So where does our bad come from?

From the moment they reject the existence of God, atheists — at least the thinking ones — run headlong into the problem of goodness. Naturally. Because once you renounce the fount of all that’s considered to be morally superlative, you begin to immediately flounder trying to explain why the quality of ethical excellence exists in the world at all. So, for the rest of their intellectual life these poor people have to keep fighting a losing battle against their detractors by explaining away such things without the luxury of a divine cause to fall back on.

Evolutionary altruism is invoked, Darwinian group selection forces come into play, Kantian duty for duty’s sake, etc. Anything in fact that doesn’t involve the G-word.

But now consider the opposite of atheism. No it’s not necessarily theism or the belief in God. Instead, why can it not be an unbelief in the existence of something that’s the opposite of God — Satan, Lucifer or the various cultural avatars of the devil? For want of a word, we could call such people — if they’ve ever existed at all, that is — “untheists”.

Would an untheist who doesn’t believe in Devil also face a similar problem of explaining the presence of all that is evil? Like an atheist who finds that good certainly lives in our midst, he too would discover bad definitely dwells around us. What possible kind of explanation would such a person provide for its existence in the absence of a source who is its fount?

Suddenly evolutionary biology and philosophy are of no help. Almost nothing that can be considered the opposite of altruism is found amongst animals now or extinct. They can be carnivorous , killers, savage or deadly but can anyone seriously say they’re “bad” in a judgemental sense? Yes, some cuckoo species lay eggs in other birds’ nests and their young which hatch first dump the other eggs off the tree but is it done with malice aforethought? Surelynot. It’s genetic programming. Survival of the fittest. Could any philosophy, too, ever pronounce something like shirking for shirking’s sake (since only that would make it bad)?

Untheists have not existed because unlike good which can be credited to us — however tenuously — without the intervention of a superior agency, bad is more difficult to attribute in the same manner. Some atheists are aware of this but don’t acknowledge it because it would weaken their argument considerably.