A G K Y R A

If you haven’t been to the website for Tim Keller’s new book, why don’t you take a look? Make sure your computer audio is turned up so you can hear.

I’m excited about tomorrow morning, for I get my first experience teaching a university class. I’ll be teaching two sections of undergraduate Faith and Critical reason, just for the day while the regular professor is away at a conference. Tomorrow’s topic: the problem of evil. The lead-in is a segment from the PBS program Frontline: Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero and then some discussion about how it relates to their readings for the day, a selection from Augustine on evil and a chapter of John G. Stackhouse’s book Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil. This is what the professor who teaches the class had planned already. I get to lecture and lead discussion about various kinds of evil such as impersonal “evil” (natural/physical events or processes) compared to personal evil acts (moral evil). We’ll talk about whether evil is a substance or the privation of good, the nature of subjective and objective norms, the origin of evil, and what evil implies about God and his existence or non-existence. I hope I get them thinking.

Something occurred to me as I was thinking about the old idea that evil is a substance (I take the Augustinian view that it’s privation of good, or departure from an objective norm). If evil is a substance, it just is. There’s nothing good or bad about anything that just exists except with respect to a norm, and norms are intrinsically personal. Cancer isn’t evil, nor is it bad — except with respect to a personal norm. Tsunamis and earthquakes aren’t bad either. They just happen. Natural evil, as is commonly agreed, isn’t really evil at all. So, if there is some substance out there that goes by the name “evil,” how do we come to evaluate it as evil except on the basis of something else? Motorcycles are motorcycle-ish and clocks are clocky, but by saying that, I haven’t said anything about motorcycles or clocks or about what it is to be motorcycle-ish or clocky. So to evaluate Evil (the substance) as evil (the quality) is either meaningless or the adjective “evil” takes its meaning from yet something else — which is subject to the same difficulty. The conclusion: evil cannot be a substance because it is irreducibly normative. This is just a roundabout way of pointing out the dichotomy between what is and what ought to be, the positive and the normative.

I haven’t muddled over this particular line of thought for very long, so maybe there are problems with it. It’s not going to be part of my lecture tomorrow in any case.

I think I’m going to love teaching.

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