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There was a time when the problem of evil would be raised, as to why God permits it to exist if He is loving and omnipotent. Atheists often like to get bogged down in this spurious argument, in their attempt to make God out to seem nonexistent, perhaps not realizing that they are entering into a somewhat intricate, theological debate which they are simply not adequately versed in enough to offer sound and persuasive reasoning. At least these atheists are lucid enough in their thinking to acknowledge the reality of objective evil, something which is seemingly beyond the grasp of those who in theory claim to make no distinction between good and bad, right and wrong, yet are in practice far removed from psychopaths who, coincidentally, think in the same warped manner.
If evil is a negative sounding word that is only because life has its negative aspects alongside its positive ones. One may dislike the term but banishing the word from one’s active vocabulary does not nothing to remove its existence from consensus reality, no matter how sandy one’s hair may be.
If one has ever studied sociopathy or criminology, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that there is certainly something within certain human beings that compels them to commit heinous deeds, other than factors within the psychology of the deranged individual that might be traced back to arrant parenting.
A naturalist might chalk up such depraved activity to either insanity or some quasi-mysterious psychological remnant of our primal ancestors (the atavistic view), but never to diabolical forces.
It is the fashionable thing nowadays for some people to question the very existence of evil, primarily because we live in a world that generally believes and teaches a non-spiritual worldview and where worldly success is often attained at the expense of any virtues and values one might have had at the outset of his ambitious pursuit. A psychopath is one who lacks a strong concience, or any one at all, who feels little or no pity, compassion, or remorse. Psychologists who have studied this particular mentality have wondered whether the psychopath is, at least in part, a product of his evolutionary minded and dog-eat-dog social environment, where even in business and politics, although no violent crimes are committed, one nevertheless often finds the same sociopathic spirit in practice, in the form of ruthless business practices.
In other words, would wickedness exist at the lower rungs in a society if it were not for the existence of corruption or outright evil in high places? If the answer to that is no or not very likely, one might then rule out the psychological/biological perspective in favor of a sociological or even supernatural explanation.
Save for extreme examples, as in the case of outright bad seeds and nefarious dictators, I don’t think there is any one definitive answer that can satisfactorily account for the behavior of evildoers as a whole, whether that be the influence of the reptilian brain or Reptilian string-pullers. It might very well be a combination of causes.
In the Bible, the most malefic being of all that is said to exist is referred to as the Evil One, with power over the entire world. This holy tome teaches that man may be so inherently corrupt so as to be unqualified to live independent of divine direction, but it doesn’t help matters when, elsewhere it’s mentioned, the Earth is littered with machinators, quite possibly influencing global affairs and playing one side off the other.
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