If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?
-Boethius
Hello reader,
Today, I'd like to make a case you might find rather unusual — Evil does not exist. Evil is NOTHING.
Now if you're all read up on your Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas, you can probably guess where I'm going with this.
Otherwise, if you have a life, then you may have no idea what I could mean by "evil doesn't exist." Don't we see acts of evil everywhere??
Isn't this world a cesspool of sin?? Aren't you the one that's always on about objective morality? Don't you believe in the Devil?!?!
Let me explain.
Whence Evil?
If I were to ask you the question posed by Boethius above, what would your answer be?
(If you don't know about Boethius, read about him here.)
Generally, there are two answers in our modern society:
Good and Evil don't "come from" anywhere. Goodness and evil are just social constructs we developed through evolutionary processes in order to better survive a pre-homo-sapien world where we were bloodthirsty chimps pillaging and raping our way through the jungles of Africa before turning into Asians. Thus they are entirely illusory concepts that don't really exist.
Goodness comes from some morally perfect God, and Evil comes from mankind's own free will.
Now, these answers describe the typical responses in the modern debate, but there is an older question in philosophy, and it is not as well-known as it once was among Christians.
The question Boethius is really asking is "what is the nature of evil?" And his answer is surprisingly — nothing.
I was recently reminded that many Christians are positively scandalized by this answer, that they are convinced Evil really is something, and while I certainly appreciate their instincts — they're wrong.
Let's see why.
The Argument that Evil Is NOTHING
You may remember from a possible college philosophy class that Boethius is not the only one who made this argument.
St. Augustine was also famous for having really expounded on this argument in various works, including his Confessions.
Augustine was deeply concerned with the problem of evil, and wanted to give a detailed explanation of how God could exist, be wholly Good, all-powerful, and yet evil simultaneously existed.
Historically, of course, he made the so-called "free-will" defense famous, which is still defended in the modern era by eminent philosophers like Alvin Plantinga.
Before one could arrive at the free-will defense, however, a Christian (historically) had to answer where evil "gets its existence" in the first place.
What do we mean by that? For the historical Christian, what makes an action "good" is its conformity with the nature and will of God.
In other words, God is the ontological basis of "goodness itself." Ontological is a word that comes from the Greek root ontos— which means "being" or "existence."
So God is the place where "Good" things get their existence, because He is Good. This line of reasoning comes from the philosophic tradition that began with Plato (as I explained in last week's article).
God, in fact, is the ontological basis for all things — He is the creator of everything, and in Him is Being itself (1 Col. 1:16)
But if God is the creator of all things, and all things get their existence from Him, then do evil things come from Him as well?
Certainly not, says the Christian, yet the question follows — from whence, then, do evil things proceed?
If we maintain that evil exists outside of God, but that God is the creator of all things, then it will mean logically that evil is an uncreated thing.
If evil is uncreated, then like God, evil exists necessarily and eternally. In short, there are two Gods — one good and morally perfect, another evil and immorally perfect.
The heretical sect of the ancient Christian church known as the Manicheans held this view. For orthodox Christian philosophers, however, this is not an acceptable conclusion.
Augustine, who was once a Manichean himself, wrote against this view in his philosophical works (and we'll see what his solution was in a moment).
If we say, however, that evil does not exist outside of God, then it seems God must have created the very essence of evil itself.
To avoid this dilemma, ancient Christian theologians and philosophers turned to Socrates and Plato —
If God is the creator of everything, then evil cannot "be a thing." In other words, evil is nothing (that is no-thing).
Hold on, you still haven't explained how evil doesn't exist! And how can evil be "nothing" if we see it all the time?
Let me use a simple example to explain.
Swiss Cheese Shirts and Rotting Fruit
Ok, truth-be-told, I may have intentionally misspoke at the top of the article... evil does exist.
Neither myself, nor any of the Church Fathers would argue it doesn't, but I have to write a hook on these philosophies posts or otherwise I can't get you to read on....
The question is how does evil exist, and it should be clear at this point that it can't be God that creates it.
When I say "creates it" I mean what is the objective basis by which we call an evil thing "evil."
Where does evil get its nature? How do we know something is evil inherently? What creates the substance of an evil thing?
The answer is that an evil thing doesn't get its nature from anywhere, because there is no such thing — no such substance — as evil "in itself."
This doesn't leave us declaring that evil doesn't exist, however.
To see why, consider an apple.
An apple is a thing, it has a substance. It was created by God, and He gave the apple its nature.
Now, if we leave that apple out in the sun, what will happen? The apple will rot.
The rottenness of the apple is analogous to evil — without the apple in the first place, there is no corruption or rottenness.
If the rot of the apple should consume the whole apple, what would be left? — NOTHING.
Or consider the example of a hole in a shirt. Does the hole really exist? Of course it does, it would be absurd to suggest that the hole isn't really there!
But ask yourself what the hole is made of? It isn't made of anything, it is formed from the missing material in the shirt that ought to be there.
If the hole were to grow so large as to be the size of the entire shirt, what would remain? — NOTHING.
This is how the Christian Church has historically understood evil, evil is a privation of something good that ought to be there, not something in itself.
So there you have it friend, evil really is "nothing," and yet can still exist. This is called the Privation Theory of Evil.
Objections and Consequences
Now, it behooves me to mention that this argument has had some historical opponents, most famously in my opinion — Dostoevsky.
Before I address the common objections to the Privation Theory, let's quickly make some clarifying claims.
First off, the privation theory is concerned with the ontology of evil, that is, the nature of good and evil.
So simply referencing some truly heinous act does nothing to refute the argument.
If someone were to refute this argument, they would need to show either that something exists which is truly evil in itself, or that the privation theory is incomplete or incoherent.
One last note — the privation theory is not a theory of "absences."
I have found it is popular for Christians to say things like "evil is the absence of good, just as darkness is the absence of light."
This is not correct according to the privation theory. The privation theory states that evil is an absence of a good that ought to be there.
In other words, it is not evil that a bear simply lacks wings. It is not in the nature of the bear to fly, so it is not evil that it lacks this ability.
It is an evil if the bear is missing two of its legs, however, because it is in the nature of the bear to walk.
With that in mind, let's quickly address very bad objections to the privation theory:
The Devil is evil in himself
Rape (or any other heinous evil) is real and you can't say that's nothing
The bible says this or that about sin and evil being real, so this theory has to be false
Okay, let's quickly do away with these objections:
No, the devil is not evil in himself. This cannot be possible, because God created him, and God cannot create anything evil. In this theory, goodness is equated to Being, so insofar as anything exists — it's good.
Just like a rotted apple is good insofar as it's an apple, but bad insofar as it's corrupted, so is the devil.
As mentioned above, pointing to some heinous act and saying that "it's real" doesn't address the argument because the Privation Theory does argue that evil exists.
The theory asserts that evil privates its existence from things with real substance, not that evil is illusory, or somehow not evil.
The last objection is simply an equivocation.
When the bible speaks of sin "being real" the bible is not speaking in precise metaphysical language, but merely pointing out a hole in a shirt and stating the hole "is real."
Better objections to the argument have come in the form of asking whether certain acts are really aimed at something good afterall.
The classic counterexample for the Privation Theory of Evil is pain. Isn't pain something intensely evil and feel personally real?
Many philosophers have argued that pain is a sufficient counterexample to the privation theory, but the objection has been addressed adequately many times. For example — here, and here.
The more interesting objection — raised by Dostoevsky — is that certain acts of evil really do seem to be "aimed" at evil.
If the privation theory of evil is correct, then when a person does something evil they must be "willing" an act of some kind, but the object of their will must be a good thing.
If that sounds confusing, here's a simple way of thinking about it —
Whenever you choose to do something, you act. To "act" is to move your will, but you must have a goal or "end" in mind when it moves.
Like an archer shooting an arrow, your will is the arrow that moves towards its end (the target).
But what if you will something evil? What is there to aim at?
According to the privation theory of evil, there is nothing which is evil in its substance, so even evil deeds must be "aimed at" something good.
For example, if I commit theft, my will and desire is aimed at something good — say, an Iphone. The phone itself is the object of my desire, and yet it is a good thing.
Augustine argued on this logic that what makes a certain deed evil is not the object of its desire but rather desiring that good over other more important goods.
So for the theft example, I am desiring the Iphone (a good) over and above the property owners right to property (a higher good).
So, for Augustine, we make evil choices but we do not choose evil.
Dostoevsky thought this explanation was too wishy-washy. He did not believe evil could always be explained on the basis of desiring something good.
So, in his The Brothers Karamazov, he asks us to consider a fictional story of soldiers flinging the babies of the conquered into the air and catching those babies on bayonets.
What good is that action aimed at?
How about the medieval and Nazi torturers? They seemed to get a great deal of pleasure from torturing their prisoners?
Are we really to believe that these actions are aimed at something good, and if only these people had better logic training, they wouldn't have committed these vile deeds?
This is a powerful objection, but once again, I think it fails.
The answer to the objection is that these actions are aimed at evil itself. That is, they are aimed at non-being — at non-existence.
Evil is non-being, it is corruption. If you become so corrupted by it, you begin to love the corruption itself.
I'm not denying the privation theory, I'm arguing that the hole in the shirt is real, and if you become sinister enough, you can desire to see the hole become the shirt.
That is what happens to men like the Nazis — they seek out destruction, self-destruction, and non-being.
Evil men take pleasure in their evil because they want to see the destruction of Being, they desire to violently rip away from reality even if they know there is nothing on the other side. They desire the same for everyone else.
That is consistent, it seems to me, with the Privation Theory of Evil, as well as scripture. It is the most complete and horrifying description of evil I can imagine.
Further Reading
Confessions by St. Augustine
Various Dialogues of Plato (Timaeus, Protagoras, Republic, etc)
Metaphysics by Aristotle
Enneads by Plotinus
Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Wandering In Darkness by Eleonore Stump
Evil Is Privation — Anglin, Bill, and Stewart Goetz. “Evil Is Privation.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13, no. 1 (1982): 3–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40036345.