THE CITY

The City
A PARADIGM SHIFT
The story of how the modern period lost the traditional problem
of evil has been told by Susan Neiman in a fascinating book entitled
Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. There
she describes how the problem of evil has undergone a number of
transmutations and has come to be viewed in a radically different
way as a result. In the introduction to that book, she states the
fundamental conviction that drives the problem of evil: “Every
time we make the judgment this ought not to have happened, we are
stepping onto a path that leads straight to the problem of evil.” 1
However, the judgment also raises a question that can hardly
be ignored, and it is this: what reason do we have to think of any
given event or incident that it ought not to have happened? What
grounds this judgment that we often make with such certainty and
conviction? What distinguishes those things that ought to happen,
or that simply happen as a matter of course, from those that ought
not to happen?
These questions have a reasonably clear answer in Christian
theology, where the reality of evil is apparent, as well as the sense in
which it ought not to happen. Beginning with the Garden of Eden,
if not in the primordial fall of Satan, evil has played a vital, if not
central role in the drama of sin and redemption. Evil is very much a
problem not only in the sense that it impairs the human flourishing
that God intends for us and leads to various forms of suffering, but
also in the sense that it has corrupted the entire fallen world and
causes it to fall short of the purposes for which it was created. Evil is
thus very much at odds with God and his purposes, and in this sense
it ought not to happen.
But here is the bottom line: our passionate judgment, “this ought
not to have happened” only makes sense given certain convictions
about ultimate reality. What has traditionally driven the problem
of evil is that ultimate reality is good because ultimate reality is a
God who is not only perfectly loving and good, but also supremely
powerful. But what becomes of the problem of evil when this
conviction no longer holds?
1
Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002), 5.
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