Evil's Existence

Evil Existence?

 

A sting to a tale

 

I cannot remember how much of the following text is my own, or how much of it I based on a lying claim that has become an online cliché, so, if I am plagiarising anything non-trivial, I apologise in advance. In contrast to the liars, I do not claim that my version of the confrontation is literally true.

And what point am I making...?

If that is what you ask as you reach the end, you have answered your own question; and I hope that you have done so to your own gratification.

A professor asked the students : “Did God create everything there is?”

One said: "Yes, he did!"

“According to the bible, and to various religious sects, yes, God was the only creator; to suggest that anyone else, angel, devil, or human, created anything else, directly or indirectly, would be blasphemy” the professor continued. "If so, then God created evil and suffering, since we see evil and suffering everywhere, and since God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, it follows that the creation was deliberate, making nonsense of the myriad of mutually contradictory Abrahamic faiths that extol the antipathy of God to evil and the comfort of God to those who suffer."

The student subsided.

Ignoring his friends’ snickers as calmly as he ignored the authority of the professor, another student asked, "Professor, does cold exist?"

"In what sense of existence? "

"My point professor, is that cold does not exist. What we consider cold is in reality the absence of heat. Absolute zero is the total absence of heat; all matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at that temperature. We have created this word to describe how we feel if we have no heat."

“Well done for independent thought,” said the professor “though your understanding of absolute zero, and accordingly of cold, is deficient. According to physics and ignoring certain technicalities, absolute zero is not attainable even in principle, and however cold you can make something, it always is possible to make it colder, though the temperature is asymptotic to what we call zero Kelvin. And even at zero Kelvin, matter is not fully inert; this follows from the basic concepts of quantum theory and information, which as it happens are beyond the scope of this module. 

"But your point does not follow; cold is relative, a difference in levels of heat, not an absence. And, in physical terms, relationships are in themselves real, so your claim is suspect at the very least.

“Whenever something is a lot less hot than something else we may elect to say, in relative terms, that it is cold. Or cooler at least.  For instance if I dip a rod of ice, cold enough to cause frostbite, into liquid air, it is hot enough to cause that liquid to boil. If I dip a thick red-hot iron rod at say, 700K, into molten iron at say 1812K and pull it out again soon enough, it will come out white hot with extra iron welded onto its outside because it is cold enough to freeze the molten iron. So you need first to clarify what you mean by freezing cold; it is not the simple absence of heat, or if it were nothing but that, there never would be any cold anywhere.

“Furthermore, if you dip one hand into ice-cold water and another into hot water at say 50 Celsius, then after a minute take them out again and put both hands simultaneously into another basin of water at a comfortable room temperature, then the one hand feels as if it is in hot water, and the other as cold. Both "hot" and "cold" imply relationships, and not necessarily in every sense symmetrical relationships.

“Apart from any idea of cold though, your question ignores the nature of the concept of existence itself, which, semantically, is a treacherous topic; in fact, to save you unnecessary searching, I warn you that "existence" is not cogently definable except in terms of what effect any item of existence or non-existence may have on relationships within the light cones of the relevant locally existing entities. 

It follows that cold definitely does exist by many measures in many contexts. By all means come back and contradict me once you have investigated the subject adequately.”

The student persisted, "Well then Professor, does darkness exist?"

The professor responded, "Much as the concept of cold is relative and context-dependent, so the concepts of light and dark are relative and context-dependent. Darkness is not to be defined absolutely in terms of how much light, but also what form of light (whether at visible or invisible frequencies, collimated, polarised, or diffuse for example) may be present at given coordinates; arguably the question is even more troubled than that of the existence of cold. What is dark to a bee in red light, which it cannot see, might be quite clear to me, because I can see in red light. The bee in turn can see in near ultra-violet, which would look like darkness to me. If I come out of dazzling sunlight into a room that looks brightly lit to someone coming out of a darkroom, it might look dark to me until my eyes accommodated to the ambient illumination. 

"It is perfectly possible to argue in proper contexts that cold and dark may exist as relationships, but not as absolutes. For one thing, you cannot have absolute darkness except at absolute zero (strictly speaking, not even then), and, as I already have noted, you cannot get to absolute zero. You could save much of your effort and my time if you prepared your thoughts and questions more carefully in advance."

"Professor, I think you are being unfair; you have had longer to prepare these points than I did, but in the context of your original question, does evil exist?"

"You still have not said what you mean by existence. I never mentioned existence in any such context at all; the term as applied to cold or to dark, or to trees falling unheard in forests, or to clouds capping mountains, or to the stool over which you trip, or the hole into which you fall, means different things. Would you argue that a hole is not a hole, but the absence of earth, and therefore that a hole into which you fall, however painfully, does not exist? 

As I already have said of course, God, having created the world and all that is in it, including all the relationships within it, would be responsible for everything happening in it, or existing in it, including man's inhumanity to man, or beasts' beastliness to beasts. Whether or not nature might be evil, it certainly seems to include evil in that God created it full of suffering and pain — which at the least suggests a malicious creator. You may have read Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Khayyam:

‘...For all the sin wherewith the face of man
    Is blackened, Man’s forgiveness give — and take. "

The student replied, "Evil does not exist professor, or at least not unto itself. Evil is just the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, that you affirm do exist: a word man created for the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is unlike faith or love: those exist just as light and heat exist. Evil is the effect of the absence of God's love when man excludes God from his heart. In that way it's like the cold that comes where there is no heat or the darkness that comes where there is no light."

“Your passion does you more credit than your sense, but on the principle of 'nullius in verba', we need not accept your unsupported assurance that cold or dark do not exist, either more or less than faith or love or hatred or treachery do or do not exist, or in what forms and circumstances they are in themselves evil; the inappropriate intensity of either too little or too much heat or cold, is bad when it is more than we can bear. Similarly, faithfulness or love are good only in the right intensity at the right time and in the right application: you would not regard faith in, or faithfulness to, the devil, or love of evil, as good, I hope? 

Atrocities and tragic absurdities throughout history and in everyday family and community life have been justified in the name of faith and love and loyalty, and it still happens all around us in our time. Contemplate the outcomes of some recent elections if you doubt me. 

All this incidentally, fails to dispose of the very concept of the absence of God, that you so casually assume; remember that the bible explicitly asserts the omnipresence of God, so you do not make it clear where you got that idea from.

"Consider first for example what you mean by the very concept of existence: existence is a challenging thing to define, and you do not seem to have taken sufficient care in defining it, even in your own terms. First of all, you need to consider the concept of 'entity': what we might call a 'thing':  to exist in any defensible sense, the presence and absence of an entity must in some ways affect events or states differently. That is one basis for definition of existence itself. And relationships between entities, such as cold or evil or holes in the ground, accordingly are themselves entities as real, and with as definite existence, as any other entity: whenever they mean anything at all, they make differences.

“And evil too, is a relationship between a deed and its intent and the suffering it causes, and the entities affected by it. Love and faith, like cold and anger, when in a favoured cause or directed to a favoured object, do good from some points of view at least, but when not, they do harm, and may be seen as evil, or seen as evil to one, but good to another: the fatted calf could not have shared the joy at the return of the prodigal, any more than the faithful brother did. 

"Consider when one man in a war dies for his country or his faith: the dying man would have preferred to kill the one who in the event killed him. If he had succeeded, the other would have died for his country or his faith instead. In either case there was evil from one point of view, but heroism from the other.

"Two heroes for the price of one, and two villains into the bargain.

“Nor are faith or love, as relationships, in any way either more or less existent than evil; certainly the so-called holy scriptures say nothing of the kind, so what is your authority for such claims?

“Bear in mind that, in spite of your assurance, the Word of God does not say that evil is the absence of God; in fact the bible does explicitly affirm that God is omnipresent, even if you take the wings of the morning; remember? So, how is God to be excluded from the evil or its source? And who are you to assert that evil does not exist except where god is absent, if he ever could be? There are plenty of biblical texts that speak of evil as something existing in itself; consider the like of: 'I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me', or 'Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for good?', or 'Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil'.

“Let’s not blaspheme by making unsupported assumptions about a human’s paltry ability to exclude Him in contradiction to scripture, contradiction to God's word, shall we? 

"And the Word similarly speaks of suffering as real, and instances it repeatedly. 

“Nor has suffering ceased in our day. As Stephen Fry said: ‘You can't just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children’. Whose exclusion of God from whose heart causes such cancer, or other evils and suffering, would you say? 

"Furthermore, suppose an earthquake or volcano or tsunami or avalanche were to wipe out a community: by what right do you assume that every victim in every such disaster — man, woman, child, fetus, and domestic pet — was so evil as to deserve death? Or that in such a disaster only the wicked died, so that all the living were the virtuous ones? Or that at every such event, omniscient, omnipotent God was absent, his (or Her) absence being what permitted or caused the slaughter? Is evil only that which some human intended in the absence of God? 

"I think you should do some studying into the concept of special pleading. 

“Now meanwhile, what are the rest of you laughing at? You lacked the sense to ask, and the nerve to argue; you should be ashamed. If you must laugh, laugh at yourselves.”

 

Any reader might object that this professor seemed to be unfairly well prepared with arguments, positively glib in fact; but no professor would be worth his salt if he presumed to raise such a topic in class, without being properly prepared.

Incidentally, in contradiction to the dishonest claim that prompted this account, this rebellious young man, whatever his name or origin might have been, had nothing whatsoever to do with the more famous Albert Einstein; neither Einstein's views nor his parentage match those asserted in the original version of the story. Even if the details had matched, that would have added nothing to the merits of the parable.  However, the urge to add puffery to the account is characteristic of the ethics, honesty, and dignity of the sources of such trite religious homilies.

One wonders what sort of person they should impress, and in which direction...