The God Squad: Moral evil is the result of our mismanaged free will

Q: Last week, I reached into the Book of Isaiah 45:7 for the striking prophecy:

“I form the light and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” In your article, “The biggest of the Big Questions: Why does God allow evil?” you say there are two types of evil: natural and moral. Natural evil is caused by events in nature that we must endure for us to exist on this planet. Moral evil is the result of our mismanaged free will. Isn’t there a third type of evil that is caused by the devil? Did God create the devil? If so, how does the existence of the devil serve God?

How can one tell evil created by the devil from moral evil created by man? Thank you so very much for all your superb articles which open my mind to so many new ideas. -- J, Wilmington, NC

A: The key to understanding the devil is understanding Aristotle and the Holocaust. Aristotle writes in his Nichomachean Ethics that evil is really nothing but the absence of good (privatio boni). What he believed by this was that all human evil is just the result of ignorance not malevolence. We do evil because we use our free will to make choices that we think are good but are in fact horribly ignorant and terribly bad. We just do not know the nature of the good and so we fall into evil. For centuries this view of evil as a mistake caused by ignorance rather than a willed act of cruelty has dominated secular philosophy.

Another view was present before Aristotle and that view comes from the Bible. In the Book of Genesis (6:5), “And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” This view of evil gives credence to our inherent venality, or in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “Each man is the wolf of his neighbor.” (homo hominis lupis). This teaching from Genesis balances our inherent goodness that comes from our being created in the image of a good and loving God with an equally inherent inclination to do evil.

After the biblical period the rabbis of the Jewish tradition built upon the Genesis verse a teaching they called yetzer ha-rah, “The evil inclination.” It still locates the source of moral evil within our divided souls. We do evil because we are torn, however Christianity went down another road in which we do evil because we are seduced — seduced into evil by the devil — by Satan. The Satan does appear once in the Hebrew Bible in the Book of Job, but only as an accuser of man’s phony righteousness

The devil as a demon with horns and a tail is a medieval creation as are the full blown list of angelology in Christianity. There is of course the story of Jesus’ Temptation in the desert after his baptism that is described in all three synoptic gospels, (Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1:12-13, and Luke 4:1-13).

All this devil talk began the Christian teaching that, as you ask in your question, seems to make Satan the cause of evil in addition to God and human free will. That view cannot really work because God created the fallen angels that include Lucifer. Also, even with the temptations of the devil, the choice to do evil is still ours. Isaiah got it right and you found his wisdom in your question. God is the creator of everything, and that everything includes evil. God does not do evil but God allows evil and that evil in our world is our work not the devil’s work. The devil is an excuse for us to blame someone else for what we ourselves have done. The devil is not a force for evil in his own right. The idea of the devil as evil incarnate is just an extension of the evil in each of us.

There is one element of the belief in the devil that does chill my soul. For me the devil is just that part of humanity who do not create evil as a mistake but create evil as an act of intentional cruelty. This is one of the lessons of the Holocaust and slavery and all the other genocides and oppressions that have stained our collective humanity with the blood of innocents. This is devilish evil even though it is completely the work of human beings. We now know that Aristotle was wrong. Radical evil—the kind of evil we have been cursed to witness and record in human history is not just the absence of good. Radical evil is the presence of the devil in our souls and our world.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman.)