Problem of Evil...

The problem of evil has a couple different manifestations in my mind. (Yes, in my mind, I use words like manifestation regularly. I am such an elitist nerd. I am truly sorry.)

First, there is the religious view that I learned as I grew up. This "problem of evil" centers on the question of, "Why would a good God allow bad things to happen to good/innocent people?" This cuts to the nature of the relationship of the divine to the created world.

Secondly, an alternate, but related, question comes from the secular front: "What does it mean to be evil?"

These two questions rest at the center of my intellectual pursuits. It is my goal to work of outlining the connections between these two inquiries.

Sure, this sounds great and deep, but why should anyone care about my little game with language? I recently read an article by a French philosopher, Badiou, who wanted to diagnose one of the problems of contemporary philosophy as its dependence on playing with language.

This article wanted to reestablish the realistic and practical approaches to the questions of the universe by refocusing on reason and rationality. What amazes me and makes the combination of these two different perspectives on evil so important is that both take an issue of life, "evil," and point to the problem of relatibility that is embedded within these questions.

Both questions point out an unknowability of the answers to these questions. Knowing indicates some measure of certainty. In the first question, even though there is God to act as an independent measure of the truth of the answer(s), our ability to know God's answer means that we function, to some degree, on faith and assumption.

In the second question, asking what it means to be or do evil indicates that the meaning is not set. There is a cultural aspect that manipulates the understanding of the question.

Since both of these ideas point to some measure of the impossibility of gaining a definite epistemology of "evil," then one aspect of the meaning of being human centers on dealing with, not resolving, these sorts of locations of fluid knowledge. Dealing with good and evil as fluid terms is one of the perspectives that the contemporary church has taken up arms against in their conflict with postmodernism.

In the future, I want to look into some ways in which a postmodern understanding of morality and ethics might provide more room for a Christian perspective in contemporary culture than the traditional, rational, enlightenment approach to thought that the American conservative church espouses.