A quick observation about the question of evil

I was just reading the obituary of John Templeton, the legendary fund investor, and this led me to looking at the list of those who have received his Templeton prize. This prize is mostly given to those who bridge the religious and science 'divide' that so many see as mutually exclusive. I agree with Templeton that they are not mutually exclusive and enjoyed just now reading about several of the prize recipients.

Whilst reading one of them I noticed his pondering about the classic question of, to put it simplistically, "if God is good why is there evil?" You must understand that it is only the recent generations that really think that is such a serious question to ask. People through most of their civilized history were subsistence farmers, hunters and gatherers. They really did not recognize "evil" so much as a force. To them life was something they had to work to maintain day by day in often harsh conditions. So early humans were really too busy trying to survive to really ponder (or actually experience) very much "evil."

So it occurred to me to explain to you that there have been since then kind of three stages in humans' understanding of evil, even though they don't seem to be aware they've gone through these stages, LOL. Here they are in just a few words.

1) After the subsistence phase that made up so much of human history, as I described above, sufficient leisure resources accumulated so that people could even contemplate matters such as religion. Evil was very simple for them to understand because they simply defined it as failure to follow the laws of God or their culture's "supreme beings." In other words, they did not think of evil as a "force" per se, and one that must be accounted for. They viewed disobeying God or whatever their cultural pantheon of supreme beings as being "evil doers."

2) With the development of the "enlightenment" and the glorification of rational and scientific thought, often at the expense of religion, "modern man" split into two bodies of mind about evil. The religious faithful correctly observe that in addition to those who simply break God's laws (and thus were "evil" in the classic definition), that there is a drive or a force that seems to lead a segment of the population into committing truly evil acts. These people attribute the extremes of these examples to Satan or demonic forces, and understand that the rest are due to people doing "very bad things" albeit not necessarily or even frequently being diabolical, just bad examples of humanity.

The scientific/atheist/"rationalist" side denies evil as a force and simply ascribes it to very bad behavior, but with "a reason," such as social injustice, poverty, prior abuse or mental illness. In other words, they tend to dismiss the idea of "evil" as a force and consider the whole question of bad behavior to be an individual by individual, or overall societal question about some lacking or injustice. So even a great horror such as the Holocaust, Cambodia or so forth, they will focus on identifying the socio-political factors rather than ascribe any part of what happened to a force of evil.

This phase 2 is pretty much where humans are today, in that kind of split, depending on whether people are primarily religious oriented or "rationalist" oriented. It's really an artificial split, and work is being done to bridge it, which I call the third phase.

3) Understanding that religion and science are not incompatible, people can rationally and faithfully come to the conclusion that while the vast majority of individual and collective "bad behavior" that is so extreme it can be called "evil" can be explained with rational reasons, there remains a human capacity to do something that can be identified as truly an example of having a resonance with an evil "force," for lack of a better word. Thus one can, for example, discuss Nazi Germany in both "rational terms," identifying the social and political forces that created the evil, but also acknowledge a national "possession" (as Carl Jung described it) that recognizes that classic undefinable "evil" as a force did exert a power.

So really, when people ask "Why does God 'allow' evil to exist," this is really a modern affectation and not as common a question as people today now think. It's understandable, because that's what a lot of people ask when something goes terribly wrong and tragic: asking that question is like a person having a natural reflex when their knee is tapped, for example. But the rationalist side has seized on that question as kind of their reflexive attack on the religious side, because they know most people cannot answer that question, and are left feeling somewhat inadequate in the "defending their belief in God" camp. In other words, it is a litmus test question that really should not be one.

The reason I say this is that the rationalist side conveniently ignores the many religious believers who accept evolution as a scientific reality, although they tend to argue about who is wagging, the dog or the tail, since they continue to consider God "in charge" even if evolution is one of his chosen methods for exerting his will. Now, if you believe in evolution, as just about everyone really does today, let's be serious for a minute, you can gain insights into "evil" simply by studying the animal kingdom, from which man descended. Is there evil in animals?

The answer is "no," there is no "evil" in animals because animals operate on instinct and survival requirements. There is nothing that animals do that is consciously malevolent, hence they cannot be accused of evil. HOWEVER, there are examples where one must think for a minute. The most obvious one is a film I saw some years ago about a wild troop of chimpanzees.

A pregnant female chimp had withdrawn from the troop to have her baby. The film documents how cautious she is to bring the infant back to the troop because for no survival reason at all, members of the troop are malevolent toward the infant. The narrators explain that before she can return to the troop she must gain the protection of an alpha male. (I'm not using the most exact terminology here, but you get my point). The film footage was really hair raising and scary. Why? Because it's one of the few examples you will see of what can be called conscious and malicious tendencies in an animal that has no instinctual reason or survivability imperative. It's not like there is scare resources, or the male kills a litter that is not his own. These were mostly "women" chimps and lesser males who wanted to hurt the infant.

The deep thinkers of this century will start to make the connection between biological evolution of humans, and how unresolved and unevolved malevolent tendencies arose from predatory and other survival imperatives that have gone awry, as the chimps in that example demonstrate, and deviance from God's natural law, which is a compensatory remedy for these impulses. In other words, God more than anyone understands humans (obviously), and the laws that God established were to provide boundaries and channels to allow humans to "let their morals catch up to their biology." Without belief in God and obedience to God's laws and will, you end up with a species that evolved too big brains, too much technology, too much non-survival related time on their hands, and a taste for malevolence. So far from God "allowing evil" or "obviously God's not there because he lets bad things happen or he doesn't know about it so he's not all knowing" blah blah blah, God put in place laws of conduct to contain the growth of evil when humans first showed their first "taste" for it: Adam and Eve, and then Cain and Abel.

"Rationalists" should not dismiss "Adam and Eve" and "Cain and Abel" as myths and fairy stories or morality tales. That is being disrespectful of the obviously very real and careful genealogy that is recorded and preserved in the Old Testament. If it was not Jews and Christians but instead some small tribe on Whatever Somewhere island, they'd be falling all over themselves with respect for the "historical" record that the natives maintained. Yet humans have managed to actually record the first two instances of humans willfully and consciously doing something "evil" and this is scorned, not prized for its insight in deep human history and development. Notice that the first killing was not sexual jealousy or for possessions. It was "pure evil" because it was not driven by an animal like survival imperative (like those examples would have demonstrated), but one brother envied the spiritual goodness of the other brother. That is an awful lot like the chimp troop who wanted to harm the new infant just because they could, and because it was helpless and "good."

There is so much information out there that serious scholars could write many of their PhD's about, and help society while they are at it, if they stop with the question of "evil" as just a way to bash or trivialize the "other side's" beliefs, and start to take seriously the moral and spiritual side of this complex equation and a fresh look at the new and sophisticated science that evolutionary psychology and biological systems/genetics provide that were not understood even a few years ago.

I hope you found these thoughts useful, even if I got the chimp species "wrong" or something LOL.