Three young girls dead; eight more wounded, two adults badly injured too, the broken lives of bereaved parents, relatives, friends, and acquaintances, the tears and rage of strangers. The Observer described the Southport killings as “an act of unspeakable evil”. If attacking young children is not evil, what is?
And now we have the further evil of far right supporters spreading misinformation about the assailant, using the massacre as a pretext to stir racial hatred and violence. The thugs are on the streets, cars and shops are burning. One evil begets another.
When someone says they believe in God, particularly within a Judaeo-Christian context, they usually mean they think a benevolent, all-powerful and all-knowing being exists. If such a being does exist it is a mystery for many of us why they would let this sort of thing happen.
The problem of evil is the problem of reconciling what we think we know about God with the worst that happens. The presence and extent of evil in a world watched over by God doesn’t add up, or not obviously anyway. Why would a good God allow this?
In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume, who was at least agnostic and probably an atheist, remarked that “Some small touches to Caligula’s brain in his infancy might have converted him into a Trajan” (a well-respected emperor rather than a sadistic tyrant).
Similarly, God could have prevented the murders in Southport by making a few tweaks to the assailant’s neurones. If God is so good, why did he let the attack go ahead? Why didn’t he extirpate a few cells in the killer’s brain?
Human beings in general could have been much better designed. We don’t seem to be the work of a benevolent creator. Many of us turn to violence and cruelty. That is the history of humanity. We’re deeply flawed.
Some people claim that evil is necessary for good people to display their saintly qualities. I don’t buy that. The murder of even one young child is far too high a price to pay for that. A character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov makes much the same point.
The easiest way out of this tension between the presumed attributes of God and the existence of so much evil is to deny the existence of God altogether. If there’s no God, there’s no problem of evil – or at least the problem becomes one of understanding the causes and patterns of evil and working out how to minimise the consequences.
The second easiest way out is to suggest that God exists but is not powerful enough to prevent us from harming one another. That is a move away from traditional theism, but it fits the facts better.
You could add a dose of Manichaeism, which involves the belief that good and evil are in a constant struggle, with good only sometimes gaining the upper hand, to make it more plausible still.
Another riposte would be to adopt the Deist belief that God is in fact completely indifferent to what happens to us, not personal at all – but that is really another way of rejecting the claim that God is benevolent and edges towards the far more plausible conclusion, namely that God doesn’t exist.
Some religious believers shrug their shoulders at all this and say “God moves in mysterious ways. It’s not for us to think we should be able to understand what’s going on”. On this view God’s plans and actions are far beyond human comprehension, and philosophical explanations are beside the point. God has a plan, but it’s opaque to us. That’s an option for the faithful, but not one that sheds any light on evil.
Historically, believers have responded to the problem of human evil with the Free Will Defence. This starts from the premise that we need free will to act morally – otherwise, we’d be automata or God’s puppets.
God has given us the gift of free will, which is the essence of being human, but that brings the possibility of cruelty and evil, otherwise it wouldn’t be genuine free will.
Some people take the wrong path and torture, maim, and murder their fellow human beings – that’s unfortunate for us, for their victims, and for them – they may well end up in Hell as a result. That’s the argument.
But is free will, assuming we have it (which some neuroscientists deny), such a wonderful gift? Personally, I’d have been happy with the illusion of free will and no more child-killers.
