The question of good and evil in the world has been challenging philosophers since the beginning of recorded history; how can a good God allow so much suffering? How do I understand good and evil?
I had a go at answering this question exactly nine years ago (discovered by chance when I linked the dream-inspired short story I posted earlier today to it). I can see where my thinking on the question remains similar, and where it differs.
The death of Rysiek from cancer – a good man with a healthy lifestyle and no vices, leaving three young children, just before Christmas – clarified the way I perceive God, as I wrote late last year,
What's changed little is that I see the Universe, and God, as a work in progress; an unfolding. Back in 2015, I wrote: "If the Universe is evolving spiritually towards perfection, it suggests that it is not, a yet, perfect; nor will it be perfect for many eons to come." I stand by that today. God is neither omnipotent, nor omniscient, nor omnipresent – but will be. The word here not only as the future tense of 'is', but in the meaning of intending something to happen. God intends to be. A teleological direction.
Also unchanged in my theology is the rejection of the idea that if there's a good God, there must also be an equal and opposite force of evil – Satan, the Devil.
Today I am more inclined to see good and evil in terms of emergence and entropy.
Let's start with entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy can be defined as a measure of the disorder present in a system, or how spread out and dissipated energy is in a process or system, energy that can no longer be used to do work. Organised structures break down. Leave a strawberry on your kitchen table long enough and it will turn to mush as the cells that form it break down. Leave an ice cube on your kitchen table at room temperature and it will soon melt into a pool of water that will eventually evaporate. From order to disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates an increase in entropy over time. The Universe is considered by many cosmologists to end in heat death, as one by one, the stars go out and the atoms that form matter cease of hold together. All the energy ends up homogeneously distributed; no more work can be extracted from any source. So that's entropy. It is entropy that dictates the direction of the arrow of time. That strawberry can never reconstitute itself from mush; at room temperature the water vapour that once was an ice cube will never go back to being an ice cube.
Yet despite that tendency for things to wind down, things are emerging. New life arises. New complexities evolve. After the Big Bang, we could have had a uniform Universe, with nothing in it other than randomly scattered hydrogen atoms. But no – we have an unfolding Universe of stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters; here on our planet we can see life all around us. We humans are developing ever-more complex societies; life is evolving everywhere in response to natural selection and the changing environment.
Good and evil. Consider the body of a dead Russian soldier, blown up by a shell while sent to attack well-prepared Ukrainian positions. What was once a sentient biological entity is now a collection of decomposing cells. Complexity that had emerged to live and breath and reproduce has been turned into useless matter, unable to do anything. Entropy. The man who sent this soldier to his death, to increase entropy in the system, the man who orders guided missile attacks on residential areas of Ukrainian cities, to kill, to maim – this is evil.
Consider the onset of spring (the past two days have been lovely in Jakubowizna). Warmth and sunlight, first butterflies, birdsong, tiny buds emerging on twigs, squirrels chasing each other in the high branches – emergence. Life from what had been for months cold, hard, dead earth. Emergence and complexity. Good.
Coming back to teleology – does complexity serve a purpose, or is it merely an accidental byproduct of random interactions? I intuitively believe that it does serve a purpose, and isn't random. That's for us to recognise, and be grateful for.
I wrote back in 2009 about the way our lives are forever balanced on the edge of chaos; we could consciously stay upright and keep moving on, or we could complacently put a foot wrong and tumble over the precipice. That constant dance between emergence and entropy can be seen in the inherent dynamism of existence; new complexity emerges all the time from seemingly chance interactions. And all complex life eventually succumbs to the ever-present tendency towards disorder. Our bodies die. Every living thing dies. But they leave a trace. And there's more to the Universe than biological life – there is consciousness, and there is the conscious will.
More tomorrow.
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