The problem of evil has always been with us. The ills that befall us and the monstrous evil that people do are a problem because they challenge the belief that life has a higher meaning. They are particularly corrosive of belief in a loving God.
The problem of goodness is rarely spoken of. Yet it challenges the view that the only meaning we can find in the world is at the level of what can be perceived and measured.
Evil challenges large frameworks of meaning because random suffering and human brutality are experienced and imagined with such intensity. Explanations of how they are consistent with a loving and attentive God may be intellectually satisfying. But when people experience suffering and brutality in their own lives, they are often repelled by large arguments.
The explanations, which work at a level of abstraction and assume a large view of the world, may seem superficial to them in their deep loss and pain. Once they believe that the cost of accepting that their suffering has a higher meaning would be to deny its overwhelming reality and obscenity, they reject all large explanations.
Theories that deny any higher meaning may then be attractive. If we can say that there is no other human reality beyond the small causalities and interplay of chance at atomic, genetic and other levels, evil and suffering cease to be a problem. They can be explained in material and physiological terms, with no need for a larger reason, nor an intelligible purpose into which to fit. So people are relieved of the burden of meaning.
Then there is goodness. In this context I understand goodness as something concretely experienced and not as an abstraction.
Most of us have known people whom we could only describe as good and whose qualities have made an indelible impression on us. We experience them as generous, serene, selfless, and unfailing in their consideration and personal regard for others, even when this is costly to themselves and apparently not in their own interest. We see in them a great and remarkable inner freedom and consistency. We might describe our dealings with them as an experience of goodness.
Goodness is an encouraging an experience as evil is undermining. But it becomes a problem if our understanding of the world and of our own lives is confined to the interplay of material causality and chance. We might certainly expect to find evidence of genetic predispositions to friendly behaviour, the influence of habit in modifying brain paths in ways that incline us to altruism, and the role of nurture and environment in helping shape the ways in which we live.
But what we experience in people who are translucently free in their goodness is not adequately explained by these factors.
Just as the arguments for larger meaning can fail to meet the concrete experience of suffering and evil, so arguments that rely on chance and determinism may fail to do justice to the concrete experience of human goodness. The accounts are too piecemeal and reduce goodness to something much smaller than what is experienced.
Of course, problems do not always hole the ship of meaning. The extent to which the experience of overwhelming loss or evil will threaten someone's belief in a God who creates the world out of love, for example, depends largely on the strength of experience they associate with a caring God. It may also be that a similarly strong experience of the explanatory power of scientific thought will sustain others confronted with the opposite challenge.
The importance of experience suggests also why the proper initial response of churches to massive natural disasters such as tsunamis is one of solidarity with the victims and of providing symbolic space for people to experience and grieve the scale of suffering, and to pray. Responding to arguments that the disasters discredit Christian faith is best done later.
In arguing that goodness presents a problem for some accounts of the world, I am not trying to make a sneaky, back door argument for the existence of God. I am arguing simply that any account of the world must give full weight to the experiences that are problematic for it. It should not shrink the dimensions of the experience so that it fits into its theoretical framework.
The depth of the evils that people suffer and do and the transcendent quality of human freedom are the site on which explanations of the world must be built, not building materials to be cut to size.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street. Check out the latest edition of Australian Catholics magazine for more on the theme How to be good, including Andrew's article 'The importance of being good'.