There is no Problem of Evil (Alan Watts Summary)

This is a summary of what Alan Watts said about the problem of evil. I’ve synthesized multiple sources where Watts talks about this idea into a single version here (and added emphasis to quotes in bold).

This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Alan Watts’ books (Amazon).

There is no Problem of Evil (Alan Watts Summary)

“For Hindu thought there is no Problem of Evil. The conventional, relative world is necessarily a world of opposites. Light is inconceivable apart from darkness; order is meaningless without disorder; and, likewise, up without down, sound without silence, pleasure without pain.” — Alan Watts

**Remember that God is doing everything to himself:**

“You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself.” — Alan Watts

“If the generation of māyā (of the world illusion) is the play of the Godhead, then he will play the villains as well as the heroes, the fools as well as the sages, and the sinners as well as the saints … The inmost Self of saint and sage is no less the veiled Godhead than the inmost Self of the debauchee, the coward, the lunatic, and the very demons.” — Alan Watts

“It would be very bad indeed if God were the author of evil and we were his victims. That is to say, if we keep the model of the king of the universe, and the creatures are all subjects of the king, then a God who is responsible for evil is being very unkind to other people. But in this theory, God is not another person. There are no victims of God. He’s never anything but his own victim.” — Alan Watts

“It isn’t as if the creator had made evil and made someone else its victim. It isn’t like saying, ‘God creates the evil as well as the good, and poor little us are his puppets, and he inflicts evil upon us.’ The Hindu says, ‘Nobody experiences pain except the Godhead. You are not some separate little puppet which is being kicked around by omnipotence. You are omnipotence in disguise.’ And so there is no victim of this; no helpless, defenseless, poor little thing. Even the baby with syphilis is the dreaming Godhead.” — Alan Watts

“Each one of us is a way in which the whole fullness of ultimate reality pretends that it gets lost in an individual life situation, and endures the adventures of pain and death, and endures all the critical efforts and decisions connected with practical and moral problems.” — Alan Watts

**Stories must include good and evil:**

“(The Hindu) feels that the creator, or the actor, is the author of both the good and the evil. For the reasons that I explained it to you, you have to have the evil for there to be a story … Hindu mythology elaborates the theme of the divine play on a fabulous scale, embracing not only colossal concepts of time and space, but also the widest extremes of pleasure and pain, virtue and depravity.” — Alan Watts

“The opposites (dvandva) of light and darkness, good and evil, pleasure and pain, are the essential elements of the game, for although the Godhead is identified with Truth (sat), Consciousness (chit), and Bliss (ananda), the dark side of life has its integral part in the game just as every drama must have its villain, to disrupt the status quo, and as the cards must be shuffled, thrown into chaos, in order that there may be a significant development of the play.” — Alan Watts

“The things that we call good as well as the things that we call bad, the things that we call healthy as well as the things that we call sick, the enlightened and illuminated and liberated point of view as well as the egocentric point of view in bondage—all of them as being integral parts of this terrific playfulness.” — Alan Watts

“In almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad.” — Alan Watts

“We are all amazingly involved in the process of being human, and playing our game and taking our side, and therefore our victories and defeats, our sicknesses and our healths, are things we get mighty partisan about. And therefore we cannot see that human behavior is just like everything else: it never makes a mistake. Only: its never making a mistake must include the feeling that mistakes can be made. See, that’s where this point of view would differ somewhat from the point of view of a Christian scientist, who strives—manfully, in a way—to assert that evil is purely illusory, but doesn’t quite grasp the point that the illusion of there being something evil is important and good, too. We’re not trying to get rid of it, you see? Because if you get rid of it you would have problems.” — Alan Watts

A nice little tangle:

“How does man follow the will of God if the will of man is perverse? The theologians say you cannot do this without having divine grace, or the power, to follow the will of God. How, then, do you get grace? Why is grace given to some and not to others? If I cannot follow the will of God by my own effort because my will is selfish, how will my will—which is selfish—be transformed into an unselfish will? If I cannot do it because I am already the selfish will, then grace must do it. If grace has not already done it, why not? Because I didn’t accept it? But by definition I had no power to accept it because my will was selfish. Must I then become a Calvinist and say that only those people who are predestined to receive grace will be able to live the good life? Then we come back to the inadmissible position that people who live evil lives and do not get grace—because they are not predestined to it out of the infinite wisdom of the Godhead—then God Himself must be held responsible for their evil deeds. And so that is a nice little tangle.” — Alan Watts

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