Rev. Tim Ross’s lecture on What is Evil ?

• Consider: Are peanuts evil?
  PEANUT FACTS
  Peanut allergy is the most common cause of deaths from food allergy.
  Allergy to peanuts affects 1.3% of the British population (British Medical Journal) = 790,000 people.
  Peanuts are the number one cause of severe food allergic reactions. (Food Allergy Network)
  
  Philosophers call the problem trying to balance the existence of suffering with a belief in God, “The Problem of Evil”, implying that all suffering is evil. The question then is, if peanuts cause so much suffering, are peanuts evil?

Activity: Make an Evil Meter                 

Take a selection of pictures depicting various kinds of suffering and place them on a scale ranging from absolute good to absolute evil. Make sure both moral suffering (injustice, hate, greed etc) and natural suffering (earthquakes, hurricanes etc) are represented.

The exercise raises all kinds of questions about evil. For instance, if suffering is to do with physical or mental discomfort, how bad does pain have to be before it becomes evil?

One example is bees. A bee stings you, it hurts for a while, but you probably wouldn’t call a bee “Evil”, or say that a bee sting questions the existence of God, unless you were the parent of a child who has just died from an allergic reaction to a bee sting.

We seem to have an inbuilt scale of what is and isn’t evil. Most people probably wouldn’t call a lamb absolute evil, but they might put the Holocaust in that category. They might not call a stubbed toe absolute evil, but they wouldn’t call it absolute good either; they would probably put it somewhere in between. The question is, can there really be a scale that goes from good evil? Surely something is either evil or it isn’t. More to the point, putting good and evil on the same scale means that, at some point Good becomes Evil – which can’t be right.

Looking at suffering this way, you arrive a more fundamental another question. Is suffering actually evil? By that I mean, are suffering and evil the same thing? Atheists argue that God cannot exist because evil exists, but when they use the term “evil”, they are usually talking about suffering. Are the two really synonymous?

Discussion: Define evil.

To avoid spending hours arguing about what is or isn’t evil, we need to know what we are talking about; we need a common definition of evil. In groups, come up with a definition of evil.

Points to consider: At what point on the scale does evil begin? Are evil and suffering the same thing? Is evil the same as sin? 

   

Definitions:

The Oxford English Dictionary:

This picks up on two main points:

• Evil is to do with immorality, which means not conforming to moral standards. From the Christian standpoint, by ‘moral standards’ we mean the will of God.
• Evil has a sense of malevolence about it. That is, evil involves a conscious and purposeful act, performed with the specific intent to go against the will of God.

International Bible Society’s Concordance:

So, we could try this as a definition:

What about me? I sometimes oppose God’s will by thoughts, words, actions and choices, so am I evil?

No, because whilst I do sin, I still love God and my innermost desire is to do his will. Paul recognised this dilemma in his letter to the Romans:

• Romans 7: 18ff “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing… For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
• So, we could modify our definition as follows:


Natural suffering is left out of this definition, after all, a volcano does not choose to bury a town with a lava flow – unless you believe that an evil entity set off the volcano+. As we have seen in the discussion about suffering; earthquakes, typhoons, floods etc are the result of living in a free environment, created by God to enable us to have free will. Which implies that all suffering is not evil in itself, rather, suffering is the result of evil and of living in a free environment.

This definition also accounts for all the various beliefs about the fall (the account of Adam and Eve’s submission to temptation in Genesis) and original sin. If you believe that Genesis is an historical account of an actual event, then all suffering is understood to be the result of Adam and Eve’s once choice to disobey God. If you believe the account is a myth, then the account of the fall is an explanation of the presence of suffering as a result of the choices we make. If you believe the first chapters of Genesis tell an absolute truth about the human condition, then suffering is still the result our choices.

In fact, this word ‘choice’ is an important part of our understanding of evil, and we’ll come back to it later, but for now, it’s just important to understand that evil is do with actions and their results.

 

St Augustine

When it came to evil, Augustine realised that before he could tackle the question, “Why does evil exist?”, he needed to answer another, more fundamental question, “What is evil?”

He realised that if you had reasonable evidence for the existence of a loving God, you could come at the question of evil from a different angle. His argument was that if God does exist and is good then he would be incapable of creating evil. Something else, then, must be its source. His argument could be put like this.            

In Augustine’s way of thinking, evil is not an actual thing, like a person or a table. Nor is it even a created spiritual thing, like angel. For instance all the moral evils, such as greed, injustice, racism, hate, murder etc, do not exist as actual things. They were not out there, floating in the universe, waiting for humans to come along and pick them up and use them. Augustine’s answer to what evil is and where it comes from, is that evil is just the absence of good.

God cannot be blamed for bringing evil into existence, because it is not a created thing as such. All the bad things that happen in the world are just instances where good is lacking. So, for instance hate does not exist in the same way that love does, hate is just the absence of love.

“Evil is the absence of good” - Augustine

Augustine argues that God is supremely good, thus everything he has made is good, but not everything he made is perfectly good like God. Only God is supremely and unchangeably good; creation, although good, can be corrupted. Evil is the result of good being corrupted and diminished. People are the same, God has created them, so they are good, but because they are not perfectly good (as God is), they can be defective. According to Augustine, it is this defect, this corruption of good and absence of perfection, that we call evil. For Augustine, evil can only exist where there is something that can be corrupted. So evil it does not exist of itself; it does not have a source, as such, it is just a way of describing the defect and corruption that occurs from things not being perfect.

The problem with this is that sometimes evil seems to be more deliberately malevolent than just the absence of good. Describing the Holocaust as simply an absence of perfection doesn’t seem adequate.

The first part of Augustine’s argument is helpful. God cannot have created evil; it is just impossible. Likewise, thinking of evil as not an actual thing is also helpful, but there are problems with the “absence of good” theory. One problem is that the theory assumes that there is either good or evil, with nothing in between, yet it is quite possible for me to be completely unconcerned about something, without either loving it or hating. My not loving lettuce does not mean that I actually hate it; my attitude to lettuce is not evil - I just don’t like it.

Also, we still need an answer as to where the defect and corruption come from. There seems to be a piece missing in the “Absence of Good” idea. The answer lies with choice – with free will.

Evil does not exist as an actual thing. As we saw earlier, moral evils do not exist ‘out there’ somewhere. Evil is to do with actions, or the results of actions which are in themselves the results of choices. It is what occurs when beings created with free will choose to go against the will of God.

In fact, this is what we find in the Bible. In the Bible the word ‘evil’ is almost always mentioned in terms of actions or deeds.

E.G. Isaiah 65:111-12

• “But as for you who forsake the Lord... I called but you did not answer, I spoke but you did not listen. You did evil in my sight and chose what displeases me.”

Now we agree with Augustine that evil does not exist as a thing, and so was not created by God, but we avoid the “absence of good” idea, which looks upon evil as a kind of spiritual black-hole where good is missing or things are not quite perfect. Now we can expand our defintion:

 “There are four parts to the solution to the problem of evil. First, evil is not a thing, an entity, a being. All beings are either the Creator or creatures created by the Creator. But every thing God created is good, according to Genesis. We naturally tend to picture evil as a thing—a black cloud, or a dangerous storm, or a grimacing face, or dirt. But these pictures mislead us. If God is the Creator of all things and evil is a thing, then God is the Creator of evil, and he is to blame for its existence. No, evil is not a thing but a wrong choice, or the damage done by a wrong choice. Evil is no more a positive thing than blindness is. But it is just as real. It is not a thing, but it is not an illusion.

Second, the origin of evil is not the Creator but the creature's freely choosing sin and selfishness. Take away all sin and selfishness and you would have heaven on earth. Even the remaining physical evils would no longer rankle and embitter us.” Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College. Fundamentals of the Faith. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) , pp 54-58. http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0019.html

What does the Bible say.

God has given us the power to overcome evil.

Luke 10:17-20

“He replied, ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’”

Through Jesus evil is defeated.

Galatians 1:3,4

“Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age...”

In Jesus, we are dead to evil but alive to God.

Romans 6: 11,12,14

“In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.”

Colossians 1:13-14

“For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

The days of evil are numbered.

Revelation 12:9-12

“The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
   ‘Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.’”

The end of evil.

Isaiah 65:17-25

“Behold, I will make a new heaven and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered... the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.”

Conclusion

The Cross was the greatest act evil that ever happened, but it was also the greatest act of love, and because of that, it was also the downfall of evil.

A Prayer

Lord,

Sometimes it is hard to understand how the terrible events we see on the news can be allowed to happen by a God who claims to love his creation.

Help us to see these things from your perspective, from the perspective of love that is prepared to sacrifice everything, so that what results is not some quick fix, but evil made impotent through love.

We offer you our ability to choose. May our choices be led by our deep desire to love you and love everything you have created, so that through our choices we see your kingdom come, your will be done and evil destroyed for ever.

In the name of Jesus,

Amen