Both Red and Green but Religiously Right: Coping with Evil in a Religion of Nature
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The problem of evil is not an accidental difficulty for religion; it is the starting-point from which the search that sometimes leads to religion begins.
—Mary Midgley1
The problem of evil of which Mary Midgley speaks is not just the relatively narrow theoretical one familiar to us in the West of how conceptually to reconcile an alleged absolute goodness and power of God with the rampant evil in the world, but the much broader existential one, applicable everywhere, of how to interpret, respond to, and cope with the presence and power of evil in daily life. It is the problem of how to find courage and strength in the face of the relentless perils, sufferings, and losses experienced on an everyday basis by the world's creatures, and with full awareness of the threat of abrupt calamities that can wreak havoc in the natural world and pose dire threats to human well-being. This existential problem of evil is also posed by the struggle with dark propensities to evil that lurk within every human breast, are entrenched in the institutions of human societies, and can and frequently do cause incalculable and pervasive harm for humans, for nonhuman forms of life, or for the natural environment as a whole.
Evils or threats and tendencies to evil menace us from without and within, and if powerfully experienced or deeply reflected upon, they have the potential to reduce us to hopelessness and despair. A business of all religions—if not, as I firmly believe, their principal business—is to point the way beyond this brooding hopelessness and despair and to provide us with visions, goals, and resources to live positive and meaningful lives.
We live in a world of natural laws. Were it not so, there would be no world and no "we." There would be only chaos. Not only do such laws provide the large measure of stability, predictability, and dependability without which no creature could exist or have hope of survival, but natural laws provide a necessary [End Page 108] causal context for the operations of human freedom. Freedom would be meaningless if from one moment to the next we could have no confidence in the outcomes of our actions, no ability to predict what their effects would be. If I were to stretch out my arm with the intent to move my chair, for example, and there were no stable laws enabling me to do so from one situation to the next, then my supposed freedom would be rendered meaningless. I would be incapable of executing my choices.
But of course we do not live in a world constituted solely by entirely predictable occurrences and regularities upon which we can always confidently depend. There are such things as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, fires, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, plagues, famines, and accidents of countless kinds that we must contend with. The world is a volatile, ever-changing place, and the natural laws upon which we have no recourse but to rely can grievously harm us as well as sustain us in particular situations. Moreover, the lot of living creatures is rife with predations, mutilations, starvations, birth defects, infant deaths, extinctions of species, and the like, and it exhibits a never-ending struggle for survival beneath the placid surface of its ecosystems. Nature is a complicated intermingling of stability and change, and the changes can sometimes come suddenly and without warning, bringing woeful devastations in their train.
The freedom facilitated and made possible by stable causal laws also contains its own seeds of potential destruction and ruin. Freedom to do good is also freedom to do evil. Individual human beings have the capacity to destroy themselves over time with repeated misuses of freedom, and they are capable of inflicting sometimes horrendous pain and suffering, shock, and sorrow upon others. Persistent misdirections of freedom can be magnified in their destructive effects when performed jointly with others, and they can become incorporated into enduring policies and procedures of institutions, thus further multiplying and augmenting their evil consequences. It is sadly true that intimidation, brutality...
