ABSTRACT
Materially and mechanically the world is one; but purposively, it is inescapably many and diverse. The wolf is an admirably designed machine for tracking down, catching, and dismembering sheep; that is to say, for frustrating the purposes of chewing grass, growing wool, and producing lambs for which the sheep is equally admirably designed. Some of the most beautiful examples of adaptive design are found among the parasites, which live by killing their hosts, or by making their lives a misery. The conflict between the belief and the facts produces what is traditionally called “the problem of evil.” Since evil has no positive being, but consists merely in the things lacking some other goodness which it might have possessed, evil is not caused by God or by anything else; there is nothing there to cause. There is a third way of side-stepping this “problem of evil.”
