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John Paul Jones, 1997

I. What Evil Is:

In one of her songs, Madonna says that she's a material girl, who lives in a material world, who likes material things, etc., so, despite the lack of material in her costumes, Madonna appears to be a materialist. Given her popularity as a pop culture icon and her less than magnificent musical material, I'd also wager that her's is a popular opinion. As such, false it may be, but immaterial it ain't. So, consider:

Philosophically speaking, a materialist believes that everything which is exists within the physical, material world and can be explained by material causes operating in the physical universe, so there is no need to postulate any supernatural, non-physical existents or entities to explain anything. Thus materialists are often called naturalists, because they deny the existence of anything supernatural, which is to say, non-material.

Naturally, as a Christian, I disagree. For not only does the Bible postulate the existence of supernatural or non-physical realities, but those spiritual forces and causes are held to be of paramount significance, as when, for example, the prophet Isaiah, speaking of the Egyptian army, says, "their horses are puny flesh, not mighty spirits," implying that spiritual forces are more powerful than material forces. Or again, when the prophet Jeremiah asks rhetorically, "Should the axe boast that it chops the log?", he is suggesting, I think, that the spirits which vye for the dominion of men's souls are the real forces which move us to do mighty things, so why, in that case, should we boast of our accomplishments, as though we were the power that moved us?

Yet we can, without appealing to scriptures, establish the need to postulate the reality of supernatural (i.e., non-physical) causes, or so I submit, so I believe, and so I will argue here.

According to Occham's Rule, a rule used by scientists, engineers, and philosophers alike, we are justified in postulating the existence of something that's non-observable if and only if postulating its existence is necessary to explain the existence of something which is publicly observable.

For instance, in science, black holes and certain sub-atomic particles are infered to exist even though they cannot be percieved direcltly via sense-perception, nor indirectly via sophisticated scientific apparatus, because only by postulating their existence can certain known and observable phenomena be explained. Even so, those sub-atomic particles and black holes are infered to be part and parcel of the material, physical world, so their existence does nothing to establish the existence of anything supernatural.

Even so, while many scientists resolutely reject the notion of supernatural phenomena, their own discoveries seem to reveal what they refuse to acknowledge. The discovery of the cause of scurvy is a case in point.

For centuries, men died of scurvy before scientists discovered that the disease is caused by a lack of vitamin C in the blood stream. (In fact, there is a whole host of ailments which are said to be caused by the chronic lack of certain vitamins and minerals.) Before science made this discovery, scurvy was presumably defined or identified by its observable symptoms rather than by its' cause, and consequently, not knowing the cause, people who could have accessed fruits and vegatables, thereby obtaining sufficient quantities of vitamin C, died needlessly, so whether their deaths were caused by a lack of vitamin C or a lack of knowledge or both I cannot say and do not know.

In any case, my question is this: where, exactly, is the vitamin C lacking if not where and when it is needed in the physical, material world? If this lack of vitamin C causes the observable symptoms of scurvy, presumably the lack is real, and if it is real, it exists in some sense, but in what sense, exactly, does this lack exist? Not in the physical, material sense, presumably, for we cannot taste, touch, see, hear, or smell that which is lacking. It's only by measuring and percieving, via scientific instruments, what is in the blood stream that scientists can then infer, though not percieve via sense percetion, what is not in the blood stream. What is not there cannot be physically percieved, I assume, because it does not exist physically.

In fact, what is it to say that the vitamin C is lacking in the blood stream but to imply that it does not exist in the material world? After all, to say vitamin C is lacking in a person's blood stream is not to say that it does exist but in the wrong place, e.g., on the train to New York, or at the supermarket, or in Madonna's refrigerator, but rather to simply assert that the vitamin C does not exist where and when it is needed.

Therefore, are we not justified, according to Occam's Rule, in postulating the existence of non-material, non-physical causes: namely, the lack of things needed, and specifically, in the case of scurvy, the lack of vitamin C in the blood stream? If the symptoms of scurvy cannot be otherwise explained except by this lack, then is it not needful to postulate this lack of vitamin C as very real and significant, even though it is not an observable, physical thing?

Now if the lack is not real, how can it be said to cause scurvy? If the lack is real, how can it be said to not exist? If the lack does not consist of a material thing or physical substance, how can it be said to be part and parcel of the physical, material world? If, then, the lack is real, non-physical, and known to be the cause of scurvy, how can we avoid infering that it is a supernatural cause? For to say that something is supernatural is simply to say that it's real but not physical, not material, and hence, it isn't part and parcel of the natural, physical, material world.

In any case, St. Augustine, among others, did acknowledge the reality and significance of this supernatural reality which manifests itself in the material world as suffering and pain, and he had a name for it: namely, evil, which he defined as the lack of things needed. For he noted that the things which we call 'evil', such as starvation, poverty, blindness, or ignorance, consist not of anything which exists but of good things which are lacking, e.g., blindness is the lack of sight, ignorance is the lack of knowledge, starvation is the lack of food, poverty is the lack of wealth, etc.

This abscence, or the awareness of it, causes us physical and emotional pain, but pain and suffering are merely the symptoms of evil, not evil itself, according to Augustine, because, although all evil causes pain and suffering, not all suffering and pain is evil, for it is not evil, in Augustine's view, if the wicked suffer pain or emotional torment for their wickedness; to say otherwise would imply that just punishment is evil. Therefore, it follows, Augustine reasoned, that evil cannot be defined as pain or suffering.

Even Christian theists have fallen into the error of equating evil as pain. C.S. Lewis, in his book "The Problem of Pain," seems to equate pain as evil without realizing, I suspect, the logical implications of this false assumpiton. If indeed evil is pain, then the eternal torment of the wicked would be an evil, and thus, if we accept the doctrine of eternal dammnation, of which there is ample scriptural support, Christ would have failed to defeat evil on the cross, since pain, i.e., "evil," would endure forever in hell.

II. Why Augustine's Definition of Evil Matters:

If evil could be rightly defined as pain and suffering, evil could be destroyed by simply destroying life. Indeed, I go so far as to think that the culture of death stems from this materialistic and erroneous view of evil as pain and suffering, which leads people to think that death, suicide, or the destruction of life can eliminate evil. This view leads to what might be called the "search and destroy" method of dealing with the problem of evil. According to this methodology, all we need do is find the material cause of evil and destroy it. After, all, since materialists assume all causes are material, they are logically obliged and conceptually predisposed to assume that evil is itself caused by material, physically destructable things or causes.

Consequently, those of a materialist mind-bent, whether Christian or otherwise, are constantly engaged in campaigns to destroy the evil things or people they think are at the root of the problem. So we have, for example, the "war on drugs," the "war on guns," the "class war", and various genocides--all of which are known to cause more evil than they allegedly uproot, and today, as we witness the spread of eco-fascism in Europe, which holds that we can solve the reputed environmental crisis by simply exterminating many millions of people, we also witness the widespread approval of Chinese population control techniques, such as state-sponsored abortion, infanticide, and forced sterilization. Strange fruits and bad apples, all.

Rightly discerning the evil which causes some particular calamity, ailment, or dire predicament is not easy, because the evil does not consist of the presence of anything so much as the lack of something, and things abscent but needful are harder to identify than things which are physically perceptile. Add to this the fact that it's much easier to destroy something which is than to imagine and create that which is needed but lacking, and we see why materialism is the favored philosophy of dolts.

But perhaps the worst consequence of the materialist notion of evil is that it causes people to disbelieve the Biblical account of evil, which identifies our individual and collective sins as the cause of human suffering and pain. An utterly unbelievable claim, that, insofar as one thinks that physical existents, such as hurricanes, guns, earthquakes, viruses, and other material things are the necessary and sufficient causes of human suffering. After all, there is no observable casual relationship between sin and, say, a tornado that wipes out a church congregation.

But in truth, it was not the tornado which caused people in the church to be harmed, but rather, the lack of knowledge, foresight, or protection which could have prevented the suffering. If we say instead that the tornado caused the suffering, as though the tornado is evil, we evade the fact that either people were ultimately responible in some way for the pain, else there is no point in calling anything evil, much less inatimate objects, since the word 'evil' connotes moral blameworthiness, and its practical utility as a concept is that it helps us to seriously ask the questions that need to be asked: "What could we have done to prevent this suffering? What could our ancestors have done, and how can we avoid making the same mistakes as they did? In short, how do we avoid hell on earth or hereafter?

[Note: Nietzsche, among others, pointed to the fact that in his words, "neediness is needed," which can be construed to mean one of two things: 1) that evil, i.e., the lack of things needed, is needful, and therefore, good; or 2) that imperfection, the lack of things desired, is needful, and therefore, not evil. The first meaning is logically incon- sistent and empirically groundless, so it provides no good reason to reject Saint Augustine's definition of evil. The second meaning is both logically consistent and supported by the evidence; also, it's consistent with St. Augustine's definition of evil, not to mention congruent with the basic premise of economics: namely, that man's wants are infinate and can never be fully satiated, in which case, the lack of things wanted is inevitable & necessary for life as we know it, so imperfection (the lack of things wanted) is "needed" as Nietzche put it, but evil (the lack of things needed) is not needed.]

--------------------- End of Essay ----------------------- This essay was featured in Paranoia magazine, 2003.

In the book "Truth and Tolerance", Cardinal Ratzinger gives a good explanation of the contrary Christian view, which is worth worth quoting at length: "In a philosophy of the unity of everything, the disinction between good and evil is necessarily relativised." [ Here Ratzinger is talking about all forms of mysticism, not Jewish myticism, i.e., Qabalah, exclusively, although the hexagram, as used by Kabbalists, arguably is a universal or cross-cultural symbol of the ideology which tries to "unify all things", as he puts it; as Freemason Churchward points out in "The Arcana of Freemasonry", this ideograph enjoyed wide usage long before Judaism, thus attesting to its cross-cultural significance as a symbol of the god of this world, or the "god of the dual horizon". While it's also true that the cross was used prior to Christianity, it's equally true that the cross, as used by Christians, does not signify occult duality. In fact, the Catholic crucifix is the symbolical antithesis of the hexagram since Jesus Christ Himself is there represented, signifying His great work and mission on the cross, which was to show the world that "God is light and in Him is no darkness at all", or, to use Ratzinger's words, that God is "pure light and pure goodness."] Ratzinger continues: We can find some important clarifications of this question in the thinking of Guardini. Guardini thought out the basic distinction between 'opposition' and 'contradiction', which is what it finally comes down to here. Oppositions are complementary; they constitute the richness of reality, in which he saw in the many tensions of life the wealth of existence. Oppositions refer us to one another; each needs the other, and only between them do they produce the harmony of the whole. But contradictions break out of this harmony and destroys it. Evil is not even--as Hegel thought and Goethe tries to show in Faust's Mephistopheles, I am 'a part of that power which always seeks evil and always works good.' Good would then have need of evil, and evil would not really be evil at all but would just be a part of the world's dialectical process. The sacrifice of counteless of thousands of victims by Communism was justified with this philosophy, building upon the dialectic of Hegel, which Marx [the son of a Jewish Rabbi, who evidently adopted the Kabbalist dualism of Judeo-Masonry] then turned into a political system. No, evil is not a part of the 'dialectic' of being; rather, it attacks at its very roots. God, who as a threefold unity represents, in multipicity, the very highest unity, is pure light and pure goodness (see Jas 1:17), whereas in the mysticism of identity there is in the end no distinction between good and evil. 'Good and evil, according to Buddhism, stand from the beginning in mutual interdependence. Neither has priority over the other. 'Enlightenment' is the realization of my being as it was before good and evil', is what Sudbrack says about this. The choice between a personal God or the mysticism of identity is most certainly not a merely theoretical one-- from the innermost depth of the question of being, it reaches out into practical living." -- Ratzinger, "Truth and Tolerance", pp. 48-49 [Brackets mine.]

SOURCES:

Aquinus, Thomas, The Summa Theologica

".....evil  is the abscence of the good which is natural and
due to a thing." -- Thomas Aquinus

Hick, John H. (1983) Philosophy of Religion,  Prentice  Hall
edition,  Englewood  Cliffs,  N.J., where Augusine's view of
evil is discussed on page 43. It's the same as  that  quoted
directly above.

Lewis,  CS  (1962)  The Problem of Pain: How Human Suffering
Raises Almost Intolerable Intellectual  Problems,  Macmillan
Paperbacks Edition, 1962

Maimonides,  Moses (1956) The Guide for the Perplexed, Dover
edition, 1956 (Maimonodes held a view of evil  very  similar
to Augustine's)

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968) The Will To Power, translated by
Walter Kaufmann and  R.J.  Hollingdale,  the  Vintage  Books
Edition, September 1968 (completed by Neitzsche in 1888)

Santayana,  George (1905) Reason In Religion, Dover edition,
1982

END NOTES:

[Augustine's view of evil is similar to the Kabalists' view of the Supreme Diety: Dionysius the Areopagites' "mystical works are meditations on the theme of God, whom he defines, after the manner of Plotonius and he Kabbalists, as a kind of divine darkness or emptiness," i.e., as a sort of nothingness or lack. ("The Occult: A History," Colin Wilson, pg. 130)

"All the great evils which men cause to each other because of certain intentions, desires, opinions, or religious prin- ciples, are likewise due to nonexistence, because they orig- inate in ignorance, which is abscence of wisdom." --Moses Maimonedes, "Guide for the Perplexed," Chapter XI

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