Evil itself provides no challenge
whatsoever to God—the existence of or the belief in. This may seem like a
small, semantic point, but I think it’s actually big and essential. Evil
implies God. This is not to say that God is evil but that evil cannot exist if
God does not. Without God, “evil” is just a hyperbole for events that leave us feeling
very sad or very scared. We may want to say “for events we can’t understand,”
but without God these events are perfectly plain—whether they be the extermination
of millions or the torture and slaughter of a single child, a hurricane that wipes
out a whole tribe or the man-caused heat that burns a living planet to the
ground. Without God there are only things we do or things that happen. Such events
are in the total calculation of the universe random events, no different than
the formation of a star via the coalescence of gasses or the massacre of a
tribe of termites by a tribe of ants.
But I do not believe that humans
can experience “evil” events this way—as meaningless. And I don’t think that
this is because we find these events really really sad. The truth is that the murder
of a child doesn’t just feel incomprehensible—it is incomprehensible. Despite
the fact that, without God, it is easy to comprehend, it is experienced as
something that should not have to have
happened. It is experienced with the same deep affect which accompanies (although
I’m saying this backwards) the literary form known as tragedy, which Aristotle
famously characterized as “pity and fear” but which I would think better
understood with that italicized phrase: It
should not have to have happened. Of course with the murder of any
individual child or with any “evil” or “tragic” event, looking at immediate
causes, we can always see ways it might have been avoided. Every individual
event is contingent and therefore, in theory, avoidable. Pulling back, however,
we have to see that from what we know about the universe such events in general are unavoidable. Given the
moral and physical structure of the universe, such events must be possible, and
therefore, to paraphrase Derrida, whatever can arrive must arrive.
The question we are left with is
whether the moral structure of the universe is really an amoral structure—which
is to say, does not exist at all. Put another way, we are asking whether our
reaction to Oedipus the King or the
murder of Sally Jones is something we should take seriously or ignore,
something we should believe in, or something we should pass off as an illusion
founded in the chance wiring of our common circuitry. It seems to me the burden
of proof is on those who contend that the profound experience of injustice or
tragedy is not to be taken seriously, that whenever we are tempted to say or
feel it should not have to have happened,
this is mere apophenia, we are imposing
a Darwinian impulse onto a random set of data—that our reaction to such events
is in fact so out of proportion to the events themselves that any truly
rational species peering down at us through their telescopes would be laughing.
