The So-Called Problem of Natural Evil

When I was a little kid, there were two things about my parents’ life-style that especially piqued my curiosity. One was what went on between them whenever I heard them lock their bedroom door behind them. The other was what went on between them whenever they left me in the hands of a sitter, even one I liked. Their explanation of the second kind of behavior always proved more satisfying than their explanation of the first.

With respect to both, however, I have to confess that the very idea of my parents’ enjoying a life of their own which did not involve me was both irritating and insulting. What kind of parents would even consider the possibility that their world would not perpetually revolve around their son? (My sister and her world counted for absolutely nothing in my ventings of ontological outrage.)

Of course, I left all that dudgeon behind a long time ago. But then again, maybe not. I know I am not supposed to feel anything but humbled that the universe and our earth within it have been preoccupations of God for --- Carl Sagan intoned it best --- billions and billions of years, before there was any “me” at all, and that they and God will continue to have dealings with one another long after I am gone. The truth is, though, that this discovery is not just humbling; it is downright humiliating, and I think it is to all of us. Talk about being brought low. And just when we were getting used to feeling our oats at the very center of the divine pasture.

Painful as it is to have to concede, God has been, is now, and will be enjoying all kinds of  things within which we will play only a limited part, if indeed we are permitted to play any part at all. These things will include the very smallest and the very largest of which we can ever be aware, from every sub-atomic particle/wave/string/? all the back to the big bang, with DNA, microbes, natural selection, and the human spirit paid more than lip service along the way. There will be nothing wrong with any of this, just as there was nothing wrong with what our parents were up to both when they were all alone and when they were in companies of people that did not include us.

Where the “wrong” comes in these scenarios --- the “evil,” as philosophers and theologians are fond of talking about it --- is not from the natural order itself. It is from our taking issue with its very naturalness (including the naturalness of our parents’ craving both sex and friends) by demanding participation in it on our own terms. By making an issue about natural things and processes being just what they are and doing just what they do, we lose the capacity to take wonder and delight from them and become caught up instead in feelings of anxiety, frustration, and loss, particularly when we wrongly perceive nature to have gone mad. Natural evil, then, does not lie in natural things and processes themselves. They are neither good nor bad; they are just --- well, natural. When we acknowledge and respect them in their own right, irrespective of what we might otherwise want from them,  the “evil” that is too often attributed to them goes away.

Make no mistake, there still remains a lot of evil in the world. We will not find it, though, by setting up performance reviews of the Almighty’s governance of the universe. Nor will we find it by looking more closely at the created order itself. Instead, we will find it in our own perverse and willfully destructive behavior toward others, as well as in our own misguided efforts to use nature for our own purposes while treating laws of cause and effect as anachronisms we are better off repealing.

Giving up a piece of the action, whether with respect to our parents’ behavior or God’s, does not have to mean relinquishing our natural curiosity about either. Nor does it have to mean abrogating our right to wonder if they are really making good uses of their time. Too many babies, too many earthquakes, floods, and diseases can make even the most chronically annoying child’s questions too powerful to ignore. Sooner or later, though, every child has to grow up and face the question of all questions, one which is not his or hers to ask: “where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

Nature's Fury

The largest amount of correspondence I have ever received at one time about this column came immediately following last year's Asian tsunami. Because many who wrote me were asking the "Why?" question in a number of different ways, I chose to respond individually to them rather than in column form. But their anguish has a universal dimension to it, and I promised myself that I would wrestle with this ancient and fundamental question on a more general plane, soon. Well, soon is now. After hurricane Katrina, how could we be thinking about much else?

Of course, merely thinking about Katrina is hardly the most important issue. Much more relevant will be the compassion, presence, and effective action already in evidence, multiplied many times over. The real questions right now are the "how?" questions: how to feed the starving, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, protect the vulnerable, care for the sick, restore order, and rebuild communities, cities, wetlands, and shorelines. The larger "why?" question must be left to hover in the background until these more pressing issues are handled first. But the question does hover, and perhaps we should not wait too long after any natural disaster to confront it anew.

It has taken millenia for the human race to begin looking at the natural order the way God its creator intends, as a physical system governed by physical laws not subject to the whims of friendly and not so friendly spirits mucking around with its composition, cycles, functions, and possibilities. In our tortured climb out of a too tenaciously held ignorance, we have had to struggle incessantly with two powerful obstacles to the discovery of what nature really is and is not. One obstacle is our minds' innate disposition to think in personal terms about anything and everything in experience, whether what is thought about is personal in essence or not. "Animist" has been a good word for this disposition. In times of crisis, even the brightest among us can still look upon the world and everything in it as ensouled. Lately, we hear a lot about  "rampaging Mother Nature," even from people who should know better. But always and everywhere, nature simply does what nature is supposed to do, while we sometimes do the rampaging.

A second obstacle to respecting nature for what it (and not "she") is is our reluctance to relinquish a deep yearning for control over natural processes and outcomes. Three centuries ago, thoughtful people were celebrating modern science's disestablishment of ghosts, spooks, and occult powers in general throughout the universe and the permanent dethronement of animism in every form. As Alexander Pope would put it, Nature and nature's laws remained hidden in night; but God said, "let Newton be," and then there was light. But guess what? Animism never really goes away. And this fact should not surprise us. The only difference animism's modern form takes from its more primitive ones is that we are now the spooks fooling around with Mother Nature and getting hopped up when she will not bend to our plans for her, such as allowing us to build cities below sea level without having to give up an aversion to floods and drowning.

The eighth Psalm extols magnificently the altogether moving realization that God is "mindful" of us. It also reminds us of how our own mindfulness of nature both humbles and exalts our spirits. But then the psalmist goes on to proclaim human beings' sovereignty over all that God has made, including "everything that moves along ocean paths." (vs. 9) Not only over fish, it seems, but over storms as well. It was a good thing to clear out all the little spirits in nature, to let the physical universe be just what it is and not demand that it be something else, e.g., a lawless chaos made responsive to our every whim and fear by the intervention of spiritual powers --- benign and evil --- holding us in their thrall. The disenchantment of nature, however, did not last very long. Soon, we began turning to the one really big spirit over nature to manipulate things in just the ways people once feared and hoped that the minor spirits would do.

When we make these requests, we inevitably turn the travail of enduring crises and catastrophes into something even worse spiritually, by deluding ourselves that God is now answerable on our terms for everything that God does and does not do. Here is how it might go: So, God, why did you let Katrina run amok the way you did, anyway? What were you expecting to come out of her assault that you thought would be good for its victims? Why didn't you just cool down the Gulf of Mexico's waters, send down an inhibiting front from the North, or better yet, stop her from getting started anyway? That's what we would have done. And since you didn't do any of these things, we have issues. A credible alternative to this kind of animistic thinking is the subject of the next column.