XII
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
I
How has the problem of evil tried men’s souls! How have their gods failed to live up to the character they have given them! How have they confused our moral standards! The trouble lies in a misconception of the nature of evil, and in a false idea of the universe itself.
There is no problem of evil until we have made or imagined an unnatural and impossible world. When we have enthroned in the universe a powerful man-made God who is the embodiment of all we call good and the contemner of all we call evil, then we have our insoluble problem. To help ourselves out we invent another being who is the embodiment of all we call evil and enthrone him in regions below. Upon him we saddle the evil, and thus we try to run the universe with these two antagonistic principles yoked together, and no end of confusion in our religious ideas results.
The moment we postulate an all-loving, all-merciful, all-wise, and just being to rule the affairs of this world, and place him in such intimate relations with it that not a sparrow falls to the ground without his will and cognizance, then, indeed, are we in troubled waters and have lost our reckoning. We cannot excuse such being on the ground that his ways are inscrutable and past finding out. A creator who sends into the world the malformed, the half-witted, the bestial, the naturally depraved, and then holds them to high ethical standards, is condemned by the ideals which he has implanted within us.
Now the naturalist has no such trouble. He sees that good and evil are only relative terms; that they both grow on the same tree; that we should not know good were there no evil; that there would be no development were there not what we call evil. Pain and suffering are inseparable from the human lot. They are a part of the price we pay for our place in the world. All struggle we look upon as evil. Disease, failure, death are looked upon as evil, but they are conditions of our lives. Through sickness we learn the laws of health. The lower animals have no such troubles—no sickness, intemperance, or war or avarice. They know without reason how to live, but man has reason, and the joy of its exercise and the peril of its failure. Are we not all willing to pay the price?—to take it on these terms rather than to change places with the brutes?
What a troublesome time the good orthodox brethren have with their God! He does, or permits such terrible things. Only yesterday He sent a cyclone through the State of Illinois that killed hundreds of innocent persons, and destroyed hundreds of peaceful homes, wiping out at one blow the results of long years of human labor. A few years ago He sent or permitted the scourge of infantile paralysis that desolated tens of thousands of homes and left a trail of thousands of crippled and enfeebled children. Again He sent or permitted the influenza to sweep over the land, claiming more victims than did the Great War; and so on. How our fathers, rocked in the cradle of the old creeds, wrestled with this problem! How could a paternal and all-loving God do these things? The naturalist reads nature differently. His god is no better than Nature. In fact, his god and Nature are one and inseparable. Nature goes her way and her ways are not our ways. We take our chances in the clash and war of physical forces. They have developed us and made us what we are.
It was only a few years ago that the President of the United States asked all good people to assemble in their respective places of worship and pray to God to stop the tornado of war and crime that was then devastating Europe. Is it possible to conceive of a being anywhere in the universe, with power to stop such a world calamity, who would complacently look on and wait till the sufferers could unite in a petition to him? What a false man-made god such a conception holds up to us! No wonder the World War shattered this conception in thousands of minds, and left them without any faith at all!
Rogers said in regard to evil that Sir John Mackintosh and Malthus and another philosopher whose name has escaped me, all agreed that the attributes of the deity must be in some respects limited, else there would be no sin and misery in the world.
We use the words “good” and “evil” in a narrow, personal sense. To the farmer the frost that blights his crops is an evil, but not to the squirrels who are waiting for the nuts to fall, or to the man who suffers from hay fever. Rain is a blessing, but how easily it becomes a curse! A cold wet spring cuts off the insect pests, but delays the plowing and planting. It is hard on the insectivorous birds, but the plants and trees profit. The grasshoppers that eat up the farmer’s pasturage make good provender for his flock of turkeys.
Blight and struggle, frost and drought, weed out the weaklings and beget a hardier race.
Moral evil—intemperance, avarice, war, lying, cheating—are on another plane. They are peculiar to man. Nature below him knows them not. But as they are against nature, they perpetually tend to correct themselves. The business world has learned that honesty is the best policy. Cheating is unpopular because, in the long run, it does not pay.
The most aggressive and warlike nation upon the globe has at last got its eyes open to the evils of militarism, and has bought its emancipation at a heavy price. Tyranny and oppression are finally doomed by the nature of man. Nature’s ways are roundabout, and often regardless of cost. The chaos and waste and suffering in Europe to-day are in keeping with her spendthrift methods. She knows that the most turbulent and muddy stream will clear itself and quiet down. The track of the cyclone through the forest will in time entirely disappear. Evil perishes, the good increases more and more. God is not so bad as we paint him, and we have no need of a devil. All is good. Gravity would glue our feet to the ground and we have to defeat it every time we lift a foot, and yet how could we walk or work without gravity? The bad, or the evil, dogs one’s footsteps, but it teaches us circumspection, and to beware of dangerous paths.
How easy to put one’s finger on this or that and say, “Here are positive evils!”—all diseases, smallpox, infantile paralysis, influenza, and so on—but they are only remote contingencies, and, on the whole, most of us find life good. There are good germs and there are bad germs, but the good vastly predominate. And the bad germs are only bad from our point of view. Our doors and windows let in the cold or the heat, as the case may be. We have them on these conditions. Fruits and grains nourish us, but they may injure us also.
In 1916 my naturalist’s faith prompted me to write thus of the World War: Two world forces are at death grips in this war. In terms of government it is autocracy against democracy; in terms of biology it is the unfit against the fit; in terms of man’s moral nature it is might against right. Whatever triumph Prussian aggressiveness and ruthlessness may meet with, they must in time meet with defeat, else Evolution has miscarried, and its latest and highest product, man’s moral nature, is, in its survival value, but dust and ashes.
II
There is positive good and there is negative good. We may say of health that it is a positive good, and of sickness that it is a negative good, because it reveals to us the conditions of health. In disease the body is struggling to regain its health—to recover and retain its normal condition. Its well-being is the result of a certain balance between contending forces. What we call the hostile forces appear only as the result of wrong living. The lower animals have none of our distempers because they live according to nature. Cattle do not get rheumatism by lying upon the wet, cold ground, nor pneumonia from exposure to cold and storm. In the freedom of the fields and woods it is quite certain that they would never become infected with tuberculosis. I doubt if the wild dog or the wolf ever have dog distemper, or if wild horses ever have crib-bite. Disease, as we know it, is a product of civilization.
Death, of course, is not an evil when it comes in the regular course of nature; it is an evil when it comes prematurely. The various social evils tend to correct themselves. Moral evils—lying, cheating, selfishness, uncharitableness—also tend to correct themselves. Righteousness exalteth a nation because righteousness has great survival value. The unrighteousness of Germany caused her final downfall. In an earlier age, when ethical standards were lower, she might have succeeded in dominating Europe. Our susceptibility to pain is not an evil inasmuch as it safeguards us against a thousand dangers. What I would say in a score of ways is that there is no evil in the human world not of our own making. Plagues and famines are always the result of human folly or short-sightedness. Filth breeds disease. Typhoid fever is a filth disease and is preventable. There is no god to blame for our distempers. Nature’s hands are clean. The wind is never tempered to the shorn lamb, in spite of the proverb, but the shorn lamb has not been fleeced by Nature. A heavy snowfall is an evil in towns and cities, but a good thing for the country. It enables the meadow mice to girdle the apple-trees, but it is a coverlid that greatly profits the meadows themselves. It is therefore good to both mice and meadows.
Our greatest philosopher, William James, had a wide grasp of fundamental questions, but it seems to me that he did not fully grasp the problem of evil; he saw the universe as a dual universe, two principles, good and evil, struggling with each other. He seemed to look upon good and evil as positive entities in themselves, whereas naturalism sees in them only names which we give to our experiences with objects and conditions in this world. What favors us, as I have so often said, we call good, and what antagonizes we call evil; but absolute good and absolute evil do not exist, any more than do absolute up and down; or absolute near and far. The absolute admits of no degrees, but there are all degrees of good and bad. Some hostile germs are worse than others, and some friendly germs are better than others. Again I say, we live in a world of relativity.
Naturalism does not see two immeasurable realities, God and Nature, it sees only one, that all is Nature or all is God, just as you prefer.
James was fond of quoting Walt Whitman, but he does not see, as Whitman did, that there is no evil, or, if there is, that it is just as necessary as the so-called good. From James’s point of view Nature is a harlot to whom we owe no allegiance, and another world is demanded to correct and compensate the failures and disappointments of this.
Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made the heaven and the earth, and who on looking upon them said that they were very good. Here is where the trouble begins—a Creator apart from the universe who looks upon and approves the work of his hands. This is the early, childish view of mankind. As Bergson says, when we apply to the universe our idea of a maker and a thing made, trouble begins. The universe was not made; it is, and always has been. God is Nature, and Nature is God. If this is pantheism, then we are in good company, for Goethe said that as a philosopher he was a pantheist. Even the atheist has a god of his own. He knows that there is something back of him greater than he is.
Most persons are pantheists without knowing it. Ask any of the good orthodox folk what God is, and they will say that He is a spirit. Ask them where He is, and they will answer, He is here, there, everywhere, in you and in me. And this is pantheism—all god—cosmotheism.
“Truly all that we know of good and duty proceeds from Nature; but, none the less so, all that we know of evil.”
“If there be a divine spirit of the universe, Nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man,” says James. But does he not see that this term “divine spirit” is born of man’s narrowness and partiality; that Nature is all of one stuff, divine or diabolical, just as we elect? He says that the naturalistic superstition, the worship of God in nature, has begun to lose its hold upon the educated mind; that the first step toward getting into healthy relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the God of nature.
Poor James Thomson, the British poet whose pessimism, perhaps, caused him to commit suicide, whom our James loves to quote, hurled his scorn at a fiction of his own brain when he wrote:
The whole value of philosophy is to help us to a rational view of the universe, and when it fails to do this, it falls short of fulfilling its proper function. The contradictions of which James speaks do not disturb the naturalist at all. Nature would not be Nature without these contradictions; they do not disturb the unity of Nature.
Empedocles taught that “there is no real creation or annihilation in the universal round of things, but an eternal mixing—due to the two eternal powers, Love and Hate—of one world-stuff in its sum unalterable and eternal.” And Whitman’s large lines mean the same thing: