The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener by Martin Gardner

Author:Martin Gardner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1999-08-21T06:00:00+00:00

15

EVIL: Why?

A bird sings now;

Merrily sings he

Of his mate on the bough,

Of her eggs in the tree:

But yonder a hawk

Swings out of the blue,

And the sweet song is finished

—Is this story true?

God now have mercy

On me, and on you!

—JAMES STEPHENS

My notes on philosophy and on literature are on file cards arranged in rough chronological order. Over the decades I have followed the practice of attaching tiny metal flags of six colors to cards that relate to six metaphysical topics: God, immortality, free will, evil, altruism, and the mystery of being. In going through my file cabinets for philosophy and literature, before writing this chapter, I was surprised to note that the number of flags for evil diminished steadily with time. There were many such flags for the ancient and medieval periods. They started to thin out during the Renaissance, and when the cards reached modern times the flags were few and far between. The problem of evil is not one that interests many twentieth-century writers.

I speak of the theological problem, not descriptions of evil. (Obviously there has been no falling off of descriptions.) How can the fact of evil be reconciled with models of a personal God? This is the dreadful difficulty with which I intend to grapple in this and the next chapter. To say I shall give no new arguments is to say nothing new because I have already confessed that there are no new arguments anywhere in this book. There is no way to say anything new about the problem of evil. It has all been said thousands of times before, in enormous detail, and often with great eloquence. The best I can do is repeat rusty, unsatisfying arguments, all older than Christianity. Not one of these arguments, if it tries to explain why God or the gods permit evil, carries any persuasion for an atheist. At the most they serve only to show that theism is not logically inconsistent, perhaps comfort a believer slightly, perhaps make the immensity of evil a bit easier to bear.

It is customary to distinguish moral evil or sin from what is usually called physical or natural evil, but unless I say otherwise, or the context implies it, I shall use the word to mean every kind of pain and suffering regardless of the cause. A baby who drowns accidentally in a flood is just as incomprehensibly dead as a baby tossed by someone into the sea. If a madman fires a gun at a crowd, killing ten people at random, they are just as needlessly dead as if they had been killed by an earthquake. It is this kind of senseless, irrational evil that is such a monstrous stumbling block for a theist. My little flags for evil diminished with the centuries not because evil diminished, or because theists found better ways to explain it, but because theism, among secular thinkers and writers, has diminished. To the atheist, or to the pantheist who is almost an atheist, there is no problem of evil.

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