Evil

There is a common usage (found in dictionaries) wherein "evil" is a noun used to indicate the fact of suffering or a thing that causes suffering, misfortune, etc. But the OP's question had to do with "the problem of evil" in an Anglican (and therefore a religious/faith) context. This implies a moral context, as opposed to a mishap/happenstance situation such as a wild animal attack or a boulder falling on someone.

Let's recall, up front, that we live in a fallen world. The world is under a curse. It's damaged, because Adam & Eve sinned.
Gen 3:16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Gen 3:17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Gen 3:18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
Gen 3:19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
This is fundamental to our understanding of the state of affairs we must endure in this lifetime. Animals attack, germs attack, bad stuff happens, and all of this is because of original sin; but those bad things happening don't have a moral context of their own; it's just the fallen, damaged, cursed, imperfect nature of the world and state of affairs.

"The problem of evil" is really all about people's choices and actions. It's evil doing (where evil is an adjective). When they choose or act immorally, they sin, and sinful acts & choices are evil actions & choices. They are against God's will. Usually they cause harm to someone (or even to a large number of people), although maybe not always, or maybe they just harm the sinner. When talking about how Christians in general or Anglicans in particular approach this problem, the answer is that we need to look to God as our Redeemer, spiritual Regenerator, Comforter, and indwelling Helper to make us able to resist sin personally, and we need to help lead other sinners toward doing the same. The only solution to "the problem of sin," also known as "the problem of evil," is God in us, God with us, and God for us.

 

I don't think this is a fair assessment of either the ancient world or the necessary closeness required to truly appreciate evil.

Is it true that stabbing an equal enemy capable of defending himself in his eye socket is more troubling than thousands being suffocated and burning in a trench from mustard gas within minutes, only for the wind to change and the people on the other side dying vicious and gruesome deaths themselves? Is the nature of open pitched battle where your enemy is in front of you and at the end of the day you can go home without fear an enemy will jump out at you going to the shops really more confronting than a non-conventional battle where a child might murder you at any moment with a bomb strapped to their chest and the only way to live and go home to your family is to shoot and kill that child?

With respect, I think you've committed the same error you're complaining about. You're conflating pain with evil. Yes, there was a lot more pain in the past, but there's a special kind of pain, on a scale we are only recently capable of comprehending, that is mostly unique to the modern world - and where it's not unique only recently understood by the masses.

During the holocaust there was a very different kind of suffering to a man being brutally and painfully killed in battle. The Jews in the gas chambers likely suffered less pain during death than the chivalrous knight missing an eye did. But the nature of evil during the holocaust is incomprehensible because of what it meant, not how they died. It's not about how much more they suffered in death, but how much harder it is to justify it as part of a bigger plan. How could God permit such an atrocity and still be called 'benevolent'? (That's rhetorical, I have an answer and don't struggle with the problem myself).

It is true that in the past a higher proportion of mothers would know how it feels to cry out to God asking "why" when their children died of pneumonia, but the problems of evil today, despite being of less immediate impact to ourselves, are more in our face and harder to answer without modest theological study. Some struggle to comprehend evil's purpose when someone they love is taken from them, but I think it's fair to say we all struggle to understand the purpose of genocide.

 

Unfortunately, it seems to me that if we follow the Irenean school of thought that we humans are still in nursery school as far as learning from our suffering goes.

 

I just don't think it is more shocking to see stacks of corpses on your television, than to see stacks of corpses all around you in real life. Like actual stacks of corpses, right there to the left of you; not virtual images on some flat projection tube.

You can see nazi goons committing executions on your screen, but people used to themselves execute thousands of people, by hand. In the ancient Roman army, if a legion ran from the battle, they would be gathered back at base and every 10th man was killed by hand (hence we get the word decimation). Not by somebody else, not virtually, but by you; you'd take your gladius in hand, and plunge it into the neck or spine of an assigned amount of cowards who were lined up in front of you. Murder was an everyday affair for almost every inhabitant of the ancient world. But have you or I ever killed a person? Why are we so much less comfortable with it than they were?

The problem goes deeper than that: have you even killed an animal? Skinning a deer, getting your hands deep in the blood? Almost every 'civilized' Westerner will be deeply troubled and disturbed if they had to capture just an animal (not to mention people), see it helplessly thrash in the trap you selt; then killing it and watching it writhe on the ground, then take their knife and start cutting into it to cut off the skin, the fat, the tendons. This explains the vegetarian/vegan movement today: we can't even bring ourselves to kill animals, let alone people. Many westerners consider hunting to be immoral.

This shows an incapacity to accept pain as a normal and natural part of the world.

 

That reminds me of my dad. He liked to hunt deer, and he took me fishing many a time. But Dad couldn't stand to eat chicken. When he was growing up on the farm, they were poor and his mother was ailing, and for a long stretch they had to eat a lot of their barnyard chickens. It was my dad's job (as a boy) to go out and catch a chicken, break its neck, clean out the innards and pluck the feathers, and take it inside for his mother to cook. By the time Dad reached manhood he'd killed and cleaned so many chickens, the sight and smell of a cooked chicken turned his stomach. Mom only cooked chicken for the rest of us when Dad would be away, and she'd always cook him some other meat to eat.

 

Yes, I understand your argument. I'm both rejecting your characterisation of the past, and the necessity for being close to evil for it to have an effect.

The average Roman citizen never witnessed a decimation. The average Roman legionary never witnessed a decimation. It was a threat, it was rarely done in reality. It happened to roughly one legion, once every 50 years, and often the generals still limited it to only the problem sects of the legion and didn't genuinely kill their good soldiers. You could spend a full 30 year career in the army and not one legion across the entire empire would be decimated. Those who participated in decimations and had to kill their friends were likely traumatised, I doubt they were "comfortable" with it. People who witness and are compelled to participate in evil are still traumatised today. We're talking about the masses of people, and if the masses struggle with the problem of evil more than they used to it's likely because evil is more confronting, and more visible today, not because people are only now discomforted by the idea of killing a close friend.

If I were to witness a decimation (in person, or through a screen) that would be easier to come to terms with than the holocaust (in person or through a screen). As awful as collective punishment is, there is still a purpose to a decimation that is comprehensible. Killing someone because their comrades fled in battle to instill discipline in those who survive is more comprehensible than killing someone because of who their grandparents were for no end objective except to arbitrarily exterminate a collection of people. Decimation is still evil, but I can reconcile why God might not intervene without needing to consult Augustine.

If decimations happened today and were recorded and published on the internet, and stats were put out and shared on devices in everyone's pockets, then more people would digest and appreciate the gravity of the atrocity than they did in Rome. Ordinary people in their times were not confronted by these acts of evil. Nor were they confronted by any evil happening around the world at the same time they experienced suffering in their personal lives, so the scale of evil wasn't digestible. And people will say the same about things our governments do today - there are many evil things happening right now that we are oblivious to, and when future generations are repulsed by those things it would be nonsense to say we cared about suffering differently - we didn't, we just didn't have to face the evil like they will.

I have killed an animal, I grew up in the bush. It's not pleasant, its very uncomfortable, I don't believe it was any more comfortable for people in the past. If you do it enough like those in the past did you would become desensitised to it over time, and in the past if you were hungry it would be much easier to get over your initial concerns, but I don't understand what your point is. I just bluntly don't agree that the average person thinks hunting is evil (even plenty of vegetarians don't), even if they are completely incapable of killing an animal themselves.

 

The existence of natural evil is the morally neutral condition of the possibility of committing morally good or evil acts. It is entirely possible to have natural evil without moral evil, but there cannot be moral evil without natural evil.

It is of course true that the possibility of committing moral evil is a corollary of the postulate of free will, but that doesn’t tell us why free will is itself a good. Surely it would have been possible for created free wills to be supernaturally protected from making evil choices. The retort that some second-order moral goods are only possible given the existence of first-order moral evils is question-begging; nobody actually knows if that’s true.

The notion that God permits moral evil to exist alongside moral good is the problematic one. Plato and Plotinus knew better: all evil, moral and natural, represents a movement toward nonexistence. In other words, moral good and moral evil do not exist at parity: the former is more real than the latter. The automatically compensatory nature of moral acts, with the corresponding quality of evil as something inherently self-destructive, is what makes it compatible with the justice of God. Just as physics assumes energy to be a constant, so in proper moral theism, goodness cannot be destroyed, only transferred.