Sunday, 23 August 2009

• Currently Rachmaninov: The Four Piano Concertos see related

  A Rave Concerning Good, Evil, and Freedom: Part the Eighteenth

  Horrendous Evils

  I forget who used this illustration (William Rowe comes to mind, but I'm not sure why, and besides, I'm not using it the way the author originally intended) but imagine a possible world where the only sentient creatures were rabbits who suffered terribly. Would God create such a world, even if the balance of good to evil were favorable?

  Such a question illustrates a number of things. First, if one's intuition is that there is something inconsistent in God creating such a world, then the balance between good and evil is not the only thing that constitutes what makes for a good world. There simply seems to be something overridingly wrong with vicarious evil. The other thing to note that the fixation on the quantity of evil in a given world is not determinative. One should imagine that a world of pathetic rabbits still contains less evil than this one.

  I say this because I have made a point of not invoking such modern tragedies as the Killing Fields, the Holocaust, any of Stalin's purges or the Russian famine. To employ these simply to make a philosophical point is trivialize these events. They are evil that are a part of the course of human events that were so large that those involved were simply swept up as if in a tsunami.

  Instead, I would like to look at a single event (wish I pray I don't reduce to a mere illustration) I heard about not month ago and invite you to magnify it as you may. A local court magistrate drowned not too long ago. He died in an attempt to rescue his teenage son. He managed, but at the cost of his own life. Imagine that he had not been with his son. The son himself would have drowned. The family would have grieved, perhaps terribly, but any parent will recall friends of their youth who held all the joy and promise of life and then were taken. No parent is prepared for such a thing but most who have lived through such a blow come through bent but not broken. Yet this is not what happened. Instead the son must live with the guilt of living. (On the other hand, had the father judged that he would have been unable to save his son, he would have been justified in failing to attempt the rescue but at the guilty cost of wondering whether he was in fact responsible for his child's death.) One can feel guilt for that which is not one's fault. The son is faced not only with the loss but a feeling of responsibility for the tragedy of his loss and the grief of his family, even if he were simply caught in a freak event. Turns such as these can break a person. They have the potential of blunting or utterly ruining one's very humanity and such wreckage tends eat away not only one ones self but everyone involved. Feel free to come up with larger or more graphic stories, provided that they are not so large that you can no longer fill pain of your own soul being emptied into a hollow shell. I think this captures what Marilyn McCord Adams calls the horrors and horrendous evil.

  In a nutshell, Adam's response to the problem of evil is not to treat it as a riddle to be solved. Like Tully (whom a may be able to treat in more depth later) “solutions” have a tendency to miss, perpetuate or justify evils per se. Like Tully, Adams is critical of any defense that relies on a favorable balance between good and evil that does not account for the dehumanizing affects of evil.

  Instead, while she provides grounds for why evil may be possible--relying on the infinite distance between human beings and God in a fashion that would remind some of Rheinholdt Niebuhr--she goes on to argue that the specific contribution Christianity brings is the teaching that Christ bore these horrors in himself and triumphed over them and as such we who are incorporated in Christ also shall have these evils not merely compensated for, but destroyed. I should hasten to add that for Adams, human being were created for beatitude and that anything short of universal beatitude fall short of the vision of evil being destroyed. Before I go on, I would like take a slight detour on this point.

  • 9:14 PM
  • 12 Views
  • 0 eProps
  • 0 Comments