There is an old
philosophical and theological conundrum called “the problem of
evil.” It goes something like, “If God is all powerful, then He
cannot be all good. If God is all good, then He cannot be all
powerful.” The driving force behind this argument is the existence
of evil. If God were all good and all powerful, then evil would not
exist because He would not have permitted it.
The problem is
caused by the human assumption of the existence of evil as opposed to
good. In order to make our argument, we point to the existence of
suffering, various atrocities, and bad things which have happened.
But this assumption ignores a very basic Biblical truth. God declared
everything good when He created it. The only thing He said wasn’t
good was that the first human being, a male, was alone, but He did
not call it evil as such. The truth is that
we don’t see the introduction of evil until Genesis three, the
eating of the fruit, and the introduction of Hamartia. In so doing, the world around the male and
female human beings doesn’t actually change. Nothing is different
except them. Nothing has changed except their perception
of the world around them as being now divided into things which are
good and things which are evil.
It
was the observation of St. Augustine that evil, as such, does not
actually exist. When God created the world in Genesis, after each day
of revelation, he pronounced it good. It can justifiably be said that
evil, as such, does not enter the world until the event in the garden
which led to the human psychosis called Hamartia. Human beings, after
this event, began declaring certain things “evil” and certain
things “good”, and these things were usually marked by whether
the observer believed them to be either advantageous to himself, or
disadvantageous or harmful to himself. In other words, after the
garden event, evil entered the world because evil is a product of the
psychopathic human mind
which
resulted from the damage done by the toxic fruit which our ancestors
ate. You remove the psychopathic humans, and there is no evil in the
world.
So,
I had been going through this DVD lecture
series
on neurology and the origins of human individuality. In the last set
of lectures I was watching he was discussing the role which
the amygdala and the frontal cortex play in aggression. As I was
watching, the list which Paul gave in his letter to the Galatians
(5:19-21) of the "works of the flesh" came into my mind:
“And
the biological works are visible, such things are the breaking of
marriage vows, illicit sex, dirtiness, sensuality, idolatry, drug
use, hostilities, discord, zeal, passionate anger, selfish actions,
dissensions, factions, envy, murders, intoxication, partying, and the
same things to these, which things I tell you beforehand in the same
way I told you beforehand that those practicing such things will not
inherit the kingdom of God.” (translation mine)
And, as I was thinking about it, what I realized was that everything
in this list in Galatians can be attributed to a limbic system
response. In particular, most of this list is attributable to a
fight/flight response governed by the amygdala and the frontal
cortex.
The
thought also occurred to me that, in thinking about Hamartia, we tend
to have it backwards. We often define hamartia by its symptoms:
selfishness, theft, murder, anger, etc. But many of these things are
demonstrated in the animal world, and most animals evolved in such a
way that they instinctively prioritize the passing on of their own
individual genes at the expense of their rivals. This often involves
seemingly brutal actions which if they were committed by human beings
we would see as abhorrent, and yet they do not sin when they do them.
Consider this. For billions of years, animals behaved like animals
and the planet has been no worse the wear for it. For at least two
hundred thousand years, homo sapiens also more or less behaved this
way, even with a larger cerebral cortex than most animals, and there
was no detrimental impact to the planet as a whole. And then Hamartia
was introduced by what I am coming to believe were an enlarged
frontal cortex, amygdala, and a reduction in mirror neurons due to a
toxin consumed by the ancestors of all homo sapiens currently living.
Within the span of a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, homo
sapiens have overrun the planet, driven massive numbers of other
species to extinction, and are on the verge of damaging the planet’s
environment beyond repair. Hamartia is not the existence of wrong
actions, it’s the error in processing that arbitrarily
determines something to be right or wrong, “good” or
“evil.”
The
human brain attaches to a rule or command, any rule or command. It
then begins to effectively obsess over that rule either in a positive
or a negative way (it doesn’t matter which, only the attachment to
it). Notice that Paul doesn’t here say that the violation of
the rule is at issue. It’s that the rule is creating a moral
constraint which produces either a positive fixation on it, an
attachment, what could be referred to as legalism and
self-righteousness, or a negative fixation, an aversion, which leads
to a self-justification for violating the rule, guilt, and ultimately
suffering as the human psyche must then come to terms with why it has
committed an “evil” act. “Good” and “evil” then are both
for the human mind another way of saying “attachment” and
“aversion.” The arbitrary declaration that something is either
“good” or “evil” depends on the attachment or aversion of the
individual declaring that something to be so. Both such positive and
negative responses are products of the Hamartia disorder. The
validity or beneficial nature of the rule or command in question is
not at issue. It is the moral constraint within the human psyche
which the rule creates which is the problem.
I
am reminded too of Paul’s teaching that God judges a person based,
not on His arbitrary code of conduct or behavior, but on the code of
conduct or behavior which that individual person recognizes. God
counts as sin, or Hamartia, what the individual counts as sin or
wrongdoing according to Romans 2:12-16, but where there is no such
code of conduct, there is no “sin” to be held accountable. Thus,
even though animals kill, steal, rape, and run around naked etc. they
do not “sin” because their frontal cortices are not shouting at
them that their actions are wrong in some way. This is opposed to
human beings whose frontal cortices will trigger a moral accusation
or excuse when an action described by a rule is taken. In other
words, such unaffected animals are incapable of evil.
We
are the only “animal” on earth that responds in this manner. In
any other animal, a perceived environmental event would be processed
as either a threat or non-threat through the
fight/flight/feeding/sexual response of the limbic system which would
then produce an appropriate emotional response of fear, aggression,
eating, etc. in order to continue the creature’s existence. But
human beings are quite different. It is hard wired into us to
perceive every event and thought through the filter of fair/unfair,
right/wrong, and good/evil. Those things which this filter determines
as unfair/wrong/bad are then processed by the hypothalamus as an
existential threat whether or not this is actually the case.
One
need look no further than a small child who, from an early age,
perceives his or her environment in terms of what pleases and
displeases him or her; that is, to what the child is attached or to
what the child is averse (what could also be called a negative
attachment ). The small child declares what pleases it “good” or
“fair,” and what displeases it “bad” or “unfair.” As the
child grows older, the parameters of this “moral response”
eventually adapt outwardly to conform to rules the child must adhere
to. Subconsciously, it still operates on what pleases/displeases the
child and treats what displeases it as a threat, and thus you see
both rule breaking when the child believes it advantageous, and
tattle telling when another breaks the rule and seems to get away
with it when he or she did not. As the person matures into adulthood,
the moral parameters continue to expand to embrace laws, religious
structures, and philosophical concepts with which the person agrees.
Again, subconsciously, the person is still operating on the premise
of pleases/displeases, or attachment/aversion in order to determine
threat response. This operation is so subconscious, so hard wired,
that we cannot separate it from our thought processes, and frequently
are completely unaware that we are doing it.
God’s
goal with the descendants of those
first human beings since the
corruption of Hamartia
has always been to save as many human beings as possible from it. One
could argue that, being who and what He is, He could have simply made
it go away in a kind of “reset.” One could also use the same
argument and ask why He took any time at all in creating the
universe, be it six days, or billions of years. I cannot give a
definitive reason for this, to be honest, but I can speculate based
on His behavior as recorded in the Holy Scriptures and my own limited
understanding of His Existence and His relationship to creation.
My
limited answer to this question is that the course of action He chose
was to produce the best possible outcome even if it appears to be the
messiest and most painful at times. Imagine a pool of still water.
Now, throw a pebble into it. The pebble creates ripples outward from
where it entered the pool. Now imagine two or more such pebbles
hitting the surface in proximity to one another. The ripples they
create interact with and change one another. Now imagine millions of
such ripples across the surface, billions, trillions even. Each one
affecting the one next to it, which affects another next to that and
so on across the surface of the pool in a chain reaction. Every
reaction is interconnected with every other reaction. Like those
pebbles on the pool, every event, every action, every thought has an
effect on everyone and everything around the source. One minor
ripple, or a lack of one, changes the whole pattern. God, being who
and what He Is, knows all possible outcomes to every decision, action
and interaction and the succeeding consequences of them into
infinity.
One
good pop-culture reference to this kind of thinking is from the
movie, Avengers: Infinity War1.
In this movie, Dr. Strange tells Tony Stark that he had seen over
fourteen million potential outcomes in time. When asked in how many
of those outcomes they win against the big bad guy Thanos, Dr.
Strange replied, “One.” It is also relevant that it was the
outcome where Thanos was seemingly allowed to win (by killing half of
everyone in existence) which appeared to be the only one where the
good guys would come out on top.
Allowing
the afflicted descendants of those
first human beings to
continue to exist with the affliction may have been the only path
available to Him where anything or anyone survived beyond Himself.
That no descendant of those
first human beings should
survive appears to have been
unacceptable to Him. He has also demonstrated a refusal to interfere
with anyone’s individual volition or free will though He certainly
has the ability to do so. He appears to respect a human being’s
free will far more than human beings themselves do, and this respect
appears to extend to those sentient creatures described in the Holy
Scriptures as “messengers”2.
It is clear that, even though one or more of these messengers has
itself fallen to Hamartia
and appears to be psychotic, He has not chosen to “reset” them
neither has He chosen to wipe them from existence in time and space,
which He is perfectly capable of doing. God
never appears to take the “easy” route or answer to a problem,
and Hamartia is no exception.
God
permits the existence of evil because He is all good and all
powerful, not because He isn’t. Evil exists because human beings
and those aforementioned fallen messengers exist, all of whom are
afflicted with Hamartia which causes the delusion of evil’s
existence in everything we
don’t like or agree with.
He actively works to deliver
human beings from Hamartia and thus end the “existence” of evil
that way.
1Russo,
Anthony and Joe Russo, Dir. Avengers: Infinity War.
Marvel Studios. 2018
2
Greek “αγγελος”, Hebrew “mal’akh”
