EVIL

Yet the humanitarians were as delighted as anybody with Darwinism at
first. They had been perplexed by the Problem of Evil and the Cruelty of
Nature. They were Shelleyists, but not atheists. Those who believed in
God were at a terrible disadvantage with the atheist. They could not
deny the existence of natural facts so cruel that to attribute them to
the will of God is to make God a demon. Belief in God was impossible to
any thoughtful person without belief in the Devil as well. The painted
Devil, with his horns, his barbed tail, and his abode of burning
brimstone, was an incredible bogey; but the evil attributed to him was
real enough; and the atheists argued that the author of evil, if he
exists, must be strong enough to overcome God, else God is morally
responsible for everything he permits the Devil to do. Neither
conclusion delivered us from the horror of attributing the cruelty of
nature to the workings of an evil will, or could reconcile it with our
impulses towards justice, mercy, and a higher life.

A complete deliverance was offered by the discovery of Circumstantial
Selection: that is to say, of a method by which horrors having every
appearance of being elaborately planned by some intelligent contriver
are only accidents without any moral significance at all. Suppose a
watcher from the stars saw a frightful accident produced by two crowded
trains at full speed crashing into one another! How could he conceive
that a catastrophe brought about by such elaborate machinery, such
ingenious preparation, such skilled direction, such vigilant industry,
was quite unintentional? Would he not conclude that the signal-men were
devils?

Well, Circumstantial Selection is largely a theory of collisions: that
is, a theory of the innocence of much apparently designed devilry. In
this way Darwin brought intense relief as well as an enlarged knowledge
of facts to the humanitarians. He destroyed the omnipotence of God for
them; but he also exonerated God from a hideous charge of cruelty.
Granted that the comfort was shallow, and that deeper reflection was
bound to shew that worse than all conceivable devil-deities is a blind,
deaf, dumb, heartless, senseless mob of forces that strike as a tree
does when it is blown down by the wind, or as the tree itself is struck
by lightning. That did not occur to the humanitarians at the moment:
people do not reflect deeply when they are in the first happiness of
escape from an intol