"DEAR GOD, YOU SURE DON'T ACT LIKE YOU'RE ALIVE" - Day 40

Day 40 – what about our dark side?

Darkness…is the absence of light. Likewise, sickness is the absence of health, and death is the absence of life which belongs to a being. All of these are real lacks. Similarly, evil is just as real, although it has no more being of its own than does darkness or sickness.  –NORMAN GEISLER

One day a spirit appeared to a man and gave to him an odd assignment. “Look high and low, deep and wide, near and far and find me a rock that is evil. Then bring that evil rock to me.” The man arose and did as instructed. He searched high and low for an evil rock but could find none. He looked deep and wide but came up empty. He traveled near and far, but all in vain. When the spirit returned and asked to see the rock, the man pleaded his case. “What you asked me to do is impossible! I looked high and low for an evil rock and found none. I plunged the depths and ascended the heights, and not one was to be found. I even searched faraway lands, but to no avail. I am convinced there is no such thing in the world as an evil rock.” The spirit replied, “You have spoken the truth, my friend. What I asked of you is, indeed, impossible. But I will make it possible. Go search again. This time I am sure that you will find an evil rock.” “And how do you plan to accomplish this?” the man asked. “I will grant the rocks goodness,” the spirit answered. “Then I am sure you will bring to me evil rocks aplenty.”

The moral of this story, of course, is that evil cannot exist unless goodness exists, something the philosophers have asserted for years. They have told us that evil has no independent existence; it is merely the absence of goodness. If there were no such thing as goodness in the universe, evil would not be possible. As C. S. Lewis puts it:  “Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.”¹ He rightly describes evil as “a parasite.”² In the words of Longfellow, it is “good perverted.”³ Steve Kumar explains it this way: “Evil is meaningful only with the good; it is contingent and dependent, an absence of good; not a positive quality but a negative. Evil is not a being but a parasite of being.”⁴

This is not meant to imply that evil is not real. Any talk of evil as a nonentity, an illusion, is nonsensical. All that is suggested is that its reality is predicated on the existence of goodness. Using a geometric metaphor, evil is the corollary, goodness the theorem. All of the negative traits of man are like this. They exist only as derivatives of their positive counterparts. There would be no such thing as hate in the world if love did not exist, no injustice without the existence of justice, no impatience without something called patience. In the same way, you could not be irresponsible unless there was responsibility, nor could you be labeled irrational unless rationality existed. The plain truth is that all of our positive traits are primary and self-existent. All of our negative traits are secondary and coexistent. 

Thus the positive traits of humans are stand-alone entities, and as such their existence must have a source. That source, according to the law of cause and effect, must also possess these traits. Our goodness, love, fairness, patience, reason, and sense of purpose must come from something that is good, loving, fair and just, patient, rational, and purposeful. We have already noted that nature cannot be that “something,” for it lacks these traits. The source of our positive characteristics must be God Himself. The picture that is emerging is of a God who is not a “blind Force” but a dynamic Being. As Greg Boyd wrote to his skeptical father, “the ‘it’ is starting to look a whole lot like a person.”⁵

As for our negative traits, their existence is not to be denied. We all know how real they are. But we must stop all this talk about God being responsible for them. Quite the opposite is true. They are in the world only because you and I have strayed from the Source of all that is good. When we flee Him, we run straight into the arms of what He is not. And that is what we call evil—contingent, dependent, parasitic, yet so terrifying and destructive. The remedy, it would stand to reason, is to return to that Source. In the fullness of His presence, all evil would fade as quickly as darkness at the light of day.

¹C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 44.

²Ibid., 45.

³Quoted in Mark Water, The New Encyclopedia of Christian Quotations, 320.

⁴Steve Kumar, Christianity for Skeptics (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2000), 52.

⁵Gregory A. Boyd and Edward K. Boyd, Letters from a Skeptic, 56.

   

Daily Quotation

Norman L. Geisler and Winfried Corduan, Philosophy of Religion (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 347.