The Concept of Evil

Posted by Kelly Marshall on November 15th, 2019

Evil as well as good is a fundamental concept of ethics. According to many religious doctrines, these two concepts were at the source of the creation of the world. However, evil is like a turning side of good. In religion, good is the prerogative of God, and his power in the creation of good is undeniable. On the contrary, in this outline paper template evil is in the hands of the Devil, who is weaker than God. All religions of the world teach people that God with a volitional act will finish with evil. All the phenomena of the world undergo the struggle of good and evil. The problem of explaining the presence of evil in the world created by omnipotent God the Father is one of the central problems in Christian culture.

I am going to discuss Leibniz’s ideas about the problem of evil. Leibniz argues that people live in the best of all worlds. The philosopher justifies the existing evil by the fact that it is the least evil force that God could not prevent in this almost ideal world. The ordinary view of the existence of evil in the world does not fit with the introduction of the world as the best of all possible worlds. In fact, this problem for Leibniz is one of the main issues. He devotes it a treatise Theodicy. The main conclusion of his work is that evil does not exist as such. Moreover, evil does not have its substance. However, there is a metaphysical reason for the existence of imperfection in the world. As only God is perfect, everything else, therefore, encompasses imperfection due to the fact that it is a creation. If the world was perfect, it would be as if God made Himself, repeated Himself. However, the existence of two gods is impossible. Thus, in the terminology of Leibniz evil is metaphysical, which means it is in the limitation of the world. While God is infinite, the world is limited in the metaphysical sense. Therefore, there must be metaphysical evil in the world. All other types of evil (physical and mental) are not required but only possible. Consequently, only a person makes them necessary.

Leibniz writes that the grain thrown into the ground suffers before it produces the fruit. It can be argued that painful disasters are ultimately beneficent because they are the shortest path to perfection. He argues that in this most perfect world, evil is an inevitable companion and condition of good. The main idea of Leibniz is that good far exceeds evil in this world. The world is not only an amazing machine, but because it is composed of spirits, the best state where every possible bliss and joy are provided.

Both religion and philosophy were occupied with the problem of evil since ancient times. In the broadest sense, evil is everything contrary to good and negatively perceived by a person. From the standpoint of a human, evil should not exist since it brings dissonance into the harmony of a human being. However, there is no area in life, which does not feel the presence of evil in one form or another. Evil covers negative human conditions (aging, illness, death, poverty or humiliation) and forces that cause these conditions (natural disasters, social conditions or human activities).

Philosophy distinguishes three kinds of evil, namely moral, metaphysical and physical. Moral evil is the retreat of the human will from the norms of the moral law and actions arising out of this retreat. From a Christian perspective, this is the only true evil. Talking about metaphysical evil, it is imperfection that inevitably follows from the nature of existence. Physical objects necessarily limit each other, and blind forces of nature collide and struggle. Therefore, storms, earthquakes, catastrophes, adverse climatic conditions and other disasters in nature occur. As a result, people, animals and plants perish from these catastrophes. A number of people see the imperfection of nature in the fact that some animals exist due to the destruction of others, and strong suppress weak. Concerning physical evil, it is everything that afflicts a person and violates their well-being, for example, sickness, misery, a fear of death or suffering. It should also include social evils in human society, namely unequal and unfair distribution of wealth and labor, poverty, as well as excitement, emotional distress, physical and mental imperfections or doubts that overshadow a person’s existence.

The concept of moral evil determines what morality counteracts and what it seeks to eliminate and correct. It refers to anything that is the result of conscious efforts of the subject and an arbitrary choice. The subjective characteristic of moral evil is sanity as the ability to control actions and take responsibility for them. The objective characteristic is divided into formal and substantial. From the formal point of view, evil qualifies as an activity inconsistent with the culturally accepted norms of morality (eventually - ideal). From the substantial point of view, evil is an activity that has a negative value for the states of others or acting subject. It causes material or spiritual damage, sufferings and similar negative feelings, and in the end, it leads to degradation.

The concept of moral evil is released gradually from the complex of negative evaluations, in which it is fused with the physical and social evil. The initial form of the negative evaluation is the experience of pain, suffering, and their derived emotions (fear, anger, resentment), in which the destructive aspects of reality are presented to a person. Imagination objectifies these experiences linking them with the images of fire and dirt or personalizing in monstrous demonic beings.

Evil is negative by its nature. It does not lead to the increase but to the loss and deprivation as well as the destruction of the existing order. Early thinkers searched for the source of evil in nature. However, modern scholars think that catastrophes and disasters in the physical world will eventually lead to the improvement of nature. For example, the explosion of a star, disaster in terms of its existence, leads to the formation of heavy elements (zinc, gold or iron) that are needed for the emergence of more sophisticated and complex forms of life, namely animals and plants. Likewise, after a catastrophic destruction of some species of animals and plants, there are other more sophisticated and hardy species instead of them. The struggle for existence among animals is necessary for the maintenance of a healthy offspring. In such a way, metaphysical evil is not actually evil when it is considered in the context of the results to which it leads.

The problem of evil, namely moral evil and unjust suffering, is the most powerful argument for atheists who deny the existence of God. God is all-knowing, omnipotent and morally perfect. However, many people ask “How God, Almighty and who is Love, allows evil?” If people do not understand this question, it often leads to the denial of the existence of God and, consequently, to atheism. The doubters think that “If God knows and anticipates everything and still permits evil, He is neither Almighty nor omnipotent.” They conclude that if God is not good or omnipotent, it means that He is not God, or, strictly speaking, there is no God. These doubts and atheism are inherent in many people.

A long time ago, the Fathers of the Church and many Christian writers, up to this time, gave a comprehensive answer to these doubts. Nevertheless the answer is simple, it is not enough to understand and remember it. A person should be able to survive it because the higher truths are opened not only to the mind but also to the heart of a person. The Church teaches that God is Almighty and omnipotent. However, His omnipotence is an omnipotence of love, as God is Love. Therefore, God did not create evil. It can be said, He could not even create it. In accordance with the teaching of the Church, evil appeared only because God created His highest creations angels and man in His own image and likeness. He created them completely free beings. However, freedom involves the risk of a wrong choice and the risk of avoidance of a right way. Unfortunately, this wrong choice was made by some angels and ancestors of the human race. As a result, it gave rise to evil, which does not have a positive foundation and justification. However, it exists and God wants to turn it for the good and, for this purpose, He temporarily bears it (for the purpose of teaching).

The problem of evil has always been the main difficulty of the monotheistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. From the very beginning of Christianity, the problem of evil was the strongest argument for atheism. Logically, the unjustified existence of evils might not be necessary as a disproof of the existence of God but it could certainly count as a sufficient disproof. In Summa Theologica, which is regarded as the foundation of Catholic theology since the middle ages, St. Aquinas mentions the problem of evil as the first of the two main reasonable reasons preventing the faith in God. A conventional theological term for the problem of evil is theodicy from the Greek word theos meaning “God” and dike that means “justice”. All theodicy try to justify God in terms of people. These theories try to prove that despite all the evil in this world, God is all-good nonetheless. The term theodicy was proposed by the German philosopher Leibniz. The traditional Christian theodicy is called Augustinian in honor of St. Augustine. He was the first, who developed a detailed explanation for the presence of evil in the world. In his view, the universe was not evil until the first human beings have committed evil deeds. Since then, all people inherit this tendency to do evil things, and, therefore, the responsibility for all the evil in the universe rests on the people and not God. More broadly, the responsibility for evil rests on other spiritual beings (angels), who rejected God. Talking about natural evil, it is considered as the result of the action of evil spirits (demons). There are two difficulties in the traditional theory. Firstly, science shows that there are no such creatures as evil spirits. Secondly, the universe was not free from evil before the evolution led to man. The animals suffered and died in the same way as now. Such explanation does not absolve God from the responsibility for evil because He supports the existence of evil and could eliminate it. To avoid the second difficulty, all authors of theodicy argue that for one reason or another (these causes vary by theodicy), it is logically impossible for God to remove evil that happens in the world. In fact, this circumstance can only liberate God from the responsibility for evil because even omnipotence cannot do what is logically impossible. God could not have created a better world than the one in which people live now. Thus, this world, to which God has decided to give the incarnation, is the best of all possible worlds.

The concept of evil was the cause of much confusion among Christians and the spiritually interested people around the world. Like Augustine and Aquinas before him, Leibniz understands the central issue in the problem of evil to be the matter of man’s free will. The main idea behind it is that the origin of evil was in the choice made by the free will of a group of very powerful beings who chose to rebel against God. Leibniz believed that evil exists because a person, who is not cognizant of evil, cannot recognize goodness.

Evil is the fundamental concept of ethics. It is the opposite of good. In this paper, I have provided some reasons confirming the correctness of Leibniz’s judgments. According to the philosopher, our world is the best of all possible worlds and only one type of evil is possible (metaphysical evil). Only a person can make both physical and mental evils necessary. Evil arises during the development and availability of freedom of choice as a result of an erroneous cognition.