One has hypothesized a God, the belief in which is not much tied to evidence. (It's a hypothesis for which I have wanted to find evidence, but cannot see in the way the world has unfolded good grounds for such belief.)
And the original puzzle has not been solved but only transferred to new ground, asking about this Being who might or might not exist: why would this divine character be divided in that way?
I don't see that as making progress toward explaining what we find in the world, which includes so much brokenness.
How much better to understand the problem in a way that rests firmly on the evidence and on what logic says that this evidence shows.
My "integrative vision," to be specific, lays out a sensible way of interpreting what's happened to our species that builds upon what science has told us about the evolutionary process, and it shows how that view of life brings into focus how dangerous it was for this cultural animal to break out of the biological order with the creation of civilization.
That "vision" offers nothing to explain how it comes to be that there is such a universe as the one we live in, or about why it is ordered in the particular way that it is, in terms of structure and the laws governing it.
But once we have the system existing and running, the problem of evil can be explained in a seamless unfolding of the story of life emerging on this planet, leading eventually to life's embarking (with our species) on a wholly new experiment, which inevitably plunged the world of the civilization-inventing animal into a cascade of brokenness.
Voila: Evil explained.
(Coming installments will detail the mechanisms by which that brokenness can cascade in ways that show the face of evil that's buried within the human world--a cascade that involves shape-shifting flows of the spirit of brokenness: Now it is war, now it is tyranny, now it is injustice or exploitation or evil or deceit or cruelty or hypocrisy or the lust for power or the insistence on strife or the degradation of the natural systems on which we still depend for our survival.
All these, different forms of brokenness that get pushed along by a destructive force.
So I claim that the view of things I am presenting here -- in contrast with one that makes what seem like unsubstantiated assertions about the existence and nature of a Deity -- presents a highly plausible explanation that draws upon humankind has come to know about how things develop.
It is in that context that I want to respond to a second part of your comment: namely, your initial comments about the good --" Given that here is so much evil in the world, why is there anything but evil? What explains the survival of good?" -- the implication of which, I thought, was that though I was talking about evil I had neglected to deal with "the good."
I actually began this series with the good. After an introductory entry, I turned to writing two pieces, # 2-- How "the Good" Emerges Out of Evolution
Followed by # 3-- The Sacred Space of Lovers
In those two entries, I presented "the good" in a way that, once again, makes sense in terms of what science has told us about the nature of the evolutionary process that has shaped us.
That argument begins with defining the good in terms of the quality of the experience of creatures to whom things matter. I argue that basing the idea of "the good" on the quality of experience of sentient creatures is the only way it makes irrefutable sense to declare that one thing is better than another: we sentient creatures experience of the betterness of those things that fulfill us than those things that injure us.
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