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THE
PROBLEM OF EVIL:
Exonerating God
Part I
Prefacing the Problem
By:
Geoffrey K. Mondello
No
single factor is invoked more often in people turning away from God,
or in their failing to believe in Him, than the occurrence --- note
that I do not say "existence" --- of evil, especially as it
manifests itself in suffering. The occurrence of evil appears
incompatible with God, or at least a coherent conception of God as
both (and simultaneously) absolutely good and absolutely powerful.
That God and evil should coexist appears logically contradictory and
ontologically inconsistent. The one is the abrogation of the other.
The existence of God, it is argued, precludes the existence of evil
and the existence of evil precludes the existence of God. While we
can readily adduce empirical evidence, that is to say, tangible
instances of evil to discredit the existence of God, the
availability of evidence to corroborate the existence of God, on the
other hand, is so exiguous that even when such instances are invoked
they are deemed extraordinary events in the affairs of men, indeed,
events so far from commonplace that we deem them miraculous, which
is to say, inexplicable interventions conditionally attributed to
God in the absence of explanations that may yet be forthcoming.
Whether or not this is a sufficient, if concise, summary, the
general implication is clear. The evidence of evil is far more
overwhelming than the evidence of God. If preponderance is the
criterion to which we appeal, God loses.
Evil comes as a scandal to the believer who asks, "How can this be,
given the existence of God?"
To the disbeliever no such scandal arises, only scorn for the
believer who is left in perplexity, unable to deny the existence of
God on the one hand while equally unable to deny the occurrence of
evil on the other.
How did we come to such a state of affairs? We appear to be
consigned to either nihilistic resignation in the one camp, or an
unreasoned and therefore untenable affirmation in the other --- so
both are damned to perplexity.
Neither has satisfactorily answered the question implicit within
every occurrence of evil: "Why?"
The sources and causes of disbelief are, of course, many, ranging
from competing religious traditions with conflicting and
contradictory conceptions of God, to the violence that has
historically erupted between them, subsequently scandalizing the
impulse of religion itself together with the notion of God --- at
Whose behest, it is held, or at least in Whose name, atrocities
distinctly religious in character were committed.
A more recent phenomenon to which we can appeal --- and with which
we have become intimately acquainted --- is the rise of what we
might call Militant Secularism. Secularism, however, is not the
cause of disbelief as much as a response to it. But in this case we
must in all honesty probe more deeply and ask why it is that
secularism, this manifestation of disbelief, is making such deep
inroads upon religion, especially the practice of religion.
Secularism, we must understand, is not a repudiation of the
existence of God, but a programmatic dismissal of God (if such
exists, and secularism neither affirms nor denies this existence) as
legitimately pertaining to the public and even the private affairs
of men. Secularism does not dispute the existence of God; it merely
maintains Him to be either no longer relevant, or more troubling
still, the very cause itself of much of the evil in the world as we
increasingly witness ever escalating sectarian discord and violence
in the name of religion, most notably --- and most violently --- in
Islam. This phenomenon has caused us to re-examine our own religious
antecedents in the history of Christianity.
It is important to understand, however, that in this process of
reexamination a good deal of revisionism unquestionably occurs
--- not
unlike the sort practiced within erstwhile Communist societies which
not so much politically sanitized history as programmatically
distorted it to better accord with socialist ideals --- despite the
exploitation of authenticity in the narrative. Entire histories were
re-written, revised, expunged, and politically edited until an
"acceptable" version emerged.
We still see evidence of this in Communist China, no less than in
the present drafting of the Constitution of the modern European
Economic Union, both of which, albeit in different ways, attempt to
expunge God in general and Christianity in particular from its
historical antecedents. The result, of course, is not so much
history as a disinterested chronicle of events, as it is an
explication of events through the instrument of policy ...
Secularists have embarked on a similar venture, leafing through the
annals of the history of Christianity with a careful eye to
egregious defections from it (as every sin, every injustice, is not
a manifestation of, but rather a defection from the teaching
of Christ and the Church) emphasizing the abuses that occurred
within the Church and the evils done by individuals and even nations
spuriously invoking the name of the Church --- the Church which explicitly
repudiates and vehemently denounces the political and social crimes
committed in its name to the material ends of nations or the
unbridled avarice of individuals. That there were clerics and even
popes complicit with these enormities, is an indictment of the
individual clerics, however many, but in no way an indictment of the
Church from whose teachings and dogma they defected.
While eager to emphasize these defections from the Church, secular
revisionists have been no less assiduous in programmatically
expunging the inestimable good that Christianity has brought to the
world --- and wrought within it. Pope Alexander VI, one of the
Borgia Popes of the 15th century, notoriously corrupt, dissolute,
and wicked by any standard is more likely to be invoked by
secularists as an example of Catholic religious influence than St.
Francis of Assisi, together with, say, Tomás de Torquemada of the
Spanish Inquisition rather than Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It is, in
short, a carefully selective and meticulously culled history held to
be paradigmatic of Catholicism and its overwhelmingly deleterious
influence on the world. One of the more popular --- and perhaps
prototypical --- examples cited is the lamented destruction of the
native Aztec religion and culture by the Catholic Spanish
conquistadors. That it was a religion and culture centered on human
sacrifice upon a grand scale1 is, apparently, of no
consequence to enlightened secularists --- and the Church which
abolished this evil practice was guilty of a greater evil still,
that of cultural imperialism, the supplanting of a native religion
and culture centered on human sacrifice with a culture and religion
centered on loving God and man. In reality, however, the secularist
denounces both --- but on distinctly unequal terms: one for ritually
exterminating life in the name of religion, the other for
abolishing, in the name of religion, the culture that ritually
exterminates life. That one is a religion of death and one a
religion of life is immaterial. If the same glass can hold poison or
water, break the glass ... and drink neither.
There is only one solution for the secularist: abolish God and you
abolish both.
Such an approach is not without precedent. Marxism and Communism
invoked the same solution to the problem of economic inequality.
Belief in God and the exercise of religion were "the opiate of the
masses" inasmuch as they inured man to his suffering rather than
galvanizing the proletariat to revolt in a class conflict against
the bourgeoisie. Inasmuch as God and religion were complicit in the
suffering of the proletarian masses by proffering spiritual rewards
in place of material
incentives, both must be abolished as impediments to the realization
of the Socialist ideal.
Criminalize God and you exonerate man. Lay the root of evil (in this
case, the suffering of the proletariat) at the foot of God, proceed
to abolish God, and you abolish the root of the evil.
Such a programme failed to work for Communist secularists ...
and it will fail to work for other militant secularists as well, and
It will fail to work for the same reason: God is not the cause of
evil.
Our original question asked why secularism is making such deep
inroads upon religion --- and succeeding. It is, at least in large
part, because we have failed to coherently articulate the genesis of
evil. We know the narrative, but we have failed to grasp the
ineluctable implications. As St. Paul tells us,
"When I was a child, I
spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.
But, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child."2
We have read, as from a primer, the
account of the genesis of evil as though depicted in pastels that
stir our imagination, the imagination of children --- and have
failed to follow the sad but invincible logic inescapable within it.
Let us, then, begin.
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NEXT, Part II:
The Problem of Evil Summarized ... and why we must respond to it
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1 "Human sacrifice was practiced on a
grand scale throughout the Aztec empire. No human society known to
history approached that of the Aztecs in the quantities of people
offered as religious sacrifices: 20,000 a year is a common estimate. At
Tenochititlan, the principal Aztec city buried under today’s Mexico
City, over 80,000 humans were sacrificed over the course of 4 days for
the dedication of the temple pyramid in 1487. Excavations of the
offerings in the main temple has provided some insight in the process,
but the dozens of remains excavated are far short of the thousands of
sacrifices recorded by eyewitnesses and other historical accounts."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_religion
2
"Cum essem
párvulus, loquébar ut párvulus, cogitábam ut párvulus. Quando autem
factus sum vir, evacuávi quæ erant párvuli." (I Corinthians
13.11) *
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