Is God Evil For Giving Us Consciousness?

There is no problem of evil for a materialist because there is no evil. Pain is a fact, not a judgment. So what if this child is born with incurable cancer and that child is born healthy. Evil belongs with the other fantasies of the religious and the secular who have not abandoned their consciences. As does good. Because evil as well as good implies transcendence—a point of view not apparent in the natural world—it implies some kind of divine force. To hold God accountable for evil paradoxically is to create values larger than God, which, if God doesn’t exist, then certainly those values are phantasms of our brains. God looms as large in John Lennon’s “Imagine” as anywhere else. Most materialists stop before immersing themselves completely in their ideology. They are human, after all.

For many of us the existence of the devil is the cause of human evil—not the folksy fork-tailed fellow but the impulse to destroy, the pleasure in cruelty, the rejoicing in another’s pain. Maybe some pure souls don’t feel these impulses. I suspect most of us battle with them to one degree or another. Does the selfish gene neatly explain the reason for so much evil? One male cobra will eat the other. Wild female dogs kill the puppies of other pack females. A bear will kill another’s young, so the female goes into heat. If we believe that, then we must believe it is also responsible for the pleasure our animal nature derives from these murderous activities because otherwise, we wouldn’t do them. We live in a world where not only do we need to kill to eat and defend ourselves, but we enjoy murdering our own to prevail. That pretty good devil is already hardwired into us. Sinful nature, anyone?

The violence in nature is not inherently evil—it is the forge of the elements necessary for life. In the beginning, the universe created suns that were a million times brighter than our sun. These primeval nuclear fusion forges made the heavier elements out of which the earth and we are constituted. Unimaginable distances of unimaginable cold separate places of unimaginable violence. The Fine-tuning argument claims that the incredible improbability of the universal constants being conducive to life is proof of God’s existence. That also presupposes there are physical requirements for our existence that God must obey. Could God create life without His forge? For me, the question is as rhetorical as the question, Can God create a square circle?

What about earthbound natural disasters—floods, earthquakes, disease, et cetera? Evil is the purposeful affliction of pain. A tsunami that kills 100,000 people has no evil intent, nor is it a divine culling of our species. If I may extend the metaphor, these natural disasters are small sparks from the cosmic forge—inevitable and unavoidable. However, for us to experience pain as well as outrage at unfair suffering, there must be consciousness. Is God evil for giving us consciousness? The forge of the universe also forges consciousness. Do we expect the omni God to make us immune to what created us?

Not only is pain the price of consciousness, it is the reason along with pleasure for sentience. Our understanding comes from our consciousness; our consciousness is informed by our senses that provide contrasting sensations—hot and cold, loud and soft, wet and dry, sharp and smooth. Can we have understanding without contrast? A baby is uncomfortable when it is hungry, so it cries. Could the child intellectually develop if it never experienced discomfort? Pain and pleasure—physical or emotional—help us assign values to our world. It enables us to discern between the very trivial and the meaningful—that color of orange goes well with your complexion—to the urgent—run fast, that orange is a river of lava coming your way. Qualia—the elements of our subjective experience—is often treated as the end result of the evolution of our consciousness. I believe the reverse is true: it is at least consciousness’s origin, and it may even be the origin of everything—the result of a thing’s ability to be. An unquantifiable yet unquestionable part of our universe.

My point is not the moral instructiveness of pain via a wrathful God, but the moral and intellectual instructiveness of pain and pleasure because they lie at the heart of our understanding. It is the initial differentiation that we elaborate into thoughts, desires, fears, jokes, and prayers, and these spur us to create abstract formulations, algorithms, and equations to understand and fix our world.

Unfortunately, this take does nothing to address innocent suffering. I do not intend to write off such suffering as the cost of living. A child or a pet does not comprehend what they did to deserve their pain. Their only fault was to be alive. We all suffer—it is intrinsic—even on our best days. If this is how our world has to be, we have a moral duty to alleviate natural and manmade pain. To find a cure for a disease is a supreme moral act. As a guide, we must exercise our free will to choose the right god. The God of the Beatitudes, who is looking out for the meek, poor in spirit, mourners, not to mention those who hunger after righteousness, the merciful, the peacemakers seems to have His priorities straight, even though sadly, Christians have often dishonored their faith in word and deed. Atheists with a strong moral code have simply chosen a non-personified good god.

We weren’t born morally neutral into a good world. I am not sure we would even be sentient. Even if that were possible, for better and worse, we weren’t.

If the story of life is one of the development of consciousness and, as a result, the appearance of a conscience with compassion and empathy, then good religion takes us further down the road. The brutality of nature can be ameliorated, suffering relieved, and empathy given freer rein. We must restrain our desire for domination. We must confront our sinful nature—however you term it—and go beyond to our redemptive nature.  

I contend that a nature that has gone through redemption because it has known evil and pain is superior to a nature that didn’t need to bother. In fact, I don’t think the latter can exist.

Can life come into being without the forge and the violence? It would be something different than life.