This denial, dismissal or redefining of evil is nothing new. The eminent atheistic thinker, Nietzsche argued that the very concept of evil is dangerous because it has a deleterious effect on the potential of man to become a superman. In his On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, he argues that the concept of evil arose from the negative emotions of envy, hatred, and resentment, or ressentiment. “He contends that the powerless and weak created the concept of evil to take revenge against their oppressors. Nietzsche believed that the concepts of good and evil contribute to an unhealthy view of life which judges relief from suffering as more valuable than creative self-expression and accomplishment. For this reason, Nietzsche believes that we should seek to move beyond judgements of good and evil.” But what do we move to? And when we do it, are we not making a judgment? As I will demonstrate, the more we try to deny evil, the more it comes back to haunt us.
Tolerance has become something of an ethic over and above all other ethics in modern western, developed nations. Those who are tolerant are regarded as superior over many less tolerant, less developed nations and religions around the world. This concept has been challenged many times by scholars such as DA Carson’s The Intolerance of Tolerance, (Eerdmans, 2013) and Frank Furedi, in his On Tolerance, (Continuum, 2011).
Under the modernist paradigm, tolerance looked something like this: I may disagree with you, but I insist on your right to articulate your opinion, however wrong or unkind or stupid I think it is.
However, modern tolerance now means that you must buy into relativism, which I will discuss later, that not only can you not say anyone is wrong, but that there is no wrong or evil objectively speaking to even argue about. But, now notice the contradiction, under this view of tolerance, that the person who advocates traditional views of evil or who makes moral judgements is the wrong one who is doing evil.
The problem is that in order for us to be moral beings, we must judge. The modern view cannot seem to distinguish between being a judgmental jerk and making moral judgements.
Making a moral judgment about whether to help a bullied kid in the class or speaking up about a rape in your building hallway, is a moral judgment. To be moral beings we must to the best of our ability, use our reasoning and empathy, to discern what our obligations are to other people, and to condemn certain actions, such as pedophilia or rape, as wrong. It would be evil not to.
The problem is that tolerance – understood in its classical liberal sense as a virtue essential to freedom – has been hijacked and bankrupted. Dragged into the politicization of identity, tolerance has become a form of “polite etiquette”.
At least 40% of Millennials are against free-speech and for this forced polite etiquette in the name of tolerance. Again, this tolerance is one that shuts down dissenting points of view that are considered against the mainstream. Some call this “hate speech.” They who cried for tolerance are intolerant of the other side—this is not new.
In two articles titled “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance” and “The Liberal Blind Spot,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof accuses professors in the Humanities and Social Sciences of discriminating against conservative academics. Kristof argues there’s a great injustice going on at colleges and universities across the country where liberal professors…show intolerance towards underrepresented conservatives. They used to believe; I disagree with what you said but will defend your right to say it. Now things have changed, they say “I disagree with what you say, now shut up!” ( Nicholas Kristof, A Confession of Liberal Intolerance, New York Times, May 7, 2016. “Liberal Blind Spot” May 28, 2016, New York Times. May 28, 2016.)
The people on the political and social thrones today, particularly in the USA, will not allow creationism and evolution, for example, to be even debated. The times have changed those in power—but the intolerance remains.
A phenomenon attested to by a recent torrent of pop-sci brain books with titles like Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Not secret in most of these works is the disdain for metaphysical evil, which is regarded as an antiquated concept that’s done more harm than good. They argue that the time has come to replace such metaphysical terms with physical explanations—malfunctions or malformations in the brain.
Joel Marks, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of New Haven in West Haven, Connecticut. He wrote :
Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil (https://surl.lu/tzwamr)
How do we address this?
First prove that is evil is a real phenomena by appealing to people’e ethical sensibilities. Consider the following.
It was October 1st, 1993, Twelve-year-old Polly Hannah Klaas was having a slumber party when a strange man holding a knife entered her bedroom, tied up all the girls and put pillowcases over their heads. The intruder then took a sobbing Polly off into the night.
Her friends stood back-to-back trying to untie themselves. When that didn’t work, one girl was able to bring her hands under her feet to free herself. The girls then awakened Polly’s mother, who immediately called the police. Even after two billion images of Polly Klaas had been distributed worldwide, Polly’s body was found on December 3rd 1993. It was three months too late.
The FBI’s own numbers paint a picture so grim that most people can’t even look at it directly. In 2018 and 2019, over 420,000 missing children reports were entered into the NCIC system. By 2023, that number ballooned to 563,389 missing-person entries, with 29,451 juvenile cases still active at year’s end and unresolved juvenile cases still on the books (le.fbi.gov, ojjdp.ojp.gov). That means that in America—this so-called enlightened, technologically advanced society—tens of thousands of children vanish each year into a statistical black hole, never properly accounted for.
We are not talking about abstractions here. These are not numbers on a spreadsheet. These are sons and daughters, flesh and blood, with names, faces, and stories—and they simply disappear. To shrug and call this “just the data” is a kind of moral blindness. These figures should terrify us, because they reveal the sheer scale of a nightmare we’ve managed to normalize. This is not an issue of sociology or mere law enforcement—it is an existential crisis. When nearly a third of all unresolved missing-person cases in the nation are children, it tells us something horrifying about the vulnerability of innocence in our culture. And the fact that we can stare at such numbers without collective outrage may be the most alarming fact of all!
Evil is real. Suffering is not an illusion. We must face it, deal with it, and when we can, accept it or if possible, overcome it with good. The philosophical and theological literature is ripe with people trying to provide some ways of addressing it beyond what science can answer.
Yes science can tell us how Polly Klaas was kidnapped and killed in 1993. It can reconstruct the crime scene, trace DNA, measure the neurological activity of Richard Allen Davis, and tally the grim statistics of 421,394 missing children. But science cannot tell us why what happened to Polly was evil.
Hurricanes destroy homes, but we don’t call them evil. Evil requires intention, agency, and moral accountability. To reduce it to “maladaptive behavior” or “evolutionary misfiring” is to mistake description for judgment.
Some modern thinkers try to erase the category of evil. In Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side (2019), Julia Shaw insists that we should not call serial killers or rapists “evil,” but rather “disturbed.” Yet she cannot avoid moral language, calling their actions “terribly awful” and “inexcusable.”
Orval Hobart Mowrer, former professor at Johns Hopkins University, and former president ofthe American Psychological Association took issue with the tolerant and relativistic views of evil in his article, “Sin, the Lesser of Two Evils,” in 1960:
For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch-making. But at length we have discovered that to be “free” in this sense, i.e., to have the excuse of being “sick” rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost. This danger is, I believe, betokened by the widespread interest in Existentialism which we are presently witnessing. In becoming amoral, ethically neutral, and “free,” we have cut the very roots of our being; lost our deepest sense of self-hood and identity; and, with neurotics themselves, find ourselves asking: Who am I? What is my destiny? What does living (existence) mean?
To say “evil is not real” because we cannot prove it scientifically, while still condemning it as “inexcusable” is incoherent.
Sewage by another name still stinks.
History confirms that evil does not dissolve when denied.
Once upon a time, we called places where we place people who hurt others, without good reason, penitentiaries—names that carried purpose. The word derived from the idea of penitence: a place to reflect, to grieve, to seek reconciliation with justice, perhaps even God. The very name said, “We acknowledge the moral weight of wrongdoing and aim at transformation.” But starting in the 1950s and 1960s, a linguistic pivot occurred: penology—the study of punishment—gave way to corrections, and penitentiaries became correctional facilities. Guards were rebaptized as “correctional officers,” cages as “housing units,” and inmates as “clients” or “persons in custody” WikipediaEncyclopedia Britannica. What once openly spoke of sin and conscience was softened into bureaucratic neutrality.
This is not merely bureaucratic rebranding; it is a quiet moral retreat. To rename evil as “maladaptive behavior” or to recast prisons as places for “correction” is to strip away the concept of moral responsibility. In that rename, society effectively says, “We can talk about crime without talking about sin, about harm without naming it.” But darkness isn’t dispelled by calling it “dimness,” and evil isn’t nullified by labeling it “behavioral deviation.” Moral clarity comes when we call things by their proper names—evil, repentance, justice—not euphemize them into complacency.Hannah Arendt, in her monumental Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), described the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann not as a demonic monster but as terrifyingly ordinary. Evil, she wrote, can be banal—committed by ordinary men following orders, filing papers, signing off on transports. This does not make evil any less real; it makes it more chilling.
Dr Lenon Kass called this the “wisdom of repugnance”—our visceral recoil at atrocities is a form of moral knowledge, as trustworthy as our revulsion at spoiled milk or rotten eggs. The Apostle Paul described it long before in Romans 2:15: “They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.” Our collective shudder at child abduction, genocide, or slavery is not superstition. It is testimony. As Mowrer and Arendt both saw, when we erase evil from our vocabulary, we become morally disoriented, unable to name the horror staring us in the face.
This is why science alone cannot explain evil. It can count the bodies, trace the genes, and map the brains, but it cannot tell us why what happened to Polly Klaas—or to six million in Auschwitz—was wicked and must never be repeated. Nietzsche wanted to move “beyond good and evil,” but his move collapses into contradiction, for in doing so he still judged. As Dostoevsky foresaw, if God is dead, everything is permitted. But when we recoil at the tears of one child, we reveal that evil is real, objective, and undeniable. Without a transcendent anchor, our judgments collapse into mere preferences. With it, we can look the flood of evil in the eye and still say, with Alyosha, No.
Final Word
We stand, then, at a fork in the road. Either evil is a trick of chemicals and culture, no more serious than a child’s bad dream—or it is the grim reality that every honest conscience recognizes when it sees a coffin too small for its occupant. If we call it illusion, we may succeed in flattering ourselves into sophistication, but the bill comes due in blood. To deny evil is to hand it the keys and invite it in for supper. But if we name it for what it is, we have the beginning of hope, for only what is real can be resisted and redeemed.
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt”!
And the denial of evil drowns faster than anything else. The shadow proves the sunshine: the very darkness of Auschwitz, or little Polly Klaas’s final night, testifies to a light by which we judge them dark.
It is easy to call others evil, is it not? But as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned us:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 1, Part 1, Chapter 4 (1973)
So let us drop the pretense of sophistication and pick up the ancient courage of calling things by their true names.
For until we say “this is evil,” we cannot say with equal force, “this is good.”
