The Question of Evil

I was reading Paolo Coelho's blog today and the argument of evil popped up.. and I quote..

By Paulo Coelho

A man went to trim his hair and beard. As always happens, he and the barber chatted about this and that, until - commenting on a newspaper article about street kids - the barber stated:

- As you can see, this tragedy shows that God doesn’t exist.

- How?

- Don’t you read the papers? So many people suffer, abandoned children, there’s so much crime. If God existed, there wouldn’t be so much suffering.

The customer thought for a moment, but his haircut was nearly finished, and he decided not to prolong the conversation. They returned to gentler topics, the job was done, the customer paid and left.

However, the first thing he saw was a tramp, with several days of beard, and long tangled hair. Immediately, he returned to the barber’s shop and said to the man who had served him:

- You know something? Barbers don’t exist.

- What do you mean, don’t exist? I’m here, and I’m a barber.

- They don’t exist! - insisted the man. - Because if they did, there wouldn’t be people with such longs beards and such tangled hair as I’ve just witnessed up on the corner.

- I can guarantee that barbers do exist. But that man has never come in here.

- Exactly! So, in answer to your question, God exists, too. It just so happens that people don’t go to Him. If they did, they would be more giving, and there wouldn’t be so much misery in the world.

I encountered the same argument in my Philosophy class last semester..and we debated the same way as the Barber and Customer did. Why does evil exist in a world that was supposedly created by a God that is benevolent? Why does suffering occur when it can be prevented by this entity that is all knowing and all powerful? If we are loved by this God then why then are we left to feel what hate, cruelty, animostity is? 

I think the existence of evil can also be answered by how much love exists. Sin is the absence of good, and evil is the absence of love. This simplistic rationalization of something that happens althroughout the world, and has transcended centuries is the answer I am offering to the prevalence of concupisence. The pauper on the street, the child with no home, wars in Afghanistan or even the steady growth of poverty can be answered by how much are we willing to love those next to us. 

Some people, H.J. McCloskey for example, argue that yes evil exists because of free will but why does it exists at such numbers? I think the gravity and depth to which hate has surrounded us in this world is directly proportional to the amount of selfishness in us. We are a selfish people I think. Despite the good that we are capable of doing, despite the purity found in each one of us, selfishness and self-seeking behavior over rides these good qualities. Everything becomes relative, in comparisson to the next person, instead of a universal standard. People think they are "good" because they compare themselves to those who are "worse" than they are. "I am a better person than X because I give alms, he doesn't"...etc etc. I think the standard should not be how much better we are in relation to another human being, but how much better are we in comparisson to who we were yesterday. The real measuring stick here is ourselves. Is the person staring back at us in the mirror a better reflection of our yesteryears or merely a shadow of the light that can be found inside?

Evil is not the absence of God around us. But the absence of God inside us.