The Problem of Evil

There is hardly a man clever enough to recognize the full extent of the evil he does.

- Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We have spoken of it before on this blog, and it has been mentioned in passing and deliberately, but the "Problem of Evil," yet remains one of the largest objections to Christianity. If God is all-good, all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful - why is there yet evil in the world? As I read recently from a website www.calvaryphx.com in their Q&A section, the problem of evil exists because God is good.

God is not an annihilator; He has never completely destroyed both someone's body and soul so that it is as if that person, or those people, have never been. Even those in the Old Testament, that God told the Israelites to make war upon, were not utterly annihilated. Why?

Because God does, despite what many rabid PC'ers claim, respect the views of other people. He allows people to be wrong. He allows for freedom. Love without freedom is slavery, and is therefore also not love. "...Freely you have received, freely give (Matthew 10:8)." Part of the reason why God loves a cheerful giver is because the giver does so freely and willfully, knowing that the giver has lost something, time if nothing else, and cannot get that time back. Imagine if on your wedding day your wife, or husband, to-be said "I do" not because that person desperately loved you, but because it was not possible for that person to answer otherwise! You wouldn't have a spouse, but a mere servant; a slave. We are made in the image of God, and God is no slave; part of being made in that image is self-determination i.e. free will.

Aha! some might say. If God is all-powerful, then surely He can create people who would always freely choose to do good!

But that is not possible. To which you might reply - if God is all-powerful, then nothing is impossible! But that is not true either. Consider the following (somewhat childish) philosophical argument:

1) God is all-powerful.
2) If (1), then God can do anything.
3) If (1) and (2), then God can create a rock so big that He himself cannot lift it.
4) But God can do anything (2)
- We are left with a contradiction. If God is all-powerful, can He make a rock so big He Himself cannot lift it?

Similarly, let us address the question of evil in a more philosophically rigorous fashion:

1) God is all-powerful
2) God is all-good
3) God is all-knowing
4) That which is good seeks to maximixe good and minimize evil.
5) If (1) (2) then God is powerful enough to fully maximize good and fully minimize evil (make only a good universe)
6) If (3) God knows how to make only a good universe.
7) If (1) (2) and (3) then God can create people who always freely choose to do good.
8) Evil exists
9) People sometimes do evil
- We are left with another contradiction. But before anyone gets too excited, let us revisit the summary of the first argument:

If God is all-powerful, He can make a rock so big that He Himself cannot lift it. Substitute whatever term you feel is best appropriate for "big," whether it be size, mass, density, or whatever. The statement still stands until one realizes something: If God is all-powerful, and infinite (by definition), then it is not possible for there to be any such rock! If God is unlimited in His power, and He is, then there can never be a rock which He cannot lift. Thus premise (3), in the first argument, is unsound because it supposes the existence of something that is logically contradictory. There cannot be any such rock of sufficient size, mass, or whatever, that cannot be overcome by an infinitely all-powerful being.

We have the exact same problem in premise (7) of the second argument. Just as God cannot create a rock so big that He himself cannot lift it (because God can, by definition lift anything because of His being all-powerful and infinite), He cannot create a being that always freely chooses to do good because then there is no freedom. Even the best Christians do not always do the morally best thing in any given situation, regardless of how big or small that situation is - that is why God tells believers to regularly confess their sins - because they will, in fact, continue sinning. But the presence of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer will ensure that the believer sins less and less, a process called sanctification, whereby God begins to make the believer more like Jesus Christ.

Freedom is a mutually exclusive term. Either you are free to choose (a) or you are not free to choose (a). Freedom, too, is bound by the law of non-contradiction. For those of you interested in reading more about God's attributes and logical possibility, I refer you to the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

To end, I will refer once again to www.calvaryphx.com in that site's final paragraph concerning dealing with the problem of evil.

"The real question that needs to be answered by those who blame God for evil is “how much suffering is too much suffering? Who is able to make that determination? Isn’t a certain level of pain a good thing since it warns me of danger? The removal of suffering would cripple our growth as individuals. This fact was even the basis of the Hollywood movie “The Matrix.” The ruling machines found that a “perfect world” did not work for humans and they had to scrap it for what our current reality holds. If Hollywood recognizes that suffering is essential to the human character, and the Bible states that it is inevitable, and if Jesus bore the suffering for the weight of sin, then what sort of folly begs for a world with no suffering?"

"Apart from the gospel message, I know of no other hope for mankind."
- Konrad Adenauer, German Chancellor following WWII