A Patchwork Ramble on the Problem of Evil

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”