The Problem of Evil
by E. I. Watkin
First I would insist as a truth certain to any unprejudiced mind that good exceeds evil. In every department of experience, I maintain it with the utmost confidence, the amount and force of good far exceeds the amount and force of evil. We must not, with so many modern observers, exaggerate the worlds evil. If evil were equal to good in degree and in quality, in power and reality, why do we regard it, rather than good, as a problem requiring solution? Why should we expect to find goodness in the universe, in our fellow-men, unless man's fundamental nature is good and the fundamental nature of the universe is good? If anyone tells you he has found more evil in his fellows than good, we may well inquire of him whether he believes himself to be more evil than good. I do not think he will readily admit this preponderance of evil in his own character. It is true that the saints speak as though the evil in them enormously exceeded the good, if, indeed, they are not wholly evil, but this language is explained by their realization that the good in them is the gift of God (the sole source of all goodness natural and supernatural), the evil alone from themselves. This, however, is not the position of our pessimist. His complaint is that there is actually more evil than good in men. If, however, he is unwilling to apply this to himself, what ground has he to place himself among a favored minority?...
It is also true that nature does not directly subserve human purposes. If, however, nature did thus immediately reflect an ethical order, there would be no moral test: Man would be compelled to be good by obvious self- interest. If the course of evolution had been perfectly and immediately ethical, or if natural laws immediately served man's moral and rational needs, moral and intellectual conflict, his toilsome and painful advance and struggle toward good, would be at the least gravely attenuated. But what if this struggle, this toilsome and painful advance, were itself among the highest goods, among the most ethical and spiritual ends of creation? No one of a truly spiritual insight would, I think, deny this. Nevertheless spiritual progress and struggle need not have been so slow, so toilsome, so painful, so costly of waste and failure as they have in fact been; and we are compelled to seek a further cause for these apparently unnecessary evils. Catholic doctrine declares this further cause to be sin—original and actual. But of this, more hereafter.
While a predominance of moral good over evil is thus a demonstrable fact of experience, there is perhaps more to be said for a predominance of the lesser evils, pain and sorrow, over pleasure and joy. But if the greater good—that is, moral good—predominates over the greater evil—that is, moral evil—then it must be admitted that good still predominates over evil, even if we must grant that the lesser—the physical— evil of suffering outweighs the lesser—the physical—good of happiness. Whether this be actually the case is highly debatable. Much can be said on both sides of the question.
Most probably it is impossible to reach a certain answer of universal application. In any case the goodness of God is not refuted even if suffering weighs down the scale. For if the Christian doctrine be true, and we are discussing the problem from that supposition, there is no reason to expect an excess of happiness in this life. On the contrary Christ has promised his followers, suffering in this world, joy in eternity; the cross here, the crown hereafter. Indeed, the Church teaches, and with the Church is the unanimous consent of all mystics and deeply religious souls, sinful man cannot in the very nature of things attain to the spiritual happiness for which he was created, without suffering. Purgatorial suffering, whether in this world or in the next, is the inevitable passage and entrance into the divine joy. There is, moreover, so the experience of the noblest and holiest souls bears its consentient witness, a peculiar and a sovereign joy in the suffering itself when rightly borne, a joy which surpasses all other joys attainable on earth and renders the suffering as desirable to them as it is hateful to us who do not share their secret.
That modern man tends to adopt a world outlook in which evil predominates is largely due to a psychological change. This psychological change, in virtue of which his valuations are differentiated from those of his ancestors, may be described as an increased sensibility to suffering, a decreased sensibility to sin. The latter is not a decreased sensibility to all forms of moral evil, for the modern man often possesses a heightened sensibility toward many forms of such evil. But it is a decreased sensibility to the evil of a will freely averted from the divine law. The increased sensibility to suffering is clear gain. For the increased sensitiveness of any organ means an increased utility and delicacy, an increased perception. To charge the modern soul with a weak sentimentality because of its keener and more delicate apprehension of pain is as if the short-sighted man charged the keen-sighted with a perverted imagination or the pagan polygamist taxed the Christian monogamist with a hypersensitive conscience in the matter of purity. But the decreased sensibility to sin has produced an exaggerated notion that evil in all its forms is independent of free will, and a failure to see also the purgative and expiatory values of suffering. It also leads men to regard suffering as an evil equal to, if not worse than, moral evil. This radical perversion of values cannot fail to give birth to a distorted vision of experience, an unfounded pessimism which is unable to deal with the problem of evil because it sees that problem in a false perspective. If, on the other hand, we realize that good is more natural, more powerful, more real, more widely extended, more deeply rooted than evil, we shall be able so to perceive the divine origin of the world, and God working in the world of human experience, that we can in peaceful faith commit its unsolved and insoluble problems into the hands of our heavenly Father.
Not only is evil less extensive, less potent, and less real than good, it has no existence apart from the good. In this sense, and in this sense only, it may be said to be unreal. For evil is not a mere absence of good, it is an absence of due good, of good that ought to have been present; hence, a privation. A privation, however, may be extremely real. What more real than famine? To people slowly dying of starvation, their lack of nourishment is the most actual and dominant reality of their experience. Yet privation of food is obviously a nonentity. If it is asked how evil, being merely a privation, can possess its hideous force, its power of destruction, of infection, I reply that this force, this power to infect and destroy, is grounded not in the evil as evil but in the positive and therefore good thing or person in which that evil inheres. Evil as such is powerless. Only sub specie boni, that is, in virtue of something good to which it belongs, is it a force whether of attraction or destruction. The destructive power of gunpowder is per se a good thing, capable indeed of good use when, for instance, it destroys not a Gothic cathedral but a piece of rock which obstructs a line of railway. Men never sin for the sake of evil but for the sake of some good. Consider even wanton cruelty, sheer delight in the infliction of pain for its own sake. Psychology shows that even this apparently unmixed love of evil is a perversion of the desire to exercise power—in itself a good desire—combined in extreme cases with a nervous perversion whereby the infliction of pain causes pleasure. Consider again the infectious power of manufactured war or class-hatred. This power depends on an appeal to positive instincts in themselves good, social instincts of love and loyalty to a nation or class of our fellow men. The evil lies in limitations such as blindness to the good in other groups, ignorant credulity, mental laziness, lack of self-criticism, and the like.
Evil, then, is a negative thing, even while it is something very real. If we admit a positive entity escape one of two alternatives. Either there is a radical dualism in the constitution of reality, a bad principle in opposition to the good God, or evil is a reflection and participation of the one ultimate reality, that is to say, a reflection and participation of divine nature in one of its aspects. . . . But this negativeness of evil does cut at the root of any pessimism which would see evil as more than, or as equal to, the good in the world or which would ascribe evil to the fundamental nature or the source of reality.
These general considerations directed against an exaggerated pessimism should make us see evil not as the dominant fact of experience but at most as an imperfection however extensive in a universe essentially good. But if the universe and its order are essentially good, the goodness of its Author is not rightly called in question by an imperfection whose cause is at worse unknown. It would be equally unjustifiable to deny the genius of an artist because a portion of his picture was seriously damaged or because even a considerable portion of that picture were in such darkness that no coherent design could be made out.
E.I. Watkin's best-known book was The Catholic Center. This is a portion of an essay that appeared in God and the Supernatural.
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