront these
questions in any meaningful sense? If
history is authentic, then we have a problem, much like the merchant who tried
to jump on a bulge on his oriental rug only to have it appear somewhere
else. Evil in one form or another is the
slithering and slippery snake beneath the rug, just when we think the rug is
straightened out the snake rears its ugly head in another corner. This is typical of conflict resolution on
every level, we resolve a crisis in one part of the world only to have it
reincarnate in another.
Perspectives in philosophy and
religion.
Religion and philosophy have tried to
approach the question of evil from different directions, and largely based on
three suppositions, (1) God is omnipotent, (2) God is perfectly good, and (3)
evil exists. From these three
assumptions some have concluded that, if God is powerful, surely God can
eradicate evil from the face of the earth, if not how can God be all-powerful
(a negation of God’s omnipotence)? Or,
if God as creator is good, how did evil find its way into existence, which
means God, is not altogether good because God created all things (a negation of
God’s righteousness). For the Christian
the righteousness and omnipotence of God is established and beyond question as
confirmed by Augustine (Handbook on Faith. Chap IV):
All of nature…is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good. But nature is not supremely and immutably good as is the Creator of it.
The human being as part of and existing within nature is affected by what Augustine says; he/she is created good but is not supremely and immutably good as is his/her creator. In a sense Augustine capitulates to the reality of the existence of evil in human nature, to be sure, evil is a consequence of corrupted good, which means in some sense; it existed within or alongside good. God is the good that cannot be corrupted; yet the good that allows but does not cause created good to be corrupted, evil is a consequence of good that has allowed for and is responsible its own corruption. Good chose to be evil because good could have chosen to remain good (free-will). Where we chose evil over good is where we missed the mark, it is still where we miss mark.
Some regard this response as the weakness
of monotheism, especially in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. They opt for a polytheistic approach because
it offers more options in the attempt to resolve the crisis of evil. Polytheism sees the problem of evil as
emanating from a possible conflict of interest among deities and thus absolves
human involvement. From a monotheistic
perspective, this absolution of human involvement in the problem of evil is the
precise weakness of polytheism, for how does one fix what one does not
acknowledge? To be sure, the
polytheistic approach to the problem of evil is shifting blame and holds its
deities responsible for evil in human existence.
Shifting blame or pointing fingers is
typical where evil rears its head. Adam
blamed Eve and she blamed the serpent.
That pattern of behaviour has been repeated throughout human history and
is characteristic of the human desire to be absolved from taking
responsibility. And yet that desire
fails to explain why human beings have introduced evil into human society at
many and different levels, and why even the most righteous of us are evil. Niebuhr observed (1941:96):
The inclination of modern men to
find the source of evil in his life in some particular event in history or some
specific historical corruption is a natural consequence of his view of himself
in a simple one-dimensional history. But
this modern error merely accentuates a perennial tendency of the human heart to
attribute wrongdoing to temptation and thus escape responsibility for it.
In a sense repentance is an admission by
the individual of his/her sin, that recognition means that in some way the
individual admits that a form of virtue has been violated. Sometimes that recognition and admission is
not easily arrived at especially where a person seeks to apportion blame to
something beyond him/herself. This
attribute is unique to the human being, to be sure he/she is the only one who
can stand above and pronounce judgement on the virtue or vice of his/her
situation. The question of evil however
still remains unresolved, as Niebuhr says (1941:2):
If a man takes his uniqueness for granted he is immediately involved in questions and contradictions on the problem of his virtue. If he believes himself to be essentially good and attributes the admitted evils of human history to specific social and historical causes he involves himself in begging the question; for these specific historical causes of evil are revealed, upon close analysis, to be no more than particular consequences and historical configurations of evil tendencies in man himself. They cannot be understood at all if a capacity for, and inclination toward, evil in man himself is not presupposed.
Pointing fingers does not explain the existence of evil it merely confirms it. And for Niebuhr the symptom is not the sickness, it is an indication of a deeper problem. To be sure, evil cannot be rooted out by pointing the speck in a brother/sister’s eye without due consideration of the beam in one’s own eye. But then human nature is not so good-natured or morally generous with itself; it will always portray an image of righteousness in the midst of its own unrighteousness, and right there is the root of its sinfulness.
How do we deal with the ogre in
our midst?
Every religion and cultural folklore has a
myth of creation, good and evil.
However, we may have become evil, every attempt or approach to
understand the problem of evil must finally arrive at the conclusion that evil
is a verifiable phenomenon within the scope of human existence. The more urgent question therefore is not
where evil comes from, but how do we deal with the ogre in our midst?
From a
Christian perspective, the three basic propositions of philosophy and/or
religion have a relational problem with God or the existence of God; they do
not acknowledge that God is not accountable to God’s creation. In a sense they do not accept God as standing
above God’s creation, but they stand in judgement of God. Perhaps at the bottom of it all is the
voracious and clandestine Nietzschean desire of scientific inquiry to kill God. Nietzsche’s Nihilism sought to explain human
existence without God (The God is dead theory); he argued that without God
there is no answer to the question of purpose and meaning in life. In Nietzsche's view, the death of God frees
humanity to fulfil itself and find its own essence. Not all Nihilists though subscribed to the
“Death of God theory,” Martin Buber saw a very strong connection between the
“I” and the eternal “Thou.”
When scientific inquiry seeks to understand
human existence without God it yields to the temptation that confronted Adam
and Eve in the Garden. The serpent
suggested that Adam and Eve could exist without God if they partook of the
forbidden tree (or suggested that they could be God); they were kept away from
the tree because God wanted to be God alone, to be sure, they did not really
need God to exist.
In this type of thinking, Nietzsche stood
in the tradition of many others who sought to understand human existence within
the limits of reason and sense experience.
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) for instance, put forward the argument that
God is a projection of man's ideals.
Others like Sigmund Freud have followed in the similar thinking albeit
in different disciplines. In the 20th
century Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others continued the Nietzsche’s
premise. According to Sartre, human
freedom entails the denial of God, for God's existence would threaten our
freedom to create our own values through free ethical choice.
For the Christian (and other related
monotheistic religions) the Genesis narrative seems to suggest that greed and
curiosity have always been part of the human heart. The suggestions made by this line of thinking
and questioning may be credible to the extent that they are honest, yet they
are misinformed, ill informed or deliberately seek to sway from the reality of
an existing truth. God created us good
and we chose evil, thus evil is good violated and diminished. Evil was introduced by the human being’s act
of disobedience, and therefore his/her denial and rejection of God. Niebuhr states repeatedly and in different
forms (1941:168):
The fragmentary character of human life is not regarded as evil in Biblical faith because it is seen from the perspective of a centre of life and meaning in which each fragment is related to the plan of the whole, to the will of God. The evil arises when the fragment seeks by its own wisdom to comprehend the whole or attempts by its own power to realise it.
Evil in the cloak of
righteousness.
Niebuhr believes that “Man is his own
vexing problem” (1941:1). We are
where we are not because God put us there, but because we landed ourselves in
the swamp. An authentic philosophical
and/or religious question therefore should rather honestly seek to understand,
“How did we get to be where we are?”
Human philosophies in the bid to blame or
to negate the existence of God reveal the same ignorance of the implications of
the notion of evil as is demonstrated by the dreamy homilies in an average
church service on any given Sunday morning.
Evil in its guilt and arrogance seeks to justify and defend its own
self-righteousness by shifting to others the blame it qualifiedly deserves, and
in its hypocrisy, it covers its imperial greed with the pious shroud of
defending humanity from endangering humanity.
For Niebuhr sin is the spiritual condition
of our position at the confluence of the contradiction of our finitude and
freedom. We are finite because our
freedom is defined within divine perimeters; we are free because those
perimeters are infinite. According to
Niebuhr that contradiction is the root cause of human anxiety, and yet it is
not our problem; our problem is that we are anxious in the first place, because
right there, the sin of our pride is introduced.
The consequences of evil will always be
physical, but the source is spiritual because it is influenced by sin as a
spiritual force, to be sure, evil is the good in us corrupted and revealed in
the viciousness of human situations. The
consequences of sin and its cost is the one question that occupies
international and national forums of conflict resolution, and yet we are unable
to get it right because the context in which it is confronted is not related to
its root cause. We intend to resolve a
spiritual crisis through physical or natural means.
Every effort to live life is an
acknowledgement of how far we have deviated from the original scheme intended
for the harmony of all creation. We are
not only victims of our own anxiety, but all creation is affected by the
imperial nature of our anxiety expressed in various forms. Over and above the pain we cause each other,
we bleed the earth, we invade the heavens, we destroy natural habitations, we
deplete ozone layers; and then come back to discuss how we can reverse the
consequences of our own madness.
This is the irony of anxiety gone wild in
human history; it demands peace through violence, and ensures its own security
and survival through the oppression of others.
The terms of world peace are always calculated and determined by the most
violent among us, and exploitation and servitude are always imposed on the
weakest by the strongest. In a strange
twist of evil guised as good, we want to eat our cake and have it too.
When the pot calls the kettle
black.
According to Niebuhr, it is impossible to
understand or to account for, or to hold someone responsible for human
atrocities without assuming that there is some malevolence hidden in human
benevolence (1941:2). This is a
condition of condemnation and not of creation, Paul taught a similar trend of
thought, Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and
fall short of the glory of God.” To be
sure, every pot is just as black as every kettle, even though some are blacker
than others. For Niebuhr, evil is not
the action, it is the force behind the action, and the action is an indication
of the existence of the force. The
consequence is usually connected to a system of cause, process, and
effect. He wrote (p.180):
The story of the Fall is innocent of a fully developed Satanology; yet Christian theology has not been wrong in identifying the serpent with, or regarding it as an instrument or symbol of the devil. To believe that there is a devil is to believe that there is a principle or force of evil antecedent to any human action.
This notion of an evil force behind human atrocities, or the “devil made me do it syndrome!” is one that has and will continue to meet with spite and derision from rational quarters that consider it religious nonsense and sheer human irresponsibility. Yet, no other theory has been advanced whose plausibility has influenced human thinking and behaviour more. People on every level of human existence continue to do things they regret on large and small scales because the good in us will always return to rebuke the evil. As Niebuhr says, while there is no need to be betrayed into capitulating to the suggestions of the forces of evil, it cannot be denied that the twist of truth they propose presents us with the occasion to sin (1941:178). It is equally true that with every opportunity to sin another is presented to do good, but our hearts are inclined more to evil than good.
The human being therefore is good and evil
in some great or small sense, whether or not his/her actions affirm it. The action is an indication of the force or
principle to which he/she has chosen to capitulate. To be sure, the human being is at any given
point in time presented with the opportunity to choose for better or
worse. And that is the unique attribute
that makes him/her to stand shoulder above the rest of God’s creation.
The human situation is haunted not so much
by the possibility to sin, as it is by the denial of the existence of that
possibility, as John said, 1Jonn 1:8(NIV) “If we
claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” We are constantly confronted by the evil in others that we identify in
ourselves, and in our self-righteousness and hypocrisy we appease our own evil
by exposing or even inflicting evil on others.
The denial of our own evil is the connection between injustice and
self-righteousness. Often people inflict injury on others not because they are perfect,
but to stop their own evil from being exposed, or to avenge their evil from
having being exposed. That is a basic
Christological teaching, Matthew 7:3-4 (TNIV) “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in
someone else’s eye, and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take
the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?”
No comments:
Post a Comment