A common atheist argument is: “Why does evil exist?”

But the question could well be turned around, “Why should evil not exist? Why do we expect good to exist? Why do we even have a conception of good or evil?”

If God doesn’t exist, then this world and everything in it resulted from unguided natural processes. Such processes are insentient, blind and purposeless – they act without any sense of good or evil. A world created by such processes shouldn’t have any conception of good or evil. We too, being the products of those processes, shouldn’t have that sense. As atheism can’t explain the existence of our sense of evil, it has no right to raise any questions based on that sense. Atheism, if taken to its logical conclusion, ends in a nihilistic abyss of meaninglessness. Pertinently, the Bhagavad-gita (16.08) indicates that once the existence of God is rejected, nothing has any foundation.

Theism explains our sense of evil much better: that sense has been imbued within us by a good God to prompt us towards spiritual contemplation. The revulsion we feel on encountering evil indicates that we are meant for an arena of existence that is free from evil.

Gita wisdom explains that we are souls, parts of God, meant to live in eternal loving harmony with him at the spiritual level of reality. The fundamental evil – the evil that makes us vulnerable to the many other evils that bedevil this world – is our disconnection from God. To the extent we overcome that evil by connecting with him in devotion, to that extent evil ceases to affect us because our consciousness rises above the material level of reality which is where evil acts. Ultimately, by harmonizing with God, we attain his personal abode, which exists forever beyond all evil.

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