Whether you’re an atheist, an agnostic, or a fervid believer, the questions of why evil exists, what purpose it serves, how are evil and justice intertwined, these questions torment all of us on a daily basis.

Start with the logical problem of evil. God is supposed to be omniscient, all-knowing, supposed to be omnipotent, supposed to be good. We don’t discuss here more limited versions of divine designer, divine creator, or malevolent God, as in some religions. Forget all this.

The classic God, the father in the sky with a white beard. This God is supposed to be good.

Why? If he’s good, why doesn’t he eliminate evil? If he cannot eliminate evil, then he is not all powerful or all-knowing. If he refuses to eliminate evil, then surely he’s not good.

Epicurus is said to have been the first to offer the simplistic formulation of the logical, a priori, deductive problem of evil. And it was later expounded on the David Hume in his dialogues concerning natural religion, published in 1779.

Evil is a value judgment, a plainly human, culture-bound, period-specific construct. Same form as Aquinas, called evil and suationis, the subjective perception of a relationship between objects and persons, or persons and persons.

Some religions like Hinduism, Christian science, they don’t accept it, they don’t recognize it, they shrug it off as an illusion, the outcome of our intellectual limitations, our mortality. We can’t grasp the mind of God.

My attitude is different. I think evil exists because it is God. It is a part of God. It’s a manifestation, an emanational God. It’s God’s presence among us, exactly as good.

Evil, everything is God.

But as St Augustine explains in his seminal The City of God, the fifth century, 18, what to us appears heinous and atrocious may merely be an integral part of a long-term divine plan whose aim is to preponderate good.

St Augustine says, well, you are small, you’re limited, your intelligence is not a billionth of a billionth path of God. How can you expect? You’re like an ant and a human being. How can the ant expect to understand the human being?

Leibniz postulated in his Theodicy in 1710 that evil, more of evil, physical, metaphysical, is an inevitable part of the best logically possible world, a cosmos of plenitude and the greatest possible number of compatible perfections.

But no offense to any of these great minds, this sheer absolute unmitigated nonsense.

What about acts such as murder or rape in peacetime? What about horrendous evil, the phrase coined by Marilyn Adams to refer to unspeakable horrors like the Holocaust?

There is no belief system that condones them, can explain them, incorporate them, or justify them. These are universally considered to be evil under any conceivable system, in principle.

It is hard to come up with a moral calculus that would justify these acts, no matter how broad the temporal and spatial frame of reference and how many degrees of freedom we allow. An infinite mind could not justify a finite rape, a finite murder, let alone the Holocaust.

The Augustinian etiology of evil, that it is the outcome of big choices by creatures endowed with a free will, doesn’t help. It fails to explain.

Why would a being endowed with intelligence, endowed with a word, sentient, sapient being, why would we fully aware of the consequences of our actions, fully aware of the adverse impacts on us, on others? Why do we often choose evil when misdeeds are aligned with the furtherance of one’s self-interest?

Evil, narrowly considered, appears to be a rational choice.

But, as William R. Anderson observed, many gratuitously wicked acts are self-defeating, self-destructive, irrational, purposeless.

We sometimes evil at our own detriment. These evil wicked acts don’t give rise to any good, to the perpetrator or to the victim, nor do they prevent a greater evil.

They just increase the sum of misery in the world.

As Alvin Plantinga suggested, in 1974 and 1977, and as Bede and St. Thomas Aquinas centuries before him, evil may be an inevitable and tolerated by-product of free will.

God has made himself absent from a human volition that is free, non-deterministic, and undetermined. God told us, listen guys, I’m giving you a free will, I’m out of here. I’m busy, don’t bother me. You have the free will, that’s all you need, use it, choose good.

Interesting perception of God’s presence, ubiquitous, all-pervasive presence in the world, how he absents himself when he’s comfortable.

This divine withdrawal is a process known as self-limitation, or as the Kabbalah concept, Sumnimization, where there is no God, the door to evil is wide open.

God, therefore, can be perceived as having absceded, having let evil in, so as to facilitate men’s ability to make truly free choices.

It can even be argued that God inflicts pain and ignores, if not leverages, evil in order to engender growth, personal growth, learning, maturation, it is true evil, that will become good.

Evil is the inevitable pathway to good. The road to heaven is paved with good intentions, the road to heaven, sorry, is paved with good intentions.

It is a God, not of indifference, as proposed by theologians and philosophers from Lactantius to Paul Draper.

It’s not an indifferent God, but it’s a tough love God, the Old Testament God, you know.

I know you’re going to make mistakes, like all children do, and I’m going to choose evil, I know you’re going to do wicked things, as all children do, but as all children do, you’re going to grow out of it, you’re going to learn from your errors, the errors of your ways, you’re going to repent, you’re going to become better persons.

Isaiah, Isaiah puts it plainly, I make peace and I create evil.

So you know what, let’s examine the issue of free will.

The ability to choose between options is the hallmark of intelligence, that part is true, the entire edifice of human civilisation rests on the assumption that people’s decisions unerringly express and reflect their unique set of preferences, needs, priorities and wishes.

Our individuality is inextricably intermeshed with our ability not to act predictably, not to succumb to peer pressure, not to succumb to group dynamics.

The capacity to choose evil is exactly what makes us human.

Robots will be unable to choose evil, according to Asimov’s three laws of robotics.

But that is a very, very restricted view of evil.

Things are different with natural evil.

What about natural disasters? What about diseases and pandemics? What about premature death?

These have very little to do with human agency, human choices, unless we accept Richard Swinburne’s anthropocentric, or should I say anthropic, belief that they are meant to foster virtuous behaviours, teach survival skills and enhance positive human traits, including the propensity for a spiritual bond with God and soul-making.

Swinburne said, everything that happens with nature has only one purpose, to educate humanity, to help humanity grow, to help humanity mature.

It’s a belief shared by the Mutazili School of Islam and by theologians from Irenius of Lyon and Saint Basil to John Hick.

I don’t subscribe to this grandiose perception that nature is our slave, nature is our tutor.

I don’t subscribe to Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 and 3, where the entirety of nature was created for the crown of creation, the human.

I think we should dispense with such self-centred grandiose perceptions.

Natural calamities are not the results of free will, end of story.

Why would that benevolent God allow natural disasters and pandemics to happen?

Well, one possible answer is that nature sports its own version of free will in determinacy.

Leibniz and Malbarge noted that the laws of nature are pretty simple, but the permutations and combinations of these laws are infinite, they are unforeseeable, there’s emergent complexity, and it characterises myriad beneficial natural phenomena that make them possible.

The degrees of freedom inherent in all advantageous natural processes comes with a price tag, catastrophes, viruses.

So if you want nature to have the possibility to combine, to permute, to change, you must accept natural disasters and calamities.

It’s a little like bugs in the software or glitches in a computer.

Genetic mutations drive biological evolution, for example, but they also give rise to cancer. Viruses are evolutionary engines, but they also kill.

You may have noticed lately.

Plate tectonics yield our continents and biodiversity, but they often lead to fatal earthquakes and tsunamis.

Physical evil is a price we are paying for a smoothly functioning and fine-tuned universe.

There’s also an evidentiary problem of evil.

Some philosophers, for instance, William Rous and Paul Draper, suggested that the preponderance of specific, horrific, gratuitous types of evil does not necessarily render God logically impossible.

In other words, the problem of evil is not a logical problem.

They say the very evil in the world doesn’t prove that God is impossible. It’s just proved that God is highly unlikely, and this is known as the evidential or probabilistic, a posteriori or inductive problem of evil.

As opposed to the logical version of a problem of evil, the evidential problem relies on our fallible and limited judgment.

It goes like this.

It goes like this. Upon deep reflection, we, human beings, cannot find a good reason for God to tolerate and to not act against intrinsic evil, gratuitous evil, that can be prevented without vanquishing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

If there were a God, it would have prevented evil. It would have prevented any evil that doesn’t prevent greater evil, and it would have prevented any evil that doesn’t serve some purpose or greater good.

Skeptic face counter, and they derive, they mock such thinkers.

How can we, with our finite intellect, ever hope to grasp God’s motives and plan his reasons for action or inaction, to attempt to explicate and to justify God, something, a practice known as theodicy, is not only blasphemous, it is also presumptuous. It’s futile and in all likelihood wrong, leading to fallacies, leading to falsities.

Yet even if our intelligence were perfect, let’s assume that we are omniscient. We know everything. It would not necessarily have been identical to or coextensive with God’s.

In other words, even if we had become God tomorrow, we will not necessarily be the same God. We may develop a kind of intelligence, kind of overview, kind of synoptic view that is not similar to God’s.

No one guarantees that all Gods are the same. God-like or deities or divinities are the same, actually.

Before monotheism, it was widely accepted that divinity is an essence. It’s a permeating material, and that many, many entities could acquire, even human beings, could acquire divinity. Many Roman emperors were declared gods or divinities. So human beings could become divinities, divinities could copulate with human beings, and so you could have demigods like Hercules, and numerous entities could be gods, and none of them had the same mind.

That you have an infinite intellect, infinite horizon of time, doesn’t make you identical to another entity with infinite intellect and infinite horizon of time.

As we well know from experience, multiple intelligences with the same attributes often obtain completely different behaviors, traits, results, and conclusions.

Two omniscient intellects can reach diametrically opposed conclusions, even given the same set of data.

We can turn the evidential argument from evil on its head, and following Swinburne, paraphrase Romes. If there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, call it God, then there are specific cases of such beings intentionally allowing evil occurrences that have wrong-making properties, such as there are right-making characteristics that it is reasonable to believe exist, or unreasonable to believe do not exist, and that both apply to cases in question and are sufficiently serious to come to balance the relevant wrong-making characteristics.

Wow, that was long. Let’s break it.

First of all, we assume there’s an omnipotent and omniscient being, God. We also assume that there are specific cases where this kind of being, God, intentionally allows evil occurrences, and these evil occurrences have wrong-making properties.

Okay, we accept this, but he allows these evil and wicked events because there are right-making characteristics that it’s reasonable to believe exist, or unreasonable to believe do not exist, and that the cases of wrong-making include these right-making characteristics.

So, every event in the world, every behavior, every development, everything, has evil aspects, wrong-making aspects, and good aspects, right-making aspects, and both of them apply to the same case.

And the right-making counterbalances the wrong-making or overpowers.

In other words, perhaps God constructed creation in a way that evil is ineluctable, inevitable, kind of the price you pay for good.

Very similar to the argument that you can’t discern the existence of light without darkness. Maybe evil is what puts in sharp relief the existence of good, the existence of good, and therefore it is likely that, and here comes the inductively from the Odyssey to defense, it’s likely that if there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, then there is the case of such a being intentionally allowing specific or even all evil occurrences.

He knows that these evil occurrences have wrong-making properties, but each of these events and occurrences and traits and behaviors and everything, each of these evil things has right-making characteristics, and it’s reasonable to believe in them. It’s reasonable to believe in them, and it’s reasonable to believe that these right-making good characteristics exist, it’s unreasonable to believe they don’t exist.

And it doesn’t matter if we are aware of these right-making characteristics or not.

In everything, both wrong-making and right-making, both evil and good, they all apply to the cases of question, and they are sufficiently serious to counterbalance the wrong-making characteristics.

There’s no evil without good, that’s the argument, the counter argument. There’s no evil without good.

The very existence of evil guarantees that it comes with some good.

It reminds me that there are people who are saying that the state of Israel would not have existed without all of us.

Silver lining, clouds, we know.

Okay, back to reality.

Given our limitations, some of us are intelligent, but none of us is as intelligent as God, except maybe Jordan Peterson.

Given our limitations, what to us may appear evil and gratuitous, God may regard as necessary and even beneficial.

This argument was made by Alston, Wijstra, Plantinga and others. Even worse, we cannot fathom God’s mind, we cannot understand it, grasp it, because we cannot fathom any mind other than our own.

Can you found your wife’s mind? Oh, forget it, your wife is a woman. Can you fathom your children’s mind? Can you fathom your boss’s mind?

We can’t, we don’t have access to other people’s minds. We don’t.

And if we don’t have access to other people’s mind, we don’t have access to other people’s minds.

How can we have access to God’s mind?

This doubly applies to God, whose mind is infinite and omniscient. His mind is not like our mind.

We may be the image of God, I don’t know, as far as our body, we may be a spark of God, we may be a poor imitation of God, we may be a partial element of God, but we’re definitely not God.

If God does exist, his mind is alien, inaccessible to us, there’s no possible intersubjectivity between God and ourselves.

We cannot empathize with God, we cannot empathize with God. It’s a crucial sentence and this raises the terrifying possibility that God cannot empathize with us, which is perhaps exactly why he needed the likes of Jesus and Muhammad and others, because God cannot empathize with us directly.

He needed to empathize with us via agents, agents like the prophets.

God and men have no common ground, no language.