Moral evil occurs when a human violates a moral obligation. If rape, slave trading, and sexism are wrong, then any human who carries out any of these actions (or attitudes in the case of sexism) is guilty of moral evil. Moral evil can only exist in a theistic universe, for without a deity of some sort there can be no moral authority [1] presiding over the cosmos. In the absence of a deity or deities, there are conflicting, subjective human moral preferences, but there is no metaphysical anchor for any actual moral obligations. When most people complain about the "problem of evil", they are usually complaining about immoral behaviors undertaken by human agents, like the aforementioned actions, or such things like political corruption, murder, robbery, racism, or sexually cheating on a spouse. Christians would call moral evil sin, with sin being any activity or desire that deviates from God's moral nature. God's nature and the moral revelation of the Bible are the overlapping standards that Christians use to judge if something is right or wrong--well, at least what consistent, rational, and Biblically-grounded Christians will use, as many professing Christians I've known seem to adopt many of their specific moral beliefs from culture or their subjective preferences.
Natural evil, on the other hand, is a destructive act of "nature", like a hurricane (such as the damn Hurricane Harvey I'm putting up with the side effects of), flood, or earthquake. This type of "evil" is nothing like moral evil. Ultimately, calling these events "evil" or immoral is a misnomer, for they, if humans or some other conscious force (God, Satan, etc) do not spark them, result from deterministic processes that have no moral responsibility. Mere matter only reacts to previous causes and effects; it has no mind, and without a mind there can be no free will [2], and without free will there can be no true moral responsibility. Natural evil in and of itself is nothing but the product of blind, deterministic, non-personal, unintentional, unanimated material forces. Although natural disasters can come about without human or divine origins, humans could, of course, knowingly or unknowingly trigger certain violent or dangerous natural processes. Unlike moral evil, natural disasters do not require God's existence in order to exist.
Neither moral evil nor natural evil proves that God does not exist, as it does not follow from the occurrence of natural evil that atheism is true (total non sequitur) and moral evil cannot exist unless a moral authority, i.e. God, exists as well. Sometimes someone might refer to a case of one or the other in an argument against theism, as if a calamity in the natural world or a human act of evil demonstrates that God does not exist! Despite the irrationality of such arguments, one must still interact seriously with the claims made by them.
And now I will address yet again an issue that I have never heard more than two Christian apologists of sorts (including my best friend, whom I have mentioned multiple times on my blog) acknowledge, much less rationally confront.
No, contrary to what Martin Luther King, Jr. rhetorically implied in Strength to Love, by asking "Is anything more obvious than the presence of evil in the universe?" (77), the existence of moral evil is not the most obvious thing in the universe. In fact, it is not logically or philosophically obvious at all that right and wrong exist, though any individual with a conscience will realize that it is obvious that he or she has a sense of morality. Right and wrong can only exist if God does for reasons briefly summarized above, and yet although logic proves that a deity (an uncaused cause) does exist it does not automatically follow that morality exists. In other words, if morality exists, it follows inescapably that God does; if God exists, it does not necessarily follow that morality does. Christian apologists, if they want to be intellectually and logically honest, need to acknowledge this, yet I have only met three people in my life who readily understood this point when I articulated it to them. In response to the masses of people who either intentionally ignore this fact or do not grasp reason enough to realize it, I affirm and paraphrase the words of Camus--it is indeed very easy to be logical, but very difficult to be logical to the bitter end.
Strength to Love. King, Jr., Martin Luther. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963. Print.
[1]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-nature-of-conscience.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-futility-of-existence-without-god.html
[2]. Matter without a conscious mind cannot have a will and intentionality. Mere matter cannot reason, only react. With no conscious mind, will, intentionality, or ability to perceive or think, matter without mind cannot have moral responsibility.
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