“The Mind of the Maker” and the problem of evil
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Another good idea out of Dorothy Sayers’ “The Mind of the Maker,” this time dealing with one of the real conflicts that people have about the Christian God.
If we say that God is good and all-powerful, as the Creeds say, it follows for pragmatic non-Christians to ask, “If He made all things, He must’ve made evil as well. How can a good God make evil? And if He didn’t make evil, how can He be the maker of all things?”
What Sayers suggests is that by the act of His creation, God made evil possible where it wasn’t before. To go back to Shakespeare as a way to bring it to something we can easily grasp:“Shakespeare writes Hamlet. That act of creation enriches the world with a new category of Being, namely: Hamlet. But simultaneously it enriches the world with a new category of Not-Being, namely: Not-Hamlet. Everything other than Hamlet, to the farthest bounds of the universe, acquires in addition to its former characteristics, the characteristic of being Not-Hamlet; the whole of the past immediately and automatically become Not-Hamlet.
Now, in a sense, it is true to say that the past was Not-Hamlet before Hamlet was created or thought-of; it is true, but it is meaningless, since apart from Hamlet there is no meaning that we can possibly attach to the term Not-Hamlet.”
Or, if that is still just too weird to get a handle on, she’s got another way to put it that might work better. Consider a great writer composing a poem. At some point, he is stuck for the right word. In this instance, there is only one word that will work and carry the full expression of the idea. In the act of choosing the Right word, our writer automatically renders every other word in the dictionary Wrong. Are the words inherently wrong? No. Then how was Wrong created?
“It is the poet who has created the “wrongness” in the act of creating the “rightness.” In making a good which did not exist before, he has simultaneously made an evil which did not exist before. Nor was there any way by which he could possibly make the Good without making the Evil as well.”
And, if you’re still hanging in there, there’s a further exploration of this that is worth adding on:
“Unfortunately, his creation is safe from the interference of other wills only as long as it remains in his head. By … writing it down … he subjects it to the impact of alien wills. These alien wills can, if they like, become actively aware of all the possible wrong words and call them into positive being. They can, for example, misquote, misinterpret, or deliberately alter the poem. This evil is contingent upon the poet’s original good: you cannot misquote a poem that is not there, and the poet is (in that sense) responsible for all subsequent misquotations of his work. But one can scarcely hold him guilty of them.
Misquotation, misinterpretation and deliberate distortion produce the same kind of evil in different ways. We may feel that they are quite dissimlar offenses. Misquotation arises from carelessness or bad memory; misinterpretation from lack of understanding; deliberate distorion from a perverted intention…
The mind of man has always appreciated this ascending scale of Evil…”
Now that I write this all down, I’m aware that all of this will probably be more helpful to me as “deep background” than something to try to trot out if I meet a non-believer who is open to apologetics. This is a difficult thing to get exactly right, and the choice of words is very important. In trying to bring off Sayers’ metaphor, I’d probably ending up proving her point about Evil by misquoting her badly.
And not to say, by the way, that a non-believer isn’t bound to come back with “Well, God can do anything. Why doesn’t He make everything perfect? Why doesn’t He make miracles happen all the time?” Actually, she’s got an answer for that one, too, in the previous chapter to this. But that one’s even more of a Rubik’s cube than this one — I better leave well enough alone and just suggest you buy the book. Quick read, and lots to munch on.
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