The Problem of Evil (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

On Messiahs and Extinction Events and Why We don't need a Redeemer

Part One: The Problem of Evil

A classic question within the Philosophy of Religion is how to reconcile the existence of evil with the idea of a loving omniscient and omnipotent god. The reason that this question seems so difficult is that philosophers have previously made the mistake of incorrectly identifying evil, and then not noticing that the world does a very good job at eliminating actual evil without exception.

I suspect we have made these errors because, with very little exception, the people doing the thinking were living in cultures built upon a foundation made nearly exclusively of those evils that the world has made its business to eliminate. In other words, we were standing within a blind spot that made noticing our error nearly impossible.

So what is evil as the world defines it? Evil is the extinction of life. Not the death of individuals, but the death of species. I heard a definition of extinction, credited to the biologist E. O. Wilson that described extinction as the "death of birth". I have been unable to substantiate the quote, but it seems apt. And even extinction is not evil in the view of the world.

If we look at the thrust of the universe, we see a trend of increasing complexity. Entropy will eventually deplete that, but until then we do our best. Life is possibly the ultimate expression of that drive for complexity, and the preservation of complicated ecosystems can be regarded as the highest good possible. As such, war upon the ability of our biosphere to sustain life is evil and things can be measured as good or evil on the basis of whether they support or damage our biosphere's ability to sustain life.

One might argue that this is not a valid definition of good or evil. But on the basis of available information that can be observed and tested, we can only judge good or evil by the long term effects on this world. Thus making sustainability the strongest measure of good we can imagine.

Now stepping back to an earlier assertion, namely that people struggling with the problem of evil were doing so from within evil cultures. The leap should be be hard to make to understand the meaning of that assertion now. All civilized cultures have been unsustainable for as long as they have been civilized. They have achieved civilization on the back of the biosphere and maintained it through domination and subjugation of the rest of the biosphere. It is very hard to correctly define evil when you are in the midst of committing it. There is always a justification for your activities.

So what does all this mean?