All About Evil

All About Evil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I often do, I’m going to use my Sun­day col­umn to divert us from the con­cerns of the moment. Rest assured, tomor­row Log­a­rchism will return to 24–7 cov­er­age of the upcom­ing elec­tion. View today’s arti­cle as the final pit stop before the polit­i­cal equiv­a­lent of the Indi­anapo­lis 500 roars to its end.

What I offer today is a per­spec­tive on a ques­tion at the root of all our pol­i­tics, all our cul­ture, all our social struc­tures. From a sin­gle com­ment buried in a heated polit­i­cal debate, there is cos­mic sig­nif­i­cance. We can use it to con­sider how the per­ilous issue of rape and abor­tion relates to the nature of our very selves. From there, we can per­haps return to the ques­tions of the moment, with a new and larger sense, and recon­sider our direc­tion as indi­vid­u­als, as a soci­ety, as a nation — per­haps as a species.

Last Thurs­day, in response to an arti­cle by Monotreme,  one of our Gen­tle Read­ers pro­vided a link to a blog post at National Review Online. I thought the arti­cle wrong on all counts, but par­tic­u­larly the­o­log­i­cal ones. It gave me an excuse to write an arti­cle I’ve been intend­ing to do for a long time.

The imme­di­ate topic was a com­ment by Indi­ana Repub­li­can Sen­a­to­r­ial can­di­date Richard Mour­dock on the thorny issues of rape, preg­nancy, and abor­tion, and the rela­tion­ship to pol­i­tics and the­ol­ogy and indi­vid­ual con­science. Though I pro­foundly dis­agree with Mourdock’s answer — and, as an unashamed par­ti­san, I would glee­fully take advan­tage of it — as a the­olo­gian I need to admit it was a thought­ful and con­sid­ered response. There also are fur­ther depths here to explore, depths which reach to the heart of every­thing related to pol­i­tics and social jus­tice, eco­nom­ics and freedom.

As back­ground: In a tele­vised debate, Mour­dock was asked a ques­tion about whether a ban on abor­tion should include an excep­tion in the case of rape. He answered, in part,

I strug­gled with it myself for a long time, but I came to real­ize life is that gift from God, And I think even when life begins in that hor­ri­ble sit­u­a­tion of rape, that it is some­thing that God intended to happen.

Under­stand­ably, Democ­rats seized on his answer and made some good polit­i­cal hay over it. Some Repub­li­cans dis­tanced them­selves from Mour­dock. The inci­dent was a minor embar­rass­ment for Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Willard Mitt Rom­ney, who had made it a point to endorse Mour­dock the day before. I’m not going to dwell on the polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions of his remark. My inter­est here is greater.

There is a very deep philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem that Mour­dock raised, which is known in its most gen­eral form as the “Prob­lem of Evil.” One way of stat­ing it is like this: If God is All-​​Good, and All-​​Knowing, and All-​​Powerful, why does He allow Evil to exist? Clearly, an all-​​knowing and all-​​powerful God could ban­ish all suf­fer­ing and all evil with no more effort than a sin­gle snap of His mighty fin­gers. How can a God that is All-​​Good avoid doing this? What kind of sadis­tic God, who has it in His power to erase Evil, would allow suf­fer­ing to continue?

This ques­tion mat­ters in a polit­i­cal sense. It relates ulti­mately to how we view geopo­lit­i­cal rivals, how we deal with crim­i­nals, how we address peo­ple of a dif­fer­ent race or party. How do we, as a nation, respond to nat­ural dis­as­ters or to per­sonal mis­for­tune? How dare we incar­cer­ate a crim­i­nal, if the evils that crook did were noth­ing more than car­ry­ing out divine deci­sions? If suf­fer­ing is ulti­mately the Will of God, are we thwart­ing that Will when we try to help those less for­tu­nate than our­selves? If we are sym­pa­thetic to those who have com­mit­ted heinous crimes, is that in accord with the Will of a lov­ing God, or in con­tra­dic­tion to the dic­tates of a God of Vengeance? And should any of these ques­tions be allowed to infest our politics?

There are many approaches to the Prob­lem of Evil, many attempts to explain why the God of the Bible would allow Evil to exist. Most of them have to do with the def­i­n­i­tion of “God”. He is said to be omni­scient, omnipo­tent, and supremely Good. If any one of these three attrib­utes is false, the Prob­lem goes away.

Per­haps God is not All-​​Knowing. That is, per­haps there are at least some evils of which He isn’t aware, and, there­fore, can’t stop. Or per­haps not All-​​Powerful; there are maybe lim­its on what He can accom­plish. Some evils are beyond His capa­bil­i­ties. Or per­haps He is not All-​​Good. Per­haps he wants humans (at least, some humans) to suf­fer. Clearly, if any of these three commonly-​​assumed attrib­utes have lim­its, then Evil is allowed within the cracks thus revealed.

One usual form of answers to the Prob­lem involves Free Will. Per­haps God allows humans to make evil deci­sions, because He wants us to have the free­dom to select our own fate. He there­fore chooses to allow Evil. This is the equiv­a­lent of know­ing that some­one else is plan­ning a theft — or a mur­der, or a ter­ror­ist attack, or a geno­cide — and does noth­ing to stop it.

In the Real World, we put peo­ple in prison for these sorts of things, per­haps even exe­cute them, and we often con­sider such silent part­ners to be as guilty as are the actual per­pe­tra­tors. Yet, some­how, the believ­ers in Free Will give God a pass. If we are jus­ti­fied in pun­ish­ing peo­ple for such out­ra­geous sins of omis­sion, should we not also view God as equally guilty of these evil acts?

This par­tic­u­lar attempt to resolve the Prob­lem of Evil is, there­fore, the same as say­ing that God is not All-​​Good. He shares in the guilt and respon­si­bil­ity for all suf­fer­ing, all evil, all injus­tice that exists in the world, because He chooses not to act. Some Chris­t­ian the­olo­gians refuse to accept this. Many of them, there­fore, also refuse to accept the exis­tence of free will, because allow­ing humans to decide to com­mit crimes implies that God allows humans to com­mit crimes. The only alter­na­tive is to say that no one really makes any deci­sions at all. Every­thing is pre­des­tined and fore-​​ordained. The future is already fixed, and we can’t change it.

This leads down another rab­bit hole. It implies that no one is respon­si­ble for any­thing they do, because it was all pre­or­dained. Not only did the crim­i­nal have no choice but to com­mit the crime, but we have no choice in whether or not we pun­ish him for it. Our lives are a story already writ­ten, and we are mere pas­sen­gers wit­ness­ing the tale.

This is the essence of Calvin­ist doc­trine. A moment’s reflec­tion shows that this must be so, if you believe that God is All-​​Knowing. If He knows every­thing, that means He already knows what’s going to hap­pen. That means noth­ing can hap­pen that isn’t already known. The future is already writ­ten. We can­not change it. There is, there­fore, no such thing as free will. There is also no such thing as per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity — or national respon­si­bil­ity. Every­thing from petty theft to geno­cide to elec­toral fail­ure or suc­cess is already woven into the fab­ric of Reality.

This is a rather bleak view of the human con­di­tion. (It also is con­sis­tent with New­ton­ian physics and Skin­ner­ian psy­chol­ogy. Per­haps we’ll explore that in a future article.)

Another attempt to resolve the Prob­lem of Evil is to say that what­ever hap­pens serves a Higher Pur­pose that we mere humans can’t com­pre­hend or appre­ci­ate. Every­thing that hap­pens — absolutely every­thing, no mat­ter how it seems to us — is part of God’s Plan.

This is often what’s told to griev­ing mem­bers of a fam­ily when some­one dies, par­tic­u­larly when that per­son per­ishes in a par­tic­u­larly tragic or unex­pected or untimely way. How many times have you heard some­one say, “I know how sad and hard it is, but you must under­stand — it is part of God’s Will. There must be a rea­son He wanted young Dylan to be with Him in Heaven.”

In this for­mu­la­tion, God is indeed All-​​Powerful, All-​​Knowing, and All-​​Good. Things seem “evil” to us only because we can’t see the greater good they serve. For exam­ple: the doc­tor gives a tetanus shot to an infant. The baby screams in pain, but a greater pain is averted. A par­ent slaps the wrist of a child about to burn her­self on a hot stove. A vast and bloody war is waged, but mil­lions of slaves are freed. Mil­lions die in a world war, but nations are cre­ated and Amer­ica becomes a world power. Who is to say that the Ulti­mate End of even the most dread­ful suf­fer­ing doesn’t serve a far greater purpose?

In this way of think­ing, Richard Mour­dock was absolutely cor­rect. Rape is a ter­ri­ble thing. But if in the end it brings forth a new life, who can deny that child the right to live? Per­haps he or she will grow up to find a cure for can­cer, or a solu­tion to world hunger. Or, moti­vated by the hor­ror of the cir­cum­stances, per­haps even that child will find a solu­tion to the dri­ves of sex­ual preda­tors. Even if not — is there a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for pre­vent­ing an inno­cent life? (I say “pre­vent­ing” rather than “destroy­ing” in order to side­step the ques­tion of when life begins — clearly, at the moment of con­cep­tion, the poten­tial exists.)

In this mode of thought, Mour­dock should have dou­bled down on his state­ment, rather than back­ing away or apol­o­giz­ing or soft­en­ing it. Other think­ing Chris­tians should have as well. If God is All-​​Knowing, then He must know when a rape is going to hap­pen. If He is All-​​Powerful, then He must be able to pre­vent it. If He is All-​​Good, then, in some sense, the rape must also be Good, even if we don’t under­stand why. After all, every­thing that hap­pens in the uni­verse, from the birth of a star to the fall of a leaf, must be part of God’s Plan.

Which means that the rape — and, if it hap­pens, a preg­nancy that results from the rape — must be part of God’s Plan as well. This is another way of say­ing that God planned it.

In the end, there is no get­ting around this basic prob­lem with the Chris­t­ian view of God. An omni­scient and omnipo­tent and all-​​good God means that real­ity must be as it is, and can­not be oth­er­wise. There is noth­ing which isn’t in accord with His Will, and there can­not be. Like­wise, there is noth­ing which isn’t, ulti­mately, Good.

We really have only two ways to approach this Prob­lem. I am not going to advise any­one on the proper approach, because in the end, the truly “proper approach” is some­thing rooted in the very nature of Real­ity Itself. I don’t know the answer to that.

We can accept that all of real­ity, all of his­tory, all of our deci­sions, are pre­des­tined. This doesn’t mean we do noth­ing. It means we can joy­fully par­tic­i­pate in the ecstasies and pains of the world. Like a rau­cous bar fight or a rowdy Irish wake, we dive in and pre­tend we believe in free will, because, after all, God also put that par­tic­u­lar con­ceit into our heads. For what­ever rea­son — one we can­not fathom — God wants us to accept the false notion that we can influ­ence our own fate. Play the game, there­fore, and throw our­selves into rela­tion­ships, pol­i­tics, busi­ness, eth­i­cal mat­ters, and the illu­sion of life.

Or reject the def­i­n­i­tion of God. Real­ity is not a still life already painted. If a god or gods exist, he, she, it, or they are not all-​​knowing, all-​​powerful, and all-​​good. There are lim­its to what can be known, what can be done — and, there­fore, there are lim­its to our safety and our assur­ance of being right. Bad Things are going to hap­pen — not because a sadis­tic or uncar­ing or above-​​it-​​all God made them hap­pen, but because Real­ity includes ran­dom­ness — and, there­fore, the pos­si­bil­ity of free will.

There are ways in which both of these paths are com­fort­ing, and both are ter­ri­fy­ing. For the first, we can reas­sure our­selves that what­ever hap­pens, hap­pens for a Rea­son. For the sec­ond, we can act with the knowl­edge that we truly can influ­ence our own Fate. But for the first, we are help­less before a Con­scious­ness beyond our com­pre­hen­sion. For the sec­ond, we are on our own, and respon­si­ble for what we do as well as what we don’t do.

How does this relate to Richard Mour­dock, and rape and abor­tion — and to the upcom­ing elec­tion, and the future of our nation? Here is how I see the question:

Chris­t­ian the­ol­ogy leads inevitably to Mourdock’s for­mu­la­tion of rape and abor­tion. But that also implies we may not look down on any­one who draws gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits or pays no taxes. If God gives the gift of a baby to a raped woman, doesn’t that mean the 47 per­cent who don’t pay taxes are merely doing God’s will? If we want to insist peo­ple should take respon­si­bil­ity for them­selves, what does that do to theologically-​​based notions of abor­tion or same-​​sex marriage?

Here are some ques­tions to discuss:

  • If we reject the notion that a rape-​​induced preg­nancy was the will of God, how much of the rest of Chris­t­ian the­ol­ogy must we also reject?
  • What are the impli­ca­tions for notions of pun­ish­ment vs reha­bil­i­ta­tion in our pris­ons, or “nat­ural rights”, or free­dom of religion?
  • If Amer­ica is a “Chris­t­ian nation”, then can we dis­agree with Mourdock’s statement?
  • If we dis­agree with his state­ment, then for rea­sons of prac­ti­cal­ity as well as con­sis­tency, should the reli­gious right have sway in Amer­i­can politics?

And, in the end, what do we do about it?

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