This is a list of the common answers to the problem of evil to reveal something important about fundamental questions about the nature of Reality: we cannot answer them literally without inviting blatant absurdities, or in this case, monstrosities.
Evil exists for the greater good. This logic is strange to say the least. It sounds like an economist talking about the value of making an investment, losing something in the short term, in this case having evil in the world, so that you can make more money in the long term, get more good, as if it was a substance you would want to maximize the quantity of.
Life is good. There is beauty everywhere for us to appreciate. Human beings are fascinating in their intricacies. Nature is astounding in its complexity. Do we need evil to appreciate all of this? Speaking of which.
The duality argument. But again, is that true? Do I appreciate the beauty of a church (the building) in contrast to the ugliness I've experienced, or does the beauty stand on its own? Is the moral integrity of a man only valuable because most people are cowards, or does the morality stand on its own?
I get that we are dualistic creatures, but then again, why did God make us this way?
Several versions of the "evil doesn't exist": either it's simply a lack of good, which means it doesn't exist on its own term, but rather in the same way that a shadow is a lack of light, or it's a dualistic interpretation of a Reality which is beyond our understanding.
In the first case, it's easy to say that when you are philosophizing, away from all the suffering and unfairness of the world, but good luck maintaining that position when someone treats you unfairly, and even significantly hurts you. Why would God produce such fallible beings that they can stray from the path for their entire life, and lead to the atrocities we know on this Earth?
The second case gets addressed more in point 6, but again why would God make us dualistic and fundamentally limited in our understanding of His plans? Doesn't that make us far more likely to doubt Him and go astray?
Just like you would want your children to be free to choose their own path, because telling them how to live is monstrous, so does God let you live, even if it hurts you.
I sort of get that, but obviously the most immediate counter-argument is that free will is not worth the atrocities that it has led to in the human world. Subjugation, warfare, rape, abuse and environmental destruction all arose from free will, or at least people being unrestricted both in the human world but also the Divine sense, meanwhile it seems harder and harder to see the light in our collapsing society.
Is free will really all that noble if human beings weren't allowed to choose between this world and another one to begin with? Shouldn't we have free will about whether to have free will or not?
I also sort of get that. But again, it is easy to say when your life hasn't utterly been shattered by someone else, or the world at large, to say that something is good for you. I have seen some people who spent all of their 20s running away from childhood wounds, and perhaps they will eventually heal those and grow from them, but then again, many of the older people don't seem to grow much either, they essentially perpetuate the same patterns over and over again.
Again, why would God make us so fallible? And on top of that, why would innocent people have to pay for the mistakes of others who came before them? Do young children who grow up warzones really "grow" considering that they're not responsible for the horrible situations they were born into?
And in general, the human mind cannot grasp metaphysical truths. This is the one I agree with ultimately, but I cannot deny that it very much sounds like a cope, like "sorry, can't answer this, it's simply one of those things in Life".
But it is true that the mind is limited. The human mind is bounded by duality, consistency and causality, which means that we cannot make sense of aspects of Reality which are absolute, paradoxical and acausal, which is why we cannot think of anything outside of time and space, and why the answers throughout History to the problem of evil, and other metaphysical questions 1 have been so unconclusive.
If the human mind could grasp those, then our religions would work and we wouldn't have to question them much. But clearly the beliefs of organized religions are deeply dysfunctional, and it's not because human beings in the past used to be stupid, it's because their fundamental approach to those questions, trying to arrive at literal answers to them, is flawed.
Here is a passage from Darren Allen 2 who articulates our predicament, and what a non-literal answer would be:
As soon as we articulate the reason for the evil of the world, we find our answers do not satisfy us, that there is no intelligible, unsentimental justification for the unspeakable suffering of human beings, condemned to drag a rotting carcass from oblivion to oblivion. This is why we have to either say nothing, or, to speak of a love which dissolves the barrier between self and world, learn a different, stranger, language, a language we call ‘art’, whose subject is unconditional love.
It is more honest to say that we don't know why evil exists, than to give a shoddy literal answer. Most answers to important questions are literal, especially the ones from religions, which worship the idea of God, and not the Divine Itself, which is why religions throughout the centuries argue so much with one another about ideas, and why they feel the need to go to war for those ideas.
But if we endeavor to express the ineffable, and the answer to metaphysical questions is necessarily in contact with that ineffable, then we must use something that dissolves the barriers that usually mediate our experience, because the effable is maintained by such barriers. Hence, the need for art, which can express paradox and a reconciliation of opposites, especially in the form of storytelling, which at its best conveys a non-literal form of morality which makes us understand why evil exists, in a way that mere literal statements can't.
This is why having to give a mere summary of a great story feels so wrong, because in that moment, we know that we have to convert an entire experience, the kind that genuinely transforms us and gives us clarity into our own lives, down to a few sentences which sound so laughably trivial when taken at face-value. Try to summarize the masterpieces in literature, and what you are left with are rather generic plots featuring outdated ways of living and dull characters.
This is because the eternal doesn't cloak itself in any flamboyant outfit, rather it expresses itself through one's being. When time is expressed directly and fully, then we can taste the eternal, which is why a world dominated by space such as ours, where appearances and the image have overwhelmed our awareness, feels so atomized and meaningless, because unity only comes through time, not space.
And this is why we must come to peace with the problem of evil through our own life, and not a mere answer given to us, because unity is achieved through our own being, not merely what we know. Thus the nature of evil really is beyond the mind, because experience is. Trying to give a literal answer to the problem of evil is like trying to provide a mere summary for a great story. It can't be done. And why would you want the summary instead of the story anyway? Life has to be lived to be understood, and as Kafka puts it beautifully:
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgement by that name; in reality it is a constant court in perpetual session.
1 Other metaphysical questions: How did Reality begin? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we experience separation? How do we understand anything at all? (given that we would only seek the Truth if we didn't have it, but if we don't have the Truth, then what do we use to arrive at the Truth?)
2 From his book Ad Radicem, in the essay simply titled Love.
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2026-04-13