The problem of evil, for an agnostic

Something I wish I could discuss with Chidi Anagonye

Screenshot of Chidi Anagonye in The Good Place, the character I most identify with in any work of fiction

For a few years now, I’ve gotten into the habit of saying, “I don’t know if God exists, but,” I always add, “due to my work, I know that evil does.”

It’s uncomfortable to me to stake a claim on any sort of certainty, in part because of the harm I’ve seen done by those who use their (allegedly) absolute theological claims to punish and manipulate others. But I’m also hesitant to be so confident about spiritual matters because I used to have near-certain faith. My beliefs were so inflexible that once I encountered reasons to doubt, my faith broke instead of adapting or growing.

It took years to recover. I eventually settled into a different sort of certainty and called myself an atheist. I was hurt and mad and God was dead. Finally, my college first-year lessons on Socrates kicked back in and I recalled that the wisest person is the one who admits that they don’t know.

I can’t know if there is a God or if there isn’t. I don’t know that this position makes me wise, but for me, it is honest.

So, for a few more recent years, I’ve called myself an agnostic. Sometimes, a “hopeful agnostic.” I like that agnosticism allows a sliding scale of not knowing. Sometimes, I am more skeptical that there’s anything beyond what we can observe with our human senses. But increasingly, I find myself entertaining the possibility of some spiritual realm that not only might exist alongside the observable one, but that I might even sometimes access it, with a thought, a coincidence, a prayer for a friend.

(Prayer: Sending vibes or contacting a friendly, gender-nonspecific godhead, I couldn’t tell you.)

I’d gotten used to a 50/50 sort of agnosticism. But in researching for Damned If She Does, I got to know enough women who are comfortable with patchworking their faith (a dash of Jesus, a lot of astrology, maybe a little spell-work or ancestral practice), that my own rigidity over spiritual labels split right open. I learned that I’m a Scorpio rising, which probably means nothing to most of you, but the categorization fits my personality more neatly than any of the times I’d tried and claimed to be “saved” as a teenager.

‘Damned’ jokes aside, your preorders will really help get this book in front of other readers—a successful preorder campaign makes bookstores stock a book, gets the book needed attention at release, and would help me tremendously.

While traveling recently, my family traipsed through a lot of castles, many churches, sometimes chapels inside castles. I remain a person who is edgy with formality and stodgy institutions, but thanks to the diversity of beliefs I’ve encountered over years of reporting, I’m delighted for people of whatever faith to do it however they please—as long as they don’t impose it on others. Both because it’s just plain rude and unconstitutional, but also because it also impinges upon other people’s free expression of where and how they find meaning.

So, I’ve accepted that I can plop down in a breezy German chapel with doors flung wide, and feel a nearness to… ???... or a peace with… ??? and be briefly an 80/20 agnostic, but days later reset, because I’m working on reporting a story of such vile human disregard that I know without doubt that there is evil in this world, that I am wading through its history, and if there is a God that allows such wrongdoing, I would like that God to become material so I can pop it right across the mouth—before never speaking to it again.

What makes the most sense to me in these moments is that there is no divine figure with designs on human life or decision-making. That the free will we exercise leads to injustice so often as to make the direct result of others’ free will despondency or a fight response. In any of it, I certainly have trouble seeing God.

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I’ve gotten to know people who have suffered on a horrific magnitude in deeply personal ways. Some retain a faith in God that staggers me. Some walk away from faith and a church that hurt them, and that is the healthiest choice they can make. And still others spend time believing in but furious with a God that would create a universe of pain.

Honestly, their outrage is more holy and purifying that a lot of what I’ve seen come from many faith leaders.

When I talk to survivors about injustice and evil, many recount the additional harm done by well-meaning people of faith. They are told the harm done to them was “all in God’s plan” or that “everything happens for a reason.”

Neither you nor any deity on high will ever convince me there is reason for a child to be hurt, abused or damaged. Certainly, that child may grow and choose—after years of struggle—to do positive work in the world. Some outsiders might even credit their hardship with the good they brought to the world, but I think suggesting that the bad brought the good as part of a divine plan is the worst sort of naivety. It ignores all those who live through similar circumstances and can’t dig themselves out. It creates a level of ignominy, a sort of non-chosenness for those hurt who cannot recover. It applies divine intentionality in the evil done to a child.

It grants that a loving God can allow evil to befall an innocent because the kid might rise above.

That’s a disgusting shape for love to take.

It is the problem of theodicy (a term for trying to reconcile the existence of suffering with a good, omniscient God). And it’s a problem I keep considering as I muddle through a paperwork challenge.

Over the past few days and weeks, I’ve been making public records requests for a case that I started researching years ago. I hope one day to be able to share the whole story, but suffice to say, the survivor in this story was let down by the church and by law enforcement. Repeatedly. And now, I’m even getting jerked around on public records requests the law requires these agencies provide.

It feels to me like a last opportunity to add insult to injury.

However, in the past couple of days, I’ve landed a connection with a public records expert in the state in which these records are being held. And Monday night, I received an email from that expert that armed me with clear legal standards that the agencies must either meet or I’m going to escalate the situation to an ethics board.

I’ve been jetlagged and exhausted since getting home from our trip, but my eyes popped open at 5:30 AM yesterday morning and I bolted from bed, excited to deploy this new language, to try to reshape this situation, lean into making it a little more just.

As that thought crossed my mind, I rolled my eyes at myself.

You see, I can be quite annoyed at people who claim “everything happens for a reason,” but I can accept that with great effort, human beings can make meaning. We can choose goodness. We can fight for it in this world.

I can acknowledge that evil and injustice exist—and be pretty squishy about the existence of God—but also observe how we can assist one another in pressing back against that injustice. Maybe, in the state in which we live, humans are not only meaning-making creatures, but we also have the opportunity to be justice-striving creatures.

That’s another avenue for making meaning out of meaninglessness. Some might call that divine; others magic. I think it’s the only option I have right now.

Evil and injustice are undeniable. We can either find reason in it (with God baked in or not) or let it swallow us.

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If you grant first that there is a God, you are still left with the question of whether humans are innately good. If we were good as an in-built trait, there would be little value to that goodness. It would be pretty boring too. (The final season of The Good Place speaks to this.) How would we discern evil and without humans acting wrongly, would evil even exist, and then, without that evil, what would goodness even mean? The philosopher John Hick tackled this problem with something that feels like at least a valuable thought experiment, and an idea that he borrowed from an early Christian thinker Irenaeus.

Rather than accepting the notion that humans were created free and good then sinfully fell, instead, Irenaeus argued, humans are imperfect and immature beings and by the exercise of free will, we gradually grow toward future perfection beyond this world. Hick suggested that to have this sort of freedom, human beings would have to begin at a sort of “epistemic ‘distance’” from their creator. They would exist in an environment that seemed as if there were no God. That world would have pain and suffering; people would be free to hurt or help one another.

If I were to accept that there is a God, Hick’s framework excuses the lack of evidence of a moral God in the presence of evil. We’ll get there, if we work to be good. But it also doesn’t make any of it really better until the afterlife, which feels like a hopeful cop-out to me.

It all stays neatly in the realm of theory, and yet… paddling around in Hick’s pool makes me wonder (if there is a God) if such a framing shows not only why witnessing or experiencing evil makes us feel at odds or at a great distance from God but also hints at what the practice of evil does. If virtue sets us on a path to greater maturity, on a climb toward moral perfection, falling farther back along that scale would reasonably cause a sort of withdrawal—either from the opportunity to get closer to such a God or have awareness of it.

When I think about the predators who have done such harm to my sources, and a few, to our country, I can easily imagine them in a soul-shrinking trajectory away from whatever source of goodness there is in our universe. I think I want to see them as an abject shadow creature.

But the problem is that I know too many atheists who are more morally sound than some who claim to have intimate knowledge of God. Are the good atheists fools? Are the pious predators’ God-perceptions deluded (and not just their moral sense)?

Hick once wrote, “It is our spiritual lack that constitutes God at a distance in the dimension of human awareness; and it is by spiritual change that this ‘distance’ is overcome.”

I’m battling to get records for the case of a source who suffered greatly and for a time raged at God, until she found a faith outside the church but with a connection to God. She now perceives God all throughout her days. It’s hard to be around her and not start looking too. She is a profoundly virtuous person, honed by a life reclaimed from the evils done to her.

Of course, I don’t know if the God she perceives is real, or if she is so virtuous that the mirror she holds to the world reflects back her own goodness. But I don’t care at all about who is right on this front. I just wish we weren’t so obviously on our own—for our own good (per some divine plan) or as a condition of being humans faced with evil.

What I do know for certain is that we have the capacity to help one another through, and we need one another to do it.