All questions › Suffering & Evil
What is evil?
Short answer
We all recognize evil: genocide, child abuse, betrayal. Defining it is harder. The classic Christian answer, developed by Augustine and Aquinas, is that evil is not a "thing" with its own existence. It is a privation: a lack or corruption of good that ought to be there. Blindness is the absence of sight, rot is the decay of something healthy, and cruelty is love twisted out of shape.
This matters for two reasons. First, it means evil is parasitic. It can only exist by feeding on good things such as intelligence, power and freedom, and bending them. Goodness is the original and evil is the distortion. Second, calling something truly evil, not just disliked, assumes a standard of how things ought to be. That points to an objective moral law, and many argue such a law fits best with a good God who is its source.
The Bible traces evil to the misuse of freedom by created beings who turned from God. It teaches that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. And it promises that God will finally defeat evil instead of simply explaining it.
Objections and responses
Objection'Evil' is just a label for things we dislike.
ResponseThen the Holocaust was only disliked, not actually wrong. Hardly anyone can live consistently with that view.
Read more →ObjectionIf evil is a 'lack,' it isn't real.
ResponsePrivations are real. Blindness is truly real. The claim is about what kind of thing evil is, not that it is imaginary.
Read more →ObjectionEvolution explains our moral reactions.
ResponseEvolution might explain why we have moral feelings. It can't tell us whether those feelings track real moral truths.
Read more →Best resources
- Confessions by Augustine of Hippo (book)
Read Confessions by Augustine of Hippo for the classic spiritual autobiography, written as a prayer; demanding in places but deeply moving for anyone searching. See especially the parts on the nature of evil.
- The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (book)
Read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for a vast literary and historical account of the Soviet prison camps; a sobering look at human evil (the abridged edition is a good place to start). See especially the parts on the nature of evil.
- Evil and the God of Love by John Hick (book)
Read Evil and the God of Love by John Hick for an academic survey of the main Christian responses to evil, best for students and serious readers. See especially the parts on the nature of evil.
- Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (book)
Read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis for a short, beginner-friendly classic that started as wartime BBC radio talks and explains the core of Christian belief in plain language. This question is covered in Book I, "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe".
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