Experience, Nature, Morality, Evil

Life is often *experienced* as a difficult battle to pursue certain choices, to suppress certain urges, to make good on certain goals or ideals. In each case, forms of opposition are felt. When we try and do what we deeply feel to be good, competing urges and temptations toward bad things naturally arise. We have to fight them if we are successfully to pursue good. The so-called seven 'deadly' sins used to give many people a natural reference point here. When trying to be industrious, people had to fight sloth. When trying to be frugal and healthy, people had to fight avarice and gluttony. When trying to be sexually upstanding, they had to eschew lust and, I suppose, envy. Very little about our experience today has changed, except, that is, our tendency *not* to associate these oppositions with a deeper spiritual struggle - going on both within us and in the world at large.

Experience in the universe, with its (once abundant) cosmic forces 'unperceived,', 'unrecognised'' or 'disbelieved' by many is typically (and fittingly) now talked about in a suitably more banal way. We hesitate to say 'evil' - unless, that is, we write for the tabloid press and we're talking about a paedophile or a serial killer. We prefer 'bad', or 'not nice' or some overly used swear word which loses all serious force and content when applied both to the actions of rapists and killers - for the simple reason that we use the same words more lightly or humorously in conversation with our friends. Our language, I suggest, distortively suppresses the reality of the presence of 'evil' by not daring to speak its name. 'Criminal' or 'scum' might be the best we can do to describe certain perpetrators of seriously evil deeds. But when we resort to labelling a person in this way - as the tabloid press inevitably do - we fail to make the (very necessary) distinction which Christian thinkers have tended to try so hard to make between the 'sinner' and the 'sin'. The former is not essentially 'evil'. The latter is. (We should never believe, no matter how convinced we may be, that a person is completely or irretrievably evil. This may at times prove incredibly difficult. Evil may have infected their thoughts and motivations to such a great degree that we cannot discern the presence of anything we might think 'good' or any cause for optimism regarding the person's spiritual health. The point, though, is that we must believe God can cure even the most sick - those most spiritually barren and caught up in the mesh of evil - and must pray for him to release goodness once again in the person concerned. If the spirit can breathe life into the physically dead, he can breathe life into the spiritually dead. In time, we must pray, this will happen).

I acknowledge that all I have offered here is an argument for re-introducing a certain way of thinking, speaking and interpreting into our moral and experiential discourse. Why might it have any bearing on what it actually 'out there', what is true, what is real? Is there really an 'evil' agency in the universe - or at least our lives within it - which is attempting to have its say in our lives and which sometimes has its say and wins the day? Or is this simply a bizarre way of thinking about our lives which bears no relation to what's actually going on. There's no 'evil', we might think, in cancer or flooding waters. Only 'nature' taking its course and coming into conflict with our environment (and our lives) as it does so.

The physicalist-materialist-naturalist aspect of the enlightenment legacy our culture so deeply espouses - or believes it does in many of its more 'enlightened' circles - certainly thinks as much. This (often unspoken) paradigm, I think, fails a number of important litmus tests and I want briefly to mention one problem here as an example. (This, I expect, will feed into a further series of posts on this subject).

The first problem is simply this: I think the materialists are doing something bizarre when they refuse to attribute a moral dimension to what they'd call 'natural processes'. Why should I not refer to the tidal wave that killed thousands of people (or the 'natural processes' that gave rise to it) as an instance of evil. To me it's evil. The physical world 'acted' in an undeniably evil way. Does the physical world 'act'? Yes. All the time. But does it act in a 'moral' way - or, that is, with respect to moral agency? There's reason, I think, to suspect (at the very least) that it might.

My faculties of moral reasoning are, as far as the materialists would have it, themselves part of the 'natural' order - as, of course, are theirs. Why, though, should we delimit the presence of 'moral' agency to the context of human (and possibly 'animal') minds - 'natural' as they are - and deny this quality to other 'physical' phenomena? Why couldn't the universe itself (a universe, after all, which gives rise to these 'physical' human minds) actually have a 'moral' aspect to it as well as - or even, perhaps, instead of - what we customarily label its 'natural' aspect? If human existence is 'moral' existence, and moral existence is undeniably 'natural' too, why is it safe to assume that non-human 'natural' things do not havea moral aspect to them? They, like us, are present in the 'natural' world. As are the 'forces' which shape them - which, as we know, are underneath it all (from the perspective of particle physics) very much like the forces which shape our human lives. The moral versus natural dichotomy has to be on some level false and unsustainable - at least, that is, when we consider the case of humans as simultaneously 'moral' and 'natural' (where does the one 'start' and the other 'end'?). I think the materialist would have to concede this. Having done so, why should it be possible to suggest that 'nature' dictates, governs and/or circumscribes morality? Couldn't the reverse be true? Couldn't it be, that is to say, that 'moral' forces dictate, govern and determine 'nature'? That, certainly, is what most of us feel, I think, at the level of our human experience of reality - insofar as we insist, that is, on using the terms 'moral' and 'natural' to describe it. It's our moral natures that matter most to us, surely, not our 'natural' ones. In our lives we're bothered primarily with questions of what we should do, and only secondarily - and in relation to this - with questions concerning what the 'natural' features of ourselves and our world are like.

If this seems a fair description, and if it rings true in respect of one part of 'nature', (our lives) who's to say there's no merit in the proposition when we come to consider the phenomenal existence of other worldly things?