The Problem of Evil: Part One of Three: The randomness and irrationality of evil: Steel manning the problematic at hand

“I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”

Ivan Karamazov reflecting on the sufferings of children in “The Brothers Karamazov”

Introduction: The problem of evil, atheism, and a screaming rabbit 

I distinctly remember the exact moment, as a young boy of a mere 8 years of age, when I stopped believing in God for several years. That was the day I heard a rabbit screaming in agony and terror in my backyard. I did not know right away that it was a rabbit since it sounded like a woman screaming – nay, shrieking -- for her life. I ran outside and saw a small rabbit in the mouth of our pet dog who was slowly mauling it to death. The sounds the rabbit emitted were grossly disproportionate to its size. I could not believe how loud and shrill the rabbit’s screams were. Who knew? Its eyes were wide and frantic looking. Its mouth foaming with blood dripping out.  I ran to my dog and tried to pry the rabbit free. But my usually very gentle dog dropped the nearly dead rabbit and bit me strongly on the arm before releasing me after a few shakes of his head. I backed off, and the dog picked up the rabbit and proceeded to finish it off. 

I knew right then and at that precise moment in time that there was no way an all good God existed. For me, the screams of that stupid rabbit nullified and negated God more powerfully than any rational argument put forward by the most persuasive of atheists. I sensed, without knowing the words, that nature was, as Arnold Toynbee put it, both “mother and monster”; a blind indifference meting out blessings and curses willy-nilly, like a drunken Santa Claus tossing hard candy to the crowds off of a Christmas float. I knew then, as Tennyson had said, that nature was indeed “red in tooth and claw”. 

A Jewish neighbor lady who was from Poland and who had survived Auschwitz had once cynically taught my sister and me, in German, that Gott ist tot. She had seen far more than screaming rabbits, and she herself had bulging eyes from medical experiments the Nazis had performed on her thyroid while in the Camp.  And so I knew she had come to this view honestly and not from some stupid book she fancied smart sounding.  Her name was Zuzanna Dinkiewicz, and even though at age 7 I did not know words like “hermeneutics”, I somehow knew she had given me the right way to understand what I had just seen with the rabbit.  Thus, as I picked up the dead rabbit wondering what to do with it, those words came into my mind. Gott ist tot.

I felt no sense of liberation. My newfound atheism was one of deep regret. It scared me actually. But I knew that a cosmic order arranged in a manner that allowed for the look in that rabbit’s eyes was a meaningless mélange of purely random events. A tiny screaming rabbit as theodicy problem: Quod erat demonstrandum.

Of course, I found my way back to the faith about 5 years later after reading  a lot of Chesterton, Lewis, and Newman. But for the intervening years I could not forget that rabbit.  And even after I recovered my faith, I could not forget that rabbit. It was the memory of that rabbit that started the demolition of a superficial notion of God within me, and the ensuing atheism it caused is what actually made an open space within me so that later on a much more profound notion of God could take root. As I grew older, I understood that the silly rodent was a condensed symbol for a lot of other things. Heck, had my father shot it while hunting I would have eaten the damn thing. But at age 67 I remember its screams still. And the problem of evil has always been something of deep theological importance to me. 

To be clear, there really is no completely satisfactory answer to the problem of evil and I will not be offering a “solution” in these pages. At best there are hints of an answer, but they are not so much an “answer” at all but rather the glimpsing of the analogical theological equivalent of every scream of fear and agony in the cumulative history of the world. 

Part One: The randomness of evil and our anomic anguish

There can be no doubt that it is precisely the presence of pain, suffering and moral evil in our world that are some of the biggest causes of unbelief in the God described by biblical religion.  It is next to impossible, so the criticism goes, to square the God of infinite love with the little shop of horrors that this same God has placed us within as our most proper home and has done so without our consent.  So pervasive is this pain and suffering in our experience of life that the Bible asserts that this world is “fallen” and, until the advent of Christ, actually part of the kingdom of Satan and subject to his domination.  (N.B. I will write more on this point in parts two and three of this series.) 

In particular, the sufferings of animals, so central to the natural rhythms of life and of evolutionary processes, and the sufferings of innocent children, give rise to an instinctive sense of moral revulsion and outrage that should not be glossed over as we meditate upon the full range of what God allows to happen in this captive fallen world.  For it is only in meditating with open-eyed honesty on the full reality of evil in our fallen world, avoiding all sentimentalist and pietistical glosses, that we can move beyond the usual boilerplate responses to the problem of evil and into deeper spiritual waters.  The key point here is the suffering of the innocents, which includes animals which are incapable of sin, and children who, even if they sin do so in a state of developmental immaturity with greatly mitigated culpability. 

Let us begin therefore by citing just a few of the literally countless examples of inexplicable evil that cry out for explanation.  What of the sufferings of little children trafficked into sadistic sexual slavery that we now see all over the world and for which our governments do next to nothing? Or of children forced into slave labor in wretched conditions to provide us with the rare metals we need to power the iPhones for our porn addicted culture? Or of the little girl who, a few years back, was abducted, raped, tortured and then buried alive in some pervert’s backyard inside of a Hefty trash bag? I once read a news story years ago about a little 4 year old boy on a farm who fell into an open pit of pig feces and urine and who drowned therein. Even more recently we have seen many school shootings that killed and/or severely wounded scores of innocent and harmless children.  Or of the news lately of a mother who, allegedly in a psychotic breakdown, strangled her three sweet little children to death. 

Where were the guardian angels for all of these children? Why do the guardian angels of so many such children seem completely incompetent or impotent, or worse, indifferent?  Why do they seem more like drug-addled babysitters in a numbed-up stupor as the child in their charge drowns in a bathtub, rather than … well … rather than like “angels”? Is this why so much of the “guardian angel” piety is saccharine to the point of nauseating since one has to somehow perfume over the stench of so many failures? Don’t get me wrong, I believe in Guardian Angels. Very much so in fact. But maybe we need to rethink their purpose as something perhaps more profound than a kind of supernatural bodyguard against bad things happening to me. Because if they are bodyguards, they are really bad ones for the most part. 

But I can already hear the pietistical rejoinder. A rejoinder larded with some of the same assumptions as the friends of Job:  “But what you don’t see is how in the long run these sufferings are part of a larger good!” I am sorry, but I do not see how the horror that must invade the minds and hearts of such little children as they are being abducted, tortured, raped and murdered, furthers any greater good that is discernible to reason.  And all attempts to justify such monstrous evils by somehow placing them within some putative divine plan of inscrutable benevolence seems to many to be just another backhanded way of ontologizing such evils and blasphemously placing them within the ambit of the mysterious omelet God is making by cracking a few innocent eggs. 

We must never ontologize evil. And yet so many “answers” to the problem of evil either do in fact ontologize it or, at the very least, flirt with the guards in its proximity. We must always get one thing clear: God hates evil, wishes it did not exist, and does not view it as having any “higher utility”. Furthermore, God kenotically divested himself of regal heavenly glory in the Incarnation and to suffer as one of us, precisely in order to get rid of all evil root and branch.  

And yet evil does still exist. It persists. Nor is it an illusion, part of the world of “maya” as Eastern mysticism would have it, the product of a false dualistic consciousness that falsely divides existence up into “this thing and that thing”. Evil is not the Yin to the Yang of the Good. Evil is a dark and putrid reality. In the abstract it is a “privation of the good” and a form of “nonbeing”. But in reality, it is phenomenologically a screaming rabbit or much worse, a strangled child or a Zuzanna Dinkiewicz getting her thyroid chopped up by a Nazi butcher. And none of these things should “be”. Not one.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let us return to the point of the irrationality and randomness of evil. I am reminded of the complaint of Dostoevsky’s atheist character Ivan Karamazov in “The Brothers Karamazov”, which is highlighted in the epigraphic quote at the top of this essay. After recounting several tales of the cruel torturing of innocent children, Ivan tells his monk brother Alyosha that no matter what eventual eschatological harmony might ensue eventually as a result of God allowing such horrors, the price is simply too high to pay.  He understands that such sufferings of the truly innocent are more than bestial, since animals have no capacity for such deliberate cruelty, and are instead something peculiarly human. And yet, this is the economy of salvation willed by a putatively good and loving God.  

In other words, Ivan the atheist understands that evil is real and that it should not exist at all, if the God of Christianity is real. Ivan understands that anything short of that affirmation is an ontologizing of evil.  

As stated above and highlighted by Ivan, what strikes most people about such sufferings of the innocent is the randomness and irrationality of the evils inflicted.  Such randomness, devoid of rationally discernible purpose, unsettles our souls in profound ways. Children die every day in the most horrific of circumstances; war, disease, famine, abuse, torture and various random accidents.  And yet little Adolf Hitler rode his Austrian tricycle in peace and tranquility as a boy with nary a scratch and survived the bullets and bombs of WWI.  Hitler survived the war and yet the wonderful Charles Péguy died from a bullet to the head in that same war.  Wouldn’t the interests of salvation be better served by the continuing existence of Péguy rather than Hitler? The ways of Providence may be inscrutable, but there should also be something within events that do not present themselves as sheer irrationality at odds with all that we know to be good and true.  For how hard would it have been for God to engineer for young Adolf to choke to death on a piece of sausage as he was pulling the wings and legs off of a captured bug? 

Part of what vexes us in such examples isn’t just the sheer irrationality of it all, but that the irrationality seems grounded in a randomness so irreducible that it renders any discernible divine providence utterly hidden and opaque to our reason.  And recourse to the “God’s ways are not our ways” argument just seems to be too convenient, especially in light of the fact that those same scriptures tell us that we have an obligation to discern God’s will in our lives, which implies that His will can be known in some clear ways. Those same scriptures tell us that we should be able to discern the presence of a creator God by looking at the beauty and ordered structure of the natural world, which should then impel us to the worship of the one, true, creator God. (Romans 1:20) But when it comes to discerning why God allows a psychotic mother to murder her kids we are told that God’s moral sense is so equivocal to ours that it simply cannot be understood. 

Therefore, it seems that from a certain kind of superficially pious perspective we are guilty of grave sin if we fail to discern the Divine moral will and to live up to it, and yet we are also guilty of the grave sin of gross impertinence if we dare to put God in the Dock and question him concerning equally discernible crimes against humanity. 

So which is it? The ways of God are so inscrutable that we dare not question the divine goodness or that the will of God is indeed “knowable” to such a degree that rejection of his existence and commandments is a morally culpable act? It is noteworthy that the book of Job initiates the same query, thus giving biblical warrant to the questions at hand.  When God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind God’s answer is in a sense a non-answer. God asks Job if he was present when God layed the foundations of creation in place? Or if he can plumb the depths of the Divine Wisdom? The asymmetry between God’s infinite wisdom and Job’s limited finite mind is appealed to as a sufficient “explanation” for Job’s questionings. There is imbedded in this answer as well an implied apophaticism with regard to evil. Ultimately, God’s response to Job directly implies that it is simply not given to us to know the answer to this question in a way that will satisfy the rational queries of a mind captive to the logic of the pragmatism of the intramundane. 

But is this really the last word from God meant to close all further inquiry from His children who rightly seek to understand why there is evil in the world? Is God brusquely – and perhaps even callously -- telling us through Job to just “shut up and accept how things are”? Or is God’s answer to Job instead a provocation wherein God is asking us to delve deeper into the mysteries of existence in order to arrive at a more profound level of wisdom that goes beyond linear rationality? Is God foreclosing the conversation or truly opening it for the first time? I think it is the latter and for reasons I will attempt to spell out in parts two and three.  

Finally, before we move on, a most obvious fact needs to be pointed out. Namely, that the book of Job is in the canon in the first place! Its presence in the inspired canon indicates that the problem of evil raises questions that God understands will be raised and which need to be raised.  Is the Holy Spirit via this inspired text asking us merely to view the narrative as a tale of human impertinence in the face of an inscrutable Divine Wisdom, or is the Spirit guiding us to acknowledge the legitimacy of Job’s question, even if the answer is not immediately forthcoming? Or perhaps even that God’s answer to Job is more epiphanic than what a first casual reading might surmise.  

This is all well and good, but it leaves us where we started, which is a reality the psalmists use as part of their lamentations of divine abandonment, as in, for example, Psalm 22 on being forsaken by God which Jesus invokes on the cross.  The shocking nature of the psalms, unparalleled in world religions, is the bracing honesty of their questionings of God’s ways which more often than not appear so indifferent to the plight of Israel. Notice how many times the psalms ask God to remember his mighty deeds in the past on behalf of Israel and to ask Him, in light of this, why the reservoir of mighty deeds seemed to have dried up completely. Indeed, is there not even here a hint of a kind of sarcastic backhanded chiding of God in such psalms! Is there not here a tonality of, “Yeah, yeah, we have all read the stories of events from 500 years ago, but why should we believe them given your total absence now God? Perhaps Moses was just a weaver of fairy tales?” In other words, there is even an atheistic undertow at work here that goes well beyond a pious request for divine blessings “as in the old days” and presses forward into an agonistic plea to a possibly non-existent God. 

But perhaps such laments are actually a form of faith. Perhaps their presence in the inspired prayer book of the Bible demonstrates that they are without a doubt a form of faith. This would then mean that structured into biblical faith on a deep constitutive level is an anguish over evil and the apparent absence of God that implied by it. Faith experiences the absence and the anguish precisely as a mysterious conforming to something analogously within God.

There is in the psalms of lament a similar subversion as in the book of Job. There is a negation in play. And that negation is the rejection of God as a “Being among other beings albeit the Supreme Being”. This places God beyond intramundane “Being” and into a realm of supra Being that looks phenomenologically to be identical to non-being. There must therefore be, in order to avoid an utterly equivocal concept of God’s goodness, an analogical point of contact that is epiphanic. There must be a positive kataphatic “home” in such an epiphanic Revelation for all apophatic negations. And Christ’s cry of dereliction from the Cross reveals to us something of the structure of faith itself – something kenotic – that must not be glossed over and explained away. “Philip, he who sees me sees the Father”. 

And this, once again, gives a biblical warrant to the questions we ask. Revelation, in other words, seems to indicate that God actually blesses such questionings as part of the path to wisdom.  Therefore, those who see in such questions nothing but a blasphemous doubting of God’s ways are actually being unbiblical.  

When it comes to the ineradicable randomness of the events of our lives and of events in the natural world, and when it comes to the presence of great sufferings among innocent persons, we are granted by God himself the permission to be disturbed.  Indeed, the disturbance in our souls caused by such random evils devoid of discernible rational purpose, if the Bible is to believed (and I think it is), seems to be the biblically warranted way of coming to a deeper appreciation of the full weight of what sin actually is, especially in light of all of the consequences that flow downstream of its reality.  More on that later.

The upshot of the apparent randomness of evil is that it leads millions of people into either overt atheism or, at the very least, into an agnostic apophaticism that claims that any and all alleged divine actions are equally inscrutable and unknowable.  And it certainly lays waste to any notion that I should be able to figure out in this life what the “one true religion” is, especially when that allegedly true religion cannot explain why my child died a painful and horrific death because of a birth defect while baby Hitler smiled and giggled away in full health in his little Teutonic crib.  

There is also the deeply related issue of unanswered prayers. The issue is related to the problem of evil insofar as the opaque randomness of answered vs. unanswered prayers also breeds a kind of crippling agnosticism.  Even believers will often say about terminally ill persons, after all medical remedies have failed, “Well, all we can do now is pray.”  All we can do? That is not exactly a rousing endorsement of the power of prayer. In fact, it is riddled with a latent unbelief if not an exhausted cynicism.  And why shouldn’t we be so exhausted? On a personal note, I have prayed over the years, in conjunction with many others, for scores of friends and family who had terminal cancer. They all died, and some quite young. I had a five year old sister who needed open heart surgery to correct a birth defect. We all prayed for her. Our Church prayed for her. She died. 

And the presence of real healings as a result of prayer at places like Lourdes, though a wonderful blessing from the Lord in which I believe most devoutly to be true, in another way are almost like rubbing salt in an open wound. Why are these people healed and not others? Must be nice to have the money to fly to France and get your affluent petard bathed in the magic water. Why can’t God heal me from disease via a sacramental anointing from a holy priest in my parish Church in Scranton? He can, of course, and probably does on occasion. But why such randomness? Is answered prayer closer to winning the lottery through random number drawings than it is to any rationally discernible pattern of divine mercy? 

What this points to is that one of the primary downstream effects of evil and the Fall is our experience of life and existence as a seemingly disconnected set of random dots which can be drawn together into an ersatz whole only through the ruse of an imposed unity concocted out of our own subjective wish that there be such a coherence.  Some would say that this desire for coherence (i.e. “meaning”) is itself a sign of the inner dynamism of a transcendent orientation within us, pointing toward a very real horizon which grounds the whole and gives a context to every seemingly random event.  Rahnerians in particular love that kind of talk and there is, I think, much truth in it. 

But others would say that it is perhaps even more likely, given the full weight of the randomness of things, that all such “rumors of angels” hidden within the alleged teleology of existence are ultimately illusions that mask over the essentially tragic quality of human existence.  Even Cardinal Walter Kasper, in his now long ago book “The God of Jesus Christ”, notes that from a purely naturalistic point of view Rahner’s “dynamism of the human soul” is unconvincing to the hard-bitten secularists since in their view it might just as easily point to the “void” as to God, to a tragic contradiction in the heart of our existence rather than as an orientation to a God who remains tantalizingly ever beyond our reach.  In other words, God as the “ever more” asymptote of the teleology of our knowing and willing might just be an epiphenomenal accident of any self-aware consciousness. To be clear, I do not think that is the case, but I am merely steel manning here the phenomenology of our agonistic doubts in the face of such existential opacity. 

Life is littered with tragedies and thus it is easy to suspect that this is because life is ultimately tragic tout court.  We arise out of nothing, struggle and laugh for a few years in a seemingly random manner, and then we die in equally random ways, with some dying peacefully in their sleep at age 99 (including very evil people who deserved no such peaceful death), while others die hideously and in their youth. And then within a few short years of our death, even our loved ones stop thinking of us much at all.  Gravestones fade and fall over, to be discovered 500 years later and put into an out of the way pile of other such forgottens to make way for the new Dollar General or Tim Hortons.  

Part Two: Moral Agency as Underappreciated Centrality

I want now to highlight the weight of our sins because in Catholic theology sin is the cause of all of the evil in the cosmos. There is no sense in Catholic doctrine in which evil, and the sufferings caused by evil, would have been a constitutive part of our existence even had we never sinned.  God hates evil and is utterly opposed to it since it is contrary to his nature as infinite goodness.  This is an important point since there are far too many “explanations” of why there is evil in the cosmos that tend to ontologize evil by making it some kind of unavoidable element in what God wanted to accomplish in creation.  To say that there can be no goodness without evil is to fall victim to a foreign religious ideology closer to pantheism, with its “yin and yang” harmonization of opposites, that C.S. Lewis rightly describes as entailing a view of God who is “beyond good and evil”, than it is to the creator God of biblical religion.  What God creates must by necessity be good and in a state of pristine integrity.  

There also cannot be any recourse to a false equating of “fallenness” with finitude as such.  This represents one of the false answers to the question of how there can be anything that is not God. The Gnostic and/or hard dualistic answer is to equate finitude as such with a fall from perfection and as something inherently imperfect insofar as it is not God.  

But this is precisely why evil presents the Christian with a problem. If God is good and what he created was good and if God hates evil, then why is it here?  And the simple and short answer is direct and succinct: evil is caused by the sinful misuses of free will by God’s creatures.  There is no other explanation.  In the Christian vision, sin is the sole cause of evil in the cosmos. 

But this seems utterly simplistic and trite to many people today in ways that are hard to quantify and calculate.  For how can it be that we miserable little trousered apes with brains geared toward utilitarian goals can bring about such cosmic consequences through our petty choices? How can it be that a pair of aboriginal humans (or a group of aboriginal humans if you prefer), by engaging in a single sin of rebellion against the law of God, can be the cause of God consigning us to the dereliction of a history littered with sufferings unimaginable?  

Indeed, the shock of such a view is compounded if we dilate on the topic for even a smidge and realize that the entirety of the natural order has at its foundation a seemingly ineradicable orientation to pain, disease, predation, bloodthirsty competition, decay and death.  The entirety of the edifice of life, for example, is balanced on the razor’s edge between pain and possibility. There is therefore a prima facie justification for those philosophies that ontologize evil as just the necessary shadow side of the good since evil seems built into the deepest constitutive fabric of the world and its processes.  

It would seem therefore that the idea embedded within Christianity that the moral agency of creatures is the hub around which the wheel of history turns freights human nature with far more consequence than it can bear.  Indeed, we are born into a sinful and fallen world and we ourselves inevitably fall into sin – sins which weaken both our reason and our wills, rendering us less capable of true moral agency and not more.  We are therefore caught in an existential bind and a deeply vicious cycle of sin and more sin, with an inbreaking of grace our only hope. But then, as it seems so often and again quite randomly, that inbreaking seems to come for some but not for others. 

This was the fundamental point of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who leveled the accusation against Christ, as a formal “charge” requiring punishment, that he (Christ) had placed too heavy a burden on human freedom and freighted it with too much significance.  Furthermore, in doing so, the Inquisitor charged that Christ had inflicted the most hideous and dehumanizing sufferings upon humanity requiring the Church to step in to relieve people of this awful burden of freedom.  Therefore, the Inquisitor is determined to stop Jesus from returning since the modus vivendi that the Church has reached with the world is one wherein freedom is replaced with bread and circuses, raw authority, and the titillation of miracles scattered here and there.  Christ cannot be allowed to return the Church to His message of the eschatological weight of our glory.  

Is this not the entire ethos of modernity encapsulated in a story? The modern cult of bourgeois well-being reverses the spiritual order by making the pursuit of penultimate worldly realities into our only true ultimacy, and the pursuit of any kind of supernatural ultimacy is then viewed as a dangerous and anti-human assault on our right to choose trivialities as the end of our existence.  True freedom is not what is sought after since this impossible marriage of our wills with matter, as Balthasar puts it, is death to the realm of the Good as in any way normative, and therefore it is also death, ironically, to “desire” as such in its pure form, since we can only desire that which is inherently desirable, or good.  

Thus, we must invent goods that are ersatz and/or merely stipulative, which fade and lose their original attractiveness - - an attractiveness which only resided in the fact that they were simply “new” and “different” and therefore felt liberative but not in any way inherently desirable as an epiphany of a transcendent beauty and goodness.  Freedom, therefore, is not the true emphasis of modernity after all. Modernity prefers instead a vacuous open-ended, goalless, autonomy grounded in nothing beyond the passing affective moods of the choosing self.  As such, “choices” are a mere movement of directed neuronal impulses that signify nothing.

Therefore, what see in modernity is a radical denial that our moral choices can have cosmic and even eternal consequences. We acknowledge that sufferings and bad outcomes must be avoided, but do not see in such adjudications any hint of a deontological reality called a “binding moral norm.” Such norms are these days even viewed as a form of political fascism since they are “Right wing” attempts to use “norms” to repress us, restrict our freedoms and to impose upon us a theocratic regime. 

My contention is that this attitude has infected the Church of today as well. And it has led us  to lose our ability to appreciate theodrama. Thus, too many in the Church can no longer speak about evil and the problem it presents outside of political categories. Theodicy disappears as a problem and is replaced with therapeutics and politics and bureaucratic rearrangements. Our liturgies are flat and lifeless since nothing is really “at stake” with our freedom. And our Church’s look like the suburban cul de sacs that inspired them. 

Therefore, to begin to unveil even a little the significance of the mystery of evil, we must dive deeper into sin, freedom, the importance of moral agency and theodrama.  Part two will take up that task and part three will illustrate how this approach to the problem of evil also has direct ecclesiological implications.

Dorothy Day, pray for us