The Problem Of Evil

Consider this, if God did not create evil, maya or the five thieves, can they exist? Atheist's have a problem with evil and maya because they are unable to 'give an account of why one deed should be seen as good and another as evil'. The unsuitable alternative is to deny the existence of evil...

Let's suppose there is no God. The same evils still exist. Can atheists argue that the nonexistence of God and the existence of evil fit neatly together in a logical argument? Unfortunately not.

Can we believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than those of faith. Atheists would have to argue that suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist's world begins and ends in randomness and chance.

Few atheists seem to be as rigorously honest as Friedrich Nietzsche, who warned that if God is dead, it is wishful thinking to hold that reason alone can confer 'meaning' on life. Reason has been outmoded by chance.

Secular Saints?

There are, of course, 'secular saints,' such as the heroic Dr. Rieux whose story Albert Camus tells in The Plague. Many atheists today toil in hospitals, clinics, and laboratories, attempting to reduce the suffering that humans endure from dread diseases, auto crashes, horrific storms, and other physical vulnerabilities. Other atheists labor to reduce the pains of the psyche. Thus, not a few atheists practice a form of saintliness.

And yet, as Camus also pointed out, many of these secular saints look very much like those religious saints who have throughout the ages worked to ease suffering, to bring healing and comfort, and to make this world a bit more loving, truthful, just, and sane. What do secular humanists lack but places of worship?

Similarly, nearly all of these secular saints find great meaning in their work for suffering humanity. They, too, fight during long hours under the grand old flag of 'compassion,' first planted in this world by religion.

For this world to be as good as it is, the existence of evil is necessary.

If we begin our reflections with the world as it is, we learn that without human evil, the world's goodness could not achieve the heights of nobility and compassion and love that it sometimes actually does.

From what we know of the world we live in, the Creator, it would seem, was no utopian, and God's purpose was not to make a world solely for human pleasure, painlessness, and comfort. The world instead provides a tapestry of human experience, times of joy and times of trial (even a vale of sorrows) in which the golden thread of history is liberty.

The Existence Of Evil

Atheists such as Richard Dawkins claim that evil doesn't actually exist. In his book, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Dawkins writes, 'In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.'

So for this kind of atheist thinking, there is no evil. There is no purpose. Nothing, but blind, pitiless indifference. Unfortunately, many people find this hard to accept.

The problem with the atheist view of evil, is that logically it doesn't make sense. Either you agree that it exists, or you don't. If it does exist, then on what metaphysical basis does it exist? It can't just 'be' in a world that is just atoms and molecules.

If you think that evil doesn't exist how do you explain what happened to the Children of Israel in WWII by Germany during the holocaust? How do you explain the numerous Sikh genocides by the population of India? How do you explain the daily horrors inflicted on men, women and children around the world?

If you say you don't believe in God but you agree with the concept of good and evil, you're contradicting yourself.

Likewise the new atheist motto, 'There is no God and I hate him' makes no sense and contradicts itself.

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