Sympathy for the Devil

God’s apparent indifference to the world’s suffering is usually called the “Problem of Evil,” but put more accurately, it’s the “Problem of Suffering.” On one hand you have tornadoes, wars, earthquakes, AIDS, malaria, and so on, and on the other, you have the human ovens of Auschwitz.

They’re all horrific, but Auschwitz is horrific in a different way. It’s not merely a matter of degree—evil isn’t just a few more cubic feet of “badness,” but a different “badness” altogether.

Pain and suffering may call into question God’s existence, but evil raises serious questions for atheism. As detective Hercule Poirot (played by Kenneth Branagh) observes in the movie, A Haunting in Venice, “I would welcome with open arms any honest sign of devil or demon or ghost, for If there is a ghost, there is a soul; if there is a soul, there is a god who made it.” And, to follow Poirot’s logic: if evil, then God.

To say “evil” exists is to say that evil is a thing, something real, something that exists above and beyond our bad dreams and unfortunate circumstances.