In 2018 I was awarded the Reverend Robert Stewart & Doris Stewart Prize for Excellence in Religion Writing for a paper written the fall prior in my Philosophy of Religion class.

By following up with my professor I learned that, allegedly, the paper that had earned me the honor in question was one that had given me so much trouble that I had turned it in late and subsequently received a rather poor grade as a consequence. (An unearned consequence, in my opinion. If the paper was good a week ago, it’s good now. They’re concepts, not a goddamn Caesar salad. They don’t go bad, Rebecca.)

Reading the essay today, I feel much of that initial dissatisfaction I felt submitting the paper magnified. I’ve had six years to grow and learn as a person, and that alone makes revisiting a topic like ‘the nature of evil itself’ written in one’s late teens bound to invoke a fair amount of cringe.

Still, I want to honor that young author and the recognition they received from their institution and their professor. There is good work here, and good concepts.

Thus, here is the essay, reproduced faithfully. If not heretically.

Unnecessarily Evil, by Kaia Ball

Humanity is in the thrall of revolution. The results of the industrial revolution triggered countless renaissances, from the formation of modern geopolitics, to the liberation and development of colonized nations, to the humble creation of the personal computer and its highway, the World Wide Web. I was born just before the start of a new millennium, and generations before and after me are coming of age in a world unrecognizable to our predecessors. In a time when traditions of ancestors no longer seem to apply, when precedent is meaningless, many find themselves turning to the old gods and quietly asking, “Where do you fit in?”

Ignorance is dying, bleeding from billions of wounds, as more and more of the global population gain internet access and the skills to use it. The bourgeois of Belgium know the plight of the poor in Panama, and the children of Canada casually read up on Rwandan refugees. In search of comfort many turn to temples and hymns, but their children find faults in the mythos of their ancestors. Even the most stoic of choir boys finds themselves pondering the simplest of questions. “If a god loves me, then why do they allow me to feel pain?” “Why do bad things happen to good people?” “What kind of god allows the good to die young?”

Upon first glance, the entire premise of an empathetic god appears to be utterly decimated by the sheer magnitude of pain experienced by the human race on a daily basis. In the United States, a country with a GDP per capita of $57 thousand, 1 in every 30 children is homeless. That’s as self evident as it gets; the world is full of greed and selfishness. The premise then goes that a loving god would interfere and prevent or at least alleviate the suffering of the innocent. But we can observe the innocent suffering. Those homeless children? Half of them are under the age of six, too young for them to commit most sins, and definitely too young to grasp the morality of them. Yet they shiver and starve. Therefore, an empathetic god cannot exist. Nail in the coffin.

So let’s backtrack. Maybe a god would intervene, and maybe they wouldn’t. Intervention is a dramatic move for an omnipotent being. Any action taken would undoubtedly have side effects. Perhaps a god looked upon wealth inequality and greed in America and, intending to teach the rich a lesson, caused a stock market crash. Or perhaps they took one sector- housing- and destroyed that market. Now, they say, the banks will learn their lesson. The kings shall live as serfs. What life, then, do the serfs lead?

Skeptics may clamor to offer solutions and circumventions but there is no action possible in the universe that is without consequence, and whether those results are classified as positive or negative is all based on the observer. Vesuvius erupts, and a city is gone. A tragedy? Maybe so, for the people of Pompeii. But that city was a Roman colony, taken by force fewer than 200 years earlier, unliberated by an unsuccessful rebellion. For the slaves of Pompeii, was an apocalypse of ash mercy? For the enemies of Rome, was the decimation of their territory a gift from the heavens? The people of the city knew that the ground often quaked. Perhaps the catastrophe was a lesson from divinity itself. 

In his essay Evil and Omnipotence, J. L. Mackie writes, “Some have said that evil is an illusion, perhaps because they held that the whole world of temporal, changing things is an illusion, and that what we call evil belongs only to this world, or perhaps because they held that although temporal things are much as we see them, those that we call evil are not really evil.” Though he goes on to dismiss this point, I find myself compelled by it. I do not necessarily maintain the idea that evil is illusory, but rather that evil is not tangible enough to exist as an undeniable flaw in the universe, and is certainly not concise enough to hold a god accountable for allowing it to persist. Its identity is too subjective to the soul experiencing it. 

Perhaps the persistence of pain in the world truly does reflect the existence of an apathetic god, or even a sadistic one. I can make a case for neither, as a sadistic god may find pleasure in observing the self destruction of their creations, and an apathetic god would certainly make no attempts to provide us with evidence of their existence. 

The premise of a loving god is not synonymous to the premise of an intervening god, and a god of love may have a multitude of reasons to withhold intervention, or even be actively intervening in ways we fail to identify as benign.  The existence of evil, whether defined by natural disasters or the foibles of humanity, is too nebulous and indistinct to directly conflict with the possibility of a god of empathy.

As an individual, I have developed my own set of moral standards. I, a mortal with a limited perspective, do my best to aid what I perceive as justice, and alleviate suffering when I can. My definition of evil is unique to me, and runs a wide spectrum, from my outrage at the children on the streets to my bitterness over the pedantism of attendance grades. And yet my classmate’s definition would differ from mine, as does yours, and so on, so forth. 

To hold a divine power responsible for enforcing my beliefs feels indulgent of my ego. The possibility of a deity’s existence fails to be invalidated by the existence of suffering, but the possibility also fails to be confirmed by the existence of the similarly subjective joy. An answer of so little substance will likely fail to satisfy the curious heirs of society discussed earlier, but as the illustrious Samuel Beckett once said, “That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.”