Perhaps the existence of evil is necessary for the expression of good.
"The problem of evil rears its ugly head in this case. Unless you plead ignorance, I do not see how you can bypass this problem, without first conceding the omnipotence or goodness of your God."
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The problem of evil is a difficult question. I'll mention that the best treatment of it that I ever read was The Goodness of God by John Wenman; I'll also mention that my very good friend Jeff Zurheide has written a book on the matter more recently which I have not yet had the opportunity to read and have not as yet gotten the title (but since he also read the Wenman book many years ago, I suspect his treatment is similarly excellent). That said, I'll address a few main points.
My view of the problem of evil, shared by many Christian theologians in the late 20th century, sees evil as a necessary possibility for the existence of good. In short form, there is no moral sense in which you can be said to have been good were it not possible for you to have been otherwise. When the toaster produces my toast, the washing machine cleans my clothes, and my car starts in the morning, although to me those are good things in a pragmatic sense, the machines are not morally good. They could not have chosen to do other than they did; although they could have failed to operate properly, there would be no moral stigma attached to such failure. In order for you and I to be good in a moral sense, there must be the real possibility that we could be other than good, and that which is other than good is evil. But permit me to expound on this somewhat.
It is clear that we have free moral choice. This is a good thing, because we can understand and express the differences between good and evil, and we can recognize the intrinsic value of good. Yet it is a necessary consequence of this that we can choose and do evil.
It is also clear that we can affect each other: that which we do can impact on the lives of others. This is also intrinsically a good thing. It gives us the ability to improve each other's lives, to love each other in tangible ways, and to help each other. Without this, there would be much less good in the world. Yet again it is a necessary consequence of this that we can hurt each other, and thus the possibility of evil is released into the world in order to create the possibility of good in the world.
It is clear that good and evil have consequences to the individual, and that is a good thing. That those who do good are usually rewarded and those who do evil usually punished, each receiving the fruits of his own choices, teaches us the nature of good and evil, and encourages us to be good; it also results in pain for those who do wrong, more evil and suffering in the world. Yet you are correct in noting that such consequences are neither swift nor sure; yet this, too, is a good thing--for how could our moral choices be made freely if we knew that to choose badly would result in immediate and certain pain to ourselves, and to choose well would deliver immediate reward? Our choice would still be in some limited sense free; but it would be little more than asking you whether you would like to receive an electric shock or a decent meal. You could freely choose the electric shock, but it is doubtful whether you would. If you choose good merely for immediate gratification and the avoidance of pain, you are not making moral choices but pragmatic ones.
Given that the ability to freely choose good and to contribute beneficially to your own life and the lives of others is predicated on the possibility that there is another option, the existence of so much that is evil in the world is clearly the responsibility of those who have chosen evil when they could have chosen good.
But why doesn't God intervene to prevent this evil from going so far? This can be viewed in two ways. First, why should we expect that God would interfere with our choices or the consequences thereof? Would we not declare Him unfair to do so, and rightly? No, if we bring evil upon ourselves by choosing evil, we have a right to it; and if we bring evil upon others by choosing evil, we have a right to expect that they would receive that which we worked to give them--as clearly as that if we choose to bring good upon ourselves and others, we and they should reap the benefits.
But second, what makes us certain that God has not intervened to prevent evil from going too far? Many things in this world are not so bad as they might be, even in the twentieth century. The Axis powers did not conquer the world in World War II, and so did not continue to spread their genocidal philosophies to the rest of the globe. The cold war did not erupt into global nuclear holocaust despite the many triggers which might have tripped it--and I am not saying that God forbade these things, only that the world could have been worse than it is. That which we consider bad is based on our knowledge of reality. We ask why God allows that which we identify as the worst things in the world; yet we do not know what He might have disallowed, and our perceived horrors might be less severe than those which are possible. That is, the degree of evil is very much a relative thing, understood from our perspective of how far removed it is from good and how much worse it is than anything else we know. If war did not exist, if there were no famine, no plague, no incurable diseases, no children dying home or abroad, if tyrants did not rule, mass murderers did not kill, if everyone made positive moral choices nearly all the time and did their best to make the world a better place--I can imagine a world in which the worst thing which ever happened was the occasional hangnail. I realize that in such a world, if it had no history or knowledge of anything worse than those hangnails, people would be asking how a good God can allow the pain and suffering of a hangnail. It is a matter of perspective; whatever you perceive as the worst thing that is becomes your argument against God, but there must be a worst thing, so there would always be such an argument even in a world which we would perceive as idyllic and paradisal.
There is much more that can be said about this problem, but not in this letter.
To Mark J. Young's Bible Study Materials
Read about the Multiverser role playing game--accused by some critics of being "too Christian".
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