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The problem of evil
The “Problem of Evil” was initially formed as a theological dilemma: if God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent, then why does evil exist? As the West has secularised, evil has ceased to be such a pressing theological enquiry, but remains a moral one. We ask: if evil exists, then why?
I have a postcard in my study, in the style of a Where’s Wally cartoon. In it, there’s a man holding a placard which reads: “Where’s Jesus? Seriously! Where the Hell is he? People are starving!” As a Christian, this is a question I want an answer to. Where’s Jesus when people are starving? Where’s Jesus when bombs fall from the sky? Where’s Jesus when people suffer and die in war and conflict? Where’s Jesus when people sit at borders hoping against hope for a new life? This is almost the same question as the basic question of Christian theodicy, which asks why a God of love allows suffering in the world. But it isn’t quite the same question, and in some ways it may be more helpful. The question “Why does God allow suffering?” is abstract, but the question, “Where’s Jesus when suffering happens?” is far more concrete.
One often-cited answer to this question was offered by the theologian W H Vanstone in the wake of the appalling disaster in Aberfan, when a coal tip above the Welsh min- ing village slid down the mountain and engulfed a farm, several houses, and a school, leaving 116 children and 28 adults dead. Vanstone said that God was not at the top of the mountain pushing the slip, but at the bottom with those suffering, receiving the impact of the disaster in his own body. Where was Jesus when Aberfan slipped? He was at the bottom of the mountain. Palestinian theologian Munther Isaac made a similar point in response to the war in Gaza, saying that if Jesus were born today, he would have been born amidst the rubble of Gaza.
So who is to blame for all this? The truth is that it’s too easy for us to make God the scapegoat in our efforts to avoid our own complicity in the suffering of others. Aberfan didn’t fall on its own, there were human decisions behind the suffering. We do it still. Famine, war, climate change, terrorism, and displacement are the consequences of human choices. It is not acceptable for us to blame God for all these, because to do so is to add cowardice to complicity. If we pray for the suffering of others without recognising our own sinfulness, we make God our scape- goat; and in doing that we make him a monster unworthy of worship. If we find ourselves wondering where God is in the midst of human suffering and pain, we probably don’t have to look very far to find him. This is the God of the Cross, after all: the God of the incarnation, the God who comes to us in Jesus and transforms our story. The Reverend Dr Simon Woodman, Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
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When you asked me, “If evil exists, why?” I was reading a French novel. A police inspector was investigating a murder in which the victim had been chopped up and be- headed, his remains mixed up in his living room with those of his also-slaughtered pet dog. The detective does some thinking about his career of investigating crimes and his rather humdrum life and concludes: “Sexuality increasingly appeared to him as the most direct and obvious manifestation of evil.” Not an affectionate concord between innocent people but the multiplying root of all struggles between humans for domination over each other. So believes the detective. On my phone there is news of debates in a legislature across the sea on the ethics of sodomising prisoners of war with broomsticks. The death of Lieutenant William Calley, the criminal of My Lai, had been reported. I was eating tomatoes with a fork, drinking a Coke, smoking Gauloises, and looking out on the Aegean. I haven’t finished reading the French novel yet. Perhaps the detective will catch the killer. Christian Lorentzen, critic
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I don’t believe in evil, I believe in splitting. I could go through the religions of assimilation against the religions of conversion, and the invention of evil. I suppose it was necessary. Or felt to be. Just as my patients feel they have to split their minds. I feel like I spend a huge portion of my life trying to get patients out of this projection of a categorical sense of evil and badness; wondering why it’s this hard to just be disappointed or whatever. Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst and author
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Evil is not inevitable, but the tragic defeat of kindness and compassion inside us all
At a time when catastrophe is not some terrifying future prospect but that which is already unfolding, we might well ask whether there is still scope for moral categories such as “good” and “evil”. My simple answer is: yes; although we need to be careful about how we apply them, especially the latter.
According to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, there is a natural human propensity towards evil, arising from the fact that human beings are essentially free. We freely choose, Kant says, whether to adopt or not to adopt evil maxims; we alone are the authors of our moral character. But today we need to think of evil not simply as an idea that attaches to certain individuals, but also as one that can be applied – and applied primarily – to the social whole.
Walter Benjamin points us in this direction when he describes capitalism as a demonic cult. “Capitalism,” Benjamin says, “is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction.” It is here, I think, that we should locate the actuality of evil today: not simply in the system itself, but, more specifically, in the particular split it embodies – between its “natural” movement towards the negation of everything living, and its “spiritual” insistence that it alone stands for the Supreme Good. Ben Ware, writer
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I believe in evil in an objective kick-a-puppy sense. There’s something perversely compelling about the idea of evil existing in all or most, but being dormant unless coaxed out, but I also believe some people would never perform evil acts, under any conditions. Still, we live in times where, unfortunately, our worst selves are actively conjured up by bad actors. What society will tolerate makes a big difference as to whether evil becomes bold. Jeff VanderMeer, author, editor and critic
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Evil is the extraversion of pain. It happens when someone makes their own turmoil everyone else’s problem. Natalie Wynn aka Contrapoints, YouTuber
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As a young child I kept a rabbit behind my pillow. It was surrounded by other rabbits exactly like it in size, shape and colour. Only I drew a heavy black outline around it with a sticky Bic biro, picked my nose and wiped the snot on it. It was the bad rabbit, the dirty rabbit of the wallpaper pattern. Bad and dirty are not necessarily evil, but like most people
I was socialised by television programmes. I understood, for example, that leather jackets and maltreatment visually separated individuals from groups, and that these signs were cues. Fast-forward 30 years and I’m on social media struggling to write something pithy about prioritising ethics over morals, but I didn’t know what I meant. I don’t care for groups (I am the rabbit, of course) but I felt it was correct to discount an individual’s moral compass for the group’s ethical contract – God knows what shapes the criteria of a private judgement! But then again, who wants to account for their being herded by a reprehensible, genocidal government, for example? I think this is a vector of thought in the axis of good and evil: between the individual and the group, where do you place yourself and how are you implicated? Roy Claire Potter, artist and writer
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Evil is when people are left to die on the streets in the sixth-largest economy in the world. Evil is the racism that deprives people of their common humanity. Evil is the needless deaths of refugees, who flee war and persecution only to drown at sea. Evil is endless war. Evil is the successive genocides of the world. Evil is not inevitable, but the tragic defeat of kindness and compassion inside us all. Evil is created, not found. Evil persists when good people abandon their belief in a better world. Jeremy Corbyn, independent MP for Islington North
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Right now, in 2024, there are an estimated 1.46 billion iPhones in the world, each of them containing Coltan. If you are using one of those phones, as Bill Drummond is right now, then you are directly responsible for the death of a percentage of those five million that have died so far in those ongoing and evolving Congo Wars. Bill Drummond, of the band The KLF
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God planted the first garden in the eastward corner of Eden. He held out His palms and brought into reality seeds which would become his favourite fruit trees. No fruit tree had ever existed before, but He could imagine them – just like He’d imagined everything else before He fashioned it ex nihilo. The ones He chose for his special garden either had to taste good or look good. This was His criteria. But there was no risk in it, so then He dreamed up two further trees whose fruits might have real consequences: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God and the man he’d just made from the dust stood in silence together and watched the seeds grow from shoot to sapling to giants. It took years, which was a relief to God – everything else had happened so fast. “It’s gotten darker,” Adam said, finally. “That’s called shade,” God explained, and then He taught Adam how to look after the garden. Before He left man to get on with the world alone, God planted one final seed in His garden. “If you eat the fruit from the tree of the knowl- edge of good and evil,” He warned, “you shall surely die.”
That line – you shall surely die – I imagine God saying in the voice of Werner Herzog. This is because I was convinced Herzog had said that line, parodying God, in his documentary Encounters at the End of the World (2007).
In one scene Herzog asks the penguin scientist David Ainley, “Is there such thing as insanity among penguins?” “Um, well,” Ainley replies, “I’ve never seen a penguin bashing its head against a rock. They do get disoriented. They end up in places they shouldn’t be.” The interview is followed by footage of a disoriented or deranged penguin hurrying in a straight line away from his colony and into the silent, white mountains. “He is heading off towards certain death,” Herzog says over the footage. He will surely die. Only, he doesn’t say that last part. It was something I had imagined, conflating Herzog’s commentary with God’s warning to Adam, in a parable written by the Hebrew scribes of the Pentateuch that might account for all the human cruelty they surely saw in the world. The real question is: if man never ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, would evil still exist on earth, just with no one to call it such? Without moral awareness and awareness of our certain finitude, would we be more or less like the disoriented penguin running away from its colony into the mountains where it will surely die? Whatever the case, I’ve always found God’s warning in Herzog’s voice far more tempting than the Devil’s promise that partaking in the fruit would remake man into something godlike. Lamorna Ash, writer
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The pertinent question is not “why does evil exist?”, but rather “why do we tolerate its reign over every sector of our society while projecting its presence solely onto the Other?”
We spend a lot of time making recourse to the idea of innocence – our own innocence, which we grant ourselves permanently by virtue of having been badly treated, absolving ourselves either of guilt or of agency and most of the time of both, daily acceding to our local forces of gravity, the path of least resistance, carrying on and on in a state of not knowing and not needing to know, priding ourselves on our essential goodness and the relative badness of others; which brings us then to the innocence of other people, whose impossible parameters we ourselves could never live up to but which we nevertheless insist on in them – in the other – which we afford so selectively, so reluctantly, holding our noses, and yet it’s this innocence in other people, this state of absolute moral purity, unstained by life, that we require as a basic precondition for extending fellow feeling, for treating people with dignity, as if they too are deserving of justice, as if they too deserve everything, the whole world, as much as we do.
I guess this is another way of saying that if evil exists, it doesn’t exist outside of us, it’s in us, in all the ways we can’t see or prefer not to see or simply refuse to see – ourselves, other people, the world, the past. In other words, we are not blameless. We play our part. Sarah Bernstein, novelist and academic
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I have no idea. I guess it depends on your definition. Many great and necessary feelings, actions, thoughts, relationships, creations, statements have been characterised as evil because they make people think and question. Sarah Schulman, writer
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As a dealer of countercultural rare books, I encounter “The Problem of Evil” daily – through the Marquis de Sade resolving it with libertine pleasure and pain, to Aleister Crowley rather liking his mother branding him “The Anti-Christ”, and the Process Church of the Final Judgement embracing Lucifer as an eternal “trickster” aspect of humanity. The American Hells Angels biker gang badged themselves as the cast-out portion of humanity, a “1%” (like Lucifer). The occultist filmmaker Kenneth Anger embodied Crowleyanity in his religious life and films, influencing to some degree the Rolling Stones’s own anti-Sergeant Pepper album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967). Mick Jagger turned up on the cover of a Process Church of the Final Judgement magazine, as well as making a Moog soundtrack for and appearing in Anger’s 1969 film Invocation of My Demon Brother alongside Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil. The Hells Angels murdered an audience member at the Altamont racetrack in 1969 whilst Jagger attempted to sing “Sympathy for The Devil” onstage wearing a cape.
Charles Manson himself read an imminent apocalypse into the Beatles’s music – a coming time of “Helter Skelter”, a race war. The Baader-Meinhof Gruppe in West Germany commit- ted acts of violent, murderous urban guerrilla warfare because the state was so saturated with former Nazi Party members. They were atheists but worked almost religiously. Helmut Ensslin, priest and father of a group member commented on her behaviour at her trial for the arson of a department store:
“It astonished me that Gudrun, who has always thought in a very rational, intelligent way, has experienced what is almost a condition of euphoric self-realisation, a really holy self-realisation [...] To me, that is more of a shock than the fire of the arson itself – seeing a human being make her way to self-realisation through such acts”. Carl Williams, of Carl Williams Rare Books
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The Prophet Muhammad reportedly said of garlic, “It is a plant whose smell I dislike.” He didn’t say that he disliked garlic itself, only its smell. This distinction mirrors that between ontological or absolute evil and phenomenal or contingent evil. Whether a smell is good or bad is relative. The mud from which Adam was created smelt foul to Satan. There’s the infamous problem, though: the Prophet didn’t create garlic. If he had, you’d think he’d have given it a different smell. It’s harder to reconcile al-Khāliq – the Maker – with al-Hakam – the Judge. Why does God call “evil” and punish actions that he ultimately wills and causes? My take is this: God is al-Haqq – the Real – and God is al-Wāhid – the One. God exists absolutely and God exists relative to creation; God is existence. Without creation, evil would not be, but nor would God be al-Rahmān – the Merciful. The angels did question God’s decision to make Adam his caliph on Earth: “They said, ‘Will you place in it one who will do evil in it and spill blood, while we celebrate your praises and hallow you?’ He said, ‘I know what you know not.’” (Qur’ān 2:30) Khalid bin Yaqub, co-host of the podcast Subliminal Jihad
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Certain leftists hate it when we talk about “evil”. “Religulous bourgeois metaphysics!” is the typical charge, but I hard disagree. For Marx, Original Sin (at least allegorically) gestured at a real historical phenomenon: the dawn of private capital accumulation. This Satanic whisper into the hearts of mankind, which has haunted every stage of history and economic development, currently reigns over our globalising world like a cruel and petty Yaldabaoth.
Marx would probably insist that his view does not require a religious ontology or belief in literal spectres, but it is by no means fundamentally incompatible with more ancient religious discourses on good/evil, right/ wrong, or just/unjust. Presidente Maduro understood this when he recently described Javier Milei and Elon Musk as card-carrying Satanists obsessed with Hitlerian will-to-power occultism. If “evil” does not exist, what do we call these self-styled Promethean wealth-hoarding transhumanists who want to be Gods? The fact that lithium coups and Operation Condor “helicopter rides” are not regarded by many in the West as Deeply Evil, but the anti-Satanic socialist Maduro is regularly portrayed as literally demonic, only underscores the pernicious efficacy of Evil’s greatest weapons: deception, self- delusion, masquerade.
The pertinent question is not “why does evil exist?”, but rather “why do we tolerate its reign over every sector of our society while projecting its presence solely onto the Other?” How do we get tricked into humouring its relentless varying masquerades as something that’s “good actually”? What exactly does the Demiurge of Capital Accumulation whisper into our hearts every day through its culture and commerce? And to what extent have we all been shaped into a society of corrupt cops on the take, looking the other way lest we lose our own privileges in the capitals of Capital? Dimitri Poshlost, co-host of the podcast Subliminal Jihad
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I don’t have the answers, but maybe someone else does. Sarah Meth, musician .