About five or so years ago, I read Rabbi Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. If I remember correctly, in his appraisal of the Book of Job, he set up three conditions; God is good, Job is good, God is all-powerful. One of these propositions had to go. Kushner chose the all-powerful one, that God would have loved to have helped Job, but Satan is pretty persuasive and you know it’s a lot of work painting stripes on all those zebras. Good Luck! (How in the world is this comforting?) Limiting God’s power is one way to deal with the problem of evil, but this option disqualifies God from being able to be the Creator. The best such a being could do is to influence the world for good in some limited way such as we do by doing charitable acts. As much as we wish, none of us have the power to make the world a peaceful place. And so it will never be because God, in this view, can’t do it either.
Atheism affirms the existence of evil but denies the existence of God. Pantheism affirms the reality of God but denies the reality of evil. Deism distances God from the problem. Panentheism is necessary for the improvement of God’s body, the world (so in some sense, evil is good.) Theism sticks out there like sore thumb by claiming that evil in all it’s forms are ultimately our fault. Ouch.
So if God is perfectly good and all-powerful why does he allow evil in His creation? The short answer: Free Will. But with freedom comes the possibility of evil. God is responsible for creating the possibility of evil, but free creatures are responsible for realizing that potential and making it actual. Freedom itself is a good thing. And God gives good things.
There is a difference between primary and secondary causes. God is the primary cause of all things and actions. Since He has given us the potentiality to make free choices, we can actualize this potential as a secondary cause to any given action. It is not God who made the choice, but rather He just enabled man to make that choice. So then God is not responsible for the evil that men do, since it is not God who determines man’s actions, but rather man, empowered by God, determines his own actions.
Evil is not a thing-in-itself, Orthodox Christianity rejects the notion of dualism. Since God is good and creator of all things, there is nothing transcendently evil that could have created evil as an actual thing. Rather, in Christian philosophy, what we call evil is a privation of some good quality that should be or is meant to be present in any given thing. Trees are not meant to see, so it not evil that they have no eyes. But eyes which are blind lack the good quality they were meant to give, the ability to see. Total depravity is hogwash, because if any given thing had all of it good properties taken away, it would then no longer be. It would be a non-thing. Even Satan has the good qualities, of free will and intelligence, but lacks the qualities of mercy and benevolence.
It is impossible for God to do contradiction. What is meant by being all-powerful is that God can do all things that are inherently possible. God cannot make circle squares or make a rock so big He can’t pick it up. Nor can He make a moral world without the possibility of free moral choice. If the choices are not free, that God makes the choices for the creature, then the creature is no longer volitional and is not responsible for it’s actions, God is. So then the creature is not free, like a puppet on a string. (Can a puppet love?) But of what value is this? All the world would be a puppet show. If it is not, then with the possibility for worship comes the possibility for blasphemy, with the possibility for love comes the possibility of hate, with the possibility of sexual intimacy comes the possibility for rape, and so on…. The possibility for great good is always accompanied by the possibility for great evil.
The perfect goodness and omnipotence of God requires that someday evil will be defeated. Just because this have not yet been done does not mean that will never be. At the final time, this will be done by separating those people who choose the goodness of God from those who choose to separate themselves from it. Those who desire good will no longer be frustrated and harmed by evil, those who choose evil will no longer be annoyed by the preachy evangelizing of the good. The good of free choice would be upheld throughout while overcoming evil though the separation of the good from the bad. A theistic God both can do this and will do this.
“There are
only two kinds of people in
the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done’, and those to whom
God says,
in the end, ‘Thy will be done’. All that are in Hell choose it, Without
that
self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and
constantly
desires joy will ever miss it."
C.S Lewis, The Great Divorce, ch.9
I’ve been speaking mostly about metaphysical and moral evil but what about physical evil? What of earthquakes and cancer, food poisoning and drowning, why are these necessary? Now to address this I’m going to have to use Christian scripture. No one is innocent (Romans 5:12) and as such deserve death. (Romans 6:23) So earthquakes and cancer, drowning and food poisoning, resultant from the curse of God upon man’s rebellion (Genesis 3) do not harm innocent people. It is a categorical mistake to say that God has no right to take life because we do not have the right to take the life of another human being without justification. The Lord gives life; He can take it. (Deuteronomy 32:39; Job 1:21) The world is cursed as a result of the free choice of Adam and Eve, not God’s choice, though He made man’s choice possible, as the primary cause, willing that free choice be possible.
Pain is God’s megaphone as C.S Lewis put it. So pain can have good purposes like withdrawing your hand from a fire before you are seriously burned. Pain and suffering show the impermanence and imperfection of the world, thus lessening your ties to it, so you reach out for that which is perfect. God cannot withhold physical evil until His creatures are morally ready to live in such a world. If an immoral creature lived in a perfect world with no death, injury or disease, why in the world should he choose good? He could do as he pleases, but those moral creatures would then suffer from his presence and actions. But this raises a contradiction. Immoral creatures injure, but if no injury is possible, then it follows then he is not free to act immorally. So the good of free choice must be taken from the immoral creature maintain a perfect world free of injury, ending up with less than a perfect world lacking the quality of free choice.
Why does God endure evil if He is perfectly good? Since He foreknew that His creatures would choose to actualize the possibility of evil, why did He then create us anyway and so have to endure the evil that men do? This suggests that nothing is better than something. This is absurd because nothing is nothing, it cannot be compared with something, they are in completely different categories. It would be like saying a non-cheeseburger tastes better than a cheeseburger.
This same is true when it come to morality. A non-moral world with no choices is certainly not better than a moral one with choices. Freedom is good. There is no possibility for the freedom to love in a non-moral world, only forced motion much like puppets on a puppeteer’s string. Forced love is not love, but rape. God is not a rapist. Certainly love is better than non-love, for love is good and non-love is nothing.