“Why does God allow so much evil?” Is one of the most common doubts preventing people from putting their full trust in the Christian God. For the believer, this might be formulated as, “why do I keep on sinning?” For a non-believer perhaps, “why does God let evil continue to exist?” Underpinning these questions is a yearning to be rid of the cycle of evil, to be free of the pain and suffering.
In a hyper-rationalistic Western society, people, especially in universities, look to science or personal anecdotes for answers, venerating the language of numbers and subjective truth. However, science, a philosophy unto itself, cannot produce answers to existential questions beyond empty nihilism and cynicism. The scientific method by itself cannot be used to prove that ideas or objects themselves have genuine intrinsic meaning or value; no amount of linear regression or evolutionary theory can give a non-material meaning to human life. More broadly speaking, cold rationalism does not address the emotional aspect to evil, and is also not the only aspect of belief or faith that God desires. Neither is the born again experience
1 or general, feel-good anecdote of victory over sin enough to truly vanquish evil, because feelings alone are not sufficient to impart objective truth. What is evil to one person is good and proper in another person's eyes. To base our response to evil solely in our personal judgements thus invites disaster, because emotions are fleeting. People have explored both logical and experiential approaches to dealing with evil, so I hope to introduce another method of reasoning via the paradigm of symbolism, which blends together the strengths of both approaches. By representing the cycles of evil as an Ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail, we can better understand the war God wages against evil, and our place amidst spiritual warfare.
Know Thy Enemy… The Ouroboros is historically known to represent immortality or eternity. As it devours its tail, it forms a loop and becomes self-reliant, needing to only eat its own tail to continue existing. More plainly, the result is self-generated; once it begins it provides impetus to repeat itself. In this sense the Ouroboros illustrates the rhythm of human history. We can firstly see this with the wars, genocides, and rapes that echo throughout history and continue through the modern age. We can also see this through the cyclical advent and demise of societies and dynasties. Niccolo Machiavelli and many others in observing the fluctuations of societies notes that in essence, “good people create good times, good times create weak people, weak people create bad times, and bad times create good people.” Ecclesiastes 1:9 sums this up: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Before we can cast the Ouroboros as a representation of evil, we need to understand what “evil” is. In Christianity, sin is analogous to evil, and the Greek word for sin, “Hamartia,” means “to miss the mark” or “to err.” The Augustinian Theodicy
2 however provides a fuller application of this definition, which states that evil is a corruption of good. This definition proves to be more complete, as it universally applies to any conceivable evil act. As stated concisely by Inspiring Philosophy, “evil is an attempt to obtain power, pleasure, or safety…things which are not inherently evil. Evil cannot be evil for the sake of being evil. One can only be evil for the sake of obtaining what is already good.” Take for example, the application of the scientific method in medical research. One can easily find a litany of examples where doctors and governments conducted dangerous and often lethal experiments on uninformed participants to obtain medical knowledge. Neither the scientific method nor medical knowledge are intrinsically evil, but their application and pursuit was twisted so that they became evil. Thus, whenever something is “in its proper place,” that object becomes good. In short, morality is contextual.
…Know Thyself With that information, one could soundly conclude that to fight the Ouroboros, they just need to purge whatever it has devoured and corrupted. But that is to miss the entire point. If we are a part of human history, then we are already in the belly of the beast. The genocides and various atrocities were not the sole responsibility of great evil men who needed to be defeated, but also that of ordinary people — that is, you and me. In an attempt to study the psychology of genocide, Stanley Milgram
3 conducted perhaps one of the most damning studies on human nature; we follow orders, even those that directly conflict with their moral conscience. Deep within every person is the yawning abyss of Hell. In fact, all of history's great tragedies were the result of this very hell woven into our nature.
Just as we fight the enemy without, we must be wary of the enemy within. As Nietzche says, “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Jesus taught that “Your eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!” (Matthew 6:22-23). For many people, addiction is the most straightforward example of the Ouroboros within us; as one becomes more addicted to something, it becomes more and more impossible to cut it out of your life. “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his foolishness” (Proverbs 26:11). This is not limited to drug or media addictions, but rather an entire metaphor for sin itself. Put another way, as a disease begets itself, so sin begets sin, needing only to feed off itself to grow. “There is a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death” (Proverbs 16:25). The Ouroboros then, is the craftiest monster of all: it is simultaneously a roaring Leviathan and a silent cancer, corrupting everything it devours.
Crushing the Head of the Serpent So then, how can we slay the Ouroboros? Our initial urge might be to slash its body, to punish evil deeds as they happen, as God does in the first part of Genesis. When Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the knowledge
4 of good and evil, He banished them from the garden. When Noah's generation became perverted and violent, God flooded the Earth so that the corruption might be cleansed from Earth. But humanity continued to sin.
We might reasonably conclude, then, that sin persisted because Noah didn't educate his offspring. So God gave Moses the law, teaching the Israelites what they could and couldn't do. This method was incomplete, because many failed to even obey the law while others ignored the spirit of the law — but it paved the way for the solution. God offers His son Jesus Christ to be devoured by the Ouroboros, by having Him die a criminal's death despite His innocence. Because Jesus was sinless, He starved the Ouroboros from within, providing no evil the Ouroboros could use to regenerate itself. Then, through His resurrection, Jesus symbolically emerges from the Ouroboros and removes its tail from its mouth, breaking the cycle and proving victorious over death. The poisonous serpent struck the heel of the Son of Man, and He crushed the head of the serpent. In this process, God does a “double inversion,” inverting that which is corrupted and restoring it, using evil to accomplish a greater good.
Our solution then, is to build the foundation of our life, with all of its desires and purposes, on God. Instead of relying only on ourselves for life and meaning, we turn to God to redeem us from the belly of the Ouroboros, to fulfill the context for which we were designed, which is worship of the Ultimate Good. When our spiritual food is our own tail, whether that is living life only for ourselves or relying only on our own power and intellect, we invariably turn up empty, because we are limited. But when we eat the spiritual bread of Jesus Christ by trusting and worshiping Him, and seeking to walk in His ways, we partake of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, robbing the Ouroboros of its meal.
For the glory of the Lord then, let us arm ourselves with His Word and protect ourselves with the grace He purchased with His blood, and go slay the Ouroboros!
- The born again experience refers to a significant turning point going from a life of sin to “being born again” into a Christian
- A Theodicy is a philosophical argument providing a defense against the problem of evil, trying to resolve the apparent contradiction between an all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God and the existence of evil.
- The Stanley Milgram experiment had participants acting the role of a teacher, who asked questions to a “learner,” a paid actor, and were told to deliver shocks whenever the learner gave a wrong answer. The fake shocks would increase in voltage for every wrong answer and the experiment would end either when the participant wished to stop the experiment four times or when the lethal voltage was delivered three times.
- The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil refers not to logical knowledge, but experiential knowledge. The fruit in and of itself is not necessarily evil.
