Questions - Human Evil

Here we consider the issue of moral evil – that is to say issues regarding humans doing evil to one another and ask the question

Why doesn't God do something about evil in the world?

On this page you will find an extract from the chapter on Moral Evil in 'The God of the Cruel World', some book recommendations and links to websites where people are attempting to answer this sort of question.

Extract from 'God of The Cruel World'

Now, because the issue of God's lack of intervention in our world will be addressed more fully later on in this chapter, it will suffice at this point to consider one serious flaw in the proposal that God remove evil people from our world – with whom and where would God begin this process? A difficult question because surely every person is taken with temptation to commit evil, albeit in some sort of lesser form. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that moral evil is a problem which is endemic to society because it occurs in every human to one degree or another. For instance, a child takes another child's toy and causes upset. A person gossips and brings misery to the other person who is spoken about. Someone cheats on their tax return with the result that the government is denied revenue that would help others. Another person crashes their vehicle into a parked car and drives away, leaving the owner to meet the expense of repair.

From these examples, what we see is that if God were to oblige us in our request and remove people who do wrong things from the world, a problem would immediately occur: what degree of evil is acceptable and at what point would we draw the line to determine who is in and who is out? Of course, if it were down to every human being to determine the position of the yardstick by which evil is measured, each person would quite naturally locate the point at which they themselves would qualify as being 'not evil'. Indeed, in my years of speaking with people on this subject, I have come across several individuals who truly believe they have never committed an evil act in their life – admittedly, this is their own self-assessment! The implausibility of this aside, it will suffice to observe that moral evil is not so easily determined. One reason is that moral evil requires us to consider it in a more subjective way; it cannot always be calculated or assessed just by the activities that people refrain from.

Within this mix of what is evil is the different issue of the good that people have omitted to do. This is the idea that evil is also the product of our inaction or failure to bring about good in the world – a concept most famously coined in the adapted phrase of political philosopher Edmund Burke who observed 'all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing^[1].' This means that our lack of support towards the unknown person who is starving in the Third World or imprisoned in a dictator state also has consequences for us in terms of evil. So, although a person's intentions may be thoroughly good, there is an argument that their failure to fight for the cause of the needy in the world is tantamount to committing evil, albeit in a different form.

^[1] - Variations of Edmund Burke.

Tough Questions

Questions - Human Evil

Extract from 'God of The Cruel World'

Further Reading

Links

Books