Nature of Evil and The Concept of Freedom

"Metaphysical statements are not meaningless statements, but rather not fallible, testable or provable statements" ~ Karl Popper.

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"To be free is to accept the possibility of evil."

For a long time i could not grasp the meaning behind it. It seemed a contradiction. How is freedom possible
if there exist evil that would not let a person lived free?

How do one explain evil if an all-benevolent God exist? Although there are many religious people in the world, the problem of evil through the eye of religion offers nothing that i have not heard before. i have nothing worthy to add to the views already expressed by them in so eloquent words. A position of silence is best. i'd read here an article asking the question of evil and suffering from a religious Christian perspective.

Also, gnosticism's so far as it relates Plato's gods and demiurge (from his work "Timaeus"), offers a more interesting view of evil. Plato's version makes no specific mention of evil (though i could be wrong). His world consists of the physical and eternal.

The eternal is a world of reason, a perfect world of all our ideals. It is not created but is a representation of the 'maker' of the universe. And since reason never changes, so do this world. The physical is the world we lived in, a representation of the eternal. This world is created by the demiurge which may or may not be the 'maker'. This imperfect, physical world is a copy of the original 'eternal world', the "created image of the eternal gods".

The world we lived in is a "moving image of eternity while eternity itself rests in unity". Eternity is taken to mean ideals, like goodness, is eternal. A representation of this two worlds could be found in truth as eternal while belief is ever-changing. Therefore, even in this imperfect template of the eternal world there is no reason for evil to exist. It's a beautiful concept.

Not all gnostic belief is rooted in Platonist notions though. In some, evil is said to be inherent in all of us as we are created not by an all-benevolent god but by a flawed representation of god-the demiurge.

Through the point of view of pantheism (of which Einstein is thought to be a believer) though one could claimed, mostly from his words, that he could be an agnostic too. There is not much that i could say about evil being a part of nature.

The only arguments to the concept of "evil" and "freedom" i can think of is through the eye of reason. A philosophical approach. Also, my limited mind could not grasp, much less understand, the so-called "problem of natural evil". It's in my opinion that humans could only grasp or perhaps try to understand what we would called moral evil.

What is "evil"? The simplest definition would be it is the opposite of "good". Someone said that evil is 'live' spelled backwards. It simply explained that evil is anything that is opposed to life then. A good analogy. Are not the very things we know-killing, maiming, hurting another human or living beings- things that disrespect life itself, that wants to shorten, if not take away life- 'evil'?

In the philosophy of religion, there is also the question of God and evil co-existing. The 'problem of evil'. Most theists would have asked "could God and evil co-exist?" if God is omnipotent, omniscient and all-good, why is there evil in this world? And if evil exist, does it not rule out the existence of God? There is a contradiction.

Analytic philosophy offered a an explanation to this problem. The most well-known proposition of this is Alvin Plantinga's 'Free Will Defense' using the method of logic. The perfectly logical argument however only works well for moral evil and uses free will as a defense against the seeming contradiction.

Excerpt of Plantinga's 'Free Will Defence':

"Consider the following descriptions of various worlds. We need to determine which ones describe worlds that are logically possible and which ones describe impossible worlds. The worlds described will be possible if the descriptions of those worlds are logically consistent. If the descriptions of those worlds are inconsistent or contradictory, the worlds in question will be impossible.

W1: (a) God creates persons with morally significant free will;
(b) God does not causally determine people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong; and
(c) There is evil and suffering in W1.

W2: (a) God does not create persons with morally significant free will;
(b) God causally determines people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong; and
(c) There is no evil or suffering in W2.

W3: (a) God creates persons with morally significant free will;
(b) God causally determines people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong; and
(c) There is no evil or suffering in W3.

W4: (a) God creates persons with morally significant free will;
(b) God does not causally determine people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong; and
(c) There is no evil or suffering in W4."

The rest of this excellent article can be found here.

In summary, of the four worlds, all are logically possible except W3. W1 could describe our world for believers in God. The world of W2 while logically possible do not exist in our reality because most people do have a moral conscience.

The logical contradiction in W3 is best expressed in the article: "if a person is free with respect to an action A, then God does not bring it about or cause it to be the case that she does A or refrains from doing A. For if God brings it about or causes it to be the case in any manner whatsoever that the person either does A or does not do A, then that person is not really free."

And wouldn't the world be perfect if W4 could be used to describe our world now? We could all choose, "by our own free will" to do good. Wouldn't it be good if the world works on logic alone? Yet, would not a world filled with good people be boring. If such a world could exist, would it be sustainable for long if we believe everything in the universe is balanced. Good and evil is just two sides of the same coin. Would not this "goodness" be tipped over by evil if we are creatures of free will who can choose? Or perhaps goodness is a universal value and has no opposite. And evil is just an aberrant product of our immature mind.

It is said that nature works in mysterious ways. If nature is synonymous with god, as it is god who created the natural world, then if all of us exercise our free will to make this world a good place to live in, would not nature follow our will.

Could our present, and consequently our future, already be determined and it is only that we do not know what that future is? Actions of our collective humanity in the past (our past generations perhaps) of which we have no control of, could have determined our present day. Determinism then works in a broader sense where we can look back to our remote past to see where we are now, and where we would be in the distant future.

Or could our future be as it shall be because we had already made the only choice we could make, today? If we could go back in time, and faced with the same situations, would we not make those same choices as we had made. Our 'will' then would be seen as 'free' only when we see our lives in a forward-looking manner.

Schopenhauer famous words, "man is free to do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills"? But do we know the results of our will if we have not exercise that will while we are still free to do so? Freedom in the sense that a person is not subjected to external influences or threats that could cause grievous harm to life. Of course there are courageous people who chose to use their will even in situations that threatens their lives.

Whether the world turns out to be better, in the sense we all know what it is that 'good' naturally means, is our choice to make. Freedom then is not only physical freedom of the body. It is also the freedom of our mind to grasp that we do have a choice in deciding our fate in a world that seemed to grow increasingly deterministic. Deterministic in the sense that we are now seeing (or feeling) the effect that widespread manifestation of 'evil' has caused on our psyche. Not deterministic as in 'fate' brought upon by a supreme being.

When we see determinism as the universal law of causation (cause and effect), then who is to say this law works only in a forward looking, past-to-future fashion. What happened in the past affects our future (the present-day) is generally understood. But it is also (logically) true if we take it that our present-day situations could also be a cause that determined things that happened in our past.

For what is our past but documented history that is subject to human interpretations. Our present state is a cause that affects our past as much as the past affects our present. There is nothing special about the past in the grand scheme of things. Each of us hold on to it because we want to keep it special for personal reasons. And on rare occasion to learn from it. The past is just memories vaguely remembered.

If this is so, perhaps we could learn that the past holds no special power in determining our future. We could still choose. And through our actions decide the future that we want. The meaning of freedom is simply we can choose goodness even if evil is all around us. However, this remains an optimistic wish on my part. The reality as can be seen all around us is very different.