The Problem of Evil

The classical "Problem of Evil" is, if G-d is omnipotent why does he allow evil? Or to bring it down to a concrete level, the "Problem of Suffering." Why does he allow stuff like kids with brain cancer? Surely they didn't deserve such great suffering. The problem of evil and the problem of suffering are connected, because if something causes zero suffering or harm to anything at any time, it's probably not evil. We might want to broaden our sense of what qualifies as "harm," but that's a good rough guide.

I actually don't find that question as interesting as some other related questions which I will get to in a moment. The reason why I don't find the "Problem of Evil" that problematic is, suffering is temporary and relative. Even though, it may not seem temporary and relative at the time.

Watch a 5-year-old fall and skin his knee. Unless the child in question is extraordinarily disciplined, he may well scream like harpies were tearing him limb from limb. To him, the injury truly is awful, the subjective experience of it is awful, even though the objective damage is minimal. Spending 2 years dying of cancer of the anus or something might indeed feel like eternal torture, but it actually isn't. It ends. And after it ends, nobody is experiencing it anymore so it doesn't exist. Ephemeral suffering, ephemeral evil, sucks at the time. It may suck so much that it monopolizes 100% of your attention at the time, but it isn't actually that important. Sure, we all want to minimize it everywhere we can, because it really does suck badly at the time it is happening.

Suppose they invented a form of VR headset that was whole-body, whole-senses. So for instance if you loaded a simulation of a Civil War battle, you would feel the breeze on your cheek. You would smell the decaying corpses. You would hear the bullets whiz by your head. You could talk to your compatriots and see the sweat beading up on their foreheads and the look of terror on their faces. When shot, when dying, that is exactly what you would feel. You've got a hole in your chest you could stick your thumb through, and you're dying. But you unplug from that rather traumatic VR system and look at yourself, you are whole and unharmed in an air conditioned room somewhere. No harm is done. It's awful at the time, but transitory. Just as worldly pleasures are also transitory.

The problem with saying "Good and Evil" is that it does sound a bit like you are saying "Happiness and Suffering," whereas in a Judeo-Christian context, "Good" is obedience to G-d which might in fact cause suffering. This is a fact that is little-appreciated, that doing good can hurt. While "Good" is not unconnected with well-being and "Evil" not unconnected with degeneration and suffering, you might indeed do a "Good" act that causes suffering or even death. If you see someone shooting up a shopping mall and the only way you can realistically stop them is to shoot them, that act is good even though the pain and death of the shooter is very real and terrible to him. If someone gets bit by a bat and the only way to keep them from getting rabies is a series of painful injections, giving them the injections is good even though it's agonizing.

The meta-level, the cosmological level, of the "Problem of Evil" is this: if you assume that the world is a battleground between good and evil or obedience and disobedience to be more precise, why is that the case? Why is THAT the lesson we are supposed to be learning here?

If our experience of suffering and evil is transitory anyway, why wouldn't it be a battle between, lets say, vanilla and chocolate ice cream? That would be a much more genial and flavorful battle, if we need a battle. And the usual arguments for why good and evil are significant and vanilla and chocolate are not, are worldly arguments. Because evil causes pain and good heals. Ice cream is just ice cream. But if both pain and healing are transitory, why does it matter?

When we are all dead and this world is a cold cinder in space, why is the fact that it was a battle between obedience and disobedience important? All the harm done is long dead and buried. All the healing is too. So why is THIS the lesson we are supposed to learn in the cosmic school right now?

Every animal on this planet had to evolve to be selfish. To look after its own survival and its own genes, it's blood, it's kin. It is guided by its body and its senses to do so, to please its senses. This is the need for selfishness, for tunnel-vision focused on oneself and one's own body. So if you are an animal on this planet, that's what you need to learn. I have raccoons that come up to the outside of my window to eat bugs, moths and such, attracted by the lights inside the house. That raccoon does not spare a single thought for the bug. The bug does not spare a single thought for the plant that it sucks juices from. The plant, if it could think, does not spare a single thought for the plant that is being overshadowed and starved of sun by its leaves. While plants and animals may be incapable of evil as we understand it, they can most definitely cause harm.

Humans also need to know how to be selfish in this way, how to survive. But if that is all a human being learns in the time it is here, he or she is a failed human being. To live solely in this way is evil. It is both harmful and disobedient.

Why is it that the first lessons that G-d teaches man involve self-denial and pain? Don't eat the Apple, that is self-denial. The Apple looks good to eat, juicy and delicious in fact, but you must not. Why? Because it's not yours. Because G-d commanded it, and G-d decides what is yours and not-yours.

Now there were two named trees in the Garden: the other one was the Tree of Life. Note that they did not pick that one to eat from first. Why? I can surmise: the fruit of the Tree of Life looks ugly. Looks not delicious. Smells bad. To choose that fruit would have been to embrace self-denial, to disregard the senses. They were like animals, they weren't capable. You could say that Good, or rather Obedience, is like that fruit. Appears bad to the senses sometimes, but is good.

Circumcision. Abraham must have given G-d a look like, "You want me to do what now???" To Abraham, like most men, I am sure his John Thomas was the apple of his eye.

"You Want Me To CUT it???"

And then G-d asked a worse thing. Your favorite being in the whole world, someone you would die a thousand times to protect. Your son. You must take him up on that mountain and kill him. 

If Abraham had been a normal man, with the same degree of love for his son that Abraham had, there would have been no problem. He would have just said "HELL NO ARE YOU CRAZY?" But Abraham was a special man: he was willing. Had G-d not stopped him, he would have killed his son. THAT willingness, is what G-d wanted, not the actual death of Isaac.

Now why does G-d want to teach us self-denial, resistance to the senses, sacrifice, pain? This is because our natural power of selfishness is so strong. And without overcoming it in the name of G-d's will, in the name of a higher good, we can never escape the black box of our selfishness, our inherent solipsism. We cannot be expanded to care for all persons and all things.

What does G-d want from us, ultimately? For us to be helpers, participants, in Creation. Not because He needs our help, obviously, or the universe wouldn't have been created to begin with. But G-d loves company. In Genesis, He speaks of "we" did such and such. "We" is him and the host of heaven, angels. At one and the same time you could say that He doesn't technically need us (or the angels) but in some sense we complete Him.

G-d Loves.

But we cannot be turned into such a being as would be worthy to care for all Creation if we cannot escape the narrow box of selfishness. If our minds and hearts cannot be expanded that far. THAT is why the battle between obedience and disobedience is happening and why obedience is the thing we are supposed to be learning. The battle between obedience and disobedience, good and evil, is a necessary consequence of a world in which we exist as beings whose job is to overcome ourselves.

Would you want a selfish self-centered being to have the power of an angel? I wouldn't.