Meditations on the problem of evil

And review of the concept of the Demiurge

I frequently make reference to the Demiurge, so I thought I would elaborate on what I mean by this.

At the core the question being explored is: how can the problem of evil be explained?¹

The problem of evil is easy for most people to ignore when times are good; no one likes a pessimistic naysayer during easy times of plenty, according to Carl Schmitt.² But times are bad and going to get much worse, so wrestling with this question is important. Religion and material prosperity have a strong inverse correlation; think about and do a gut check on what you believe now so you are better prepared before the harshness of a rapidly declining material reality surprises you and drives you to depression or despair.

There are a couple of basic approaches to address the problem of evil:

1. Evil is the absence of and distance from God, a necessary choice given to humans with free will (the standard Jewish, Christian and Muslim approach);

2. There is no God and we are here merely as a result of the Big Bang and evolution, and evil just kind of occurs just as good does (the atheist approach);

3. There is no evil, there is just nature’s laws which a distant, aloof non-interventionist God created and it is up to us as human’s to either abide by nature’s laws and live in harmony with them which will provide peace of soul, or stray from them which causes chaos and destruction (the pantheist approach); or

4. The unrelenting evil in the world is tied to a matter/spiritual duality, where an evil being is in charge of material reality and the good God is in charge of spiritual reality (the Gnostic, Bogomil, Marcionite, and Cathar approach).

There’s also a polytheist approach practiced by the Romans and Greeks, for example, where humans were just unlucky to fall prey to the whims of various Gods. But this hasn’t been in vogue in a couple thousand years (sorry, Julian the Apostate). Same with Zoroastrianism, which posited an ongoing war between Good and Evil with the battle represented on the earthly plane.

Let’s go through the four enumerated approaches briefly. I’m not a theologian and I don’t pretend this to be a conclusive overview — it’s just my understanding, and I’m open to growing and learning if you have something to add to it.

1. Some of the problems with the standard religious approach include (1) the evil that happens to children or invalids who do not have the opportunity to decide whether to get closer to the light or not. If people aren’t provided the opportunity to choose good or evil, how can this approach be correct? (One possible solution for this is to allow for reincarnation, but these religions generally frown upon it. Or they’re stuck in purgatory until the End of Times, which seems unsatisfactory). (2) Another problem with this approach is the nature of free will conflicts with the notion of God as omnipotent and omniscient - he would already know what people will choose, so how can that free will be anything but illusory? And how can Heaven and Hell exist without free choice? Nor does (3) it properly address the role of animal suffering in this formulation.

2. The problem with the atheist approach is: where did all the matter in the universe come from? If you took all the matter in the universe and stuck it in a giant ball, something outside of that ball (and the corresponding space/time) would have had to have created it. We would call such a creator God. To claim the Big Bang started creation is to beg the question of well, what created the Big Bang? The human mind balks at envisioning a forever static universe, or a universe with infinite Big Bangs; the mind demands cause and effect resting with a first cause. It’s also something engrained in humanity — there are no atheists in foxholes, most people intrinsically feel they have some sort of soul, and God exists among all the peoples of the world.

3. The problem with the pantheist perspective is it has a poor track record. Hitler was a pantheist and lost everything (if focusing on abiding by nature’s laws was bound for victory, shouldn’t he have won?), the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was a pantheist and he died young, likely from inhaling microscopic particles of glass as part of his job. Nietzsche was an admirer of Spinoza and of Heraclitus, and he realized that his world-affirmation came close to pantheism, and he went insane and spent the last 10 years of his life bedridden.

   It doesn’t disprove it, but pantheism is a lonely, cold universe with an absent God, and it doesn’t seem to work out so well for its believers, and it provides no comfort for the losers in a Darwinian struggle for survival.

4. Regarding the matter/spiritual duality approach, material reality does seem to be infused with evil. After all, the only way one can survive is by eating other living things — even plants want to grow, to expand, to become bigger and healthier and live longer (and they have natural defenses to help them do so). This is the core, base reality, it’s extremely Darwinian as much as we (or at least those with Christian ethics) hate to think about it. The universal commandment: Consume other things in order to live. And if we look at the scope of human history, it’s full of endless suffering, ever-increasing centralization and gradual loss of individual autonomy and privacy; the bad prosper while the good suffer. It is hard to believe that a loving, caring God would allow such a situation; a matter/spiritual duality, a split where the Demiurge is the malevolent creator and maintainer of material reality, and the God of goodness is in charge of spiritual reality does a better job of explaining this scenario than the standard approach.

   There are two types of matter/spiritual duality believers: in moderate dualism the Demiurge is ultimately subordinate to the spiritual God; in radical dualism God and the Demiurge just have their own realms and they are equal in power to each other.

   Under this matter/spiritual dualist approach, a soul reincarnates until it transcends the material desires that bind it to this realm; there is no Heaven vs. Hell (Hell is here on earth). Once it transcends these material desires, the soul ascends to rejoin the spiritual God and reincarnation is no longer necessary. It’s very Buddhist-like in this sense.

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The matter/spiritual duality approach in history

The concept of the Demiurge has reappeared repeatedly throughout history, only to be ruthlessly suppressed by centralized authorities, because to deny the importance of material reality is inherently decentralizing: why strive for power, material possessions and control if material reality is hopelessly fallen and evil and if the goal of life is to return to the non-material spiritual God of goodness?³ This is why centralized authorities MUST crush this belief, because it threatens to undermine their power. Throughout history the Gnostics, the Bogomils and the Marcionites, followed by the Cathars have believed in the concept, and it offers a better explanation for the problem of evil compared to the traditional approach, which is why it always re-emerges in another form after being brutally suppressed.

The decentralized Cathars were brutally crushed by the centralized Catholic during the Albigensian Crusade, where 200,000-1,000,000 were murdered, many of them burnt to death, and then they were wiped out during the subsequent Inquisition. But does this not just prove the Cathar point about material reality being controlled by the Demiurge?

Each of these groups, to the extent they can be categorized (the Gnostics, for example, were not unified and had lots of different sects with different beliefs), believed that the God of the Old Testament represented material reality and the God of the New Testament represented spiritual reality. The Cathars did not even believe Jesus was a physical being; they thought he only had existed on the spiritual plane, and they denied the validity of the OT and much of the NT as well.

It is highly unlikely that we will receive a definitive answer to the problem of evil in this life. The most we can do is use our reason as best we can and then arrive at what we think is the most likely explanation for the world around us. For me, the older I get the more I see the matter/spiritual duality as properly reflecting what I see in the world, with evil infused in material reality and terrible incentive structures guiding human behavior (a ruthless Darwinian process to out-manipulate others or become prey; a tragedy of the commons with huge destruction of nature and extinction of species which is only speeding up; and if one closely studies our elites, its hard to conclude they’re not animated by some sort of active, creative and manifesting demonic influence, etc). A pure spiritual God who does not and will not interfere in the Demiurge’s control of this world unfortunately lines up with observable facts. Perhaps my views will evolve further in a different direction, but the regular drumbeat of terrible news, declining quality of life, and the horrors of reality itself have reinforced this to me so far.

1. While “good” and “evil” are generally defined in slave-morality Christian terms, per Nietzsche, versus a “good” vs “bad” master morality perspective of the Romans, I believe there are some aspects of life that transcend such distinctions. For example, consider something like this: I think anyone would be hard-pressed not to consider such a vision to be a nightmare of horror regardless of perspective. The photographer apparently killed himself over it.

2. “Without wanting to decide the question of the nature of man one may say in general that as long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists. The political adversaries of a clear political theory will, therefore, easily refute political phenomena and truths in the name of some autonomous discipline as amoral, uneconomical, unscientific and above all else declare this- a devilry worthy of being combated.” ― Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political 

3. It’s the same reason why Buddhism is inherently decentralized; it’s focus on human suffering in the material world and the desire to reject and transcend it has much in common with this approach. Catharism has been compared to a western form of Buddhism.