Still thinking of reasons to believe…
Something hit me about a week ago, when watching the Passion of the Christ: people do really, really horrible things to each other. The sick twisted stuff that people do to each other, the brutality, the dehumanization, the sadism, the torture, it blows the mind. Why do people do such horrific things?
At the same time, I wonder if that isn’t a kind of evidence for God for me. This isn’t a logical argument with premises and conclusions- I don’t even really want to go there right now. It’s an intuitive thing. Here goes-
Human beings are capable of unique evil. We do so much that is purely motivated by malice, and we are capable of an kind of evil that you don’t see elsewhere in the natural world. Some of the nasty crap we do can be explained as evolutionarily functional: war overresources, for example, or male promiscuity. I’m not talking about that stuff. I’m talking about genocide and systematic horror that we inflict on each other, the kind of stuff that isn’t really functional, so it doesn’t make sense, or rather, it doesn’t seem to have a natural explanation.
Nature isn’t malicious; it’s indifferent. It’s not evil; it’s amoral. But we can do things that are horrible to each other that go far beyond the harsh indifferent cruelty of nature.
And it’s not limited to the Hitlers and Pol Pots of the world, either. Just think for a second; I’ll bet you can imagine some pretty horrible things that you could do to another person, if you put your mind to it. Even if we’d never consider doing it, why can we even think of those things?
By contrast, almost all the good we seem to be able to do is either 1) evolutionarily functional (like parents sacrificing for their children, or pretty much anything good you do that has an element of self-interest or group-interest) or 2) only a matter of correcting bad stuff. If I feed millions of starving people, for example, I’m not creating a positive good so much as I am merely correcting an evil.
It’s easy to think of horrible and nasty things you could to to hurt other people for no reason and no real benefit to you (and therefore not easy to explain by evolution or nature), but it’s hard to even think of positive good (something above and beyond just correcting something bad) that you can do that isn’t naturally explicable and evolutionarily functional.
To me, this makes me think a couple of things. One, maybe there’s something to the idea that we’re fallen, broken people in a fallen, broken world that needs fixing. And maybe unnatural evil means that there might be unnatural good. It’s hard to even imagine what that kind of unnatural, positive good would look like (because of the T in the Tulip, maybe?), but if there can be malicious non-functional evil, why can’t there be pure good, righteousness, sanctification, holiness. And if it’s not here in our world, then where is it?
Where did evil come from? It’s not easily explainable from a naturalistic point of view. Does that mean it comes from outside the naturalist model somewhere? And if there is evil from outside, why not good?
Sailing to Byzantium 
Wow, dude. You sure did earn that “Thinking Blogger” award today.
It seems to me that any work of art or beauty, which exists soley for its own sake, is a Good Thing that is not derived from evolution or correcting some bad thing. And for me, anyway, creating such art is indeed a holy act.
My two cents on the source of the unspeakable evils you mention: they come as part of the package with rational thought. Here’s the argument:
1. Rational thought allows us to put things into categories (e.g. “person”, “not-person”).
2. Rational thought goes awry sometimes, due to fear or ignorance. Things get stuck in the wrong category.
3. When something that should be “person” gets stuck in the “not-person” category, unspeakable evil results.
Well put, Jeff Lilly.
It’s easy to think of horrible and nasty things you could to to hurt other people for no reason and no real benefit to you…
We can imagine it, yes, but how often do we actually do it with no reason? I can imagine hurting an innocent person who as done me no wrong, but the thought sickens me. I don’t want to do it. This is important though you kind of dismiss it from your consideration.
Why can we imagine these things? Our powers of imagination is very powerful. That same imagination that allows us to imagine atrocities also allows us to imagine a better world. Animals seem mostly stuck in how things are. They don’t seem to imagine consciously working to make the world better. I chalk that up to lacking some of the developed brain functions that humans have. In any case, there’s a flip side to our being able to imagine evil.
I don’t see the evil that humans do as unnatural (we’re using the term very loosely). As more complex animals, our motivations behind our violence is just more complex. That makes it harder to see why such behavior would provide an evolutionary advantage if any.
There is also the assumption in your post that the evil of animals is qualitatively different from the evil of humanity. I don’t buy that. I’m sure lions would gladly commit genocide against hyenas. They’re just not smart enough to do it systematically.
I remember watching a PBS program about a young male lion who hated hyenas with a fierce passion above what you would expect from an amoral drive to out-compete rivals in the food chain. He would go out of his way to torment and kill any hyena he could, risking life and limb to do so.
Regarding doing a positive good: if good is the opposite of evil, then of course all the good we can do is remedial. If our goal was to make the world brighter, all we could manage to do would be to make it less dark.
The only way we could avoid doing remedial good is in a world that is already perfectly good: we could maintain the status quo in heaven.
StB You are a thinker. The point you bring up about evil is quite a good one, a point that is talked about explicitly in Christian Scripture. As a matter of fact, that is what the book of Genesis is about. (Not so much about dinosaurs or the number of days/years it took God to create.) The book of Genesis lays out for us that at one time, mankind was in perfect communion with God, and all was peaceful, one might say Edenic. But then mankind rebelled against God, refusing God’s lordship, and replacing it with lordship of self. It is from this, that sin entered the world, and consequently self rule ruined all things. (genesis chapters 1-11) The rest of the Bible then shows how God has planned and worked in history to redeem mankind through faith in his Son Jesus Christ.
You noted that if mankind tried to do positive good, then the best he could do would be remedial. You are onto something the lette to the Romans describes. In this letter, the Apostle Paul describes how man is desperately wicked, and can never earn a relationship with God, or access to him. But God made a way for sinful man to be redeemed through faith in Christ. That by faith in Christ, we might have his righteousness imputed to us, and our sinfulness forgiven by his sacrifice on the cross.
I have enjoyed your blog, and will return. Grace and Peace to you.