The Problem of Evil meets its most worthy opponent in the Free Will Defense, yet it seems that the whole idea of choice can be reduced to competing neural impulses over which our conscious will has no control. In every decision you make, ideas, impulses, subconscious desires, and others battle to be made manifest in your behavior, making you a mere facilitator of a competition between forces of an origin entirely detached from your consciousness. You can still do what you will, but you cannot will what you will. So, if free will can be reduced and even eliminated, how can we justify the existence of evil and tragedy in a universe hypothetically designed by an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God? Well, maybe we can’t from where we’re standing. But if we step back, we’ll realize that we used a fatal axiomatic presupposition which rendered all moral philosophizing useless. We entered the moral domain with a reductionist sword. We brought the wrong tools to the right problem.
To construct a map of divine meaning and therefore address the Problem of Evil, we must first recognize that humans participate in two unique yet convergent domains of pursuit: the Is and the Ought, the physical world and the narrative world, the world we investigate through scientific inquiry and the world we explore with culture. In the domain of what Is, we start with the least fundamental phenomena - sticks and stones, for example - and use deductive reasoning, rationality, empirical experimentation, and other scientific tools to ascend to the investigation of the most fundamental and complex phenomena - cosmogony and neuroscience, for example. The principle dichotomy of this realm is between order and chaos. The universe favors entropy and life responds by creating informed, habitable order. This is the nature of our physical environment.
Moving up from the world that is computed by the nervous system is the world with which we infuse the ether to bridge the gap to Heaven. In this world of culture and moral inquiry, we create stories that reveal what ought to be and we tend to structure our conceptualizations with dogma and spirituality. I recognize that these are not non-physical processes and that not everyone partakes in them dogmatically or even spiritually, but it must be acknowledged that this is a unique realm of pursuit and therefore requires a different set of tools. In this world, we begin with the most fundamental phenomena - Hell, Heaven, Good, and Evil, for example - and work outwards to construct a coherent hierarchy of values that unifies communities and differentiates virtues. We do this, again, with stories, but also with music, art, creative intuition, and more. Of course, this should not be undertaken in negligence to scientific reasoning: people who blindly, dogmatically, and superstitiously adhere to narratives because of cultural influence without demonstrating healthy skepticism and rationality can be some of the worst people imaginable. The narratives must, obviously, be held in check and their moral abstractions should be practiced with belief within reason. Why shouldn’t we work out the kinks in the landscape of Good and Evil using reductionist rationality? You probably can and you can probably get quite far. You should just recognize two things: 1. The moral axioms you stand upon were derived using millennia of fictional exploration. 2. The best thing to do is not always the most rational. Take the Biblical story of Job, for example. When tragedy befalls you because God and Satan themselves are betting against you and your life descends into a living hell through no fault of your own, what’s the rational thing to do? Would it be rational not to shake your fist at the sky in anger and bitterness? Of course not. What should you do, though? Maintain faith in the proposition that Being itself is Good. This is probably an irrational conclusion given the evidence of your life. But we see that this story has been acted out successfully enough times that we should trust it. That’s faith in an archetypal story. And it happens to be the right way to move toward Heaven (the best state of being the world might have to offer) and away from Hell (the worst).
Therefore, if you want to bring your reductionism and rationality to the moral domain, feel free, but know that using those as your primary tools is deeply against the counsel of the wisest of your ancestors. By treating each domain of pursuit with a differentiated approach, you nourish the spirit as it reaches out toward the Good and you establish order in an entropic universe, making life more abundant and illuminating the physical road ahead. In the proper balance between these approaches, at the point of intersection between the physical and narrative worlds, at the locus of beautiful interplay, you find your personal legend and meaning. Here is where eternity sees itself in the mirror, where you are eternity and you are the mirror (Khalil Gibran). Here, you are not merely the host of competing neural impulses, you are the shining vessel through which Life and Love long for Themselves.
Just as dimension in vision comes, in part, from the integration of disparate yet overlapping inputs from each retina, dimension in Being comes from the integration of inputs from the narrative world and the physical world. Without Evil and Chaos (malevolence and tragedy), we have no dimension and no meaning.
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