CAN evil be overcome with evil? Is it right to seek to overcome evil with evil? Is one ever justified in fighting the devil (evil) with his own weapons? Human beings seem to be confronted frequently by these questions, and while sometimes they recognize the true nature of the questions which they face, sometimes they do not. We would know better how to deal with such questions, if we understood them, and our ignorance certainly increases the seriousness of our problem.
In past centuries it was a prevalent notion, as it is now, that evil is one of the facts or factors of being, an entity, reality, or noumenon, instead of being merely a phenomenon. This prevailing notion has led to the personalizing of imaginary evil deities, satans, etc., constituting various groups of supposed superhuman malevolent powers. Not only have great efforts been made by various peoples to propitiate such imagined evil gods, but many have even made them the objects of religious worship. On this basis of the supposed reality of evil, religionists and metaphysicians have found themselves in a maze of hopeless contradictions and difficulties, until they have well-nigh despaired of ever solving what they have termed "the problem of evil." Dogmas and creeds and scholastic subtleties have been propounded almost without number, but they have served only to make the confusion worse confounded.
The most astute metaphysicians as well as the most skilful theologians have attempted to unravel the riddle, but have pitifully failed. The difficulty which they have never been able to surmount belongs intrinsically and unavoidably to their problem of trying to reconcile the existence of evil as a reality with the existence of an all-wise and all-powerful Supreme Being, for the stress of logic drives them to the deduction that such a Supreme Being must be infinitely good, and therefore all His works must be likewise good. There is no logical avoidance of the truth of the Biblical statement that God saw everything which He had made, and that it was very good. Assuming evil to be a truth, or substantive fact, how is it, then, to be accounted for?
