Why There's More Good Than Evil in the Universe

I have a colleague and friend who teaches math, and is a wonderful and dedicated teacher. Years ago, wanting to do something for the cause of world peace, she started finding out about nuclear weapons, and now she’s one of the experts in the state, and has given nationally funded summer seminars on the subject to international groups. Since this topic scares me so much that I’ve only gone to one of her lectures out of the desire to support a friend, I am grateful and admiring beyond words that she does this.

She’s a sincere Christian, and, like many I’ve met and taught over the years, sees the world as a battleground between good and evil, and told me she had always thought of it, not only as a battle, but as one whose outcome was in doubt, so it was important to get as many people as possible on the right side. I told her I disagreed, and why. My response was new to her, and she found it helpful and told me to write it down. She’s been an unfailing supporter of my desire to write, and of the value of what I have to say, so this seems like a good first topic.

The point of view she shares with many other Christians, that the world is a battleground between good and evil, in the persons of God and the Devil and their respective followers, comes historically from Zoroaster or Zarathustra, a Persian who lived about 500B.C.E. Zoroaster answered the question of why there is evil in the world (by the way, “evil” in this context means “bad stuff”, not just bad stuff due to human malice), by saying that there are two forces responsible for the universe: a benevolent deity named Ahura Mazda, and a malevolent one named Ahriman. They are engaged in a struggle for control that will continue through all time, and end in a final battle in which Ahura Mazda will triumph. After that, there will be a last judgement, for which all humans who have ever lived will be resurrected. Each will be judged as to whether s/he was on the side of good or evil. If good, an eternity of delight will be her/his reward, but if evil, then an eternity of punishment. So each of us should live our lives so as to be on the side of good, and reap the reward of eternal joy.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should, because Zoroastrianism is where Judaism, Christianity, and Islam got the idea of the resurrection of the body, which was still highly controversial in Judaism at the time of Jesus. (We can see this in the story the Sadducee tells about the woman who married a man who died, and then in turn married each of his brothers to fulfill the obligation to give her first husband an heir. The question, “Who will she be married to in heaven?” is meant to show that the idea of the resurrection of the dead is ridiculous, since it leads to problems like this one.) Christianity and Islam also adopted the final battle, last judgement, and eternity of heaven and hell from Zoroastrianism, so it’s had a lot of influence, despite the fact that only a few thousand Zoroastrians survive today, in India, where they are called Parsees, because they came from Persia a long time ago.

There are two problems with the “world as battle between good and evil” idea that I’d like to look at now. One is a local one, so to speak: It conflicts with Christian doctrine. If you’re not a Christian, this may not matter much, but I’d like to look at this briefly, anyway. So here’s the conflict: Christianity is monotheistic. It believes there is one God, “maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible,” as the Nicene Creed says. That means that everything, including any evil force, was made by God, in some form, and is subordinate to God. The real attraction of the battle–between–good–and–evil view is that it avoids having to explain how a good God can have created all the evil we see in the world. Monotheism, by contrast, absolutely has to deal with this problem. In the Apocrypha (books written during the time between when the Hebrew Bible/ a.k..a. Old Testament’s content was finalized and the time the New Testament was written––the Intertestamentary Period), the book of Enoch tells the story of Lucifer, God’s favorite angel, who rebelled and was thrown out of heaven. (The book of Enoch was very popular, got translated into lots of languages, and this part of it is the basis for Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost. Because of all this, lots of people think the story of Lucifer is in the Bible. It’s not.) The Lucifer story is an attempt to deal with the problem of evil without giving up monotheism. It has problems of its own, but that’s for another time.

The second problem is a more basic one: Evil is inherently parasitic on good, and can’t exist without it. Evil is always a twisting (which is what “perversion” literally means) or corruption or disorder or destruction of good. Think about it. When you get sick, your good and normally well-functioning body is being disordered by the illness. Wars, which are hugely evil, are the destruction of what was functioning and orderly and good. No functioning body, no disease. No countries and societies, no wars. The good thing has to exist in order for the bad to attack and disorder it. At the most basic level, existence is a good, and as soon as something exists, it IS a something––that is, it has a form, structure, qualities of some kind, which are all good. THEN and because of this, it’s possible for all those things to be twisted or damaged or destroyed, or used for evil purposes, and that’s bad. But the good comes first.

So, although evil may be very powerful, and cause huge and overwhelmingly tragic losses at times, it simply can’t be as powerful as good, because it is totally dependent on good for its existence. This doesn’t make evil go away, of course, or make it less awful, but it does mean that we aren’t living in a universe evenly balanced between good and evil. Good comes first, and there is necessarily more good than evil (just as there is necessarily more of a host than its parasite). And this is actually something we can see day–to–day if we stop to think about it. There are more good people than bad (criminals are parasites on the good people), there is more honesty than lieing (lies are parasites on the truth, because if people couldn’t rely on others telling the truth most of time, they wouldn’t believe lies), there’s more kindness than cruelty, etc. A comforting thought to end on for now.

What This Blog is About

The topic of God is immensely interesting and important, I've always thought. What could matter more than whether God exists and what God is like? And yet, most people get just enough information on the subject to be immunized against further thinking about it. They go to Sunday School, or maybe listen to friends who do, or perhaps go to church, and get some ideas about God from those experiences. And usually, those ideas last them for the rest of their lives, for good or ill. At whatever age most of us stop learning math, we understand that there's a lot more math where that came from that we'll never get to, and that the math we'll never master ourselves is a genuine area of expertise, and probably quite important. But in the area of theology (thinking about God), most of us are quite convinced that our stock of ideas is pretty much all that's worth considering.

This is also true several levels up. I taught Philosophy of Religion from textbooks whose list of topics and contents made sense only within a Western Christian context, and whose authors seemed oblivious to the fact that there are other religions with other ideas, questions, and answers. I started teaching Comparative Religion to get away from that. Since religion and theology fascinate me, I kept reading in many traditions, and realized that there are many more thinkers and thoughts about God (even in the West) than you could ever guess either from going to church for your whole life, or from reading Philosophy of Religion texts and anthologies.

My own thinking about God changed as a result--I feel for the better, much better--and it continues to evolve. I want to use this blog to record and think through ideas about God that I find helpful, and to critique popular or commonly held ones that I think are wrong. I hope it will help you to think through your own ideas about God, and perhaps give you some new ideas that you may find helpful.