One Word

What is the most profound question a person can ask?

If you could ask God one thing, what would it be?

If I suddenly punched you in the arm, what would be your reaction?

When someone guns down a room full of people, what is our most enduring reaction?

Why?

Why, though, do we ask "why?" And how does "why" become the answer to the problem of evil? First, let's back up.

Human beings, as a species, are defined by our primary adaptation, our highly evolved, complex brains. It's the evolutionary survival strategy that has allowed us to become everything that we are (for better or worse, or, just for what it is). Part of that evolution, part of what makes our brains so fascinating and so deadly in the wild, is our unique capacity to ask why. Dogs and other animals can be trained to associate certain behaviors (like peeing in the house) with negativity and pain. But we humans, when confronted with negativity and pain, do not merely make random associations (at least not as much). We actively seek out the reasons for the pain. "What happened?" "What's wrong?" "Why did you hit me?" Why has this happened. For what reason. It's purely human.

Behind this trait, like a shadow, is the assumption that things happen for a reason. You hit me for a reason, and I'd like to know what that reason is, so I can avoid being hit next time. "What action of mine prompted this action of yours" is an adaptive thought: it helps us learn to live together and not kill each other. It helps us work together to take down larger prey. It even helps us learn about our world, from our initial attempts to create fire to the detection of the Higgs Boson.

But not everything has a reason. Or rather, sometimes, an event has so many millions of reasons that we can't point to just one, and we can't understand how all the reasons work together. We cannot grasp randomness and chaos at a fundamental level because the architecture of the human mind requires a reason for everything. Enter: superstition, magic, religion. We grasp at reasons where there are none. And things that lack a reason cause dissonance in our minds--we experience the uniquely human feeling of injustice: that something has happened that, given the reasons, should not have happened. Something happens, and we cannot find an answer to "why." And then, to right our understanding of the world (which understanding is mentally architectural, an inextricable part of the way our minds have evolved), we must have justice, a balancing act. If something happens and we cannot answer "why," then that something must then become its own reason, its own answer to another "why": why was that man executed? He was a murderer. Justice is satisfied: the man was simply a murderer, and there's no way to explain that, but it's okay because he was dealt with in a way that lets us know exactly why he died. Our understanding of the world as a reasonable place is upheld.

So you see, morality stems from reason. Not the Reason of the Enlightenment, but the reason that our brains automatically and constantly strive to find.

But the world is not reasonable, at least not in a way that we are capable of understanding fully. We roughly understand the reasons behind many physical phenomena, but we have a hard time grasping things with manifold and complex reasons, the random, chance. I am struck by lightning on a clear day, and everyone struggles to figure out why. Most would find their worldviews allow for such things through the intervention of God, perhaps as punishment for some secret sin: justice and injustice again. Others might simply shrug and go about their lives with a tiny scrap of denial--I think this reaction is getting easier for us. But really, outside of the human mind, it simply happened. No reason, just an alignment of energy and matter like tumblers in a lock. There was no reason, no answer to "why" or "why me" or "why now" or any other variation of why. All why's are in our minds, creations of our minds, evolutionarily adaptive because roughly useful in understanding the world.

The problem of evil is only a problem in our minds.