God, according to the mainstream Christian theological tradition, is omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent. And yet there is evil in the world. This seeming contradiction or apparently irresolvable incompatibility between official religious doctrine and a seemingly obvious empirical fact about the world is used as ammunition by atheists in their ongoing turf war against the faithful while the Christians on the other side sweat blood struggling to come up with rejoinders to the atheist observation that Evil exists, producing arguments and explanations that go under the rather beautiful term 'theodicies'. A theodicy is a story that seeks to undo the knot or explain away the contradiction. I have followed arguments between atheists and Christians for years and years and at least one of the religiously minded atheists that I enjoy watching spar with older Christians on Youtube, Alex O'Conner, has said that the Problem of Evil is the best possible logical assault on the medieval castle of doctrinaire Christianity (although I don't think he has ever expressed himself in quite this style). The purpose of this essay is to present what I think may be the best possible theodicy, a response to the Problem of Evil that finds its foundation in the concepts of 'good' and 'evil', in language and semantics, a theodicy that I have never seen or heard any one else ever propose. The argument is subtle but, when I set it out, should seem patently obvious. Somehow though it seems to have been missed both by Alex and the other atheists, and by the Christian contingent on the other side, despite their continual striving to solve this most impenetrable of paradoxes. I believe it is a Gnostic argument that I intend to make and in making it I may be spilling some of the secrets of the Gnostics, unravelling a mystery that the Gnostics may have wanted to keep invisible, esoteric. I feel few compunctions about spilling this secret though because, of course, I am only relaying it to the few initiates who have somehow stumbled across this blog in their peripatetic perambulations across the World Wide Web and who may probably already be Gnostics themselves. I am not blowing the lid off all of Creation in this essay.
First, though, I want to make a couple of comments concerning perhaps some of the most salient features of debates concerning religion in the modern Western world, especially as these appear to those of us addicted to Youtube. On the one side we have atheist materialists such as, at one time, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and David Dennett. The New Atheists regarded all organised religion as wicked and wanted to eliminate it from modern society. The special bugbear for Harris is Islam but generally they focussed on Christianity. The New Atheists had a moral sense but it was a liberal humanist morality, not one grounded on any kind of religious system – Richard Dawkins has often indirectly supported gay rights for instance. Despite their moral sense, they saw no problem with the existence of evil in the world. People can be happy or sad, good or bad, whatever they want, it has no bearing on the arguments set forth by the New Atheists. In fact, as already noted, the Problem of Evil, the empirical facts concerning the existence of wickedness and suffering in the world, is probably the best argument for atheism around. Although someone like Sam Harris has weighed in on normative ethics by proposing a kind of utilitarianism, it is typical for atheist materialists to simply accept another empirical fact, the fact that apart from sociopaths most people appear to have a moral sense and seek to act morally, and then to invest their considerable intellectual capital into elaborate attempts at scientifically explaining why this empirical fact is the case. Because atheist materialists admire and espouse Darwin so much, there have been many who have sought to explain the empirical fact that people usually seek to be moral by invoking ideas from evolutionary psychology such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Indeed because neo-Darwinists have been so infatuated with the 'selfish gene' theory of Dawkins, and because, even setting aside Dawkins' update of Darwin, nature, red in tooth and claw, selects only for the fittest, the problem for atheist materialists, being so often firmly wedded to ideas from evolutionary biology that they cannot consider any alternative to it, is not so much a Problem of Evil as a Problem of Good. It is a problem concerning why people are so often unselfish and sometimes even self-sacrificing, altruistic. If the meaning of life is simply the individual's surviving and producing as many offspring as possible, why should an individual want to concern himself or herself with alleviating the suffering of others? If the actions of others so often have so little effect on a particular individual's life, why should he or she express praise or censure of these actions? This is why I claim that it is not the Problem of Evil but rather the Problem of Good that is the puzzle the atheist materialist contingent needs most desperately to address but so far their own attempts to unravel a mystery that arises from their own way of looking at the world have fallen far short of the mark.
However it is not the atheists on their side of the cultural divide who I principally want to discuss but their adversaries, the religiously minded defenders of the Lord. I am thinking of Christians who are also professors, academics, often specialising in Philosophy of Religion, the ones we find so frequently participating in online debates. These high status commentators and apologists are firmly rooted in the Christian academic tradition that had its beginnings in the work of St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was the first to say that God was omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent – he listed at least a dozen more essential attributes of the deity showing, I think, a little hubris when doing so (although he usually sought scriptural support for the essential qualities he attributed to the Godhead). The high-status Christian intellectuals that propagated their influence first through the seminaries and the monasteries and then later through the universities believe in monotheism, monism, unitariness. Yes, the supernatural exists but it is all wrapped up in God, finds its centre, its focal point, in one single indivisible being. There is in this viewpoint a rejection of older more pluralist conceptions of the supernatural. If God is one single indivisible being, how are we to make sense of the Catholic tenet of the Trinity – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? I don't know that we can. But the apologists ignore this contradiction between natural philosophy and doctrine. Nor can we easily make sense of other older Catholic notions such as the idea that the Virgin Mary and the Saints can intercede on a person's behalf. In the past, even after Christianity became dominant in the West, the ordinary person's conception of the supernatural was usually more pluralistic than the intellectual Aquinian tradition. It was once believed that there were legions of angels on the one side and legions of devils on the other and that the devils were in the employ of an adversary to God, known as Satan, Lucifer. In folk Christianity, therefore, we could once explain away the existence of Evil by positing it as resulting from the actions of the Devil, Satan. There was a kind of Manichaean tendency among ordinary folk. Manichaeanism, which was once a religious alternative to Christianity in the West and to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam in the East, held that the world was the scene of an ongoing cosmic battle between Good and Evil, between Light and Darkness, and that human history constituted a cosmic process through which the lights of human souls were gradually liberated from the darkness of material reality and returned over eternity to the heaven of the God of Light. Now, I am not suggesting that many Christians throughout history were secretly Manichaeans. Rather I am inviting the reader to entertain the idea that the undereducated laity endorsed a kind of dualism with respect to the supernatural without being fully aware that their religious leaders rejected such a dualism. There is another tradition within Christianity, one with scriptural authority because it is something we find in the Book of Job, that presents Satan as a servant of God but I believe this cosmology too has been disavowed by many modern Christians – the wager Satan makes with God concerning Job is regarded as something metaphoric, poetic, with no relation to anything real at all. To put it baldly, I believe that many of the Christians who feature so prominently in online debates, while still believing in God and in the divinity of Jesus, actually don't believe in the devil or in Satan at all.
The point I am trying to make here is that the debates we see online between atheist materialists and Christians are debates between people who view the world, respectively, as a world without anything supernatural to it at all and people who believe in only one single supernatural being, an omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent God. It is because the Christians who have bought into this intellectual philosophical position with respect to religious cosmology view the supernatural in this way that the Problem of Evil arises – if God were either not completely omnipotent or else not completely omni-benevolent, then no problem of evil would appear in front of us. If we lived in a world that was at least in some perhaps vague sense Manichaean then we could attribute evil to evil supernatural beings. But because the apologists are committed to the notion that the supernatural is focussed on a point, is built up toward a single vertex or apex that we term 'God' in the same way that the Illuminati print on American currency a pyramid with an eye at the topmost point, this escape hatch is not available to them or to us insofar as we accept conventional theological wisdom. The Problem of Evil should be better titled the Problem of Divine Omnipotence and Divine Omni-Benevolence because we all seem to have empirical evidence for the former, the existence of Evil, but for the later have to rely on the word of theologians following the Thomist tradition. Philosophers of Religion are committed to the attribution of omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence to the Godhead, accept these three attributions as premises or axioms that must be deemed incontrovertible before venturing any further into any kind of theodicy, and so find themselves forced into the contorted position of trying to explain evil away entirely– some, for instance, by arguing that evil is an illusion and some, such as St Augustine, arguing that evil is an absence or privation of good. The simplest response to the atheist interlocutor, to claim that God does indeed exist but is not entirely omni-beneovent and/or not entirely omnipotent, is a didactic strategy that the apologists recoil from because, deep down, the idea that Good and Evil may both exist and that Good may not always win out in the end is a notion that makes them uncomfortable. Deep down many Philosophers of Religion are Christians who imbibed a conventional Christianity with their mothers' milk and never shook it off despite all their philosophical training.
If we are to discuss the Problem of Evil, we need first to try to say a little about what Evil actually is. Something else I noticed about the Philosopher of Religion who taught me the year before last, in addition to his adherence to a kind of monism, is that he was unclear about what is meant by 'evil'. It is a confusion I have seen repeatedly among others on both sides of the debate. We need to distinguish between natural evil and moral evil. For instance, if an earthquake in Pakistan kills hundreds of people we should regard this not only as an evil but also as a natural evil. We cannot regard it as a moral evil unless we have evidence, for example, that the quake was caused by the Indian government dropping a nuclear bomb on their opponents. Natural evil encompasses all forms of unhappiness – suffering, pain, boredom, anxiety, depression. Death. Cancer is a kind of natural evil as are congenital diseases such as spina bifida for instance. On the other hand we also describe immoral actions committed by agents as evil – murder, fraud, assault, rumourmongering. The Problem of Evil involves both kinds of evil but communicators on both sides often confuse them and this can lead them and us down blind alleys. Alvin Plantinga has argued that moral evil is the price we pay for free will but has found no way to rationalise away natural evil. Of course we could try to claim that earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes are God's punishment for sins committed by the causalities but this seems at least uncharitable, certainly deplorable, in and of itself. It is interesting to note here that there is a widespread view that morally good actions are rewarded and morally bad actors punished, if not in this world then in the next, if not by secular police and judicial processes then, according to Christians, by God. Some apologists have argued that this is a consequence of a fourth divine perfection, perfect justice. The relation between crime and punishment, though, is not something this particular essay shall concern itself with.
The world in which we find ourselves, which we are passing through, is saturated with values and these values come in pairs. Not only do we have Good and Evil but we also have Happiness and Sadness, Pleasure and Pain, Beauty and Ugliness, Hunger and Satiety, Truth and Lies, and so on. Every possible positive value one can find in the world has associated with it a corresponding negative value that we can find or at least be aware of. Furthermore people, like all animals, are motile. We seek, through our actions, through our behaviours, to actualise positive values and avoid or move away from negative values. If I want a coffee, for instance, my desire for coffee can be satisfied by my walking to the cafe at the top of the road and buying a flat white. A person's inclination to seek to actualise positive values is analogous to the way plants grow towards sunlight, a tendency known as phototropism, or the way their roots seek water, a tendency known as hydrotropism. In seeking to actualise positive values and to minimise negative values we encounter resistance. This resistance has two forms. The physical material world itself constitutes a form of resistance. I can't say, "I wish I had a flat white" and then have a cup of coffee magically appear in my hand. I have to walk to a cafe and buy it with money. Another form of resistance is that a person's desires can conflict with the interests, the desires, of at least one other person. In these cases, in order for one person to actualise his or her own Good there would have to be a diminishing of the Goods attained or actualised by another. This is why we require morality – we sometimes need to negotiate between or find some balance between the desires felt by one person and the desires felt by another. The picture I am painting here is reminiscent of the picture painted by academic philosophers' favourite thinker, Ayn Rand, but it has one significant difference. Rand thought that that because people pursue values, people ought to be selfish, but her ethical system didn't account for the obvious possibility that one person's selfishness may negatively affect others. Nor does the doctrine she presented in The Virtue of Selfishness account for what seems to me to also be an incontrovertible empirical fact: by performing good deeds, good works, acts of charity, acts of altruism, we can actualise a sense of ourselves as Good People, that Goodness can in some limited sense be described as self-rewarding.
If God is omni-benevolent, maximally good, and also omnipotent and omniscient, we would expect to find ourselves in a world that is maximally good for all its inhabitants. It is helpful to bring in some ideas from ethics here, in particular the ethical systems that go under the banner 'consequentialist' or 'utilitarian', currently the most popular ethical frameworks among philosophers. Utilitarians think that individuals should act in such a way as to realise the greatest possible utility. There are three main sorts of utilitarianism. The first holds that people should seek to maximise pleasure or happiness in an impartial impersonal kind of way: this is known as hedonistic consequentialism. The second, known as desire-satisfaction consequentialism, holds that we should try to maximise as many desires that agents have, again in an impartial impersonal kind of way. The third is known as objective-value consequentialism which holds that there are objective goods that should be maximised. The literature surrounding consequentialism is incredible complicated and I cannot do it justice in this essay so, for the sake of the argument I intend to make here, I shall focus only on the first two conceptions and come back to the third later in the essay. I shall set aside the complications, provisos, provisions, convolutions, and involutions that a thoroughly rigorous explication of consequentialist thinking would require but which would need me to write an essay the length of Kant's Critique of Pure Judgment if I wanted to set it all out. All that is sufficient to say here is that insofar as God can be considered Himself a person, an ethical agent, and a person who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent, we would expect to live in a world without any natural evil in it at all. We would expect to live in paradise. Yes, if Plantinga's argument is sound, moral evil might still be possible, although unlikely, but there would be a complete absence of natural evil.
In Christian mythology, paradise features twice: at the beginning of time when Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden and, after a person's death, if the person has been good enough to avoid Hell and earn Heaven, after the person disembarks at Heaven's train station. What would paradise be like? If hedonistic consequentialism is correct, God presumably organised the Garden of Eden in such a way that Adam and Eve enjoyed absolute joy, absolute bliss, all the time. It must have been the case that in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Even were totally content eating delicious sumptuous fruit, effortlessly writing perfect lyric love poetry for each other, and, I dunno, having front row seats at perfect sporting fixtures carried out between rugby playing animals in which the home team always won. I am of course being slightly facetious here – it is difficult to imagine a paradise in which its two human inhabitants enjoy absolute happiness all the time. (Sometimes people like to imagine that the pre-colonial Pacific Islands were paradises and this view informed the first and most popular novel by Herman Melville, Typee.) If hedonistic consequentialism is true, then Adam and Eve only have ever experienced positive emotional and physical states. If desire-satisfaction consequentialism is true, then we need a subtly different picture of Paradise. Every time Adam or Eve formed a desire for something God would immediately grant it. If Adam formed a desire for a flat white sometime while in the Garden of Eden, God would then immediately make one materialise in his hand. Presumably, in a similar way, He also ensures that the virtuous faithful who have found their way to Heaven will enjoy absolute joy, absolute bliss, for the rest of the eternity that they are spending there. This view of paradise informs the film This Is The End by Seth Rogen – at the end of the film, when Seth and his friend Jay arrive in Heaven, they find themselves in a place in which Jay can wish for a Segway and have one magically materialise under him and in which Seth can wish for the Back Street Boys to reunite and perform their greatest hits and for this too to magically happen. In Paradise, there would be no resistance; its inhabitants would not need to actively work for anything at all but instead would passively have all their wishes instantly and supernaturally granted. In Paradise, there would therefore be no physical or material reality as we understand it, and it would be a world which either has only one resident or a world in which no one person's wishes or desires conflict with the wishes or desires of anyone else. So maybe two max.
In the last story in the collection A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes, Barnes paints a picture of what Heaven might be like. It has been a long time since I've read this story so in talking about it I am relying on a blog post called "Kahn's Corner: The Problem of Eternity in Barnes' "The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters."" In this story, the narrator dies and finds himself in his idea of paradise – an exclusive country club staffed by angels, in which he dines extravagantly every morning and evening, has sex with a different beautiful woman every night, and spends his days perfecting his golf game on the best possible golf course. After millennia, his golfing skills having improved to the point that he gets a hole in one with every single drive and succumbing at last to terminal boredom, ennui, the narrator chooses total non-existence rather than continue as a guest in Heaven's country club. Before he goes, he is told by one of the angels that everyone in the end makes the same decision at last. This story has the unusual distinction of being a work of comic fiction that is frequently referenced by Philosophers of Religion. One moral we could draw from it is that if we are to go to Heaven indefinitely, God must do more than satisfy the desires we formed while we were alive but also fulfil new desires we need to form after we have died. If the catalogue of desires can be endlessly refreshed after death, then God can go on satisfying them eternally. But even this may not stop Heaven becoming too insufferably dull to remain in.
We arrive now at the core argument, the theodicy this essay has been inching towards. If there were no Evil in the world, could there be any Good? If we were living in the paradise of hedonistic consequentialists, we might be in a state of constant unadulterated bliss but we wouldn't know that we were happy because we would have nothing to compare it with. For happiness to have any meaning at all we need to contrast it with its opposite state, unhappiness. To know happiness, we also need to know unhappiness. Adam and Eve may have been happy but they did not know it because they had nothing to compare it with. All of the values I talked about earlier come in pairs and the meaning of one element depends on the fact that it has a binary opposite – we cannot have a notion of Beauty without a notion of Ugliness, we cannot have a notion of Truth without also a notion of Falsehood, we cannot have Sweet without Sour or Salty without Bitterness. Light without Darkness, Good without Evil. Adam and Eve knew only the positive term in each binary opposition and so lived in a world without values at all. This is why God forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And it is why after the snake had tempted Eve to try the fruit and then she had convinced Adam to disobey as well that God expelled them, banished them, from Paradise.
The story of the Fall is probably the most well known of all Biblical stories and those of us who spent a little time at Sunday school when children remember it even if we recall nothing else of the Biblical tradition. All children and generally speaking all the adults that they grow into interpret the story of the Fall alike, in quite a simple way. God said, "You shall remain in paradise eternally so long as you abide by one rule – don't eat that particular fruit!" Adam and Eve were banished for breaking God's one rule and they were banished because they had broken it. It seems to me that all children and almost all the adults they grow into fail to see the significance of the name of the fruit – it grows on a tree called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Having broken God's rule, Adam and Eve were thrown into a world in which evil exists in all its forms – death, despair, disease, disfigurement, toil, violence, cruelty, shame, etc, etc. They fell into a world of values in which every positive value had its equal and opposite. What people miss about the story of the Fall is that Adam and Eve could not have truly known Good without also learning about Evil. The secret is in plain sight. The fact that somehow people fail to notice this, the name of the tree, when thinking about the story of the Fall, is reminiscent of the way people often have the "To be or not to be" speech from Hamlet memorised but fail to recognise that the secret at the heart of Shakespeare's most famous play is hinted at in it when Hamlet describes the afterlife as "The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns," Hamlet says this in his most famous soliloquy even though he has had a conversation with the ghost of his dead father at the beginning of the play. The secret at the heart of Hamlet is that Hamlet does not know himself whether or not he is mad, if the ghost he parlayed with in the first scenes was real or not. This is why he is so indecisive. In the same way, the vast majority of people think that they understand the story of the Fall but have missed its inner kernel of meaning, the meaning indicated by the name given to the tree in Genesis.
I would like to suggest that a world which contains no evil but also no good cannot really be a paradise at all. It would be something like limbo. This is because to be human must surely involve the pursuit of positive values and flight from or fight with negative ones. A world without values of any sort would be a world without any meaning at all.
"But," the reader may say, "you have been discussing the story of the Fall from the perspective given by hedonistic consequentialism. What about the desire-satisfaction consequentialists?" In the same way that I have argued that the paradise of hedonistic consequentialists contains not only no evil but also no good because it involves only positive physical and mental states and no negative ones, I would like to argue that the paradise of desire-satisfaction consequentialists likewise contains not only no evil but also no good as well. Remember that in our Fallen world, associated with every desire there is resistance. The resistance may be small for small desires, small wishes, but very great desires, great wishes, may be associated with very great resistance indeed. Many of our biggest desires, such as winning Lotto and flying to Australia to travel up the West Coast, may not be satisfiable at all. Some of our desires are ongoing such as the desire not to be beaten up or not to be rained upon when walking round the city – such desires can be put under the heading 'freedom from' as opposed to 'freedom to'. Both sorts of desires though require actions by the desirer. I would like to suggest that a paradise in which all desires are automatically satisfied would be no paradise at all because the goodness of actions, according to the desire-satisfaction consequentialists, is associated with the overcoming of resistance. There is always a gap or interval between the forming of a desire and its actualising and what I would like to argue is that the goodness associated with active desire-satisfaction-seeking does not lie in the moment when the desire is satisfied, an idea which would return us to the paradigm associated with hedonistic consequentialism, but rather with the active seeking of such satisfaction. Consider the cup of coffee example again. I form a desire for a cup of coffee, walk up the road to buy one, and then enjoy the taste. If it is the satisfaction of the desire in which the goodness of the action lies, then it would be in the anticipated and then realised taste of the flat white where we would find it – it would seem then that desire-satisfaction consequentialism has collapsed into hedonistic consequentialism because the movement towards fulfilment must be understood as secondary to the enjoyment associated with the taste of the coffee, with the reward. In order for the two ethical systems to remain distinct, the goodness associated with desire-satisfaction consequentialism must lie in the forming of desires and the quest to fulfil them rather than in the moments when the desire is actually fulfilled. The forming of the desire and one's attempts to satisfy it can be regarded as Good and the resistance to these attempts can be regarded as Evil. Every time I buy a flat white from the cafe up the road this can be regarded as a small victory of Good over Evil. But, in a paradise in which all wishes are immediately, automatically, and magically granted by God, there could be no victory over Evil because there would be no Evil at all to resist one's wishes and thus, even in the paradigm associated with desire-satisfaction consequentialism, no Good either. If the goodness of desire-satisfaction is not to lie in the emotional and physical states that arise when the desire is consummated, then it must lie in the triumph of individual will over the resistance erected to try to stymie the desire.
There is a second argument I would like to make concerning the desire-satisfaction ethical paradigm. Resistance is associated with the material physical world and the desires of others. A world without resistance would also be a world that lacks physical materiality and a world without other people, people who if they did exist in it might sometimes have subtly different and sometimes enormously different sets of desires. Earlier in this essay I hinted that I am a value pluralist, that I think that there exist many different types of value. Perhaps the positive value associated with having a flat white magically appear in one's hand is outweighed by the negative psychological effects that arise as a consequence of being in such close proximity to an omnipotent, omniscient and 'omni-benevolent' God, specifically the rather terrible implication that there is no stable reality at all and that other people may not really exist, that the people one seems to see are only phantasms or apparitions. Earlier this year, on a couple of occasions, I had small wishes seemingly magically granted. On one occasion, I decided that in order to write an email, to help me concentrate, I needed cigarettes and then seemingly magically found an almost full packet near my bed. I did not attribute these tiny miracles to God but rather to supernatural beings, fairies or pixies, fair folk who were mischievously granting the small velleities that appeared in my mind but had no inclination to respond to my more deeply felt desires. On three occasions this year I saw perfect rainbows but the effect was not to make me feel that there was an omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent God wanting a personal relationship with me but rather to make me feel that there was something malevolent about these optical phenomena. It made me feel as though God were kicking me in the head and repeating over and over again, "I exist!" All this has bearing on another argument atheists direct at their Christian opponents, the Problem of the Divine Hiddenness of God, but, although I may well discuss this problem in a later essay, I do not intend to talk about it now except to say that it is related to the Problem of Evil and that, in a way, this essay is an indirect riposte to this problem as well.
The Gnostics interpreted the story of the Garden of Eden in quite a different way to ordinary Christians. The Gnostics thought that the creator of this world and ruler of this world was not God but an inferior being, the Demiurge, one of many 'aeons' who 'emanated' from the true superior good God known as the 'Monad'. Many Gnostic sects thought that the Demiurge was actually Evil himself while other sects held that the Deminurge was simply a somewhat incompetent servant of the true good God. There were apparently (according to Wikipedia) some Gnostics who thought that the Demiurge was actually ignorant of the Monad entirely. Jesus was either an angel or aeon who had descended to Earth to teach mankind about love and compassion or an enlightened prophet: he was not God Himself the way Christians today regard him as God Himself. According to many Gnostic writings, it was the Demiurge rather than the Monad who had created the Garden of Eden and laid out its rules. And according to this tradition, the snake was not actually evil but rather, as Christ would be later, a representative or emissary of the true good God, a God who actually wanted mankind to have Knowledge of Good and Evil, an instrument of the good God. Remember that the term 'gnosis' is simply Ancient Greek for 'knowledge'. The Gnostic interpretation of the myth or fable of the Garden of Eden can thus be set out in this way. The true good God, the Monad, wanted Evil in the world, wanted a world containing death, despair, disease, disfigurement, toil, violence, cruelty, shame, etc, etc, because without Evil in the world there could not be Good. Adam and Eve could not have knowledge of Good without knowledge of Evil as well, without knowing about both natural and moral evil, and they could only have knowledge of all these evils if these evils actually existed.
(There is another even odder interpretation of this myth and parable one could defend. Perhaps all of these evils pre-existed the nibbling of the apple but Adam and Eve were not aware of them until after partaking of the Fruit. In this interpretation, the Garden of Eden was no paradise at all but rather just something its inhabitants thought was a paradise because all the evils in it were invisible to them until the moment when they received Knowledge of them. This would seem to suggest that the writers of Genesis might have endorsed the postmodern tenet that the world is simply what we know about it, that reality is a social construction, but this seems suspiciously poststructuralist for a work written presumably around six hundred years before Christ. In this context, one may also think of an aphorism coined by the poet Thomas Gray in 1742, "Ignorance is Bliss".)
It certainly seems self-evident that we live in a world containing both Good and Evil. We live neither in Heaven nor in the Garden of Eden. Some people like to imagine that they pass through life continually making decisions between right and wrong but this is not really true of me and I believe most others. Rather we continually make decisions in which we regard our desires as automatically Good and often only much later realise that we have done something immoral or censurable. This may have happened to me recently although I cannot be sure because I lack solid intelligence either way. Early this year I was told that I was Good and that my older brother was Evil and that in the forthcoming conflict or struggle between us I would win out. Certainly any conflict between individuals can be framed as a conflict between Good and Evil – have you noticed how often both sides of a war or both sides of a sporting match claim beforehand that they have God on their side? Humans pursue positive values and it is helpful to imagine one is Good to do so and that God has one's back. Furthermore, in the pursuit of Good, in the overcoming of resistance, a person may not only improve his or her own life but the lives of others. The mystic poet William Blake, a man who had his finger on the spiritual pulse of the world, penned the following in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. "Without Contraries is no Progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence." Blake's argument is rather different from mine but this sentiment fits well with what I am trying to say myself. Without movement, motility, nothing in the world would change – the world is designed for active agents that form desires, seek to attain them, seek to actualise positive values, and then either enjoy the benefits of having satisfied these desires or the penalties of having failed to do so or of having been the victims of blind fate or accident. Not only in pursuing values individually can individuals sometimes improve or at least change their own lives but through collective actions we can sometimes improve or at least change the world. The political sphere is full of politicised conflicts – between Russia and Ukraine, between Democrats and Republicans, between climate change activists and conservatives, between David Seymour and Chloe Swarbrick. It makes one think of the Hegelian dialectic. However I am less optimistic than Hegel was when he argued that history progresses through oppositions between theses and antitheses coming together to form new syntheses because I am still undecided as to whether or not we can put any faith in the notion of human progress at all, in a divine masterplan.
I would like to quote some more Blake. This is the last part of the poem "Auguries of Innocence," the full text of which can be found elsewhere online.
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the Soul slept in beams of light.
God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But doth a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
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