I got an inspirational email yesterday about a college student who argued with his atheistic professor concerning the existence of God. The student said that there’s no such thing as darkness, just the absence of light; no such thing as cold, just the absence of heat; and finally, no such thing as evil, just the absence of good, or love, or God. The pupil turned out to be Albert Einstein.

Agnostic though I am, I think I could embrace Christianity again if I thought about good and evil in those terms.

It has seemed to me for some time that the human spirit is separate from everything else in nature. Nature is beautiful and mindless, bountiful and cruel, but it is a backdrop, not a player. Unanswered prayers, bad things happening to good people, earthquakes and floods and tsunamis: those are nature, as barren and insensitive as its rocks and rattlesnakes. Nature seems to give and take away, but in fact it just is. Magnificent, terrifying, empty.

And we want something more. We human beings with our human brains and emotions—we want knowledge; we want meaning. Nature may account for our inventiveness, and for our seeking shelter in tribes for the sake of cooperation and protection; traits such as that are evident in many other species as well. But the concepts of good and evil are ours alone. The quest for understanding and mastery is ours alone. And so is our yearning to believe in the survival of consciousness. Our consciousness.

As far as I know, scientists haven’t discovered a physiological key to these phenomena. They’ve mapped the brain and defined its activities, but thought itself is elusive. By definition, it’s out ahead; it’s what the scientists are chasing and what they are chasing it with.

The quest for knowledge is above nature, and something else is higher yet: affinity, empathy, altruism, compassion—and yes, humor. Everything we know as love, and what some choose to call God.

Is the evil around us just a lack, rather than a force in itself? Somehow that makes it less diabolical, less of a mystery. If evil intent is simply an absence, akin to cold and darkness, then it doesn’t have to be attacked and fought; it just has to be dispelled.

Or not. In the end we may be swallowed up by the absence of love along with the absence of heat and the absence of light.

It’s quite a challenge, and it has been for a very long time.