An Ontology of Evil
Evolutionary biology, data science, and why evil is a bigger problem than many like to admit
In January 2019, a family in southern Spain was subject to a nightmare scenario. During a family walk near Malaga, two-year-old Julen Rosseló fell 71 meters down a 25cm-wide borehole. He didn’t survive, and it took thirteen days for rescuers to recover his body. Later it was revealed the borehole had been dug illegally.
At the time, my own daughter was the same age, which led me to follow the story with a growing sense of horror and disbelief that such things could be allowed to happen. It seems absurd that something so truly awful could happen to anyone, let alone a child. Yet real life horror stories such as this happen all too frequently.
For atheists like myself, they represent the precarious fragility of life in a universe governed by uncaring physical laws. Simple, brutal death by physics.
Yet for Christians around the world, suffering and harm present a more nuanced problem — a challenge to faith.
The problem of evil is perhaps the greatest challenge to Christian religious belief. It is an unavoidable part of life that we all encounter evil and suffering in one sense or another. As a consequence, it is a natural human response to ask why we suffer…
