Many people abandon their faith, or refuse to believe in God, because evil is so prevalent in our world. Their reasoning often follows this line of thought: “If there were a God in charge of this world, surely we wouldn’t see so much suffering,” or “A truly good God wouldn’t have created evil in the first place.” Despite considerations like these, we don’t often stop to think: why do we think certain things are evil at all?
Let’s compare this to a more digestible analogy: how can we tell when a line is crooked?
The only reason we can know if a line is crooked is because we have a straight line to compare it to—and it’s not any different with evil. We can only know if something is evil if we have a standard of goodness to compare it to. This is because evil is not a “thing”, rather, it is whatever opposes goodness.
Now some skeptics might say we think things are bad because we have evolved to think that way. Living in herds or groups led to the highest survival rate, so selfless tendencies were naturally selected over millions of years, and things like the suffering of group members became “bad.” This objection, however, does not sufficiently explain the human experience of recognizing things as “bad.” The evolutionary development of an instinct to avoid doing what is bad for the group is just that—an instinct. An instinct merely causes an action, and the stronger instinct always wins. Humans certainly experience instincts, but they also possess a deeper sense—one that can judge something as bad even when their instincts suggest otherwise.
For example, if someone at school came up and slapped you while you were sitting at the lunch table with your friends, you might have two instinctual pulls. On the one hand, you could protect your reputation by responding calmly and maturely—but a stronger instinct might urge you to defend it by hitting them back. However, you may feel something else inside you that tells you hitting them back would be wrong. It might plead with you to take control of your animal-like instincts, rather than giving in. In that moment, more than instincts are at play in deciding what is bad. As C.S. Lewis puts it:
Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.[1]
If our instincts alone don’t decide what is good and bad, it must come from a deeper, objective understanding. But objective evil cannot exist without objective goodness, and such goodness, by definition, must transcend human opinion. To be rooted in something beyond humanity would require something like an eternally good God. I expand on requirements for an objective standard of goodness in the blog “Can ‘Good’ Exist Without God?” Without objective evil, condemnation of evil becomes meaningless. Christianity, however, provides an explanation for the existence of true good and evil. Because God is the standard of goodness, we can know evil is a real thing, and it is anything that opposes God’s goodness. Humans can be held to an objective standard, evil can be justly judged, and everyone has the choice to spend eternity with the good God who will ultimately overcome all evil
[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 10.
Written by Abbey Harley