Thought for the Week: The structure of evil

Barrie Rowson considers the structure of evil

by Barrie Rowson 12th May 2017

It may be that everyday evil is just an absence of the good, as a Friend recently wrote in the Friend. However, when we are faced with industrialised genocide or the carpet-bombing of civilian populations my intuition screams out that there is more to it than that. I am not enough of a theologian to be able to say what God may or may not want. I am, rather, a practical scientist who asks if Darwinian evolution may be able to help us in this matter. It is quite an achievement that Augustine of Hippo with his privatio boni managed to largely foreclose the study of evil for a thousand years.