The Question of Evil: A Philosophical analysis on the Problem of Evil

For many, the developments and often dazzling breakthroughs of the modern sciences since the 19th century have sustained the hope that evil will find sociological, psychological and even neurological and genetic explanations. These explanations were looked to with the aspiration that they would eventually bring about measures which, without completely eradicating evil, would nevertheless significantly reduce the pain and suffering it causes. For others, however, such hope, inherited from the ideals of Enlightenment, has revealed itself to be a mere illusion. In their view, both human reality, in its moral, political and historical dimensions, as well as natural reality, seem to show that evil, in all or part, is irreducible to this hope and the “solutions” that it conveys. In this regard, it is well known that a certain number of 20th century philosophers and writers, amongst which Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel are assuredly the most famous, have developed their thoughts on evil with reference to the horrors of Auschwitz and the concentration camps. More recently, the term or notion of evil has attracted a great deal of attention, as George W. Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, justified the U.S. intervention in Iraq by claiming the need to combat what he described as “the axis of evil”. Moreover, the important political upheavals of the recent years coupled with the numerous attacks perpetrated by Al-Qaeda, ISIL and other groups labeled as terrorists have only but maintained this focus. In this context, it is not surprising that philosophers, theologians and thinkers have undertaken to pursue and to expand their reflections on evil. For some of them, such reflections had to take the form of a re-examination of the major milestones of the philosophical view since Kant who, as is well-known, once claimed in his famous writing on religion that evil is a propensity (ein Hang) that has its origin within human reason itself. According to Susan Neiman (2002), Peter Dews (2006) and other commentators, this view combined with the responses and critics it received from philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger Bataille, Lacan, Ricoeur as well as the above mentioned philosophers, lead to defining the terms of an understanding that would really do justice to what many believe is the unfathomable, abysmal, even enigmatic or banal character of evil. The problem of evil is typically thought to be a problem for theism, the view that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, and essentially good God. In the following chapters, I sketch out what I take to be a problem of evil for atheism. I argue that many instances of evil are best understood as a radical missing of some normative state of affairs, such that we are justified in seeing evil as a kind of wrongdoing or injustice. Second, I argue that some fundamental beliefs of humanity are such that they give us genuine insight as to the fundamental nature of reality – our belief that many kinds of evil are ‘out of step’ with the character of the world being one such belief. Finally, I argue that atheism cannot account for this normative force present in many kinds of evil, and, a fortiori, that this is plausible reason to believe theism to be true. This venture can’t be complete, without evaluating different thoughts from specific philosophers who dared to engage themselves in the seeking to answer this critical question on evil.