9) A Response to the Problem of Evil: Further Evidence and a Grasping Truth

The philosophical thinkers that I know of are content to stop here.  But it seems evident to me that there is at least one last property about this objective, supernatural, good standard that we have yet to establish.  Let us turn our attention, for the moment, to one particular kind of evil; namely, moral evil.  Now, when we say that someone has performed a moral evil, we are making a critical assumption about that person: he could have done other than he did.  If we found out that his brain had been hi-jacked by an evil scientist who forced him to perform a moral evil, we would not credit the evil to him but to the scientist simply because the victim could not have done any differently than he did.  It follows that in order for someone to perform a moral evil, he must be capable of choosing not to perform a moral evil.  Moral agents must have self-will or else they are not moral at all.

Our lovely standard-in-the-sky has judged this, too.  When we say that moral evil exists, we mean that there is a standard of moral good that man has fallen short of.  When a man says that he is morally evil, he has discovered this by comparing himself to that which is morally good.  We can thus add a new property to our objective, supernatural standard: it is also morally good.  But hold a moment – what does it take to be morally good?  Surely, if someone mechanistically did something good, we could not call that action morally good.  If a scientist took charge of someone’s brain and forced them to give to charity, we would say that that was charitable on the scientist’s part, not the victim’s.  In order for someone to be morally good, then, that someone must be self-willed.

This brings us to the rather startling conclusion that the standard has a will of its own.  If it did not, then it could not be morally good.  And if it is not morally good, then there is no standard by which we have judged our own actions to be morally evil.  If the contention that we are imperfect moral agents is to make any sense, there must be some objective standard of the perfect moral agent.  So, what we had been thinking all this time was an impersonal set of supernatural laws has actually turned out to be much more like a law giver.  Now in possession of a self-will, the standard which has judged the world to be evil is much less a “what” but a “who”.

Let’s recap.  The existence of evil communicates to us the existence of a standard of good.  We have seen the evidence that this standard is objective rather than subjective.  We know that the standard cannot exist in the thing which it judges, and since it judges the natural world, it must exist outside the natural world in the supernatural world.  Finally, we know that we could not have decided that man was morally evil unless the standard was morally good.  And in order for the standard to be morally good, it must have a will of its own.  To say that evil exists affirms an objective, supernatural, self-willed standard of good.  Does this not describe God perfectly?  Someone apart from us, existing in the supernatural, always using his will to do what is morally right?  Far from being a problem for theism, evil has just proven that God exists!