Good and Evil

I'm about a third of the way through the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. JG mentioned this book to me in the context of a talk he gave at his church (see this post). While discussing "Turning to Christ During Times of Loss or Despair", JG contrasted how God and the Devil would want us to react in times of loss or despair. I thought the approach was an interesting one and asked JG how he had thought on the concept. As part of explaining his thought process, JG mentioned the Screwtape Letters so I decided to check it out. So far it's been a fascinating read and I'm sure it will lead to a number of posts on this blog.

For those of you not familiar with this book, it's a series of letters from Screwtape, a professional devil and self-described under-secretary of the department of temptation, to his newphew Wormwood, a junior temptor. Screwtape provides a series of directives and plans through which Wormwood may subvert and twist human strivings toward love, charity, and wisdom, manipulating the human soul to his own diabolical ends. In the course of providing this guidance to Wormwood, Screwtape indirectly provides a number of insights into the human psyche and the nature of God and religion. As Lewis puts it in the preface to the book, the book's purpose "was not to speculate about diabolical life but to throw light from a new angle on the life of men."

One interesting place to start is who or what the Devil is. Earlier in the the preface to the book, Lewis says:

The commonest question [I receive] is whether I really "believe in the Devil." Now, if by "the Devil" you mean a power opposite to God and, like God, self-existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No. There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. No being could attain "perfect badness" opposite to the perfect goodness of God; for when you have taken away every kind of good thing (intelligence, will, memory, energy, and existence itself) there would be none of him left.

The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. This is to say, I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devils. They do not differ in nature from good angels, but their nature is depraved. Devil is the opposite of angel only as Bad Man is the opposite of Good Man. Satan, the leader or director of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.

I like this explanation. It makes sense and it also doesn't violate monotheism. It does not answer the question, however, of why there is evil in the world if God (being entirely good) is without equal. In the religion course I took, the instructor talked about the concept of Ethical Dualism in the context of Zoroastrianism (a religion that predates Judaism). Specifically, he said:

Ethical Dualism is a creative and psychological approach to the problem of evil. Basically, it states that evil is not part of the universe itself, which is good because it is created by God who is good. Rather, humans make evil a reality as a result of their choices. In other words, evil enters time and history with the human race. Philosophically this means that evil is the price of freedom. In order to be free, we must have the ability to make choices and in order to choose between good and evil there must be opposites to choose from. But evil does not spring into reality until it is made present by human choice. Good and evil in this world become matters of function and not substance. They do not have any substance outside the realm of man's thought, word, and deed. This gives humans quite a bit of power; power which has not been used so wisely in many cases.

Zoroaster believed that “no one can be just neutral; in every area of life, day by day, everyone must decide which lord he or she will side with, the Lord of Light or the Lord of the Lie”. My faith in humans definitely varies over time. Most of the time, I believe that most people are inherently good and given a choice between good and evil, they will naturally side with good. But some of the time, I believe that people lose sight of that choice and they don’t consciously side with good. In the absence of that conscious, intentional choice for good (which is basically an implicit decision against good), it’s very easy for evil to creep in. Perhaps it’s just gossiping or cutting someone off on the road. Perhaps it’s getting so caught up in our own needs that we lose sight of the needs of others. But without resolve, without a committed decision to move the world toward good, it’s hard to make much meaningful, sustainable progress in that direction.

It is an interesting question why an all-powerful, all-knowing God would give humans free will in the first place. It would seem to run counter to the notion that God is all-powerful. How can God both create humans and be all-powerful but not have the ability to override a person’s free will to pursue evil in the world? Why is “free will so important that even God must respect it”? On some level, it just doesn’t compute. Then again, if you were the creator, what fun would it be to create players in a game and then control their every movement on the board? It would be much more interesting to establish a set of rules, establish a starting configuration of players, and then see what unfolds. The fun would be in the uncertainty of the outcome of the game. In that context, you could argue that God has created an elaborate game on Earth in which the goal is to get as many people as possible to consciously choose a relationship with God, to choose a relationship and commitment to good. But the only way that game can enfold in a non-deterministic way, for it to be fun for its creator to observe, is for people to have “opposites to choose from”.

Zoroastrianism says that the world was created for the purpose of attracting evil “in order that it may be brought into God’s world through the choices humans make when they choose righteousness instead of sin”. If you accept that, you could view the world as a huge proving ground where people earn their right to have a relationship with God by exercising their free will to side with good over evil (rather than people having a preordained, inherent right to have a relationship with God simply because they are a human being). This all seems to make sense on some rational level but it still seems odd to me that God would create man, give him/her free will, and then put him/her on the Earth just to test their resolve towards good when God could have just as easily pre-wired humans to be good in the first place and just side-step the whole free will thing to begin with.

Coming back to the Screwtape Letters for a moment, Screwtape helps shed some light on this topic in one of his letters to Wormwood. In talking about God, he says (and remember this is a devil talking):

He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself - creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct ...

You may have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve ...

He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs - to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such [difficult] periods, much more than during the [joyous] periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature he wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with, the better. He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be decieved, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

People have been trying to figure out the nature of good and evil since the beginning of time. I'm not going to figure it out in just one post - or ever. But some food for thought.