n an attempted justification of the ways of God to man, the
scientific studies the system of things as a given whole to which all
questions of justification are irrelevant. The world is as it is, and
the category of responsibility is inapplicable. Evil becomes a
practical and relative problem. There is no thought of trying to fix
responsibility upon some personal agent who could have done otherwise
and did not. Man is a part of nature, although a self-directive
organism adapted more or less adequately to his environment. And just
because he is an organism, he must maintain himself in the face of
attacks and fluctuating changes. He is not able to claim exemption
from the consequences of cataclysms, such as earthquakes and tornadoes,
which result from the unstable balance of physical {166} energies. He
perishes in the same way that beasts and plants do, when his
intelligence is not able to find a way of escape from a sudden danger.
In other words, physical evil is evil only because it hurts man, who
does not want to be hurt. From the objective standpoint, evil and good
differ not a jot from one another. They are both causal events
baptised by man in accordance with his sympathies and antipathies.
Events are good to him or bad to him; in themselves, they are neither
good nor bad. Rain does not fall in summer in order to nourish the
plants; instead, the plants are nourished and continue to exist because
the rain falls. Once, it was hard for man to admit this impersonalism.
He wanted to find an objective purpose focusing upon his career. But
he is at last beginning to realize that his will to live and create is
the source of all values. Nature is a thing to be used for his own
desired ends.

There are no problems harder than false problems. The great
achievement is to see that they are false because they flow from a
false assumption. Remove this assumption, and the problem which
tortured the greatest thinkers vanishes into thin air. The problem of
evil becomes the problem of lessening evil by conquering nature and
rendering her subservient to man. It is a problem of engineering, of
applied chemistry, of preventive medicine, of social planning. Man
must become the master of his destiny through the instrumentality of
his intelligence. But what a different setting this presents from the
one in which primitive man existed! Then man was needy and fearful and
ignorant and helpless. Now he is wealthy, ingenious