Aging Thoughts: Evil as Ignorance

One of the key problems for atheists and believers in some divinity (God, source, force or purpose) in the universe is the question of evil. The atheists use the existence of evil as proof that there is no god or that if there is one, he/she/it is a failure because, in the argument of Harold Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981), God is benevolent but not able to prevent evil. God is simply not all-powerful. Neither atheists nor many Christians want to believe that. Atheists simply deny the existence of a god while Christians find it hard to accept a less than omnipotent one.

Believers have frequently attributed evil to an external source (e.g. Satan, the Devil). If you take this route, you have a dualistic world view:  God vs. the Devil. This was the view of the Persian religious leader Zoroaster, who posited a God of Good and one of Evil. This view eventually worked its way into Jewish and then Christian thought.

Another Christian view is that evil exists as a test, helping us grow spiritually by giving us an opportunity to prove ourselves worthy by choosing the Good. As humans, we have free will and thus can choose evil over good, sometimes seeing evil as apparent good. Probably the most common “free will” explanation of evil is made more deterministic by the fifth century Christian theologian and “church father” Augustine of Hippo. He locked in the important but unfortunate doctrine of Original Sin to explain, at least to the Western Christian world, why evil exists.

It is our fault, not God’s.  So there! We all inherited the sin of Adam and Eve.

The original sin doctrine became a linchpin of Christianity, leading many after Augustine, and some before him using the writings of the apostle Paul, to create the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.  This explained that the death of Jesus on the cross freed us from the effects of Original Sin, providing we were baptized (at least that was the Catholic version).

Since, generally speaking, only ordained clergy (priests and ministers) could perform the sacrament of baptism—as well as other sacraments and blessings either necessary or useful for one’s salvation, this gave the Christian church considerable spiritual and worldly power, at least as long as people believed that dying with a sin “on your soul” condemned you to an eternal Hell. Another belief of Augustine was what we call Predestination, the idea that some are chosen to be saved and others to be condemned.

Neither of these beliefs (in Hell or Predestination) are as widespread today, as church membership and even the idea of being religious has declined dramatically, especially among the young (those under forty).

Yet we still are troubled by evil. And some of us seek to escape this by accepting the view of some Christian or Buddhist thinkers (mystics?) who tell us that, whatever the reason for evil, we can transcend, transform or overcome evil by changing our attitude toward it.  Evil is not something to be resisted because, as one saying puts it, “what you resist persists.”

Rather, we can deal with evil by focusing on positive thoughts and emotions—by cultivating love instead of hate, compassion instead of anger, and by believing at some deep level in a divine goodness that exists in all creation and in us.  In the words of Thomas Merton, 20^th century Kentucky Trappist monk, poet and spiritual intellectual:

 God’s name is written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence,

As our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.

It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of Light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness\

  And cruelty of life vanish completely…

This notion of a divine spark within each of us strikes many practical, rational people as a silly dream-like response to real evil, to how bad things really are!

Yet, might we not, perhaps just as a thought experiment, consider the opposite. Instead of evil being the way things are due to either sin or the caprice and arbitrariness built into a universe was created by some cosmic accident or explosion, what would happen if we consider evil to be the fantasy, the unreality, a product of our ignorance of ultimate truth?

I should add here that I do not see “natural disasters” as evil but only part of how creation works.  Of course, when humans ignore warning signs, as we are doing with climate changes and by living in permanently low-lying areas prone to flooding, we are complicit in the “evil” these “acts of God” bring to us.

What if we as humans just haven’t evolved enough to understand that evolution is not only physical but spiritual as well?  What if things we call evil are not only due to our poor choices but also due to our ignorance of where we, as part of creation, might be heading?

Long before the power of electrons and protons were understood and we “developed” or “invented” electricity, the power of electricity already existed in nature and we “only” had to figure out how to harness it. 

Might the same be true of our spiritual evolution and understanding of good and evil? Might we grow spiritually beyond what we today call religion and become, as some already claim to be, more attached to spiritual growth than to empty religious forms?”  Could we someday become meta-empirical and understand there are some truths we are yet unable to see and some thoughts that we are not yet able to think?

Is it possible that the evil that humans do, the harm we cause to each other and then blame on “human nature,” is really due to our ignorance of the spark of divinity within us? Might this divinity be something that we may someday come to understand and harness, unless, of course, climate change destroys our species or planet before we can evolve to that level of spiritual awareness?

I would enjoy hearing both from readers who feel spiritual evolution is unlikely or impossible as well as from fellow seekers who think that there might be some truth in the idea that we do have a divine spark within us, and that this can allow us to overcome or transform in some way the evil that exists in ourselves and in our world.