God, THAT, the Tao, the Fount of Being, call it what you will, has engendered a universe in which we inexplicably find ourselves. We owe our very existence to Darwinian selection, which is predicated on death and destruction. No universe containing creatures like us can exist without them; they are, quite literally, necessary evils. The Hindu trinity consists of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. All three together, in a single Godhead.

This is the ineluctable truth with which God rebukes Job from the whirlwind: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Speak, if thou hast understanding!” Who are you to judge what is good or evil? Recall that the original sin, the forbidden fruit for which Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden, is precisely that of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. These are human categories that we impose on reality. Our attachment to them is the root of all human suffering; that is the teaching of the Buddha.

Archibald MacLeish, in J. B., his modern retelling of the Job story, puts it succinctly: “If God is God, he isn’t good; if God is good, he isn’t God. Pick the even, pick the odd.” I pick the first horn of the dilemma: God is not good. THAT, the Way of Nature, is indifferent to what we call good and evil. Death, decay, and destruction are necessary features of the best of all possible worlds. A world without them would not be a possible one.