The “problem of evil” is the question of how the world can be so full of suffering and evil if its divine source is good. It’s one of the biggest questions in life, and it has plagued philosophers and theologians from all around the world for as long as our species has existed. Many people accept or reject entire religions on the basis of the problem of evil. And if there isn’t any realistic solution to the problem of evil, why be religious or spiritual at all? Aren’t all religions and spiritual paths just shams at that point?
Personally, I find almost all of the proposed “solutions” to the problem of evil (or “theodicies,” as they’re sometimes called) to be hopelessly insipid in the face of the sheer horror and magnitude of the suffering we experience. For example, as a child in Sunday School, I often heard that God had to allow the possibility of evil to exist in order for humans to have free will and thus to be able to voluntarily choose the good.
This argument is tantamount to a denial of two of the divine’s definitive characteristics: its omnipotence (it’s all-powerful) and omnipresence (it’s present everywhere). Either the divine is omnipotent and omnipresent, or we have free will; both things can’t be true at the same time. If the divine is truly omnipotent and omnipresent, then everything we do is the divine acting through us, whether we realize it or not. This makes the divine just as responsible for the “bad” as the “good.”
Furthermore, to say that the divine had to give us free will in order to allow us to “choose” the good is to place constraints on the divine, which, again, is an affront to the divine’s omnipotence. The divine could have designed the world any way it chose, so why did it decide to structure it in such a way that the very thing that made good possible also made evil possible?
If the divine is real, then free will is ultimately an illusion, and any arguments based on free will are just as spurious as the illusion on which they’re based. But if all of the suffering we endure and inflict on others manifests divine action, how is the divine not a sadistic monster?
So let me relate what is, as far as I can tell, the only viable theodicy or solution to the problem of evil – the argument that makes spirituality and religion make sense despite, or because of, how frightfully evil and painful this world is.
What Is Evil?
Whenever a problem seems unsolvable, that’s a strong indication that it’s framed badly. If it were framed correctly, the solution would present itself much more naturally. The problem of evil offers a prime case in point.
The issue is: what is “evil” in the first place? Depending on how we define “evil,” the nature of the “problem of evil” changes, and the range of possible solutions or theodicies changes accordingly.
In religion, and in life in general, there are basically three possible definitions of what “evil” is. They come from different levels of awareness that entail different approaches to life. Each of these definitions is valid at its own level, but since the levels of awareness to which they correspond reflect reality to different degrees, their degrees of validity differ accordingly.
The first and most superficial definition of “evil” essentially equates it with suffering. This is what “evil” is from the perspective of the everyday self or “ego.” It’s whatever our egos don’t like. When we’re trapped in our egos, suffering seems to be the definitive characteristic of life.
Buddhism expresses this particularly clearly, and makes it a particularly central part of its religion. The core precepts of Buddhism are often called the “Four Noble Truths,” and the First Noble Truth is usually summarized as “Life is suffering.” In the Pali canon, a collection of early Buddhist sacred texts, the Buddha explains: “Now this… is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering.”[1]
The second definition of “evil” refers to moral evil specifically. These are the actions that the world’s religions tell people not to commit. This definition is “higher” than the first level because it’s a way of “taming” the ego: some moral actions are sometimes displeasing to the ego, and some immoral actions are sometimes pleasing to the ego, so acting in a moral way helps us to become less attached to our egos and more attached to the divine source from which moral values come.
But even this moral definition of “evil” falls short of the spiritual definition of the word, which is the third and highest. At this ultimate level, evil is separation from the divine, or the stubborn illusion of separation from the divine – in other words, it’s any experience or mode of perception other than spiritual enlightenment or union with the divine. “Good” is to live in that awareness that the divine is all that truly exists, which religions agree is the meaning of life. This is the sense in which Christianity’s Gospel of Saint Mark (chapter 10, verse 18) asserts that “No one is good but God alone.”[2]
Saint Mark states this point in terms of “positive theology” – that is, saying what the divine is rather than what it isn’t. But since the divine is beyond anything and everything that can be put into words, the divine is so unimaginably “good” that the very concept of “good” doesn’t do it justice. Thus, it’s even more fitting to say that the divine transcends the categories of “good” and “evil” altogether. This is “negative theology” – stating what the divine isn’t rather than what it is.
For this reason, many classic spiritual texts from many religions point out how far above any and all ordinary notions of “good” and “evil” the divine is. The Katha Upanishad, an ancient poem held to be a piece of scripture in Hinduism, thus says that the divine is “beyond right and wrong, cause and effect, past and future.”[3] Likewise, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a sacred text in Tibetan Buddhism, declares (brackets in the original):
How debilitating is the view which dualises good and evil,
When Samantabhadra, [The Ever Perfect], is beyond good and evil!
How pitiful we are, clinging to purity and impurity!
We confess this transgression within the expanse,
Which is free from the duality of good and evil![4]
Rumi, one of Islam’s greatest mystical poets, also describes enlightenment as the extinction of all duality, including the duality between “right” and “wrong:” “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”[5] (The “meeting” between the poet and the reader is the death of another duality: that between “self” and “other.” When “self” and “other” vanish into the divine, which encompasses all things, there’s no one to commit wrong and no one to be wronged.)
Or, to cite just one more example, the central sacred text of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, says in the voice of someone in a state of enlightenment:
Is there a difference between yes and no?
Is there a difference between good and evil?
Must I fear what others fear? What nonsense![6]
To prevent a possible misconception that could arise at this point, let me note once again that all of these definitions of “evil” are valid at their own levels. “Good” and “evil” at the moral level are only transcended through spiritual enlightenment, so as long as we’re in our everyday, unenlightened state – which almost all of us are almost all the time – it’s imperative to believe in moral good and evil and to act accordingly. Morality is an indispensable bridge between the petty egoism that’s our default state in life and the spiritual realization for which we all yearn in the bottom of our hearts. It’s part of the means of healing our apparent separation from the divine. Just because it’s possible to transcend moral “good” and “evil” in rare moments doesn’t mean that you and I can disregard that distinction here and now without bringing great harm to ourselves and others. As Muslim philosopher of religion Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes,
[O]n the plane of relativity in which we live, [moral] evil is real; it is as real as we are in our relative level of existence. It would in fact be a catastrophe for the soul on the road to the Garden of Truth to deny the evil forces within as well as without until it has transcended completely the realm of duality and opposition, until it has reached that absolute Goodness from whence one can deny the reality of evil because one has now gone beyond the domain of relativity, where evil exists.[7]
To put this another way, here’s the Muslim mystical poet Attar on the same theme:
So long as you exist,
there will be good and evil,
but when you lose yourself,
they will vanish too.[8]
The Solution to the Problem of Evil
This brings us to the crux of the argument about the problem of evil. We can now see how the problem of evil, as it’s conventionally framed, is the wrong way of framing the question. It takes the existence of evil (at all levels) for granted as an absolute reality, and then asks how the divine could exist in light of that. This is exactly backwards. It reverses what’s absolute and what’s relative. If, as religions claim, only the divine truly exists, then the existence of evil is, in the end, only apparent, not real. Evil seems to exist only inasmuch as we seem to exist as things that are separate from the divine. Only from such a deluded vantage point – however “normal” that vantage point may be – are we capable of posing a question like the conventional “problem of evil” in the first place.
The “problem of evil” thus breaks down into two separate issues. Firstly, if evil is ultimately nothing more and nothing less than separation from the divine, the solution to that “problem of evil” isn’t an intellectual one but a practical one: to attain a state of oneness with the divine through the practice of mysticism (and, of course, divine grace).
The second issue is an intellectual one: why does our everyday state of apparent separation from the divine exist in the first place? Why aren’t all of us effortlessly enlightened all the time?
The only honest answer to that question is that it’s a mystery – not a problem that can be solved, but a mystery at which we can only marvel. Rather than the “problem of evil,” this issue could be more appropriately called the “mystery of everyday appearances” or something to that effect.
Some people of a materialistic or atheistic bent may think that this is a cop-out and declare that this proves that the world is nothing but senseless chaos. But to call the world “chaos” or “randomness” is to dogmatically insist that we can know for sure that this painful world doesn’t exist for any particular reason. In contrast, calling the world’s (relative) existence a “mystery” is much humbler and more open-minded: we don’t know why it seems to exist, and we’re not going to try to force an answer.
To dismiss the religious and spiritual systems that provide the only solution to the practical problem of evil on the grounds that they fail to provide an intellectually tidy answer to another question is to throw the baby out instead of the bathwater. Rene Descartes, one of the founders of modern science, famously declared that the only notions about the world that are worth taking seriously are those that provide “clear and distinct” answers.[9] But as anyone who’s been alive for more than five minutes knows, the world itself is anything but “clear and distinct.” To demand that the world be crammed into our “clear and distinct” boxes, with no room left for mystery, is to replace the world we’ve actually got with a fake one of our own design. If everything in religion were rationally comprehensible, that would be certain proof that religion doesn’t come from anything that transcends the human mind.
Why anything other than the divine seems to exist at all is beyond the meager limits of our understanding, and all we can do is live in awe of that while pursuing oneness with the absolute Good from which this ultimately illusory world somehow comes.
In another text from the Buddhist Pali canon, the Buddha’s intelligent but confused disciple Malunkyaputta asks his master various questions about the world that have nothing to do with the pursuit of enlightenment and liberation from evil. The Buddha responds with a parable that’s right on the nose:
Suppose, Malunkyaputta, a man were wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends and companions, his kinsmen and relatives, brought a surgeon to treat him. The man would say: “I will not let the surgeon pull out this arrow until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble or a brahmin or a merchant or a worker.” And he would say: “I will not let the surgeon pull out this arrow until I know the name and clan of the man who wounded me;… until I know whether the man who wounded me was tall or short or of middle height;… until I know whether the man who wounded me was dark or brown or golden-skinned;… until I know whether the man who wounded me lives in such a village or town or city;… until I know whether the bow that wounded me was a long bow or a crossbow;… until I know whether the bowstring that wounded me was fibre or reed or sinew or hemp or bark;… until I know whether the shaft that wounded me was wild or cultivated;… until I know with what kind of feathers the shaft that wounded me was fitted – whether those of a vulture or a crow or a hawk or a peacock or a stork;… until I know with what kind of sinew the shaft that wounded me was bound – whether that of an ox or a buffalo or a lion or a monkey;… until I know what kind of arrow it was that wounded me – whether it was hoof-tipped or curved or barbed or calf-toothed or oleander.”
All this would still not be known to that man and meanwhile he would die.[10]
Suffering as Divine Justice and Mercy
Although we’ve already reached the main conclusion of the argument here, a few further reflections on the nature of suffering seen in light of the preceding sections will help to round out the picture of the problem of evil and its solution by adding more depth and nuance.
The problem of evil is sometimes framed as, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Simple: there are no good people.
Recall Mark 10:18 from the Bible, which we quoted earlier and which provides the perfect summary of the highest and most spiritual definitions of “good” and “evil:” “No one is good but God alone.” Since everything in the world manifests the divine somehow or another, it’s good in that regard. But inasmuch as it’s something separate from the divine, however ultimately superficial that separation may be, it’s evil. People are good inasmuch as they’re the divine, and evil inasmuch as they’re people instead of the divine. As the Muslim mystic and poet Rabi’a once said, “thine existence is a sin wherewith no other sin can be compared.”[11] In the end, the problem of evil isn’t a problem with the divine, but with us.
As things that are separate from the divine, we deserve every last drop of suffering that befalls us. Everything that our egos take to be “evil,” everything that causes us to suffer, is a manifestation of divine justice (through the intermediary of karmic justice, in the terms of Hinduism, Buddhism, and certain other Indian religions), and everything that our egos find to be pleasant and agreeable is a manifestation of divine mercy. As Saint Augustine, one of the most influential theologians in Christianity, puts it,
We know that grace is not given to all men; and that it is not given… because they deserve it by their good will, let alone because their deeds deserve it… it is out of God’s gratuitous mercy that it is given to those to whom it is given… it is by God’s just judgment that it is not given to those whom it is not given to.[12]
Or in the words of Hafez, another Muslim mystic and poet:
My heart, don’t whine so often that your friend’s
Unjust to you;
This is the fate he’s given you, and this
Is justice too.[13]
When we find ourselves hating the world and/or hating ourselves, we’re seeing things from the perspective of divine justice, however little we may recognize that while we feel that way. We can’t not manifest the divine somehow or another, and in this case, we’re inadvertently manifesting divine wrath, so our hatred is entirely valid for what it is.
But just as separation from the divine can only be superficial, and gives way to unity with the divine at a deeper level, so, too, must our just hatred give way sooner or later to love and mercy for ourselves and for others. Such love and mercy are expressions of the underlying unity of all things in the divine. As a cherished Islamic hadith or “saying” attributed to the Prophet Muhammad succinctly puts it, “God’s mercy precedes his wrath.”[14]
For this reason, even the suffering that justly befalls us is, at a deeper level, an expression of divine mercy in its own right. It’s an opportunity to heal the separation between us and the divine that causes us to suffer in the first place. It all depends on how we approach suffering.
The ego suffers because it’s a tiny, weak, and tightly limited thing lost in the infinity of the divine. It yearns for the divine’s self-sufficiency and omnipotence, but it doesn’t realize that it can only achieve that by dying to itself and achieving union with the divine. Instead, it tries to obtain this self-sufficiency and omnipotence while still remaining a specific ego that craves specific worldly things. This is, of course, impossible, so the ego suffers and cries “Injustice!” in the face of something infinitely greater that “threatens” to dissolve it.
Suffering thereby presents us with an occasion to expand our sense of self beyond the ego. We can use the frustration of our desires as a catalyst for detaching ourselves from them and from the ego that gives rise to them, letting it open up into the vast field of divinity that surrounds it on all sides, which wants nothing because it’s already perfectly whole. Thus Attar, a Muslim mystic and poet whom we quoted earlier, advises:
Leave asceticism, forget piety!
It’s pain you must seek,
longing and experience.
For your longing, seek no remedy;
if you do, may your soul fade away.
You must keep thirsty, stay vigilant,
don’t think of your next drink or meal.
If you have not suffered longing,
you’ve not been touched even by the dust
of the lovers’ Path.[15]
To reach union with the divine, we have to see the divine, the perfect Good, in all things, refusing to accept the ego’s debased, futile standards of what “good” and “evil” are. This requires an attitude of exceptional equanimity and humility. As the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart writes,
If it comes so, take it and be content – if it does not come, be likewise content and take whatever God wants to give you at the time, and remain always in humble self-naughting and rejection, considering always that you are unworthy of any good that God could do you, if He would….
A man who is established thus in God’s will wants nothing but what is God’s will and what is God. If he were sick he would not want to be well. To him all pain is pleasure, all multiplicity is bare simplicity, if he is truly established in the will of God. Even though it meant the pains of hell it would be joy and happiness to him.[16]
Only when we approach life’s suffering in this way can we love and pursue the divine for its own sake rather than for what it can do for our egos. Many people often approach the divine as a means to an egoistic end – some variation of, “God, you’re really powerful, so please give me what I want.” But as the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, reminds us, “You may dislike something although it is good for you, or like something although it is bad for you: God knows and you do not.”[17] Thus Rabi’a prays:
O God!
If I adore You out of fear of Hell, burn me in Hell!
If I adore You out of desire for Paradise,
Lock me out of Paradise.
But if I adore You for Yourself alone,
Do not deny to me Your eternal beauty.[18]
Conclusion
To reject religion and spirituality over the problem of evil is not only intellectually misguided, but counterproductive in terms of practicality. As it’s conventionally framed, the problem of evil is an expression of identification with one’s ego, which is the very source of all suffering and evil. Not only can religion and spirituality emerge unscathed from an investigation of the problem of evil – they offer the only efficacious solution to that problem.
The fact that spirituality can make such a stark difference between a thoroughly meaningful life and a life consumed by senseless suffering powerfully suggests that the religions from which spirituality comes (whether it’s practiced within the formal structures of a religion or outside of them) have a uniquely firm grasp of our nature and the nature of reality as a whole. In other words, spirituality’s unique ability to solve the problem of evil is further evidence that religion and spirituality are rooted in truth.
References:
[1] Bhikkhu Bodhi (transl.). 2000. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya. Wisdom Publications. p. 1844.
[2] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 1451.
[3] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Katha Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 78.
[4] Padmasambhava. 2006. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Transl. Gyurme Dorje. Viking Penguin. p. 143.
[5] Barks, Coleman (transl.). 1997. The Essential Rumi. Castle Books. p. 36.
[6] Lao Tzu. 1989. Tao Te Ching. Transl. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English. Vintage Books. p. 22.
[7] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. HarperOne. p. 83.
[8] Attar. 2018. The Conference of the Birds. Transl. Sholeh Wolpé. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 292.
[9] Gregory, Brad S. 2012. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Harvard University Press. p. 49.
[10] Bhikkhu Nanamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi (transl.). 1995. The Middle-Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Buddhist Publication Society. p. 534-535.
[11] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. HarperOne. p. 54.
[12] Delumeau, Jean. 1977. Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation. Westminster Press. p. 100.
[13] Davis, Dick (transl.) 2013. Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. Penguin Books. p. 19.
[14] Chittick, William C. 1989. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination. State University of New York Press, Albany. p. xv.
[15] Attar. 2018. The Conference of the Birds. Transl. Sholeh Wolpé. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 348.
[16] Walshe, Maurice O’C. (transl.) 2009. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. The Crossroad Publishing Company. p. 106, 297.
[17] Haleem, Abdel (transl.) 2005. The Qur’an. Oxford University Press. p. 24.
[18] Upton, Charles (transl.). 1988. Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi’a. Pir Press. p. 47.