This claim, which I believe is valid, can most successfully be made by appealing to a metaphysical religious standard. ^1,2 The difficulty with judgments about what is right or good is illustrated by the title of moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? ³ The common-sense approach of “I know evil when I see it” depends on who is doing the seeing. Moral appeals to a secular enlightenment rationality, or to a post-modern relativistic framework, simply devolve into who has the best frame of reference or the most insistent will. ⁴ Science cannot particularly help with establishing moral claims, because science has no intrinsic ethic or standard of what is good other than life-span development growth curves. ⁵ Otherwise, the ethical standards science applies to itself have been borrowed from metaphysical frameworks, such as religion.

Religion has been concerned with evil for at least three millennia. Evil has often been separated into categories by various world religions. ⁶ One general category might be better called suffering rather than evil. ⁷ This includes physical suffering often called natural evil, such as from natural disasters, disease, and disability. ⁶ It also includes psychiatric suffering, such as dread, terror, isolation, and despair. This has been called metaphysical or psychological evil. ⁶

The other general category is often called moral evil, which is what I will be focused on in this essay. It has been defined in non-religious terms as an intentional act by a moral entity that causes unnecessary suffering. ⁶ This definition can work when everyone in the conversation is coming from the same world view; however, as previously mentioned, this is often not the case. I will work from a religious definition of moral evil: free will actions that are in opposition to God’s will that cause unnecessary harm and suffering. ⁸

In my last essay, “The nature of God”, I outlined common religious values that I inferred could be viewed as God’s will, and as well as their opposites that could be viewed as being in opposition to God’s will. I further claimed that Trump is opposing God’s will by his actions. These are acting as a controlling dictator, lying, taking things by force, abandoning or exploiting the vulnerable, subjugating the poor, hating and excluding groups of people, and starting a war. All these have been evident since he took office on January 20, 2025. Although mentioned in my last essay, I will not include vile ugliness as part of Trump’s evil, as standards of beauty are more subjective; however, most people would view the cultural harm he has done to the Kennedy Center and things posted on his Truth Social media network as ugly and vile.

Trump’s actions match the pattern for moral evil. But why is he evil? Why is anyone evil? I will again turn to world religions in my attempt to answer these questions. As in my last essay, the methodology I will use is to explore whether there is a clear consensus across the nine largest organized world religions, arranged here from largest to smallest: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism/Taoism, Judaism, and the Baháʼí Faith. ⁹ Confucianism and Taoism are combined because most adherents of one integrate the other in their beliefs. ¹⁰ Below is a table where the main theologies of these religions are noted regarding moral evil, with the addition of Zoroastrianism because of its historical importance on the topic. ¹¹

Table: Largest Organized World Religions, Moral Evil, and Self-Idolatry

*Zoroastrianism, currently a relatively small religion, is included because of its historical influence on the theology of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam regarding evil

What do these religions attribute moral evil to? The Baháʼí Faith view is that humans use their free will and selfish desire to turn away from God’s goodness. ¹² In Sikhism it is that a self-centered ego separates us from God and produces vices. ¹³ Hindu mythology presents moral evil as being due to human ignorance and believing the illusion of the world, which produces greedy desire, anger, and karma. ¹⁴ The Buddhist view roughly parallels this, while using slightly different terms and to more explicitly explain suffering. ¹⁵ Confucianism holds a positive view of human nature, but that it can become trapped in an evil environment, ¹⁶ while in Taoism moral evil results when humans egotistically try to impose their will on the simple naturalness of the Tao. ¹⁷

The Jewish teaching is that moral evil is due to human free will and an inner drive toward evil. ¹⁸ The Christian view is similar, with a shift toward a uniquely Christian doctrine of original sin, ¹⁹ or a disordered will, ²⁰ with the addition of Satanic temptation.  In Islam, Allah creates a world where moral evil is possible to test humans, who choose it using their free will and giving in to the tempting of al‑Shayṭān. ²¹

Together, there is a majority sense in religion that moral evil is caused by greedy human desire and ego, while free will also plays a role. This fits in the case of Trump.

But could morally evil behavior also be caused by demons? On this issue there is little consensus among the religions. The Baháʼí Faith ²² and Sikhism ²³ teach there is no evil metaphysical presence, while Hinduism ²⁴ and Confucianism/Taoism ^25,26 believe in minor demons and spirits. Buddhism ²⁷ and Judaism ²⁸ have adversarial metaphysical beings who test humans, but do not play a major role in moral evil. However, Judaism’s history of exile brought it into contact with Zoroastrianism in Persia, and its dualistic theology of a good god battling an evil god; Jewish thinking had shifted to where Shatan, or Satan, had become more powerful by the time of Jesus. ²⁹ Christianity, in turn, absorbed the theology of Satan as a powerful demon, ³⁰ as did Islam. ³¹ However, it would be inaccurate to characterize religions as agreeing that demons are causing moral evil; even Judaism later reverted to the less-powerful ha-Satan.

An important caveat here is that a lack of consensus among the largest organized world religions only means that this method does not point one way or the other. From this analysis morally evil behavior might be caused by demons, or might not be, or demons might not exist, or the evidence for that claim might need to be constrained to Christianity and Islam.

If not demons, might there be another force behind manifestations of greedy human desire and ego, Trump’s included? I propose there is: the desire to be God, or to be worshiped as God and to attain God’s attributes, particularly omnipotence. The world religions’ evaluation of this desire is clear: it is wrong for a person to equate themself with God.

This is summarized in the last column of the table. Although Hinduism asserts the pure self is God, it also teaches that to attain that place the pure self has become free of greed, anger, and karma-bondage ³² and is marked by a moral, pious, and virtuous life. ³³

According to all the other religions listed, equating the self to God is either badly mistaken or immoral. In the Baháʼí Faith, the self is likened to a mirror that reflects the sun, or God in the analogy; the mirror is clearly not God. ³⁴ In Sikhism, the term for the selfish ego, haumai, literally translates to English as “I-I”, or the self grotesquely magnified:

“Fundamentally, haumai is a kind of false conception of oneself as singularly important, and correspondingly, a false conception of the world as revolving around oneself, as a world of objects there for one’s use. It is, at its extreme, a kind of ethical solipsism: an inability to conceive of anyone or anything but oneself as an ethical subject.” ³⁵

Buddhism also criticizes the idea of “I” or “mine” as a dangerous illusion, and its resulting selfishness and individualism, which is bonded to desire, wealth, and power. ³⁶ In Confucianism the ideal is “a self of integrity, substance, and character and self-consciousness.” ³⁷ The Taoist sage Zhuangzi advised, “Do not develop the Heaven of Human, but the Heaven of Heaven. Developing the Heaven grows the potency; developing the Human grows hurt.” ³⁸

In Judaism, people are to imitate their creator God, but realize they are not God. ³⁹ Similarly, Christian theology is that people are to become like God, but not God. ⁴⁰ For the Muslim, people are Allah’s vicegerents, or deputies, here on earth and should avoid both pride and self-humiliation. ⁴¹

Donald Trump is morally evil because he equates himself with God. He is not unique in this, as it is common enough for the largest world religions to have teaching on the issue. However, with full access to the executive branch of the U.S. government, and with apparently no one within the Republican party having the position, will, and moral courage to oppose him, he can do more moral evil than almost anyone else in the world. He has already committed a large amount and appears fully intent on committing more.

1.         Macintyre, A. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Duckworth, 1990).

2.         Murphy, N. A Philosophy of the Christian Religion (Westminster John Knox Press, 2018).

3.         MacIntyre, A. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).

4.         MacIntyre, A. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

5.         Gorsuch, R. L. Integrating psychology and spirituality? (Praeger, 2002).

6.         Vicchio, S. J. Evil in World Religions (Wisdom Editions, 2022).

7.         Rice, R. Suffering and the Search for Meaning: Contemporary Responses to the Problem of Pain (InterVarsity Press, 2014).

8.         McFarland, I. A. The Problem with Evil. Theology Today 74, 321–339 (2018).

9.         Preston, C. List of religious populations. Encyclopedia Britannica. (2024).

10.      Vuong, Q. H. et al. ‘Cultural Additivity’ and How the Values and Norms of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism Co-Exist, Interact, and Influence Vietnamese Society: A Bayesian Analysis of Long-Standing Folktales, Using R and Stan. SSRN Electronic Journal 7 (2018).

11.      Boyce, M. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (Psychology Press, 2001).

12.      Schaefer, U. Some aspects of Bahá’í ethics. The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 16, 1–32 (2006).

13.      Singh, K. Vice and virtue in Sikh ethics. Monist 104, 319–336 (2021).

14.      O’Flaherty, W. D. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Motilal Banarsidass, 1988).

15.      Gäb, S. Why do we Suffer? Buddhism and the Problem of Evil. Philosophy Compass 10, 345–353 (2015).

16.      Fengyan, W. Confucian thinking in traditional moral education: Key ideas and fundamental features. Journal of Moral Education 33, 429–447 (2004).

17.      Elmi, Q. & Zarvani, M. Problem of evil in Taoism. Religious Inquiries 5, 35–47 (2016).

18.      Goldman, N. S. Mythology of evil in Judaism. Journal of Religion & Health 15, 230–240 (1976).

19.      Sanguineti, J. J. God in the face of natural and moral evils: A Thomistic approach. Religions 14, 816 (2023).

20.      McFarland, I. A. In Adam’s Fall. A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (Wiley, 2010).

21.      Agha-Mohammadi, M. The problem of evil in the Qur’an, traditions and intellect. Kom : casopis za religijske nauke 7, 29–46 (2018).

22.      Smith, P. An Introduction to the Baha’i Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

23.      Singh, P. The Sikhs (Knopf, 2000).

24.      Sharma, A. Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, USA, 2001).

25.      Littlejohn, R. Confucianism: An Introduction (I.B. Tauris, 2011).

26.      Kohn, L. Introducing Daoism (Routledge, 2009).

27.      Harvey, P. An introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

28.      Pagels, E., H. The social history of Satan, the ‘intimate enemy’: a preliminary sketch. Harvard Theological Review 84, 105–128 (1991).

29.      Jonker, L. C. “Satan Made Me Do It!” The development of a Satan figure as social-theological diagnostic strategy from the late Persian imperial era to early Christianity. Old Testament Essays 30, 348–366 (2017).

30.      Farrar, T., J. New Testament satanology and leading suprahuman opponents in Second Temple Jewish literature: A religio-historical analysis. The Journal of Theological Studies 70, 21–68 (2019).

31.      Neuwirth, A. & Hartwig, D. Beyond Reception History: The Qur’anic Intervention into the Late Antique Discourse about the Origin of Evil. Religions 12, 606 (2021).

32.      Chauhan, K. M. S. & Kumar, B. M. N. Concept of Atman (self) in Indian philosophy: A review. Journal of Natural & Ayurvedic Medicine 6, 1–6 (2022).

33.      Khajegir, A. R. & Afroogh, M. R. The dignity and unity of Atman and Brahman in Vedanta School- Hinduism study. Journal of Philosophy and Ethics 1, 13–19 (2019).

34.      Diessner, R. Beauty of the human psyche. The patterns of the virtues. The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 26, 75–93 (2016).

35.      Singh, K. Vice and virtue in Sikh ethics. Monist 104, 319–336 (2021).

36.      Jiwanda, J. & Lubis, A. Y. No-self: Reflections on ethics and identity. in Cultural Dynamics in a Globalized World 139–144 (Routledge, 2017).

37.      Chen, X. The ethics of self: Another version of Confucian ethics. Asian Philosophy 24, 67–81 (2014).

38.      Hsu, C. The authenticity of myriad things in the Zhuangzi. Religions 10, 218 (2019).

39.      Najman, H. Imitatio Dei and the Formation of the Subject in Ancient Judaism. Journal of Biblical Literature 140, 309–323 (2021).

40.      Vallier, K. A Christian account of the rationality of morality. On theosis and the trinity. TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 9, 1 (2025).

41.      Mashkour, L. S. The objective study to the meaning of humiliation from the perspective of the Holy Quran. International Journal of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities 13, 556–566 (2023).

March, 2026

Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the writing of this essay.

My previous essay, “The nature of things”, discussed the relationship between the physical and metaphysical realms. This essay will primarily discuss the metaphysical realm. It is fair to start a conversation about whether something exists or not beyond our known physical universe by granting that the evidence is mixed and it can be defensible to believe in either direction. Then, if it is granted that the metaphysical universe is real, differing beliefs are even more defensible regarding what is there, and with what attributes.

A substantial reason for this is that, since the metaphysical universe cannot be investigated empirically, there is less that can be objectively known about it. My method will be to base metaphysical inferences partially on the physical world, and what can be inferred from established evidence. ¹

As I mentioned in “The nature of things”, the precision of the mathematical constants of the physical universe has raised the questions of why we exist at this time and in this place, with one answer being that our universe is fine-tuned for it. ² A question that follows is: Was this was done intentionally by a fine tuner? Religious believers typically point to their deity as this master designer. If this is the case, what would be some fair inferences to make about this master designer? Initially, one is the fact that we are having to make inferences means that this master designer is mysterious and generally hidden, although we can perceive some indirect evidence of its existence. ³ Another is that it values intelligence, the evolution of which requires a consistent and sustained physical environment that supports biological life. ³ A third, closely related to the previous inference, and perhaps the first, is that it values free will. Free will develops with intelligence and independence from forced behavior. ³ Some religious scholars have framed the mysterious and hidden nature of the master designer as being necessary for the development of our free will. ⁴

These three inferences are interesting, but it would be helpful if more detail was added. A natural place to look for this is in the world’s major religions, however they typically make claims that truth about metaphysical reality was revealed exclusively to them only: how can we hope to objectively adjudicate between their claims? One idea is that it is possible that religions might be viewed as groups of informed experts, and the consensus across the groups may well have increased validity compared to an individual group, or the entire population. ⁵

Psychological constructs, such as depression and intelligence, are not metaphysical, but neither can they be measured directly like physical attributes can, such as height and weight. Psychologists pioneered the idea of accounting for statistical error, ⁶ assuming that error is present and primarily paying attention to the major results. This has resulted in psychological studies being more accurate over time. ⁷ Minor results are assumed to be either trivial or error and are not included in the interpretation of a study. ⁷ In a similar vein, expressing too much confidence in minor metaphysical points, getting too specific before there is convergence of knowledgeable opinion, may well also lead to error. Sticking to what can be generally agreed upon by most religion scholars is probably the best approach.

All human societies throughout history appear to have been religious. ⁸ One way to establish the attributes of God is to look at the communalities across the largest organized religions; where to draw a line for inclusion is arbitrary, but for this essay religions are included if their world membership approaches 10 million or more. ^9,10 Arranged from oldest to most recent, ¹¹ these are Hinduism, ¹² Judaism, ¹³ Buddhism, ¹⁴ Confucianism/Taoism, ^15,16 Christianity, ¹⁷ Islam, ¹⁸ Sikhism, ¹⁹ and the Baháʼí Faith. ²⁰ Confucianism and Taoism will be combined because they are often followed together in East Asia religious practice. ²¹

Given the proportion of humanity that has found throughout history that the world makes better sense when viewed through the lens of these religions, they likely have some lived validity in their understandings of the metaphysical phenomenon they are built upon. All these religions have their unique views that may well be a mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy; they also have some convergence of theology regarding the metaphysical presence their religions are organized around. It is this convergence that I will focus on.

With acknowledgement that religions have their own varied names for this metaphysical presence, for simplicity the rest of this essay will refer to it as _cfGod₉, or the common factors within the views of God among the nine largest organized religions. If an attribute of God is found in most of the religions, it will be included. _cfGod₉ is not being advanced as an orthodox vision of God according to any of the included religions, and not all possible attributes or values of God are being explored here.

Table 1: Attributes of God Across the Nine Largest Religions

Note: X denotes an attribute’s significant presence in a religion’s view of God.

Inspection of Table 1 shows that _cfGod₉ is universally good, intelligent and powerful to the point of designing and creating our universe, including us. _cfGod₉ is outside of time and has always existed, however is also hidden from our senses in that we cannot see or hear _cfGod₉. In this, _cfGod₉ is a profound mystery.  It should be noted that Buddhism, while having multiple deities, does not have a global divine presence like the other religions listed. ²²

Table 2: Values and Teachings Across the Nine Largest Religions

Note: X denotes a value or teaching having significant importance in a religion.

Table 2 shows the common values and teachings of _cfGod₉ as understood by the disciples and later scholars in these religious traditions. _cfGod₉ values:

• Intelligence and free will
• Love, peace, and inclusion
• Truth and justice
• Beauty
• Grace, redemption, and charity for the poor

In my previous essay “The nature of things” I mentioned that, in addition to believing that God exists in the metaphysical universe, evil also exists. Evil has been defined in various ways, but from a religious standpoint the simplest definition is that evil is free will actions that are in opposition to God’s will. ²³ Making an extension to the opposite of _cfGod₉’s values, the characteristic patterns of evil are:

• Dictate and control
• Hatred, war, and exclusion
• Lies and taking by force
• Vile ugliness
• Subjugation, abandonment, and exploitation of the vulnerable

The significance of defining the _cfGod₉ values is that it forms a basis to make moral judgments against evil in a less relativistic manner. This is important in our current post-modern society where moral disagreements are difficult to resolve due everyone being free to pick their own authority to appeal to; moral disagreements tend to be resolved by whoever is the loudest, or whoever has the most force behind their will. ²⁴

I will return to the patterns of evil and how they are manifesting themselves in my later essays, “Spirituality”, “Religion”, “Human nature”, and “Society”. As a preview, I will point out the obvious, that evil has been particularly prominent during this presidential administration and we have the moral foundation and obligation to oppose it.

References

1.      Russell, R. J. Cosmology from Alpha to Omega: The Creative Mutual Interaction of Theology and Science (Fortress Press, 2008).

2.      Abramowicz, M. & Ellis, G. The elusive anthropic principle. Nature 337, 411–412 (1989).

3.      Ellis, G. F. R. The theology of the anthropic principle. in Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Eds. Russell, R. J., Murphy, N. & Isham, C. J.) 367–405 (Vatican Observatory and CTNS, 1993).

4.      Cramer, D. C. John Hick (1922—2012). in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2026).

5.      Navajas, J., Niella, T., Garbulsky, G., Bahrami, B. & Sigman, M. Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds. Nature Human Behaviour 2, 126–132 (2018).

6.      Nunnally, J. C. & Bernstein, I. Psychometric Theory (McGraw-Hill, 1994).

7.      Gorsuch, R. L. Factor Analysis (L. Erlbaum Associates, 1983).

8.      Ondich, J. & Cory, S. C. World Religions: the Spirit Searching (Michael Schwartz Library, 2024).

9.      Preston, C. List of religious populations. Encyclopedia Britannica. (2024).

10.   Pew Research Center. How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020. (2025).

11.   Chronology of World Religions. Preceden Timeline Maker. (2026).

12.   Sharma, A. Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, USA, 2001).

13.   Grossman, M. & Sommer, B. D. GOD. in The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (ed Berlin, A.) 962 (2011).

14.   Harvey, P. An introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

15.   Littlejohn, R. Confucianism: An Introduction (I.B. Tauris, 2011).

16.   Kohn, L. Introducing Daoism (Routledge, 2009).

17.   Barth, K. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Eerdmans, 1979).

18.   Ali, K. & Leaman, O. Islam: The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2008).

19.   Singh, P. The Sikhs (Knopf, 2000).

20.   Smith, P. An Introduction to the Baha’i Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

21.   Vuong, Q. H. et al. ‘Cultural Additivity’ and How the Values and Norms of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism Co-Exist, Interact, and Influence Vietnamese Society: A Bayesian Analysis of Long-Standing Folktales, Using R and Stan. SSRN Electronic Journal 7 (2018, March).

22.   Cohen, S. The Problem of God in Buddhism (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

23.   McFarland, I. A. The Problem with Evil. Theology Today 74, 321–339 (2018).

24.   MacIntyre, A. C. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the writing of this essay.

Living takes faith, no matter your worldview. Much of what we assume and build our lives around cannot be proven in the 100% sense, such as in mathematics. For instance, I have faith that reality exists outside of my mind and I can influence it. ¹ This may seem self-evident to most of us most of the time, however it is not provable beyond all doubt if you are talking to an extreme skeptic. ² There is a chance our consciousness exists in an artificial simulation, possibly in the way made popular by the movie The Matrix. ³ However, it is probable enough that the universe is not simply the subjective world inside my consciousness that I believe it’s safe to proceed on faith as if it’s real. ⁴ This will be a theme across these essays, that a preponderance of evidence is enough to construct a worldview and proceed accordingly, and absolute proof does not come, although some worldviews are more probable than others. I am approximately 98% sure of the objective reality of the physical universe.

The physical universe is all that can be known and detected empirically, or with our senses. ⁵ However, the amount of the universe I am aware of is only a very small part. Human senses are limited, although we have helped them with technology, such as satellite telescopes and electron microscopes. This leads to the topic of science. Anything that can be measured can be studied scientifically. Science is one of the best ways to know the physical universe, and I will say more about it in my later essay “Science”.

Science is not the only way to know the physical universe. Personal experience of our immediate world is also a good way to know the small part around us. I’ll say more about this in my later essay “Ways of Knowing”.

Even when we can physically experience parts of the universe with our senses, our intellectual limitations impede our understanding. There are many factors that we only have vague knowledge of causing the simple things we observe. For instance, we hear and see a number of a particular bird species in our neighborhood. What brought them here, why now, for how long, and what is the purpose of the noise they are making? The common reasons given generally have to do with food and reproduction but that is only a surface explanation. Why do they they like this food rather than some other food, and why do they like nesting here rather than somewhere else? How do they remember to fly here from some other part of the world? How did their wing feathers got so strong that they could withstand the trip? Why have I noticed fewer of them over the past several years? What do they think of me? The answers cut across many areas: physics, chemistry, cosmology, biology, ecology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and politics. It is impossible for one person to understand even a single phenomenon completely at an expert level.

Although there is less evidence for it, I believe there is also a metaphysical realm, some sort of reality that exists beyond the physical universe we can sense. If it exists, by definition it cannot be measured and is beyond the reach of science. However, there should be aspects of the metaphysical realm that are detectable in the physical universe. While this takes more faith to believe compared to the physical universe, I still hold that this belief is supported by a preponderance of evidence. I am approximately 2/3 sure there is a metaphysical reality.

I believe that some sort of higher power that is universally good, commonly known as God, exists in the metaphysical realm. While there are religious theories, writings, and community traditions often offered as evidence for the existence of God that I will discuss in my next essay “The Nature of God”, in this essay I am focused on scientific circumstantial evidence, what has been called the anthropic principle of fine-tuning: our physical universe appears fine-tuned for the creation of life through the process of planetary formation and evolution. ⁶ If any of the fundamental cosmological constants scientists know of in our physical universe—the speed of light, Plank’s constant, the charge and mass of electrons and protons, gravity, the Hubble constant—had been different by 1 part in a million or billion, intelligent life could have never evolved. ⁷ We (along with other intelligent creatures) ⁸ are here, but how and why are legitimate questions. Beyond intelligent life, it is fair to ask why anything exists at all in the physical universe, given how improbable it is that the conditions were right for galaxies, stars, and planets to form. ⁹ One answer is that this is because God designed our universe to be fine-tuned for intelligent life to evolve. There are other answers offered that avoid appealing to God, and I’ll discuss these in the later essay “Science”.

I believe it is also legitimate to presume there is an evil power that exists in the metaphysical world. I am not referring to what is often called natural evil, or events in the physical world that kill people such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, floods, avalanches, lightning-strike wildfires, and weather events. Rather, I am referring to a morally evil power that is working to turn people against God. I will also discuss this more in my next essay.

What is important for this essay is this: all reality, physical and metaphysical, ultimately fits together. In this life we may not get to where we perceive uniform consistency between all reality, but our goal should be consonance, or the idea that we should at least insist that our theories of the physical and metaphysical are not contradictory. ⁷ Science must be considered in our theories about the metaphysical realm, and our metaphysical theories cannot contradict established scientific theories.

The problem is our afore-mentioned intellectual limitations. As my research mentor Richard Gorsuch, pointed out to me in graduate school, science is an oversimplification of the nature and theology is an oversimplification of God; two oversimplifications can appear to be contradictory on the surface while their complicated realities are not. However, he also observed that the human mind had to have oversimplifications of God and nature for our understanding. ¹⁰

The history of science shows us oversimplifications that improve over the centuries. The earth-centered view of the universe worked well for a couple of millennia and was consistent with Christian metaphysical theory, but caused some problems for astronomers, who had to adjust their charted pathways of the planets to include small epicycles that interrupted their larger circles around the earth. The sun-centered view was somewhat more accurate and solved the astronomers’ problems of tracking the “wandering” planets. However, it was initially resisted by Christian leaders, who believed on metaphysical grounds that the earth must be the center of the universe. 

About a century later Newtonian physics was developed, which is still excellent for navigating the obvious aspects of our physical world, including getting astronauts safely to the moon and space probes to the other planets. It was such a great description of cause and effect that Christian metaphysical theory shifted to view God as the watchmaker who, after creating the world and getting it moving, had nothing else to do. ¹¹ God created the laws of the natural world which determined everything, including people’s actions, and God could not intervene without it being a violation of the laws. The metaphysical theories of God helping those who prayed or God doing miraculous things was contradictory to the Newtonian view of how the world works. ⁷ In order to preserve both free will and divine action, Christian scholars embraced dualism, where the mind is separate from the body. ¹²

After Albert Einstein’s work on the theory of relativity, which superseded Newton’s oversimplification, quantum mechanics was developed to further improve the understanding of tiny, subatomic particles. A basic aspect is that it can never be accurately predicted what these particles are going to do, but only probabilities about them can be given. ¹³ This opened a new metaphysical theory about how God could interact in the physical world without “breaking” the natural laws, the theory of quantum divine action. In this theory all quantum events are underdetermined, and God makes the final decision for what will happen. ¹⁴ Specifically regarding people, God is constrained by the prior state of the person before the event, as well as God’s respect for the person’s free will. God’s actions will always appear to be simply the natural laws of the physical world being carried out because God is working in the open design of the quantum level. ⁷. In particular, God can influence the consciousness of God’s faithful. ¹⁵ This allows some metaphysical theories about God to be consonant with current scientific theory but is believed through faith more than proof. There are also other unproven theories of how God could work that are consonant with recent theories of science. ¹⁶

In addition, it is important to remember that our metaphysical theories about God, or theology, are inevitably an oversimplification of whatever God’s reality is. Christians believe the New Testament is a correction to the oversimplification of the Old Testament. A few of the New Testament things Paul wrote about slaves, women, gender roles, and same-sex relationships were oversimplifications that we are still trying to correct with more accurate views.

Life pushes us to adopt worldviews that are still in process where we are hoping they will prove true and useful. Our intellectual limitations keep us from having a clear understanding of how reality fits together, but I believe it is important keep bringing our experience and knowledge of the physical universe to our theories of the metaphysical realm, particularly about God, in addition to looking to the metaphysical for guidance and meaning.

1.         Chakravartty, C., Massimi, M., & Sprevak, M. Scientific realism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (eds Zalta, E. N. & Nodelman, U.) (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2025).

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Generative artificial intelligence was not used at any point in the creation of this essay.