“What does your book say about evil?,” an attendee posed to panelists at the VA Fest of the Book event that I moderated. It was a lively event, not least because the composition of the panel led inevitably to passionate disagreement. As the psychiatrist who wrote of religion as a product purely of human physiology and psychology observed, it looked like “the three righteous brothers, sister Clare, and the devil.” 
Two Christian pastors (Alex Joyner and Winn Collier) plus the professor from Liberty University (David Baggett) would certainly seem to be at odds with the co-authors (Clare Aukofer and Andy Thomson) of Why We Believe in God(s), with a foreword by Richard Dawkins. And at odds they were. Is evil the perversion of humankind’s innate sense of morality, or does it have something to do with sins against God enabled or encouraged by a principle of wickedness — call it Satan or the devil? “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no one,” Mattie thinks aloud in the movie True Grit. The quote is almost exactly a King James Version version of Psalm 23, the most beloved (and memorized) Psalm. But the biblical version has the word “evil” where Mattie uses “no one.” Maybe the first question is: what is evil, and then: is evil only manifest in human actions?
