Our culture may indeed be materialistic, and frankly I'd agree that it is, to its great detriment, but scientific it most emphatically is not. It's technological, not scientific. The vast majority of people have almost no understanding of the methods or the nature of science, but they love the technology that spins off from it, while continuing to cling to superstitious nonsense that the science that created that technology falsified long ago. I also strongly doubt that anyone would deny the existence of evil when it's so clearly manifest in the daily news. Ponerology is the study of evil within the restricted context of theology, not the study of evil generally, and in that context I can't see that it has any solution. Reconciling the presumed existence of an omnipotent, benevolent deity with the evil that so obviously exists in the world seems to me to be philosophically intractable, there is no sensible explanation. Or if there is, I've never encountered it in decades of searching for it. But if you leave the deity out of the analysis, the problem of evil becomes readily explicable. In the simplest possible terms, some people are bad and sometimes nature does bad things to people. The cyclone that ripped up the Irrawaddy River delta in Myanmar recently, for instance, did great harm to tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people; how can you possibly reconcile that with most theological views of the world? That kind of thing happens all the time, and you can view them as impersonal, undirected natural events, or as some kind of deliberate behaviour by the deity. In the former case, it is simply physical, non-moral evil that requires no explanation beyond the observation that this is how the natural world has always operated. In the latter case, however, there's a very thorny philosophical problem of why does a deity allow or cause such things to happen. By far the simplest explanation is that there is no deity.
