Who’s responsible for evil?

One of the deepest concerns of theology is the problem of evil. That is, why is there such a lot of wrongdoing in the world when there exists a God who, besides being omnipresent and omniscient, is also omni-benevolent to the extent that He is the ultimate embodiment of good?

Surely, the argument goes, such a deity would have either not created horrific things like paedophilia , torture and genocide which affect millions of people , or would have ensured they were rooted out by now. In fact, it has led many philosophers to claim that God’s existence is so incompatible with the amount of iniquity and unethical behaviour as to cast doubts on His existence.

A new study whose aim was not to address this doctrinal question but rather to look at a related social phenomenon may explain to some degree at least why really bad things happen at all. In ‘The Scope-Severity Paradox: Why doing more harm is judged to be less harmful’ , research teams at Harvard Law School and elsewhere found that a judgment of harm tends to be based on emotional reactions and thus, people have a stronger emotional response to singular identifiable victims rather than to an entire crowd of sufferers.

In one particular experiment, they looked at the outcomes of 133 US court cases between 2000 and 2009 and found that the total damages awarded decreased as the number of people affected increased.

As the leader of one team put it: “We found that increasing the number of people victimised by a crime actually decreases the perceived severity of that crime and leads people to recommend less punishment for crimes that victimise more people.”

Which is why when harm is extreme and widely dispersed among a large population of people as, for instance , in a genocide , it’s not so immediately palpable as, say, the vivid and personalised accounts of individual victims, such as the diary of Anne Frank. In which context, the dictator Joseph Stalin was actually spot on when he once claimed that a single death was a tragedy but a million deaths was a statistic.

And there we have it, the problem of evil in a nutshell: enormity and spread diffuse it to the extent of making it almost partially palatable and easier to live with or endure . In all possibility, God is neither needed nor necessary to either create evil or condone it; we manage to do both pretty well ourselves . And that’s more than enough to perpetuate its existence.