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RICHARD SOOGRIM
Professor Garret
TA: Mert Reisoglu
Texts and Ideas: Antiquity and the Enlightenment
Essay 2: Topic 4
Does the existence of evil provide strong
reason to believe that God does not exist?
March 30, 2013
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
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The existence of evil questions the belief in God because God is deemed good, righteous
and the creator of all, so why does He allow evil? Evil, which is detrimental to humanity, exists
in many forms─ injustice, war, and natural disaster. Augustine (a 5th century philosopher) and
Hume (an 18th century philosopher) delve deep into the existence of evil as they philosophize on
matters of morals and religion. Both would agree that evil exists in nature because it is a
necessary incentive to push for societal benevolence. They would answer that evil doesn’t
disprove the idea of God’s existence, rather it proves that man has the ability to act in evil ways,
evil occurs naturally, and we should find a common-sense solution to avoid evil by means of
laws, regulations, and a code of social conduct.
Hume’s book, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals explains the origins of
moral sentiment. Hume concludes that morality comes from actions that bring societal benefits.
The Enquiry demonstrates many examples of the reasoning behind moral actions. Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion, also written by Hume, is a book about three men debating the
subject of belief in God and His attributes. The speakers are Demea, an orthodox believer,
Cleanthes, an empirical theist, and Philo, a philosophical skeptic. Though Philo is the character
whose views are closest to Hume’s own, no one character seems to represent Hume's thoughts
entirely. Augustine’s Confessions were written as an objection to Manichaeism beliefs.
Augustine reasons that God sees no evil because the entire creation was harmonious.
In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume questions if goodness is a
matter of intelligence. He then reasons that moral judgments are derived from feelings and
therefore are part of individual sentiment. Moral judgments are made because they are
benevolent and just, which is widely recognized as virtuous by people of all races and cultures.
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Actions are regarded moral when they contribute to interests of humanity and they are immoral if
they are contrary to these interests. Hume claims that justice is a virtue and is useful in society.
He uses property rights to demonstrate that societies with limited resources require justice to
ensure proper distribution. Interestingly, evil takes shape when equal distribution of wealth is
taken upon all members of society. It’s impractical because men are unequally fit to complete
tasks, provide a different quality of work, and take on different habits of industry. Equal wealth
distribution eliminates the incentive to work hard and encourage laziness. Laziness is an evil
because it takes away benefits that can be explored. If God created man with body parts to build
things with and a mind to think with, how can one challenge His existence upon witnessing
laziness as an evil, when man chooses to act in that way as demonstrated by an equally
distributed economy.
Hume says that marriage laws are needed because it will allow couples to properly raise a
child. Can you imagine a child growing up with his mother or father constantly courting other
people? Who in the couple would take responsibility in raising the child? It makes sense for a
couple who conceives a child to stick together and it becomes natural for the couple to keep
faithful to one another. (Section IV) Throughout the Enquiry, Hume gives many examples to
back his ideals. He would say that evil is caused by disorder and that moral actions are enough to
counteract it. God cannot be held accountable for a child who grows up with destructive behavior
since the child’s parents were missing half the time. Couples create their own progeny and it’s
their own responsibility to raise their child to be respectable, knowledgeable, and safe. This
provides hard evidence that the existence of evil could’ve originated through man’s selfishness.
God gave man a tendency for virtues such as justice and the sentiment of pleasure and pain. We
also feel sympathy for one another. (Section 5) Honesty, fidelity, and truthfulness are virtues
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which are praised because of their immediate tendency to promote the best interests of society,
one cannot say relentless evil exist, for evil is naturally overcome.
Evil can co-exist in the world in addition to the pious belief in God because man has free
will and can choose to commit sin, which amounts to the evil that other men have to endure. To
combat evil, society answers with morals. Morals are very apparent because God promotes the
greater good and men protect this by establishing laws, regulations, and codes of conduct. Hume
exemplifies criminals that keep secrets and don’t rat one another out to demonstrate how integral
morals are.
In Hume’s Natural Religion, Dialogues X and XI demonstrate that evil can coexist in the
world whilst there is a God. Demea argues that man should conquer his emotions because he
invents his own enemies, such as guilt and shame. Man is the greatest enemy of man because of
constant engagement with oppression, injustice, war, slavery, and fraud. Since man creates the
evil, why are we to reject the existence of God? Philo’s greatest argument is that Cleanthes looks
at the world of nature to draw conclusions about God's nature, yet given how much evil there is
in the world, what could we evidently deduct about God?─ not much. Philo asserts that we
cannot conclude that God is infinitely good and infinitely powerful because the evidence
available to us in nature is not sufficient to establish God’s natural attributes, since his
infiniteness and his perfection is very debatable. Hume wouldn’t reject the existence of God
because of evil. Hume would agree that the nature of God’s allowance for evil is not
determinable and on the subject of evil, it’s nonsense to visit one bad aspect of humanity when
human morality clearly leads one to conclude that man is inclined to act righteously in an
organized society.
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Philo makes an analogy of God to an architect that is highly skilled and manages to
produce the best living environment given a limitation of materials and space. If one were to
look at the architect’s palace and call his finished product ugly, he would have no basis to infer if
the architecture was talented or not. The existence of evil might be the result of imperfection.
Highly skilled or not, the architect or God managed to produce the best dwelling space he could
have, given the limitations of his materials and space. If we look at the world and see only the
there’s wretched evil, we have no grounds on which to infer that God was talented in creation.
Philo emphasizes the ill constructed nature of the world with miseries that he believe
shouldn’t exist. He begins with pain, claiming the purpose of pain is to motivate us to avoid
certain actions and take part in other actions. Philo revokes pain because the same result could’ve
been accomplished with pleasure. Actions that are bad for us could be dealt with by lessening of
pleasure instead of inflicting pain. The third misery is that general laws regulate the world. Philo
claims that if God were to run the world by his own choices and perhaps suspend the laws of
nature (physics) when appropriate, it would be better. This misery coincides with the limited
abilities of every particular species. God gave each species what they need to survive, but there’s
a lack of concern for each species’ comfort, safety, and happiness. The final source of misery is
the fragility of the universe, where it functions when condition are just right. If there’s too little
of something, (like rain) there’s another disaster (drought) and if there is too much of something,
there’s a disaster (flood). In both of these cases plants and animals would die. The same effects
can be said about wind, heat, bodily fluids and much more. Philo assures his friends, that faith in
a benevolent God is enough to believe that God's goodness and the world's evil is acceptable and
perhaps undeniable in some sort of way. (Hume, Dialogue XI) In my belief, evil could be god’s
motivation for men to work together. If we felt no pain or had an abundance of resources, there
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would be little interaction between people because everyone would happily pursue their own
self-interests.
Moving to the fifth century mindset, Augustine discusses the problem of evil, which he
blames man. In The Works of St. Augustine, Augustine says, “The cause of evil is the free
decision of our will, in consequence of which we act wrongly and suffer God’s righteous
judgment.” (Augustine, 161) This relates to Hume’s philosophy about the origin of morals
Augustine questions, “Whence did I derive this ability to will evil and refuse good? Is it in me
simply so that I should deserve the punishment I suffer? Who established that ability in me, who
planted in me this bitter cutting when my whole being is from my most sweet God? If the devil is
responsible, where did the devil come from? If he was a good angel who was transformed into a
devil by his own perverted will, what was the origin of this evil will in him that turned him into a
devil, when an angel is made entirely by the supremely good creator?” (Augustine, 162)
Augustine answers with his new faith in God. God created evil in the process of creation with
good intentions, and he is far more wonderful than any evil in every respect. God established
good “in the beginning” and man has corrupted it.
Out definition of evil, become tainted when the sentiment of fear arises. Evil might not
truly exist if we stop worrying about falling off cliffs and thinking about horrible events to
unfold in the future. Is it wise to reject belief in God if the evil we face is emotional?
According to Augustine, “If we say that our fear is meaningless, then the fear itself is undeniably
evil, for it… tortures our heart to no purpose, and so the evil is all the greater in as much as the
object of our fear is non-existent, yet we fear all the same. Either the evil we fear exists, or our
fear itself is the evil. So where does [evil] come from, if the good God made all things good?”
(164)
Augustine question the materials of creation, asking if they contained evil and if God lacked the
power to destroy evil (an idea similar to Hume’s) after creating it, or can evil exist against His
will? Augustine didn’t want to impiously question the omnipotence of God, but we can assume if
God can’t destroy evil, evil is either infinite or God isn’t supreme. Augustine says, “If he were
able to construct good things only with the help of material he had not himself constructed, he
would not be omnipotent.” (164-5) I don’t think it’s right to call the material of creation evil or
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good, but if we have faith that God did good, then the universe may have been created with good
materials and evil would therefore not exist. Evil can just be an illusion, some sort of test.
Book VII of The Works of St. Augustine pivots on the question─ what is time.
Augustine’s analysis of time and his principles draws on important themes that Hume crosses in
his principles of morality and reasoning. Augustine says that time loses itself to the past and he
questions what grounds does time exist in the future? “What is a long or short time?” He claims,
“Things in the past are nonexistent; they cease to be at all.” (Augustine, 298) A thing from the
future hides until it becomes present and then it hides again as it transitions from present to past.
Augustine says, “This is the case with my childhood, which no longer exists: it belongs to past
time which exists no longer, but when I recall it and tell the story I contemplate the image of it
which is still in my memory.” (300) I can connect this philosophy to the evil expressed by Hume,
by concluding that time can destroy evil because, evil would cease to exist, yet people are
haunted by their pasts and account for evil done to them. If someone had a horrible childhood,
then it would cease to exist after present time passes by and there is hope for a great adolescence
experience, adulthood, and seniority. God created the world with good for us to live, so evil
shouldn’t blindside us to believe He doesn’t exist, rather, we should praise the Lord for allowing
the good of what we were given─ life, time and moral sentiment.
Good versus evil is a common, almost cliché, topic in literature. Folktales use good and
evil characters. History provides examples of good and evil events. The study of philosophy
requires reasoning as to how we are supposed to live, which involves eliminating the threat of
evil, wherever it may lie. The origin of evil is a mystery, but regardless of God allowing it and
perhaps being unable to destroy it, or if evil came about by our own free will, these ideas do not
disprove the existence of God. Hume, through Philo, would argue that God was faulty in
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creation. Augustine would argue that evil is man’s doom and fate, and to fathom its existence
would be similar to explaining how time should be thought of. Both authors would agree that
evil doesn’t provide good evidence to reject belief in God for God is immeasurable. Atheists
have trouble discerning whom or what created the universe, however they recognize patterns in
nature and the cosmos, which Hume terms “machine-like.” The universe feels like it was
designed, but if not by God, then how did it all come to be? The evils we face should not to turn
us away from God; rather, it evokes us to pray for morality and justice to overcome it. Philo
concludes, claiming the most important step toward “true” Christianity is revelation since
reasons cannot explain how we came into existence and it’s only through revelation that we can
learn the “true” way to worship God. He also says empirical theism will lead directly to atheism
because reason cannot account for the universe and therefore God cannot be a conclusion.
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WORKS CITED

Hume, David. Ed. Popkin, Richard H. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1998. Print.

Hume, David. Ed. Schneewind, J.B. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1983. Print.

Augustine. The Works of St. Augustine. Edited by Boniface Ramsey. 50 vols. Hyde Park,
New York: New City Press, 1990.