Field Notes on Theodicy
When people start talking about the "problem of evil," conversations moves fairly quickly to genocide, atomic bombs, and Hitler. I agree all of these things are very bad. But for addressing the problem of evil head on, I don't think these are the most relevant cases—they are just the most extreme. Both terrible suffering and small indignities happen every single day. Even more to the point, our fundamental human situation is just extremely weird.
We are all walking around, loci of subjective experience, unsure how to handle ourselves and longing for intangible things like love and connection. Moreover, the intangible things we long for are things we aren't sure how to find. We know few people if any who have found them, and yet we are willing to sacrifice a tremendous amount to even possibly find them ourselves. It's a bizarre state of affairs all around.
In this context, questions about how the universe was made so that evil is "allowed" are a little off-topic. Like, it's super interesting from an intellectual perspective to understand how the universe was made, but not having this understanding doesn't seem to create immediate problems. Maybe if we understood how the universe was made, we could understand how to resolve our longing? Or feel less resentful about it? But are there ways to access love and connection without understanding the origin of everything?
To me, it seems useful to address our most immediate longings head on, instead of trying to reach through billions of years of space-time to resolve them.
A few things are clear.
Experiencing a lack of love makes us do awful things to each other.
We will do insane things to try and keep approximations of love, including being on the receiving end of such awfulness, or at least aligning ourselves with its perpetrators.
Loving each other does often feel very good.
Yet. Trying to find love only from each other—or from "inside" ourselves—ultimately seems to lead to much heartbreak, confusion and loneliness. Relationships are awesome and important, but they don't seem to resolve fundamental longings.
Love appears to be accessible even in very bad external circumstances. This seems to be to true for everyone, even people who we feel like don't deserve it. Even for people we almost all agree don't deserve it.
Some people (though definitely not all!) are able to use very bad external circumstances to break open their hearts and access love more easily. This is not to speak in favor of bad conditions but to recognize something unexpected and significant.
For some (many? all?), love is accessible even when not attached to specific people or groups of people. Where does it come from? It's unclear. Calling the place it comes from God is a useful shorthand for many of us, but very much not required.
The practice of reaching out for this love is helpful in actually accessing it. The reaching itself seems important.
Reaching out together is even better. Even though we can't get the love we want from each other, when we come together to reach out to God for love, we can get really good at connecting to it.
All of the following are useful in reaching out for love: singing that you want it, praying for it to come, writing out your desires, giving it away for free to other people and living things, trusting it is there to connect to if you want that.
If God is the source of this love or simply is this love, they are available at all times and all places. For some (many?), connection to this love quenches a fundamental thirst. It is incredibly powerful in this way. It's incredibly powerful in terms of transforming relationships. But it's not particularly powerful in almost any other way, like making other people change into someone else we would prefer them to be or changing each of us into some idealized version of ourselves.
However, connecting to love in a reliable way does seem to reduce the amount of human activity people might describe as "evil." Mean, inconsiderate, selfish, thoughtless? Sure, even satisfied people act in those ways—we are all still people after all. But that does mean that we know how to dissipate evil even though we don't fully understand its origins.
Why is this our predicament? It's not clear. But this lack of understanding doesn't keep us from taken positive action and reaching out, together, for love, whenever we can.
