What is evil? Has God something to do with it?

This is an updated article from my Book, Quest beyond Religion. The world we see, seems to have more evil than good. Take Manipur for instance. It is a perfect time for the youngsters in Manipur to lie in bed and think for half an hour before they fall asleep at night.

What is Evil? Is it simply badness or wickedness? Who causes evil? Is it God? Is it Nature? Or is it a spontaneous result of our existence? Who decides what is evil? Is Islamic terrorism evil? Opinions vary. Definitions vary, as does the analysis of its root motives and whether God has something to do with it.

In general, evil is associated with a conscious or deliberate wrongdoing, unnecessary violence, racial discrimination or acts designed to humiliate others.

To defend innate human nature many religions have Satan by different names as the personification of evil in opposition to God who is an embodiment of goodness, nothing but goodness. Reflection on human nature over the eons shows that there have always been good and bad before God was invented by the feverish human mind.

Theologians and many philosophers regard morality as absolute - God’s absolutism, but I believe morality is relative eg the Halal slaughter of animals by the Jews and Muslims, which they do not regard as evil, is evil to non-Muslims.

The Holocaust of gassing millions of Jews was not regarded by Nazi Germany as evil. It was to them a simple ‘racial purification’. Until the middle of the 19th century, Bible-clutching Americans in the South did not regard slavery as evil.

Many philosophers give reasons for the existence of Evil. They are all opinions that are as good as yours and mine. Perhaps yours may be better. Theologians and religionists defend the ever-so-righteous God by putting forward the notion that God has nothing to do with evil because God has given what they call “free will” ie freedom for human beings to do what they like. It is a bit like a father telling his children what is good for them and leaving the rest up to them. This is of course, presuming that God exists.

‘Theodicy’ was coined by Leibniz to justify Gods’ existence in the light of too much evil in this world, especially in Christian theology. This completely fails to reason out the existence of God. It is just pulling wool over the religionists’ eyes. Humanity has evolved into more complex moral beings from primitive states, but the evils are still persistent as ever. If it is due to a God, He has not moved with time.

Evil is a complex word. It is a bit like God that has no definition. It is abstract. For the religionists and the uninitiated the history of Satan is the history of Evil. Only the law and customs of a community can approximate the definition. Example, female circumcision is evil in the West and East but not in the African countries.

Broadly speaking, evil is of two kinds. Physical evil: that includes all kinds of harm to humans, animals and plants. Moral evil: this is a deviation from the moral code of conduct of a community. It is mostly God-centred. There is a minor metaphysical evil, as believed in many communities. It is the ‘evil eyes’ known in Manipur in northeast India as ‘helloi changba’ or in north India as ‘nazar lagna’, in Arabic as ayn al-hasud and in Spanish as mal de ojo. ‘Evil eyes’ is a gaze suspiciously believed to be able to cause some form of physical or mental harm, which is of course bunkum.

Different religions have different answers to the paradigm of evil, and therefore what is not evil is good. But they also respond to different types of evil as explained above.

In Islam, the problem of evil has an easy answer. The failure to surrender to Allah by not becoming a proper Muslim is evil. Allah has options as to who should be rewarded or punished. There is no concept of absolute evil in Islam.

Hindus have no problem in explaining the existence of evil. The concept of Dharma (righteousness) dissociates good from evil. Vices and virtues are merely social conventions.

In the Buddhist belief system, the catalogued causes of human suffering are evil. In Confucianism and Taoism evil corresponds to wrong behaviour with inappropriate social relationships.

Evil according to Christianity is any action/attitude that is contrary to the character of God as described in the Old and New Testaments. In this Biblical context, Thomas Aquinas (later, St Thomas, 1224-1274) tried to solve the problem of evil by dissociating God from it but like everybody else he failed.

Thomas Aquinas’ thoughts were compiled as Thomistic philosophy or simply Thomistry. He believed that both faith and reason would discover the truth, a conflict between them being impossible as they both originated in God. He further believed that evil is necessary so that people have ‘free will’, without which they would be like robots and life would have no meaning.

In my opinion, faith cannot be reasoned. You can reason your faith with all the mythologies and miracles but you cannot prove your faith and thus the truth is you cannot discover whether evil and goodness or goodness alone, are associated with God.

What Aquinas did explain was how much free will did God provide for everybody or, did He provide a larger percentage of free will for the evil people! He also failed to answer the silly question that when people are not using free will, would they be going about like robots”!

In my opinion it is balderdash.

Equal baloney is the other official Christian Theodicy known as “Irenaean Theodicy” which says that evil is necessary to allow people to grow and develop. It is like the common saying that without light you will not know what darkness is, ignoring the fact that light and darkness are there and we do not have to search for one or the other.

In addition, there are other unofficial theodicies. These are people’s opinions as the one I am giving. I will just quote one. It is called “Process Theodicy”. It was an explanation given by philosopher Leibniz. He said God is not omnipotent but is limited by the world and is doing the best He can. God is perfectly good, we are, in fact, living in the best of all possible worlds, and that some ineffable (unknowable) factor prevents it from being what we would consider ‘perfect’.

Leibniz has gone slightly against the Christian concept of God as omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent.

Evil is universal among the people in the world, with or without God. It is simply that some people can choose decidedly evil acts such as the drug barons or many others who decidedly follow a good path in life such as Mahatma Gandhi, while most people choose to do both. Everybody is the master of his own will. God has no place in the wiring of the human brain.

Evil is some kind of reality. There always has and will be evil. This is evolutionary human nature. When we have a need we try to get it somehow. But we can prevent some social evil by trying to bring equality in society with a good penal system.

The writer is based in the UK

Email: imsingh@onetel.com

Website: www.drimsingh.co.uk

6-Jan-2013 / 01:14 AM / Dr Irengbam Mohendra Singh / 0 Comments