Mystery V: Lawlessness and The Mystery of Evil

Don: Nothing challenges faith more than the problem of evil. The argument goes: “If god exists and is all-good and all-powerful, then why did he allow evil into the world to begin with? And since it is here, why does he not eradicate it? Since we do see evil, either god must be not all-good and/or not all-powerful or there is no god.” So the existence of evil deters belief in god. It enables the atheist or agnostic to dismiss the notion of god, whereas it leaves believers to wrestle with the mystery. And many have wrestled with it, through the ages. The 13th Century Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas was one.

He divided evil into two types: Natural and moral. Natural evil includes things such as hurricanes that often cause death and destruction. Moral evil is perpetrated by humans. It comes about through making bad choices—through the volitional selection of evil, chosen and implemented by the force and effort of the free will of Wo/Man. Aquinas absolved god of any responsibility for moral evil. God cannot be responsible for the choices of a free willed being. To Aquinas, evil was not an entity in and of itself; rather, it was the absence of goodness. So the only way to eliminate evil was to fill the space with goodness. It was a zero-sum game: The more goodness, the less evil. He might have drawn this conclusion from reading Romans 12:21:

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Ancient Israel and indeed all humankind since the beginning of time inhabited a world of cause and effect, where if people are good, then god will reward them; but if people are bad, then god will punish them. Many people still believe that today. The story of Job shows that this is wrong, and Jesus declared it also in absolving a blind man and his parents of responsibility for god’s presumed “punishment” of his blindness. John 9:1-3:

As [Jesus] passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

In other words, the blindness was unrelated to sin. He said in Roman 8:28:

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

And in Ecclesiastes 3:11:

He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.

In god’s original plan in the Garden of Evil, Wo/Man was not supposed to know good from evil; that was a divine prerogative, not an human one. The parable of the Wheat and the Tares confirms this, when the laborers were told not to weed the field because they would be unable to tell the true wheat from the tares (weeds). Only the divine labor of angels had the power to discern.

The concept that there is more grace when there is evil, more righteousness where there is sinfulness, is stated Romans 5:20:

The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,…

The proportion is not linear, but logarithmic: A little bit of sin evokes a lot of god’s grace.

Last week the parents of a young aid worker brutally beheaded by ISIS publicly forgave their son’s unknown murderers and expressed their belief that something good would emerge from all the evil of ISIS. It struck me that without evil, neither the power of goodness nor of forgiveness could be seen; that evil is necessary for the appreciation of good. Without evil, grace would be meaningless. It would have no anchor. Perhaps some of the mystery of evil and suffering is the ability to see some goodness within them.

Is it possible that the concept that all things will work out for good in god’s time is an answer to the mystery of evil? As Chuck has often remarked, we in our finite mortality cannot expect to see things from the perspective of a divine immortal.

Pat: I have two questions: First, it seems fair to assume that god did not intend to create people with knowledge of good and evil, so why then would there be an unguarded doorway in the Garden of Eden that led to that knowledge? Second: When god gave us free will, did he not thereby limit his omnipotence?

Charles: The experiential result of all evil is suffering and the ultimate cause of human suffering is desire—wanting things to be different than they are. This was true in the Garden. Desire led to the fall… to death… and ultimately to all forms suffering. If we can accept the way things are as god’s will made manifest according to his plan, at his scale and on his timeline and then to let go of our desire for things to be different than they are… to unconditionally surrender to god’s will and accept god’s plan.  Such complete acceptance is the end of all desire, the end of all suffering.  Suffering and Evil exist to the extent man’s will and desire conflict with God’s will.   How could it be otherwise?

With perfect faith, we could not desire anything to be different from what is, no matter what conditions obtain or transpire. The Fall from the Garden was a desire to understand or control god’s will and succumbing to desire created the necessary conditions for reconciliation—a context for the story of salvation which is played out through the rest of Genesis, Moses and the Prophets, Jesus and ultimately through to the End of The Age.

So to me, the mystery of evil centers upon the spiritual cause and condition for suffering, which I frame as our human desire for things to be different from the way they are, for conditional reality to exist according to our will as opposed to God’s will… our way and not god’s way.

David: I have to challenge the premise that god gave us free will. I believe that, like evil, free will just is. So, to me, the question cannot be “Why did god give us free will?” It seems to me that the Daoist and Jesus are in perfect agreement about the blind man. The blindness is what it is, it is just a part of The Way, or as Jesus called it, the simple manifestation of the work of god. The same is true of free will. Evil and free will are certainly linked.

That the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil clearly existed in the Garden even before Adam appeared is a scriptural statement that evil already existed. Good (god), evil, and free will are fundamental properties of the universe.

Pat: So do animals, plants, and computers, have free will?

David: I think that higher animals do, but I doubt that plants do. Free will is a function of consciousness. As consciousness emerges—through evolution in animals, or through design in computers—then free will must inevitably be present in the newly conscious creature. It’s all explained in my book. 🙂

Don: Is free will antithetical to god’s will?

David: Yes, I think so. The message we get over and over from Jesus is that we ought to subjugate our will to god’s.

Pat: To align one’s will with god’s is a holy act, so our free will in that case cannot be antithetical to god’s. But it is an investment of self.

David: Last week we talked about showing god by showing goodness, so exercising your free will by choosing to help the homeless person reflects that your will is aligned with god’s will. The conundrum is whose will was really exercised here? Yours, or god’s? As a believer in the presence of god inside all of us (known variously as the Inner Light, Inner Voice, Holy Spirit, the “eternity set in our heart”) I must conclude that when I choose to do the good thing, my will is essentially acting at the behest of god. It is god’s will acting through my will followed by my action.

Pat: But we have to be groomed for it, because we are in fact largely driven by our own desires, not by god’s will, and desire makes it hard to make the investment of self.

David: That’s true. I think we know the truth, because it is radiated by the Inner Light inside us; but we hide that light under a bushel for selfish purposes, to satisfy our own desires rather than god’s will. I rant against the harm done by religions that groom people to do the religions’ definition of god’s will, rather than encouraging the individual to lift the bushel from the Inner Light and so let the Holy Spirit speak for itself.

Kiran: I wonder about the definition of evil as the absence of goodness. Jesus clearly recognized evil spirits in people and sought to exorcize them. God himself used evil spirits, like the one he sent to Saul. The only way to overcome an evil spirit is to let god’s spirit defeat it, push it out. Some people blame their behavior on an evil spirit rather than their own decisions.

Charles: On the one hand we have the concept of “Worldliness”… the things of this world defined by an impermanent physical and mental reality as experienced through the senses and the “thinking mind”. On the other hand we have the concept of spirit(ual) reality as defined by such things as awareness of those thoughts and sense impressions—in the Eastern religions this is described as mindfulness… a knowing… enlightenment and so on. This spiritual presence stands in sharp contrast to a physical and mental reality that is defined by impermanence and ultimately subject to decay and death. Spiritual reality is eternal, everlasting, “God-like” and ultimately “unknowable” to the corporeal senses and thinking mind; rather, it is something to be experienced… something to be revealed through a process of spiritual perfection… the Word… the Way… the Truth.

I am continually drawn to the notion in scripture that “the Kingdom of God is at hand” which can be interpreted as “the Kingdom of God is here… Now”.  Perhaps, like the Jews of ancient times we have simply been searching for it in all the wrong places, at all the wrong times and with all the wrong tools. Perhaps “the Kingdom of God” refers precisely to this spiritual perfection… to unity with God… to unity with that inner spark… that presence… that spiritual knowing, consciousness and awareness. Perhaps the Kingdom of God refers to the I Am which always was, is, and will be “at hand.” In this way, each of us and everything are a manifestation of God and his will, each with a precise role to play according to His plan but this manifestation of God is corrupted through dis(comm)unity with God, through human desire.  Choosing our way over God’s way leads ultimately to suffering and physical death.   Choosing God’s way leads to peace and eternal “life”.

The spiritual question is how do we open ourselves to that which was and is always there? That which is “at hand”? The extent to which we can make that choice is the extent to which we can let go of our desires, let go of our will. The extent to which we let go of our will is the extent to which the I Am can become manifest and the path to ultimate peace, joy, and all the other fruits of the spirit that can only be realized by surrender to (and fulfillment of) God’s will.   The Rich Young Ruler’s problem was not just a matter of giving up wealth and positions—he was ultimately unwilling to give up his attachment to the World… Materiality… Corporeality… unwilling to trust completely in God… to surrender… to choose God’s will.  And the result was suffering and death…. in that way the Rich Young Ruler was much like each of us.

David: The problem with desire is that it is driven by individual ego. Therefore, by extension, the choices we make with our free will also tend to be ego-driven. As Kiran said last week: Jesus was practically a communist. The choices we make should be focused on helping our neighbor, on community work; not on self-aggrandizement and personal enrichment. Ego would have us choose the latter, but the Inner Light—god’s will—urges the former. There’s not much in scripture stated more clearly than that, when Jesus said that judgment depends solely on what we do for others.

Pat: In so many cases, people do not differentiate between our will and god’s will, or do not have a measuring stick to help them. For example, ISIS fighters sincerely think they are doing god’s will in despising and killing people who disagree with the ISIS interpretation of god’s will. They believe they are cleansing the planet of evil. My concern is that messages from the Inner Light to the individual can evidently be so easily perverted (as with ISIS) without a proper community and without the proper kind of tenets on which to make choices.

David: You are quite right! And it’s your religion and your community—not mine!—that is not proper and that perverts the truth! 😉 This is the problem of evil. It flourishes when we adopt external interpretations of god’s will and neglect the voice inside. I don’t mean that religion and scripture are necessarily all bad. They may have a constructive role to play, but in my view their role should not be to interpret the Word of god. It should be to help people recognize it in themselves and start dismantling the bushel that smothers it. To me, the beauty of Jesus and The Dao is that they do just that, each in their own way but to the same effect: They cause something to stir inside. Something resonates when you read the remarkable sayings of Jesus about turning the other cheek, and the sheer blessedness of being persecuted and poor in spirit. It is not an intellectual, not an emotional, but a spiritual resonance. But the length and complexity of religious scriptures—the bible, the koran—are enough to reveal them as human inventions designed more to persuade (i.e., pervert) than to resonate. They lead to crusades, Inquisitions, and jihad—even within their own religions!

Charles: Those acts of evil are supreme examples of man’s will, not of god’s will. They are always and instantaneously repugnant to our inner core, except among the few whose inner cores have been subverted by some cultish directive or other. To most of us these acts are immediately antithetical to our inner I am-ness, our inner consciousness. The Ecclesiastes passage about everything being appropriate in its time and all things working for the good make these horrific human perversions of god’s will work to push humanity away from them and toward a relationship with god and the spirit.

Chris: Why was the Tree of Knowledge planted in the Garden of Eden? Genesis suggests that people can be good only if god enforces his wants and wishes on people. It’s a protective barrier. God removed that protective barrier from Job, thereby allowing Satan to torment him with evil. So Job no longer was protected by god’s will and had to show what he could do when it seemed he had to rely on his own will, as his family and friends were urging him to do. But he didn’t listen to them. He continued to ignore his own will. He rebuked his friends and continued to put his faith in god’s will regardless of the bad turn in his life and affairs.

God’s will is externally focused, toward others; our will is focused internally, toward our selfish selves.

Don: Can one can see evil through a lens of goodness? In our own lives, can we see that all things work out for the good in the end? Or is this self-delusion?

David: One may not see good in an event at the time of the event, but one may later realize that good ultimately resulted from it anyway. Taking the longer view, even within our human, worldly timeline, in the grand scheme of things—in the history of the world—evil events such as the Holocaust and the Inquisition did not prevail. Goodness ultimately won. Even today, the evil of ISIS and Boko Haram and so on pales in comparison—I believe—with the good and peaceable nature of most people and communities in Syria and Iraq and Nigeria. Don has often mentioned that we often ask in dismay and despair: “Why is there so much evil in the world?” when we ought to be asking in wonder and delight: “Why is there so much good in the world?” We might even apply these questions to our own individual lives—and be pleasantly surprised by the answers. This does not mitigate or excuse evil; it simply reduces it to what it is: A small part of The Dao, or of god’s plan if you wish. Hence Jesus’ example of the blind man: Blindness is a rare condition! Most people see perfectly well throughout their lives. So at least at the societal, community, level (as opposed to the individual level) blindness is hardly evil at all. Sightedness, not blindness… goodness, not evil… god, not the devil… is the norm.

Don: We’ll continue this discussion next week.

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