Discussion Post: On Evil, Suffering, and the Liberation of Cosmic Indifference

As a secular thinker, I’ll confess that “evil” is not a concept I find particularly useful for building a worldview. It carries theological baggage—the implication of some cosmic force of malevolence—that doesn’t map onto my understanding of reality. I prefer to speak of suffering, harm, and injustice. These are concrete, observable, and—importantly—addressable. That said, I do think there are people whose actions are so deliberately cruel that “evil” serves as useful shorthand. But for the purposes of this discussion, let me engage with the question on its own terms.

If the question is directed at theists—why does your God allow evil?—then I think the problem is genuinely intractable. This is the classic formulation traditionally attributed to Epicurus: Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? (as cited in Lactantius, ca. 313 C.E./2003).

The common theological responses don’t satisfy me. The Free Will Defense—that evil is the price of human freedom—seems to create a false dichotomy. Is there truly no middle ground between a world of puppets and a world with childhood leukemia? The suffering of innocents does not somehow validate or improve my capacity for love. My love for my daughter is not made richer by the fact that children starve to death daily. The logic simply doesn’t hold.

And if we’re speaking of a truly omnipotent being, the defense collapses entirely. An all-powerful God could, by definition, create a world where genuine freedom and love exist without the necessity of such suffering. To claim otherwise is to place limits on omnipotence.

From my Absurdist perspective, however, the existence of suffering is not a problem to be explained away—it is simply a feature of an indifferent universe. There is no cosmic author who permits evil for some greater purpose. There is no “lesson” in a child’s cancer. There is only the brute fact of a universe that does not care about us.

And here is where I find this worldview genuinely liberating, in much the same way, I suspect, that a religious person finds comfort in “God’s plan.” I do not have to contort myself into theological knots trying to reconcile a loving, personal God with the daily horrors I see in my work as a healthcare data analyst—the preventable deaths, the medical bankruptcies, the suffering caused by a system that treats health as a commodity rather than a right.

Is that system “evil”? In a colloquial sense, yes. But I don’t think it’s malice driving it. It’s indifference. It’s the prioritization of profit over patients. It’s systemic inertia and a failure of collective will. And unlike some abstract cosmic evil, this is something we can address. This is a boulder we can push.

Camus wrote powerfully about the absurdity of innocent suffering in The Plague. For him, the only honest response to such suffering was not theological explanation but revolt—the conscious decision to fight against it, even knowing the fight is ultimately Sisyphean (Camus, 1991). This resonates with where I’ve landed: meaning is not found in explaining why evil exists, but in the struggle against it. The universe offers no justification for suffering. The only meaning comes from our refusal to accept it passively—from the compassion we extend to one another in the face of cosmic indifference.

So, to answer directly: I don’t believe evil “exists” as some metaphysical force. Suffering exists. Cruelty exists. Injustice exists. And in an indifferent universe, the only meaningful response is solidarity in the struggle against them.

References

Camus, A. (1991). The myth of Sisyphus and other essays (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1942)

Lactantius. (2003). De ira Dei [On the anger of God]. In A. Bowen & P. Garnsey (Trans.), Divine institutes. Liverpool University Press. (Original work published ca. 313 C.E.)