The Problem of Evil
in various civilizations
piero scaruffi
Mesopotamia
• Problem of evil
– No concern for evil
– Gods are capable of both good and evil
– Gods are an aristocracy that humans have to
obey to
• Afterlife
– Indifference towards immortality
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Egypt
• Problem of evil
– No concern for evil
– Gods are capable of both good and evil
• Afterlife
– Immortality for the king and queen
– Osiris: immortality for everybody
• Book of the Dead (1,600 BC): formulas to help the
deads in the afterlife journey (regardless of
good/evil)
• Anubis places the heart (site of the mind) of the
dead on the Scales of Justice and feeds the souls
of evil people to Ammit (eternal annihilation)
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India
• Problem of evil (1500 BC)
– Karma of the person causes apurva that causes
good/evil to the person
– Misfortune is caused by prior wrongful deeds (is
not only deserved but even required)
– Causality is a loop from the individual back to
the individual
– Cosmic justice is totally independent of gods
– Samsara: endless cycle of death and rebirth,
transience of ordinary life
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India
• Salvation
– Moksha: liberation from maya and experience
of the brahman
– Salvation is achieved by transcending the
human condition
– Nothing has changed in the world: it is the
individual’s state of mind that has changed
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Babylonia
• Astral religion (1800 BC - 600 BC)
– Gods lose their “human” attributes
– Gods are inscrutable
– Humans can only have faith
– Humans have sinned
– Humans are depraved beings
Persia
• Zarathustra/ Zoroaster (b 628BC)
– Dualist: separates good and evil (Egyptian and
Mesopotamian gods were capable of both good
and evil)
– The universe is under the control of two
contrary gods: Ahura-Mazda, the creator god
who is full of light and good, and Ahriman, the
god of dark and evil
– Frasho-Kereti (“Rehabilitation”): apocalyptic
ending/judgement that takes place on Earth
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Judaism
• Stage of El the nomadic god of the Jews
– Negative god ("thou shalt not")
– Religion is obedience to God
• Stage of Yahweh (Moses, 1,275 BC)
– Not infinitely good: capable of both good and evil
• Stage of monotheism (8th/6th c BC)
– Yahweh/El is the ONLY god
– Just and omnipotent god
– Yahweh is an inscrutable god, no longer
concerned with the problems of the Jews
• The problem of evil:
– Why does evil exist if God is omnipotent?
– Because we disobeyed him
China
• I Ching/Yi Jing Book of Changes (900 BC)
– The fundamental pattern is the cycle
– The cycle is due to the interplay of yin and yang
– Contraries are aspects of the same thing
• Religion is natural philosophy: no holy wars,
crusades, jihad, etc, no fear of damnation, no anxiety
of salvation, no prophets, no dogmas
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Greece
• Homeric Greece (900 BC)
– Indifferent to afterlife
– Hades: not punishment or reward, simply a place
(underworld) where the dead go
– Gods are capable of evil
– Immortality via
• Heroism
• Family
Greece
• Cults of immortality outside mainstream religion
– Eleusinian mysteries
– Dionysian mysteries
– Orphic mysteries
Rome
• Roman republic (700 BC)
– A religion for the protection of the state, not of the
individual
– Morality = patriotism
– Roman gods do not mingle with humans and do not
quarrel
– Priestly class reporting to the king/emperor
– Romans not interested in individual immortality
– Immortality via the state: the Roman Empire is
eternal
– Evil: any internal or external threat to the state
India/ Buddhism
• Not evil but suffering (600 BC):
– No atman: no subject (who can perform evil)
– No brahman
– Life is suffering (“dukkha”)
– All suffering is caused by ignorance (“avidja”) of
the nature of reality and by attachment to Earthly
belongings (“tanha”) that results from ignorance.
– Suffering can be ended by overcoming ignorance
and attachment
– Very difficult to do the right thing (requires
meditation and practice)
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China
• Confucius/ Kung Fu-tzu (500 BC)
– All humans are born alike
– Human nature is not evil or good, humans become
evil or good
– Ideal: the “chun tzu” (ideal person, humanity at its
best)
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China
• Lao-tzu/ Laozi (520 BC)
– The “Dao” (the “way”): ultimate unity that
underlies the world’s multiplicity
– The way things do what they do
– Good: harmony with nature
– Bad: government (an obnoxious interference with
nature)
– Good: spontaneous behavior, action through
inaction (wuwei, flow with the natural order)
– Bad: calculated behavior (eg, rituals, education,
learning)
– Good: childish behavior
– Bad: civilization/progress
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China
• Xun-zi/ Hsun-tzu (b 300BC)
– Human nature is evil
– Goodness must be learned
– Goodness must derive from society's action (wei)
– We need tough teachers and draconian laws
(“legalism”)
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Christianity
• Augustine (400 AD)
– Problem of evil
• Evil is the absence of good, therefore it is
"less", not "more", than God
• Evil (lesser degrees of good) emerged with
free-willing creatures
• God created our free will, not evil. Our free
will causes evil
• We cannot comprehend why God invented
such free-willing creatures and thus Evil
• What appears to us mortals as evil is good in
the context of eternity
• From God's perspective, evil is good
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Islam
• Islam (600 AD)
– Free will does not exist
– Problem of evil: Allah does what he wishes and
it is not a business of any human being to argue
or even try to understand it
– Faith leads to Paradise
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