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.