Some More Underbrush

There are other ways of dealing with the problem of evil on the market today. Most of these are even less satisfactory than those of Job's "friends." We must be careful not to be sold a false bill of goods on such items as the following.

There are those who claim that all suffering comes from God. This is simply a crueler version of the notion that all suffering is punishment for sin. If we say that all suffering comes from God, we thereby succeed in making him responsible for evil in a way that transforms him into a frightful kind of demon, bent simply on destroying rather than creating. We also provide ourselves with a nice way of escaping responsibility:

JUDGE (at conclusion of murder trial) : For deliberately and willfully strangling this person to death, in an act of premeditated crime, you are hereby sentenced to die in the electric chair. Have you anything further to say in your defense? PRISONER: Sure. God made that person suffer, not me. It's his world, not mine. I can.'t be held responsible for what he made me do. Who are you to question God? I didn't do anything wrong. I ought to go free.

(Exit prisoner, struggling with guards, unaware of the fact that to be consistent he would have to grant that God had ordained his suffering as well.)

If you were the judge, you would hardly let the argument that "all suffering comes from God" pass unchallenged.

Occasionally, people will suggest that evil is an illusion -- that it doesn't really exist at all. Obviously only a superficial sophisticate can make such a statement seriously. A trip to a casualty ward, or a battlefield, or a mental hospital, should be enough to dispel the illusion that evil is an illusion. Or, in a lighter vein, the well-known limerick may serve:

There was a faith healer from Deal Who said, "Although pain isn't real, When I sit on a pin And it punctures my skin, I dislike what I fancy I feel."

Another sophisticated argument is that evil is necessary to the "good of the whole." A jarring discord in a symphony may be very irritating if heard in isolation, but when heard at the proper point in the symphony it contributes a contrast to the beautiful passage about to be heard, making the latter more beautiful than ever. If this view is true, there is no real incentive to get rid of evil. To remove the discord would spoil the symphony; to remove the evil would spoil the greater balance of the whole. This is a view that takes no account of people as people. Could you honestly suggest that someone dying of tuberculosis was simply contributing to the "good of the whole"?

Finally, some people will justify evil on the ground that everything will come out all right in the end. Those who suffer will get their reward in heaven. Here again, religion becomes simply a reward offered to "nice" people, and here again, the argument makes it possible to be supremely unconcerned with evil here on earth. ("Let 'em suffer a few years; they've got all eternity to be happy in.")