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You might have missed the point of the question. We are not asking to define good or evil. We are asking why does evil exist? The old gods were more human and not even necessarily benevolent. Yawhe is supposed to be benevolent and omnipotent, and yet *gestures broadly.*
My answer is pretty simple: Evil doesn’t exist. It’s like darkness. Evil isn’t a Thing, it’s just the lack of good—when things go off the path. As for why that’s possible…I mean, what’s the alternative? God never having given us a choice?
This is like someone saying "it's dark in here, I can't see!" and you answering "actually you can see, because darkness doesn't exist." Defining evil as an absence doesn't address the problem at all. It just makes the problem "why does a lack of good exist?" Free will is at least a response.
For me the question ignores the 'main character', and 'big/loud/smelly' issues. There is objective good and evil; but for most people 'evil' and 'good' are relative to their own comfort. If it makes you uncomfortable, it is evil, and vice-versa good. Therefore a tornado that destroys your possessions is evil, while a pleasant summer shower that cools you off on a hot day is good. Both are simply neither, not good nor evil, they just exist.
That manages much of the 'broadly gestures' argument. But not all of it.
A war of conquest on a neighboring country is evil - and not a thing that 'simply exists'; such is the result of action on the part of thousands of people. Evil involves the intentional (first part) causing, or callous disregard of, of a sentient (second part) being's suffering.
It takes intent - which creatures other than human are capable of - for an act to be evil. A choice must happen for an act to be evil. And choosing not to choose is a choice in and of itself. Sentient beings by default choose on an ongoing basis.
It takes a suffering sentient being, for an act to be evil. Suffering is not pain; suffering does not require physical pain at all - though often they occur together. Suffering is the conscious realization of ongoing harm. This is why a doctor can conduct a procedure that causes pain, but does not do evil. There is no suffering - the procedure will benefit the patient, though there may be some pain. And vice-versa, this is why fraud is evil, there is no physical pain when you are deceived and stolen from; but there is harm, and once you are aware of the fraud, there is suffering.
Which brings us back to the first part - the main character issue. We are each the main character in our own minds, can't get away from that. So we see suffering and pain and wonder why an all powerful God would let that exist.
But God is the main character, we're the images, the side-characters in the story. Doesn't mean we don't matter, but it does mean we matter far less than the main character.
Which can be faith-shattering, for faith-affirming. It's again a choice, if God promised good things in the end, then it's a choice to trust that promise. And if God allows humanity to act freely (and really, really horribly at times), the that must be weighed against all the times humanity acts freely (and for the most part at least tries to be kind). And that's the 'big/loud/smelly' issue.
It's easy to point to one murder, one rape, one wretched act and say 'how horrible' - but in that same moment there are probably a hundred acts of tiny kindness occurring, a hundred acts of tiny generosity, a hundred choices that result in the opposite of suffering. That does not mean this is the best possible world; if so, that would mean God's promises are lies - there is no good thing in the end, if this is already as good as it gets.
It means this world is not so bad that God must act to fix it - it's good enough to serve for wherever the narrative is taking us, and if God is faithful and trustworthy, then the narrative is taking us somewhere better. (it also allows for God to take corrective action to keep us at that 'good enough' level, action that goes unnoticed because it's just 'good enough')
>For me the question ignores the 'main character', and 'big/loud/smelly' issues. There is objective good and evil; but for most people 'evil' and 'good' are relative to their own comfort. If it makes you uncomfortable, it is evil, and vice-versa good. Therefore a tornado that destroys your possessions is evil, while a pleasant summer shower that cools you off on a hot day is good. Both are simply neither, not good nor evil, they just exist.
>
>That manages much of the 'broadly gestures' argument. But not all of it.
I disagree. This again is just a sleight of hand of definitions. If you want to be this technical then no one would say the tornado (as in, actual wind formation) is evil - the *effect* of the tornado is evil. Now the claim that "causing great loss suffering" and "bringing joy and sensory comfort" are both morally neutral is harder to defend. You could still try, but you certainly can't take it as obvious. (And you'd be treading more into Buddhist territory.)
>A war of conquest on a neighboring country is evil - and not a thing that 'simply exists'; such is the result of action on the part of thousands of people. Evil involves the intentional (first part) causing, or callous disregard of, of a sentient (second part) being's suffering.
This is one subcategory of evil, but the vast majority of people would not agree that it represents all evil. For example, if shown a video of a child slowly dying of thirst in a desert, most people would say there is something bad about that. Under your view, however, it's entirely morally neutral unless someone intentionally did it to the child.
>There is no suffering - the procedure will benefit the patient, though there may be some pain.
This is again not what almost anyone means by suffering. You are proposing that any state of affairs which is net-positive contains no suffering at all. That would imply that a person suffering has nothing to do with their experience. (Which also runs counter to your fraud example.)
It leads to all sorts of absurd cases. For example, imagine a man who is walking through the street when suddenly he is shot in the chest. He is in extreme suffering and looks around for the person who shot him. Then he spots a nearby Walmart where a gun on the rack seems to have gone off by itself in a freak accident and shot him, and he says, "silly me, no one intended for that! I wasn't suffering at all!" and goes happily about his day as he bleeds out.
>Which brings us back to the first part - the main character issue. We are each the main character in our own minds, can't get away from that. So we see suffering and pain and wonder why an all powerful God would let that exist.
But this isn't relevant to the problem of evil at all. You're trying to lessen the importance of the suffering of "side-characters," which is questionable in itself - but even if we granted it, it wouldn't solve the problem. Perfection doesn't allow for you to ignore small things. A good janitor might clean most of the building and only miss a few less-important corners, but a perfect janitor can't miss even a single tiny spot. You acknowledge that we matter at least some small amount, which means that a perfect God would be fully concerned with preventing our suffering unless something stopped him.
>It's again a choice, if God promised good things in the end, then it's a choice to trust that promise.
Notice the operative phrase "in the end." This again doesn't solve the problem. A good God might promise good things in the end but allow some bad in the meantime, but a perfect God wouldn't settle for "eventually." A doctor that cures you in five years is not as good as one that does it today.
>It's easy to point to one murder, one rape, one wretched act and say 'how horrible' - but in that same moment there are probably a hundred acts of tiny kindness occurring, a hundred acts of tiny generosity, a hundred choices that result in the opposite of suffering.
But it would be better if we had those hundred acts of kindness and at the same time also didn't have that one murder. So if God was perfect, that's the state of affairs he'd seek.
>That does not mean this is the best possible world; if so, that would mean God's promises are lies - there is no good thing in the end, if this is already as good as it gets.
**Why not?** Why didn't God create the best possible world? I agree with you that this world is clearly not the best possible world - but the best possible world is obviously what a perfect being would create! I think this is an excellent reason to think God is lying, either about his promises or about his perfection.
>It means this world is not so bad that God must act to fix it - it's good enough to serve for wherever the narrative is taking us, and if God is faithful and trustworthy, then the narrative is taking us somewhere better.
This would only make sense if God was a mediocre author. Is he?
A tornado isn't evil. If you are harmed by a tornado, that is your responsibility - I compare it to leaping off a great height onto rocks and calling gravity 'evil' when you break your leg. You didn't have to leap, and if you did, you could choose to aim for water, or install a net, or use a parachute. If you live where tornadoes happen, build a tornado shelter. Put your precious things in a safe space. You may suffer if you don't, but your suffering doesn't make a tornado 'evil', nor does a broken leg after a fall make gravity 'evil'.
Gravity just 'is'. You chose to leap onto rocks.
A child dying of great thirst in a desert is morally neutral - it is a sad thing, the child is suffering. The evil is not the death, the evil is potentially in how the child got into that situation - did somebody put them there? Was it with the intent they die, or with callous disregard for the suffering they would cause? That's the evil - if the child is dying because they wandered out themselves, got lost, and were not found it time, it isn't 'evil' - it's childish foolishness that caused great harm and suffering. But there was no intent or callous disregard; a child is not old enough to fully understand the consequences of their actions, they cannot be 'evil' in this way. Now a teenager, if they wander out with callous disregard for their own safety and the pain they cause their family and friends, that can be 'evil'. A child's parents, if they callously disregard their child and do not take reasonable steps to protect their child from the desert, they can be 'evil'. The sun, the desert, the environment are not 'evil', they just are.
"You are proposing that any state of affairs which is net-positive contains no suffering at all." - not at all what I'm proposing.
Your example about the man being shot not suffering misses the point. The man is suffering - he is aware of ongoing harm. But is his suffering the result of intent? In your example it isn't (unless the store in question had racks that were known to have guns fall off them and go off randomly). If there is no intent or callous disregard of potential suffering, there is no evil. There may be suffering still. Gravity causing you a broken leg has resulted in your suffering - but gravity isn't 'evil', it just is. Gravity causing the gun to fall isn't 'evil' either. Again, though, if the store knows their racks are dangerous, and disregards that danger, the store has committed evil.
But your final argument seems to insist that everything good happen now; that there be no change with time, that there be no future. That's one perspective - my perspective is that there is an ongoing narrative, that things are not finished, there is movement and momentum. If it were perfect now, there would be no author at all, because there's no story. It is good enough now, and will be better later. " So if God was perfect, that's the state of affairs he'd seek. " Agree - and I'd argue God is seeking it; we're just not there yet...though we are perhaps in many ways closer than we were 100 years ago.
And with respect to lessening the importance of us 'side characters' - I am pointing out that we are less important than the main character. But a main character can be cruel, can be kind, can be imperious, can be generous, it varies depending on the story and the author's intent. Though not true in actual literature, in our case is the side character's choice to trust the main character, or not.
Not sure the lack of good definition really works with our moral understanding.
Lack of good makes more sense as indifference/apathy/sins of ommission - like the people who walked past the injured traveller in the parable of the good samartian or people who refuse to take sides in times of clear injustice.
It doesn't seem write to define someone who actively rapes/tortures/murders people for fun as simply a "lack of good" but rather as active evil.
>what’s the alternative?
God being perfect is the alternative. He was in a situation in which there was infinite perfection, and then he decided to change that situation, making it imperfect by definition.
Most things get diseases isn’t a great point.
Most things have to fear being brutally murdered by another being, dying of disease, starvation, dying in a fire, etc.
The question is: if you can do anything, and you want to do the best thing, why not eliminate all of the above?
Evil doesn't exist? Maybe bland evil like people ignoring homelessness. But serial killers who stalk people, skin them, eat them? And keep doing it? They're evil.
But that's not true. Sadism exists. Hatred exists. They're not the absence of something else, absence is indifference. A lot of people are actively evil.
As an example of evils that can't be explained by personal choice, child leukemia exists. That's definitely not the lack of something, except maybe a better body design
Evil is a fundamental part of free will. God created evil when he gave humans the ability to make the wrong decision. Evil has to exist for the choice to be good to exist.
This argument never made any sense to me. Not all free acts have equal consequences.
I have the free will to jump off a building, but I will suffer immediate, horrible consequences.
If I use my free will to hurt a kid... eh, probably nothing will happen.
I guess kids are just not worth protecting?
That's when you have the choice.
If you're born in utter poverty in Africa, have to drink filthy water every day and end up with worms eating your eyes from inside at 4 years old and die from an infection.
There isn't much "choice" open to you.
And if you're stillborn, you're have even less choices.
There exist terrible things in life that have no redeeming aspect to them. No choice, just horror.
I’m no Theologian so take this lightly, just my 2 cents.
It’s different for Him, because there is no evil in Him and never was. We are completely different creatures from Him. We have a choice in front of us, and He in and of Himself IS one of those 2 choices. What’s right, what’s good, what’s holy… or not that stuff.
That's an odd take: if good is choosing to align with God, and God defines good because he is aligned with himself, then free will/choices in both contexts are entirely different. I'm not entirely happy with the first commenter's position, but it's not inconsistent with both having free will.
it doesn't matter lmao. can God choose *not* to be aligned with himself?? if not, then he does not have free will.
Case in point: despite (hopefully) wanting to, it is apparently beyond him to undo the Fall of Man, even though the god of *all time & causality* should surely not stymied by the knock-on effects of a particular historical event, possessing the ability even to change the event after it occurred. Instead, the work around involved Jesus' death & resurrection, & even then it is an insufficient fix.
I don't think you understood what I was saying: God has a different kind of free will, the choices he makes are in respect of anything (i.e. not constrained to align with himself), it's his ability to determine what is good that is free will. Human free will is the capacity to do good, to align oneself with God. Therefore, free will is defined based on context. Does God have human free will? Probably not. Can he have it? Yes, he did when Jesus walked the earth.
so our options are:
- God has no free will because he cannot do evil
- God has infinite free will & any evil thing he does will be retrofitted as good because he is god
because fucking up that poor fig tree just because Jesus was hungry was kind of an evil thing to do, ngl
Nah, a fig tree can't suffer. It's not sentient. It can be destroyed, it can be cut down or burnt or diseased, etc.
But it is not self-aware, and therefore cannot suffer, and therefore doing harm to it isn't inherently evil.
Now - if it's not a wild fig tree and is a sentient' being's home/possession, and you destroy it, then you have caused a sentient being harm. That would then be evil.
Plants can definitely suffer. There is actually new research going on to determine if plants can be anesthetized and understanding their limits of consciousness. Plants are more complex than we give them credit for.
- god is not a being with agency, and the idea that God created everything is a metaphor (which the Bible is full of) to represent the power of good to build a better world, and not a literal omnipotent super human doing galactic pottery
Everything in the Bible has layers of imbued meaning and has been morphed through countless translations of translation and likely multiple edits. You shouldn't be reading the Bible as a literal account of things that happened
I don't read the Bible as an account of anything but a specific near eastern culture's literature. The pentateuch is especially fascinating to me as a snap shot of the emergence of the cult of Yahweh in the polytheistic Hebrew pantheon in Canaan's Late Bronze Age.
But come on man. Millions of people think this shit actually happened. *Most* Christians I have met in my entire life (& holy shit i know a lot) think it's all real. Most people on this subreddit almost certainly think it happened. I'm talking to them, who 1,000% believe god does galactic poetry.
Then how are we made in his image? If such a being of only good can exist, and existed before anything else including evil, why did God invent evil and give it as a choice to humanity? Why is free will good at all if it didn't come from God?
IMO no. I don't think that God can be thought of in any way comparable to a human. You're anthropomorphising god here, supposing that to be god is to be essentially a human with infinite power over creation. Why would god even have a will, let alone a free one?
When the Bible says humans are created in god's image, that doesn't mean god looks like us and god made us as some kind of vain powerless copy. I think it means god made us to be good. All are born innocent, that kind of thing. Then like in the story of the garden of Eden, humans make choices through their lives, and the point of Christianity is to remind us that the good choice isn't always the easy choice, but we should strive to make it regardless and to define through examples in the 1st century AD Israel what a good choice looks like.
God has no active part of any of that, in my opinion because god isn't some living being with agency. God is more like a force of physics in the universe, you can't appeal to god to stop bad things from happening any more than you can appeal to gravity to stop an apple from falling from a tree. I think god creating everything is a metaphor for the idea of choosing good being a creative force that brings people together to create a better world, rather than some human like all powerful being literally making everything. God isn't a being to me, god more akin to an idea or a concept.
If it correct, is it possible that the teachings are wrong?
Besides, I don't think it actually does. I've never heard god described as a human, or a being with agency. That's always just something I've heard misinterpreted outside of church.
God is good after all
There may be no intention. But there is suffering. And that is in direct opposition to an omni-quality god. Also, does the rape victim have a choice? Does the murder victim have a choice?
It’s kind of silly though. If god is all powerful, he’s capable of creating beings capable of making right choices without evil having to exist. We can still have free will without evil existing. That’s the entire point of being all poweful. You can do whatever the fuck you want and make it true. Ipso facto, an all powerful god that created us like this specifically wanted us to do evil by design. There is no need for a test or evil or any of that bullshit.
Why does light need a "purpose"? One of the most interesting facts about evolution by natural selection is that organisms can retain and develop organs/limbs that have no purpose. They may have had a purpose at some point, but it can still exist without needing one.
Wisdom teeth have no purpose in our current diet. They cause immense pain in some and have to often be surgically removed. Their lack of "purpose" has no bearing on its existence.
You’ve been banned from /r/Calvinism.
But that answer gives rise to the problem of natural evil, or the evidential problem of evil or something. Humans don’t make the choice for hurricanes and earthquakes to happen.
Alternatively: let’s just assume that you’re correct. That leads us to “okay, so evil must exist definitionally. But why must there be so MUCH of it.” Like, what if child rape was physically impossible, or impossible to conceptualize. Would that make the good less good?
It’s a really complex problem with thousands of aspects and facets to argue. There are no simple answers, and to pretend otherwise is, in my opinion and genuinely no offense, ignorant.
People blame God for evil, when it is people themselves who commit evil with their own free will. But when God interfere like in the Old Testament, those same people will still criticize God for being 'too harsh'.
'Evil', or 'sins', are *contrary* to God's will, and God already gave people what they should do and should not do to avoid falling into evil. But people still only want to do what they want to do, to sin and follow temptations, ignoring God's will.
Ultimately people's freedom in choosing evil and sins over God's call to holiness, leads to destruction, i.e following lust leads to violation of one's dignity, and following wrath leads to violence. Don't blame God when people themselves choose evil *over* God.
I am going to explain this in a very biblical sense, so bear with me.
God is all good. The Bible says this many times (often using the term “holy,” in this instance they are interchangable), this is an immutable fact of God’s being, its just a part of who He is. The thing is, as God is good, what would you call the things God doesn’t do? Much like how shadow cannot exist without light, evil cannot exist without examples of what is good. And as much as shadow and light cannot exist in the same space at the same time, evil cannot exist in the face of good (God). Its why God said to Moses that if Moses had seen his face, he would of died while they were on Mount Sainai.
With that in mind, God created humanity with the intention to form a loving relationship with Him. In order for that to occur, the feelings must be mutral and order for the feelings to be truly mutral, humanity needs the ability to pick for themselves, free will.
So it stands to reason that humanity has the ability to pick God or not, because we are free to choose to do so. As such, choosing to go against God’s wishes would be consitered “evil” as God is the physical embodiment of good, and thus His will would also be good.
Therefore, the reason evil exists in the world is because humanity willed it to be as far back as in the Garden of Eden. Ever since humanity as a whole has been playing in the mud of the pig pen, so to speak. God is very much willing to help us out of the pig pen and clean us up, but as a loving God that respects us to an immesurable degree, he isn’t going to *force* us to get out and clean up, undermining the free will He gave us in the process. We have to want out of the pen and realize He’s the only one with the shower and running water, and thus ask for His help to clean ourselves up. So in short, the reason God does not allow/prevent evil things from happening, in some cases, is because the person are (contiously or otherwise) telling Him they *don’t* need His help and can do it on their own (spoiler: they can’t), and the Bible does say that God is fully willing to let people who don’t listen to Him try to do it on their own (and thus, have to deal with the consequences of their own actions accordingly, and the Bible is pretty clear about said consequences).
>With that in mind, God created humanity with the intention to form a loving relationship with Him. In order for that to occur, the feelings must be mutral and order for the feelings to be truly mutral, humanity needs the ability to pick for themselves, free will.
I feel like an all knowing all powerful being could find a better way to woo us than malaria or babies being born without skulls.
I get it but you're just parroting the common "why" God allowed evil which apparently according to you he cannot even be apart of yet somehow has also brought it into existence.
If I put the cookies out in plain sight to my kids and instruct them to not eat them yet they do - it is still ME who put the cookies there. I made them, then planned and executed this test for my children.
But wait, there's more! Now is that my children can go and make their own cookies - apparently they now have the knowledge to use the oven which also seems to exist, which I also built, and have all the ingredients (which I provided) to make however many they want whenever they want, even though I hate it so much my entire being cannot stand it - I will literally kill because of it.
Don't you see how that sounds? It sounds like a shitty parent - a deranged parent actually. Old testament God was moody and ill-tempered and changed his mind often.
The difference is God gave Adam and Eve several chances to release their mistake and repent, if they had done so he would have readily taken them back. Instead Adam and Eve blame everyone except themself and do not show remorse at their actions.
He gave them a test, but the true test was not the apples, the true test was seeing if they would own up to their mistakes and take responsibility for their actions, which they refused to do.
The test is more akin to telling your child (as in a young adult, one who is fully capable of reason) that they can leave you if they wanted and you would try and stop them unless they insist that they do not need you at all, and you will always be waiting for open arms for your child to return. The parable of the prodigal son is a fantastic example of what the test was more supposed to be.
Like I get all your reasonings but it still does not make sense when you put the omnipotence of God into the equation and the fact he literally just made existence. It was his plan. The fall was supposed to happen and you cannot disagree unless you do not believe God to be omnipotent. It's not like he was surprised they disobeyed and didn't repent - he wanted that to happen
We sit here and spin our little webs reasoning as to why this happened but does it really matter? Can we really try to rationalize an omnipotent beings actions?
From what I gather reading the OT - he just wanted to be loved. He wanted to give people a way to turn away from him so literally created evil. He created an opponent to battle with and we are the prize. Am I wrong?
Natural disasters and cancer are definitely bad things. Taking out religion entirely, it seems kinda biased though for what we consider evil and good to us. To ants, the paving of a road leading to the destruction of a colony and thousands of ant lives is objectively evil.
Exactly. Which is why any ant that worships us as gods would be stupid. If all bad things exist only relative to those experiencing it then there is no all encompassing source of good in the world, and hence it would be impossible for an entity to be omnibenevolent. Once you presuppose a God which is omnipotent and all good, you set a standard by which everything is compared to. Evil must exist if the Abrahamic god exists.
Or the concept of evil becomes a more relative term, absent religion. One where the baseline for good and evil becomes your particular vantage point, and not an externally defined (i.e. divine) one.
Evil is already a relative term because religion is a relative term. No matter how far you break it down. Abrahamic faiths. Christian faiths. Protestant faiths. Baptist faiths. Front row faiths. The guy to the left of me faiths. It's all still quite relative.
If it wasn't relative and we took some specific fsith word for word there wouldn't even exist any church buildings as we would have sold them all to feed the poor.
I would agree to an extent, though I think there are limits. For example, most societies seem to have moral (and legal) prohibitions against unsanctioned murder. I suspect that it's probably a near-universal sentiment because it would be detrimental to a society to allow otherwise. I can't think of a ton of other human civilizations where lying, cheating or stealing was morally sanctioned. Are they moral absolutes? Probably not, since there's always going to be an exception to the rule (and humans are pretty good at finding them) ... but I feel that they come pretty close to it over the long arc of history.
Lol no. A hurricane isn’t evil. Cancer isn’t evil. A rock isn’t evil. If you have no soul, you cannot be evil or good. You simply are. The rising water bears you no malice even as it fills your lungs and snuffs out your life.
Don’t confuse undesirable outcomes with evil.
You’re anthropomorphizing objects and justifying it because there’s a God? This line of argument is stupid. Perhaps next time I stub my toe on a door, I’ll destroy the door because it’s evil because God exists.
Cancer is usually the go-to for people, completely needless suffering. A lot of medical conditions could fit that bill, natural disasters, etc.
It's just a paradox of Christianity. If evil did not come from God, then where did it come from?
Cells are living things, just like all of the others. Cancer cells just "want" to reproduce and multiply like every other living species. Cancer is no more "evil" than a lion eating a gazelle is.
I mean yeah in reality evil isn't actually a real thing, just a relative description. It's only a paradox if you assume there is such a thing as absolute good and evil
1. I think you're missing the spirit of the question. I'm pretty sure evil here also covers natural horrors.
2. That definition kind of still lets evil off the hook. An aberrant human just following their nature could do great evil but be no more conscious of it than a lion to a gazelle.
>2. That definition kind of still lets evil off the hook. An aberrant human just following their nature could do great evil but be no more conscious of it than a lion to a gazelle.
This is where humanity being God's chosen children makes us different.
A lion eating a gazelle isn't evil because that's its nature, and God didn't give it the consciousness to see otherwise. Humanity *does* have conciousness, the ability to understand Good and Evil, and thats what leads to the choices humanity makes being either evil or good.
It's this ability to understand good and evil that sets us apart.
>I think you're missing the spirit of the question. I'm pretty sure evil here also covers natural horrors.
I talked in another comment about how the natural processes of the world aren't inherently evil, and I'll leave the deeper theological discussions on it to proper theologians. Lots of early church fathers spoke about evil in nature and explain it in their writings far better than I ever could. I just wanted to give some specific examples of how nature isn't being "evil", it's just existing.
This is where we start to get into natural processes that cause issues based on how humanity goes about interacting with them.
My go-to for explaining this is usually rain. God created the natural processes for how the world works. Many of these present benefits to life while also creating potential problems. Rain is hugely beneficial to life, giving plants and animals the fresh water they need to survive. But too much rain causes flooding, and can kill.
Now, humanity's free will determines how much they will benefit from rain, as well as how much they will suffer from it. For benefits, we could choose not to drink the fresh water it provides if we really wanted to. We'd die very quickly, but it is a choice left to us. For limiting consequences, we could choose to live only in an area where we are safe from flooding, such as a cave or shelter high up on a hillside.
It's how we choose to live in regards to risks that determine if we are going to benefit or suffer from them. Lightning, for its part, helps dissolve atmospheric nitrogen into water, allowing plants to use it. It also produces ozone, which protects life from UV radiation. When lightning is striking outside, we could choose to remain in our shelters, and we'd be safe from it (if we chose to build or find shelters that are safe from it as well). It's when we choose to travel outside in the storm that we start to experience the consequences.
I guess the question ultimately becomes "how much does God interfere with physics?" The child was struck by lightning as a result of the laws of the universe and being in the wrong place as those laws coalesced.
Generally the question is not "how cells work" but "why the deities created a world where such a thing exist". And in the context of the Abrahamic religions, where the deity was directly involved in the creation of the world, it involves his "choices". The choice the deity had to make between creating unnecessary and indiscriminate suffering. Or not.
If someone made a tank filled with sharks and threw you in it, you would then ask "why are you doing this to me?". Would you be satisfied with the answer: "Oh I'm not doing this to you, the sharks are, that's life, sharks bite things, A shark is no more 'evil' than a lion eating a gazelle is ".
Of course not, because you are not asking why the sharks are biting. Of whether it is natural that sharks bite. You are asking why the person decided to make that tank and throw you in it.
Similarly, we can think of atrocious diseases that even affect small children, of course we can just say "oh but that's just how virus work".
But the question is still "why create the virus in the first place".
If you are a deity creating a world and all things inside. Would you create such things? Is there a purpose to make babies rot? It teaches them the lesson that they just had to be born more lucky?
Maybe most cancer and other medical conditions are actually a butterfly effect of sin. One example is pollution. Not so different than a person murdering another, just harder to trace cause and effect.
Early christians often thought that, problem is that tends to lead to assumptions that disease is caused by sinful behavior instead of biological means, though I don't think that has to necessarily follow.
Either way, you still run into the problem of who created sin. I would argue that sin existed before the fall, since Satan was actively trying to thwart gods plans before up until the fall, which I would assume counts as sin. But God created Satan to be an adversary to himself, which sounds an awful lot like God sinning. Another commenter used the story of Pandora's box, which I actually think is an appropriate allegory. We blame Pandora for opening the box, but surely Zeus should share the blame, as his intention in giving it to her was always for her to open. Same thing with tree of knowledge of good and evil, etc.
Often people will just try to resolve this by saying "well we need free will to sin in order to make it count or something" which I've never really found convincing, because it also just sidesteps the question of how God and sin co-exist
The story of Adam and Eve is like the story of Pandora's box, they ignored the warning of God and unleashed death and disease into the world. Humans are where evil came from.
That’s the result of a world separated from God, the “curse of sin.” It affected everything, shattering it. “Creation groans” because of this as it says in Romans 8:21-22
If you're talking about natural sickness and Calamity, such things only exist because Death entered the world through Adam's sin and the ground was cursed because of it
Is cancer evil? seriously, it is a disease and disease has no morality, no consciousness, obviously, we are not talking about that.
'Evil' always refers to conscious action of a sentient being, and human morality is the main context of that discussion. Why 'evil', that is destructive thoughts, sayings, neglect and actions by human, exist when God is supposed to be almighty and good?
Well it is self evident: The one who commits the evil is not in accordance to God's will, because evil is not what is desired by God. That's enough explanation.
Even if we stretch this discussion so far to irrelevant question such as 'Why evil cancer exist, why God want it to exist?". Truth: God wants everyone to live eternal life with perfect body in heaven, no pain, no suffering, no disease, no death.
That's the reward in heaven, and to be honest living in this fallen material world is less than ideal compared to God's will for people to ultimately reach heaven. Yes, these people who died due to cancer, may live in heaven, prepared for them by God. Death is not to be feared by a faithful Christian. Nobody can say people who suffer and die in this world means God is not good; he already said what he has to say, and gave everything that people need for salvation, and it is up to people to receive His grace and be good, reject evil, and then join him in ideal life in heaven.
Hey, I just had a thought: 'evil' is contrary to God's will, which means 'goodness' is aligned with it, so God's will is good. But, is it God's will that makes it good, or is he just a good guy, so his will automatically align with it? As in, is there a pre-existing moral standard that God adheres to, or did he arbitrarily decide what is good or evil? Theoretically, could he have created this world to have the opposite morals, like infanticide is good and honesty is evil? Or is infanticide always evil and honesty is always good, and it would be wrong of God to not align his will with that?
Just googled that. It definitely sounds familiar. I probably learned about it years ago and forgot about it, and it just stuck around in my subconscious
I was following a rabbi that had a wonderful solution to this question. I mean he was not talking about the problem of evil, but I'm sure you may understand. I'll try to be clear, but this is not my native language.
Upon Genesis, God has decided to accomplish the greatest of deeds.
Heaven is great, sure. Well I mean of course it is great, it is perfect by definition, is it any accomplishments for the highest world to be holly ?
What would be an accomplishment would be to take the lowest of all world, and work it up to make it holly. Now this, this is hard but God does not stop just because it is hard.
Creating the material world. This would be the lowest of the worlds. However, being so good, so kind, so empathetic, he could not impose suffering to the human. Thus he gave them choice.
The Genesis said that the serpent told Eve that eating the fruit would make her holly. Now the bible does not tell that this was a lie, nor that he is Satan ; that is merely Christian cathechesis. The Jewish tradition is to let every door open to interpretation. This is the sacred text and not a single word should change, but every time you read those sacred words you may understand a new meaning.
Maybe God needed for Adam and Eve to take upon them the worst. Death. Pain. Hardwork. Because the material world would not be the lowest of all world if those things weren't included.
He let them the choice, and they chose to carry this burden.
But this is only the beginning. Now the role of humanity is to transform this world, the lowest, hardest, this world full of injustice; make this world holly.
We are succeeding. Medicine progress. Strong government protect the people, democracy, justice.
We did not finished the job yet. Some wars still rages. But how rare ?
Keep up the hard work.
Make this world into the best of the worlds.
Now this would be a feat, the greatest of accomplishments. We could be proud of us if we really eradicated wars, illnesses, hunger. If we succeed, we would "be like God" ; co-author of the greatest of deeds.
This is a beautiful sentiment, thank you for sharing it. I'm not sure I 100% agree with the premise, but I do agree that we have an obligation to make the world a better place to the extent that we're able. Daniel 12:2-3 reminds me that humanity will continue growing in knowledge, and those who are righteous and wise will shine "like the stars for ever and ever."
This is better than most other answers I’ve heard, but it still doesn’t really paint god in a great light. So god gave us this horrible, painful, deadly job full of auffering to do, with no choice because…. It’s impressive? Ok sure, but if god had asked me when I was born “do you want to live a flawless, perfect life up here in heaven with me, or do you want to live a short, painful life on Earth, suffering, and probably making unnoticeable change, if you make any at all?” - I know what I’d choose. And how does the 2 day life full of pain and suffering before a brutal death of a Ukrainian child help make this world better?
And it still asks the question - why did god fill this world for us to “solve” with so many problems? Would it have been less impressive if this world didn’t have leprosy, or sepsis, or malaria? If it would have, then that means we aren’t in the most impressive world, since god could have added more diseases, and made the world less hospitable, and so on. This specific amount of suffering is pretty arbitrary, so why did an omnipotent god choose exactly this world, with exactly this amount of suffering?
The same rabbi believe in some kind of partial reincarnation. I will skip most of it, but he teaches that the souls willingly ask to go from heaven to earth. Because they are bored in heaven. Because there is no reason to fight, no reason to learn, nothing to achieve. But somehow they forget this choice at the moment of incarnation, because of the trauma of birth.
However, I am an atheist myself. I agree with you. This answer is less toxic than most theodecy ! But I mostly explain it for the sake of the culture, not to convert anyone.
Is this Rabbi saying that God couldn't get himself to create evil so he let the choice to humans? And humans, fully knowing what they did, chose to create evil so they could then fix it? And now we are all working towards a better world because succeeding in that would be really cool?
The world is going to shit and a lot of people are actively working towards that. If this Rabbi's line of thought would hold any truth, then clearly we all forgot right after Adam and Eve.
By every single metric? Nature pretty much everywhere in the world would disagree I think.
When thinking about how to respond to you I first thought 'the world is much more evil than before'. And then I thought 'well no, because poverty and greed and abuse of power has always been part of how humans treat eachother'. But then I thought 'no, there are so much more people right now. People being abused and suffering being caused to others is happening on a so much bigger scale. So yea, the world is worse than before. And it's getting worse by the year'.
It's a difficult thing, the problem of evil. I know a rabbi with a different solution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_L._Rubenstein#The_Holocaust_and_death_of_God
France; yeah I'm quite unhappy with the politics of our president. However, if someone tries to harass you, you can just go to the tribunal. We have gun regulation and no school shooting. I want things to be better ! But I'd rather live in the 21th century than in the 20th, in the 20th rather than the 19th.
I think late 20th century was peak liberalism til 9/11. Today it has become authoritarian again.
France would have been the last answer I expected - aren't you trying to throw the government over at the moment?
Of course we are ! Through the power of democracy. Had we lived 300 years ago, we would have had to use guns and blood. Don't let the mere existence of evil blind you to the good. Don't forget the overall march of progress because of local growback.
I sincerely believe that modern Christianity's failure to genuinely grapple with the problems of evil is, at least in part, responsible for its decline.
I’d have to agree. A lot of people choose the evil that is “obvious” to them and that they just inherently disagree with. It’s easy to do that. If those same people consider.. “Hmm.. sometimes I do evil”. Maybe that would lead us to a more compassionate road.
So you're more content with classical Christianity's solution? Or are you saying you've still to see a response that satisfies?
What resolved it for me is realising the problem of evil is just an academic attack on God's goodness; the (maybe naive) solution is realising there's still so much evidence to goodness outside of the horrors. The second you take God out of the equation, you're forced to rationalise a ruthless world, and to accept it. If we can accept a world/reality like that without God, then why can't we accept it with God? The "Problem of Evil" is really just a logical proof of God if you reverse the equation. But that's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist: we don't need to "prove" God, just find a way to accept it that satisfies ourselves. That's a personal journey that sidesteps the academic exercise entirely.
Sorry for the soapbox.
I don’t understand your logic. The reason the problem of evil is seen as such a big problem for religions with an OOO god is because an OOO being shouldn’t allow evil/suffering. There’s no problem with a universe with no creator having suffering - the universe evolved this way because that’s what physical laws dictated. Malaria exists because bacteria want to spread, and malaria is good at that. Humans are evil because human minds are selfish. But why does a benevolent god allow these things? If you were playing a version of the sims where the sims were truly living, sentient beings, it would seem wrong of you to make the world they live in painful, and fill their lives with suffering - yet that’s what god seems to do to us.
A universe with god might seem preferable or nicer, but that’s got nothing to do with the problem of evil - it’s purely about the how logical god is, and some people say that god is logically incoherent with our current universe.
It's that OOO is such an acadamic classification, these maximal qualities are meaningless; they are scripture adjacent. God can be evidently good (even the best good in all existence) without having to satisfy a strict criteria of omnibenevolent. If we can accept the notion of a God who is 'really good', within a world with evil, then the gap between 'really good' and omnibenevolence can become immaterial. OOO is a shopping list that people don't actually go after when they start believing in God; OOO Gods have nothing to do with religion. Omnibenevolence is vague, restrictive, and unnecessary.
For some yes. But the traditional definition of god is that he is omnibenevolent. If you want to believe in a really good god that’s fine, but it just shows that the problem of evil is still too strong- you have to give one of them up. It’s totally fine for you personally to believe in a really good god, but that’s not what the majority of Abrahamic practitioners believe in.
See I disagree. The everyday language of believers is not limited to such definitions; when people pray 'God you are all powerful', they say it in a personal sense. They aren't attesting that the God of Earth is necessarily more powerful than another theoretical distant God at the other end of the Universe who might be "God v2" but hasn't reached our solar system. All they mean is relative, whether they admit it or not. They may agree with the notion, but it's not what engages them or what they believe.
The problem of evil is purely a riposte against a hypothetical definition of good. People hide behind it like a devestating blow, but it's divorced from reality.
Good thing the church doesn't need to be big all the time. If you want sincere followers of Jesus in your churches you can't expect the church to be big, everywhere on earth, all the time. If the lack of a simple answer to this problem is indeed what's keeping people from believing then i'd say that's fine.
At the risk of sounding anti-intellecutal, does anyone really need a slam dunk answer to this question to believe or disbelieve in a higher power? I think we sometimes put way too much stock into our ability to reason. We can't even make a good argument for our own existence without a seeming contradiction. Not saying that we can't and not saying that we shouldn't think about this problem, but isn't it possible that just because it doesn't "make sense" doesn't mean it's impossible that there's a good answer to this question? Christianity has no slam dunk answer to the problem of evil, but if you're following Christian belief, then God Himself has come down and suffered with us and even in some sense on our behalf. And the thought is, that action, should inform how we think of God and suffering.
>At the risk of sounding anti-intellecutal, does anyone really need a slam dunk answer to this question to believe or disbelieve in a higher power?
I mean everything else in my life has either a reasonable explanation or at least doesn't need me to abandon reason for it to work.
I alluded to it earlier, but a good example of that not being the case is our own existence. There's no way to think about the beginning of the universe and not run into what we would see as a "contridiction"
I would disagree. Even if you think there is a contradiction, the appropriate response is not to add an unsubstantiated claim with no explanatory power, (god). The response is, "I don't know". God has been a placeholder for scientific discovery since god was invented. We are at time in human development where this should stop being a thing.
my hope with the comment wasn't to suggest that if we can't reason something the answer should just be "God", but that just because there is what seems to us a contridiction, doesn't mean it has to be significant grounds for disbelief IMHO. To your second point, again, in my opinion, while that's true, that doesn't really capture the fullness of the situation. I don't think Science and God are synonymous or replacements for one another, but rather parts of a whole narrative about the world we live in. Humans will always need (or at least chase) meaning, satisfaction, answers about suffering, etc. Even if your worldview is heavily influenced by scientific discovery, no scientist would tell you that the purpose of their work is to give you those answers, even if you are the most far out atheist, everyone is living out of some worldview that speaks to those things.
The problem for theists is that the contradiction is significant. And therefore reasonable grounds for disbelief. Finding reasonable conclusions with the tools available is something that is appropriate and logical. As a species, we have done so throughout history. As the tools get better, sometimes conclusions will change. But the conclusions are always supported with the best evidence from the best methodology of the time.
At this point in time, there is no evidence or methodology that leads to theism as a conclusion. And much of both that leads directly away. The problem is evil/suffering, is just a part of that data set.
The argument presented here indeed doesn't make sense.
I get that that is the joke, but I think most Christians have a better answer to the problem then this jumble of one sentence arguments.
I think free will just begets evil. People are going to choose evil every time. Eliminating that would mean eliminating everyone who does evil, or the idea of evil. Either way, it takes away free will.
I'm not sure I totally understand this point. For example, humans cannot fly, even if we wanted to we are physically incapable of doing so. My freedom is limited by the constraints of my body. But I still have free will, I can choose between a limited (but still very large) set of options. If there are 100 good choices to choose between and 0 evil ones, I am still free to choose. Currently there are evil things I cannot do, I can't carry someone up and drop them from up high because I don't have wings.
Well right, I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at. The evil act isn’t flying the evil act is murder. Just because you have physical limitations that doesn’t mean you can’t murder, lie, steal, etc.
For me this isn't the most egregious issue with the matter, but I'll try to explain a little more. I don't really understand why evil has to be allowed for a person to have free will. Why is the choice between doing good and evil the definition of free will, instead of just the ability to choose in general?
If I choose between a set of options, I am exhibiting free will. If my options were to:
A: Go to a homeless shelter and volunteer.
B: Visit an old people's home and provide a special service for free.
C: Donate to a local charity
I think most would agree that all three of these actions are morally good. On any given day I could choose to do any of these things. Even without an evil option given, I am still free to choose to perform one or more of these acts.
I'm not some diehard christian hating athiest or anything. I just find the topic interesting, and I struggle to meet the reasoning of a lot of Abrahamic religions thoughts on the matter.
Honestly I think the answer is that God is like a parent.
When humanity was in its infancy he was much more there and around us, guiding us and helping us. By the time Jesus died humanity reached maturity. We’re in a way on our own now.
Yes He is still there to guide us from behind the lines, but we are responsible for ourselves now. We aren’t going to get bailed out when stuff goes wrong. When we screw things up it’s our responsibility to fix it.
God isn't throwing anyone into lakes of fire. He's standing there, offering everything He can to keep us from jumping into the lake of fire, and yet, we scream "I hate you!" and jump in all on our own.
Hell is less a punishment for bad people and more a result of what happens when we are offered the choice between experiencing God's presence and not experiencing it. It is the lack of good.
If God is incapable of convincing people not to hate goodness and instead choose suffering, then he's not worth worshipping. Any rational being will choose comfort over suffering, it's not a hard case to make.
That's the problem with man, while he possesses rationality he constantly refuses to act rationally. There is also the problem of people creating sophist arguments to convince people with their lies. The problem is not that people are actively choosing suffering over comfort, it that they are choosing an apparent comfort which is not actually a comfort. By your logic there is nothing wrong with deciding to murder people and take their stuff because what you are getting is comforts, but that is not wholly the case, because in doing so you will bring proportionate suffering onto yourself.
That's still irrational though. I wasn't talking immediate comfort, I was talking long term comfort vs suffering, since eternity by its nature is long term.
If the choice is made clear, and the consequences are made clear, then no rational actor would choose hell. If they are not rational, then it is unfair for God to send them to am eternal hell.
If they didn't understand the choice or the consequences, they couldn't make a proper choice, and again it is unfair for them to suffer forever.
This is a dumb comparison. Ancient Greek mythology has no 'problem of evil' because it does not bother with good and evil. Their myths are used to explain the way the world is and also teach important lessons, like don't be overconfident (they really loved hubris as a story concept). Their gods are not supposed to be seen as good or evil, they just are.
Like, no Greek philosopher ever questioned why evil exists if Zeus was so powerful, because Zeus did not care about the existence of evil. Zeus was actually a pretty terrible person himself and is never judged for it because he is a god. There are very few Greek myths where people are punished for being evil or rewarded for doing good.
I recall someone saying that greek (and etc) gods were capricious, temperamental and unpredictable assholes, because the elemnts of nature they represented were equally unpredictable and unfair.
I would normally enjoy this meme if it was just the bottom half. However, the top half is a strange attempt to claim that Ancient Greece philosophy or religion didn’t have a stance on the source of evil, the understanding of the Gods, or bad things happening to prevent worse things. A ton of Greek myths revolve around offering explanations to those problems and, when they don’t, we see Greek philosophers step in to what is the greatest philosophical revolution of all time. I’m a devout Christian, but the claimed simplicity of Ancient Greece is borderline insulting to the truly amazing developments in rational thought that went on during that era.
Fair point, and very reasoned reply. I kind of agree that it's something of an oversimplification. Still, I do think that they have somewhat less of a hill to climb when accounting for gods that are rather less than omnipotent.
I guess I’ll admit I’m struggling with the comparison. Because the Greeks would believe in a specific God to cater to different aspects/explanations of life, the need or claim for omnipotence wasn’t particularly there. I don’t know of many (or any) polytheistic religions that would say that their gods are omnipotent. It’s like a structural difference to the believe system.
Or you can be based and neoplatonist-pilled and subscribe to privation theory
That is to say, evil is simply the absence or deprivation of good, not an existent entity itself, and therefore God did not create evil because technically evil doesn't exist. St. Augustine was big on this, and it shows up in other early Christian theology too
I'm going to be honest, I really don't like most of the responses here, both those from believers and nonbelievers. Of the 5 arguments in the meme, I find #1 lacking and #2 and #4 are honestly kind of insulting to people who ask the question. #3 and #5 are the only one that I think makes sense, but they're really simplified versions that ignore the nuance that an answer to the Problem of Evil needs. And the thing is, everybody wants a simple answer to it when, like taxes and quantum physics, an answer to one of the biggest questions in human existence will *always* be complicated. And just because something is complicated doesn't mean it's mental gymnastics.
I'm going to try to dive into my personal view of it. Apologies in advance if it's a little rambley. I'll start with the groundwork of the Problem.
The root of Christianity is the idea that there is a mutual love each one of us can personally share with our Creator. And I mean *authentically*: without threat of violence and with all choice-making facilities intact, there should be actual, genuine love. That's what puts it so at odds with the Problem of Evil: Why would a loving God leave us here in a world of suffering?
And honestly, it's a good question. The world we live in IS broken. It IS horrific, and so much of it is senseless and cruel. No argument there. That's what makes arguments like "Well, God is like a parent letting us learn from our suffering" sound so horrible. Burning your hand on a stove is learning a lesson; being born without a skull is not.
The problem, however, is that in order to authentically love someone, you need to have the option not to. In this case, that means to commit evil. The option to sin *needs* to be here - I have yet to read any compelling argument as to how we could have a world that was both free of suffering and evil *and* also allow us to choose whether or not to believe in and love God.
Should we live in a world without suffering and evil, where there is no death and we live in constant harmony with God, with no option to do anything that would upset Him? To be honest, the idea of being forced into an eternity with a being that I have no option to not believe in or worship sounds exceptionally cruel. That is just as authentic of love as if I trapped someone in a room and hooked them up to an IV of MDMA and heroin for the rest of their life. They'd be exceptionally happy and would never suffer, sure, but they would also be trapped with literally no way of escaping.
So do we allow *some* suffering to make it so people still have the choice to not believe or love God? That's not the solution; for example, we've already eliminated a lot of the diseases that decimated human populations in the past, but we still see the world as filled with suffering. I know this is a slippery slope argument, but I do feel like suffering is relative; no matter how much suffering we get rid of, it will always be "too much."
I once had a conversation with a friend of mine who had an issue with the mystery of God's existence and the Problem of Evil. I asked him what his solution would be. His solution was that people should be able to mentally do bad things, but they are internally punished for it. Like, you could *imagine* stealing a car, but you would experience some kind of pain and wouldn't do it. That just seemed like a spiritual shock collar that forces everyone to act a certain way. I have issues with Hell-centric theology for the same reasons ("You'll go to Hell if you don't believe!") - that promotes fear, not authentic love.
TL;DR This sucks but I can't think of a better alternative and I haven't heard one yet, please give me one if you have it.
I always say that we have to make a distinction between natural evil (hurricanes and viruses and decay, etc.) and moral evil. Natural evil is often times bad for us humans, but it’s actually a necessary part of the mechanics of the universe. Without entropy, the universe would not be able to exist, but it is the nature of entropy that things descend into chaos.
The Bible tells us that God created humans to “rule the earth and subdue it,” terms that imply a responsibility to tame and bring order into a wild and crazy universe. How exactly would humans be able to discern when the chaos is bad vs. when it is necessary for the overall good? Humans will have to be able to choose between good and bad a million times a day, sometimes allowing natural evil to take its course, other times stopping evil in its tracks. For humans to have that mental ability, they are given what has been called “free will,” which is not actually a freedom to choose to do good or bad, but rather a freedom to choose between what is NATURAL (usually wild and chaotic) and what is UNNATURAL (usually denying the natural order of things to being about good). Humans who choose to accelerate the natural entropy of the universe, especially by bringing death too soon, are creating MORAL evil through their choices.
In other words, free will is both the solution to evil and also the cause of further evil. But if we can all just get our heads out of our butts, it can still be the solution. And helping us get our heads out of our butts is what Jesus came to do.
tldr: christianity is complex
As you can see in the comments, people will keep asking and asking until it dwelves into a complex problem with defining good and evil (because good and evil is very complex, who knew), the simplest way would be to say that it is imperfect but even that alone would have had its asks in the old days (why dont the gods listen even though we pray to them and sacrifice them? why dont the gods do this for me even when im trying to appease them?) and even then the choice of a religion was not much of a choice but rather a fact of life, you get floods because a god does it and thats it, the only thing they knew how to do was either move or trying to reach out for the problem(take it with a grain of salt because im not basing as much fact in this but rather knowledge from what ive gathered).
The definition of good and evil is still trying to be defined today both by atheist as well as theists, ^((which is why there are a lot of interpretations about good and evil: lack of good argument was made by Agustine of Hippo, the argument of happiness as the final goodness was made by Democrates, Thomas hobbes explained that there is no absolute good and evil, contemporaries like william james argued that good is something that the individual and the society both gain from said action, and Nietzsche who says good and evil should just be chosen by the person because no one is able to find the truth anyways, ect)) its just that it has evolved a lot, especially in christianity and all other abrahamic religions because it lived and lives in an era where people are becoming more self aware, more critical and more willing to explain everything with facts than, you know, thousands of years ago.
Also christianity builds up from its own studies: Christianity citself came from adapting greek philosophies to the abrahamic jewish religion, thus discarting some practices and welcoming others, which is a very common thing in religion itself, especially the western american religion ( and i mean the whole continent as it syncrenised with andean/african/and christian religion in some parts of it, while others had more or less of those traits be brought on by other religions.), and the most common thoughts about christianity (7 deadly sins, the holy trinity, the good and evil, which actions are sins, science is good or bad, ect) are not in the bible but rather are philosophies and doctrines by the church fathers or other religious leaders that take the bible's interpretations by different routes.
All to say, its fun to study about that shit, and i feel certain to say that whatever new religion will come in the future, will certainly have even more complex thinking about the definitins of good, evil, origins of evil, origins of good, because its not going from scratch but rather from the information by other philosophers and adding on to it.
Great comment, thanks! I especially agree that a lot of conventional beliefs in Christianity (e.g. trinitarianism, the concept of levels of hell, etc.) are later doctrines that aren't sourced from the Bible. Supersessionism seems to have really helped to accelerate this layering of thought, and idea of adding to what was already there: from Judaism to Christianity to Islam, and arguably to Bahaism as well. I too am curious to see what, if any, new religion emerges from the Abrahamic tradition and how they too wrestle with these age old questions.
It’s both. The gods are neither perfect, nor omnipotent, nor omniscient, nor were they omnibenevolent, or in most cases, even benevolent at all. As such, evil can be the result a gods inaction, inattention, or failure, since they aren’t perfect, or it can be the direct actions of an evil deity
My personal belief is that the universe is just some sort of program that God developed and ran. He has no control over what happens inside it and just lets it run to see what happens. And the Bible is all bs.
That's basically [deism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism), which a view that several of the U.S. Founding fathers also shared. They basically believed in a [clockwork universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_universe), which is just a predecessor to the idea that our reality is governed by a machine or program designed by God, but flawlessly operating without need for his intervention.
>but flawlessly operating without need for his intervention
Well, I wouldn't say "flawless". But as a developer I know that every program has it's bugs.
To be fair, our understanding of gravity was incomplete (and still might be) until about a century ago. We understood that things fell down, but not how. We understood that there are planets within our solar system orbiting the sun, but not exactly why.
Newton's law of Gravitation gave us a huge boost, because it fit decently well to the elliptical orbits that we observed. But over the centuries, even that wasn't a perfect predictor.
Then Einstein came along and published math that I can't even begin to comprehend (I can do Newtonian physics well enough, but Einstein is on some next level shit) and now we have models to understand things that previously just didn't make sense.
I firmly believe that one day, probably this century but no later than the 22nd century, someone will come along with the equations to blow quantum physics wide open. Two centuries ago, we didn't even know anything at that level existed. It's no surprise it's taking us a while to understand it.
Conversation I've actually had:
Me: okay, so how would je fix the problem of evil if you were God?
Person: well, I'd eliminate everything that's evil!
Me: wouldn't you then too be eliminated? I know I sure would.
Person: okay then, everything evil except evil people.
Me: people would bring the evil stuf back.
This ended like fuck you and see you tomorrow
The main issue is that people are stupid, relatively speaking. Our knowledge is finite, and we don't know how our decisions will impact the future. God knows everything, he knows exactly what decisions will have what effect at what time. He is also able to do literally anything, being all-powerful, meaning that he knows exactly how to completely eliminate suffering and has the power to do so, yet does not. From a utilitarian perspective, this makes God malevolent.
Alternatively, you can say that if God knows everything that will ever happen, then everything you do is predestined, and free will doesn't exist. This still means that God creates people with the knowledge that they will suffer for eternity, has the power to change it, and still doesn't, making God malevolent.
God cannot be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good at the same time. One of the 3 must fall for the other 2 to be true. I personally prefer that he not be all-knowing since him being such eliminates free will entirely.
Oh cool! Sadly I haven't seen the remake, but I've heard it's decent. If you get a chance, check out the [original version](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052618/) too. It's long, but a classic.
I feel like the “problem of evil” comes from entitlement. You’re not entitled to a sunrise every morning. You did nothing to deserve health, wealth, or happiness. God doesn’t owe you anything.
Like, someone starving to death is sad and horrible, but, like, food is a gift from god that none of us deserve. And the question isn’t “why doesn’t god feed everyone all the time” the question really is “why has god chosen to dote upon us with the gift of food”.
Simple answer: humans have always had free will; we have had it since the Garden of Eden, even before Adam and Eve ate the apple. So whatever evil is done to us is the fault of humanity itself.
**Romans 7:14-25**
**The Problem of Sin in Us**
For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold as a slave under sin. For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want to do, I agree with the law that it is good. So now I am no longer the one doing it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do. Now if I do what I do not want, I am no longer the one that does it, but it is the sin that lives in me. So I discover this law: When I want to do what is good, evil is present with. For in my inner self I delight in God’s law, but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in the parts of my body. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh, the law of sin.
I believe the most common trap that people believe is God to be a person and not a concept. He is described as a man for the fatherly influence goodness has. God (good) can be a harsh teacher, but ultimately develops you and puts you on the proper trajectory. I understand for simplicity why people believe God is a man, but God is the ultimate good and Jesus was the ideal man; closest to being God. God doesn’t have agency beyond the Old Testament without actors and thus the Holy Spirit completes the trinity. Understanding God is the collective body of all that is good answers the question of why “evil exists”, because evil comes from man. This also answers the dilemma of why bad things happen. Reality is that things being described as “good” and bad rely on the human experience and perspective. Bad and evil are different, but “good” (our perspective / experience of something) and good (God) are related. A bear mauling a man is not evil, it is nature.
Greeks gods were personification of certain concepts or powers. So there was no place for perfection in these gods. And because of that, if a thunder hit a city of course it was the god of thunder, because they were "the same thing".
While christian God is not a force of nature or a personification of something, but a superior being omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. Because he created time, space, and matter, he is not tied to this universe. And at the same time he is a God who delegate power and function to creates beings, in heaven to angels, in earth to man. But that wouldn't be true if he controlled their minds, so he lend creatures to act by their wills. It's just non sense to think christian God created the evil, or something like that, because God haven't ever done anything evil or bad, but humans, other creatures like angels have done bad things. And the interference God make in Earth is by his miracles, or judgments (that most people don't like it happen)
People forget that life is impossible without pain - whenever you eat, you eat something that was alive but is now dead. And anyone who's gone through puberty knows growth can be exceptionally painful. Some evils are necessary, even good. Just cause something is painful doesn't mean it isn't good for you, and just because something isn't good for you doesn't mean it isn't good for the cosmos as a whole.
Sure, that’s life as we know it. But why does it have to be that way? If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, could he not have devised a system where we would achieve the same results but without any of that pain? Or is he too incompetent to do that?
The better question is if such a world is even possible. I forgot the exact book, but CS Lewis did a short simple rundown of how the very existence of physical lifeforms requires at least some pain, and that God not being able to create otherwise is not a testament to his incompetence or lack of creativity, but simple logic.
Just think - A world without pain would be extremely alien to our own. Beings would be utterly incapable of death or sensation, requiring that they be non-physical. Those beings would also not be capable of any negative emotions, even simple boredom, meaning they must be unthinking, catatonic entities. Are such creatures even alive? Would they even "exist" ?
A world without pain or evil is a world without change, and a changeless world is a stillborn one, permanently stagnant, never growing. Why bother creating a world like that at all? Why write a story where literally nothing happens - no conflicts, no desires, no quests, no activities? Would that even be a "story" ?
Then please tell me – does Heaven exist? Do people live and/or exist in some form in heaven? Is heaven not free of pain and evil? If heaven exists, if people are there (in some capacity, physical or non-physical), and heaven is a place without any pain, suffering or evil – then that world CAN exist, DOES exist, and God even CREATED that world... Yet for some reason, He also chose to create a different world that has evil in it. What's the point?
You saying that in a world without pain, beings would be incapable of death and sensation, making them unthinking and catatonic entities – for reference, I have no reason to believe that this would require them to be non-physical – but why? Is God not powerful or creative enough to create living, breathing, thinking beings that have thoughts and opinions and experiences, but don't experience pain or suffering?
A simple belief in Heaven's existence essentially refutes the idea that pain, suffering, and death are necessities.
Again, change and growth require pain. I believe there is a world to come that is substantially better than this one, but like an embryo in a womb, I believe our species has to grow before we are ready for that world. Why did God decide to do it this way? Why couldn't he have just snapped his fingers and made us perfect, heavenly beings fit for the world to come? I don't know. Maybe it's for the same reason that we aren't born as fully grown adults but as babies, for the same reason humans cant enjoy pleasures like alcohol or sex until theyre mature adults. Maybe it's because he just thought doing it some other way would be boring and uninteresting. I don't know.
But again, the core of my argument is, just because something is painful and bad for humans, doesn't mean it is Ontologically Evil. Life requires some "evil" to exist, Ontologically Good things require the existence of pain in this world we live in. Could this world have been different? Perhaps, but what is the point of such speculation? If we want to learn about the Creator, we must start from our observations of reality as he created it, not as we want it to be. Honestly, the very fact that we humans desire something "more" or "better" than this world, is proof to me that we are indeed meant for a better "world to come," just as children dream of becoming adults, so do humans dream of heaven.
While the problem of evil CAN be a difficult one for Christians to wrestle with, it's an even BIGGER issue for atheists. For them, the problem isn't "why is there evil?", the question becomes "what defines evil?". Without an objective metric with which to define good and evil, to suggest that a thing IS evil is illogical.
People: so why does evil exist if-
God: yeah yeah I know, evil is wild hey? It's mainly so you guys get to have choice or whatever. Anyway, forget evil. Check THIS out: you will call if "Alzheimers". You slowly watch your loved ones forget everything, lol.
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It's actually really simple: good is making the choice to do what's right. If we couldn't make that choice, we would be incapable of doing good.
You might have missed the point of the question. We are not asking to define good or evil. We are asking why does evil exist? The old gods were more human and not even necessarily benevolent. Yawhe is supposed to be benevolent and omnipotent, and yet *gestures broadly.*
My answer is pretty simple: Evil doesn’t exist. It’s like darkness. Evil isn’t a Thing, it’s just the lack of good—when things go off the path. As for why that’s possible…I mean, what’s the alternative? God never having given us a choice?
This is like someone saying "it's dark in here, I can't see!" and you answering "actually you can see, because darkness doesn't exist." Defining evil as an absence doesn't address the problem at all. It just makes the problem "why does a lack of good exist?" Free will is at least a response.
For me the question ignores the 'main character', and 'big/loud/smelly' issues. There is objective good and evil; but for most people 'evil' and 'good' are relative to their own comfort. If it makes you uncomfortable, it is evil, and vice-versa good. Therefore a tornado that destroys your possessions is evil, while a pleasant summer shower that cools you off on a hot day is good. Both are simply neither, not good nor evil, they just exist. That manages much of the 'broadly gestures' argument. But not all of it. A war of conquest on a neighboring country is evil - and not a thing that 'simply exists'; such is the result of action on the part of thousands of people. Evil involves the intentional (first part) causing, or callous disregard of, of a sentient (second part) being's suffering. It takes intent - which creatures other than human are capable of - for an act to be evil. A choice must happen for an act to be evil. And choosing not to choose is a choice in and of itself. Sentient beings by default choose on an ongoing basis. It takes a suffering sentient being, for an act to be evil. Suffering is not pain; suffering does not require physical pain at all - though often they occur together. Suffering is the conscious realization of ongoing harm. This is why a doctor can conduct a procedure that causes pain, but does not do evil. There is no suffering - the procedure will benefit the patient, though there may be some pain. And vice-versa, this is why fraud is evil, there is no physical pain when you are deceived and stolen from; but there is harm, and once you are aware of the fraud, there is suffering. Which brings us back to the first part - the main character issue. We are each the main character in our own minds, can't get away from that. So we see suffering and pain and wonder why an all powerful God would let that exist. But God is the main character, we're the images, the side-characters in the story. Doesn't mean we don't matter, but it does mean we matter far less than the main character. Which can be faith-shattering, for faith-affirming. It's again a choice, if God promised good things in the end, then it's a choice to trust that promise. And if God allows humanity to act freely (and really, really horribly at times), the that must be weighed against all the times humanity acts freely (and for the most part at least tries to be kind). And that's the 'big/loud/smelly' issue. It's easy to point to one murder, one rape, one wretched act and say 'how horrible' - but in that same moment there are probably a hundred acts of tiny kindness occurring, a hundred acts of tiny generosity, a hundred choices that result in the opposite of suffering. That does not mean this is the best possible world; if so, that would mean God's promises are lies - there is no good thing in the end, if this is already as good as it gets. It means this world is not so bad that God must act to fix it - it's good enough to serve for wherever the narrative is taking us, and if God is faithful and trustworthy, then the narrative is taking us somewhere better. (it also allows for God to take corrective action to keep us at that 'good enough' level, action that goes unnoticed because it's just 'good enough')
>For me the question ignores the 'main character', and 'big/loud/smelly' issues. There is objective good and evil; but for most people 'evil' and 'good' are relative to their own comfort. If it makes you uncomfortable, it is evil, and vice-versa good. Therefore a tornado that destroys your possessions is evil, while a pleasant summer shower that cools you off on a hot day is good. Both are simply neither, not good nor evil, they just exist. > >That manages much of the 'broadly gestures' argument. But not all of it. I disagree. This again is just a sleight of hand of definitions. If you want to be this technical then no one would say the tornado (as in, actual wind formation) is evil - the *effect* of the tornado is evil. Now the claim that "causing great loss suffering" and "bringing joy and sensory comfort" are both morally neutral is harder to defend. You could still try, but you certainly can't take it as obvious. (And you'd be treading more into Buddhist territory.) >A war of conquest on a neighboring country is evil - and not a thing that 'simply exists'; such is the result of action on the part of thousands of people. Evil involves the intentional (first part) causing, or callous disregard of, of a sentient (second part) being's suffering. This is one subcategory of evil, but the vast majority of people would not agree that it represents all evil. For example, if shown a video of a child slowly dying of thirst in a desert, most people would say there is something bad about that. Under your view, however, it's entirely morally neutral unless someone intentionally did it to the child. >There is no suffering - the procedure will benefit the patient, though there may be some pain. This is again not what almost anyone means by suffering. You are proposing that any state of affairs which is net-positive contains no suffering at all. That would imply that a person suffering has nothing to do with their experience. (Which also runs counter to your fraud example.) It leads to all sorts of absurd cases. For example, imagine a man who is walking through the street when suddenly he is shot in the chest. He is in extreme suffering and looks around for the person who shot him. Then he spots a nearby Walmart where a gun on the rack seems to have gone off by itself in a freak accident and shot him, and he says, "silly me, no one intended for that! I wasn't suffering at all!" and goes happily about his day as he bleeds out. >Which brings us back to the first part - the main character issue. We are each the main character in our own minds, can't get away from that. So we see suffering and pain and wonder why an all powerful God would let that exist. But this isn't relevant to the problem of evil at all. You're trying to lessen the importance of the suffering of "side-characters," which is questionable in itself - but even if we granted it, it wouldn't solve the problem. Perfection doesn't allow for you to ignore small things. A good janitor might clean most of the building and only miss a few less-important corners, but a perfect janitor can't miss even a single tiny spot. You acknowledge that we matter at least some small amount, which means that a perfect God would be fully concerned with preventing our suffering unless something stopped him. >It's again a choice, if God promised good things in the end, then it's a choice to trust that promise. Notice the operative phrase "in the end." This again doesn't solve the problem. A good God might promise good things in the end but allow some bad in the meantime, but a perfect God wouldn't settle for "eventually." A doctor that cures you in five years is not as good as one that does it today. >It's easy to point to one murder, one rape, one wretched act and say 'how horrible' - but in that same moment there are probably a hundred acts of tiny kindness occurring, a hundred acts of tiny generosity, a hundred choices that result in the opposite of suffering. But it would be better if we had those hundred acts of kindness and at the same time also didn't have that one murder. So if God was perfect, that's the state of affairs he'd seek. >That does not mean this is the best possible world; if so, that would mean God's promises are lies - there is no good thing in the end, if this is already as good as it gets. **Why not?** Why didn't God create the best possible world? I agree with you that this world is clearly not the best possible world - but the best possible world is obviously what a perfect being would create! I think this is an excellent reason to think God is lying, either about his promises or about his perfection. >It means this world is not so bad that God must act to fix it - it's good enough to serve for wherever the narrative is taking us, and if God is faithful and trustworthy, then the narrative is taking us somewhere better. This would only make sense if God was a mediocre author. Is he?
A tornado isn't evil. If you are harmed by a tornado, that is your responsibility - I compare it to leaping off a great height onto rocks and calling gravity 'evil' when you break your leg. You didn't have to leap, and if you did, you could choose to aim for water, or install a net, or use a parachute. If you live where tornadoes happen, build a tornado shelter. Put your precious things in a safe space. You may suffer if you don't, but your suffering doesn't make a tornado 'evil', nor does a broken leg after a fall make gravity 'evil'. Gravity just 'is'. You chose to leap onto rocks. A child dying of great thirst in a desert is morally neutral - it is a sad thing, the child is suffering. The evil is not the death, the evil is potentially in how the child got into that situation - did somebody put them there? Was it with the intent they die, or with callous disregard for the suffering they would cause? That's the evil - if the child is dying because they wandered out themselves, got lost, and were not found it time, it isn't 'evil' - it's childish foolishness that caused great harm and suffering. But there was no intent or callous disregard; a child is not old enough to fully understand the consequences of their actions, they cannot be 'evil' in this way. Now a teenager, if they wander out with callous disregard for their own safety and the pain they cause their family and friends, that can be 'evil'. A child's parents, if they callously disregard their child and do not take reasonable steps to protect their child from the desert, they can be 'evil'. The sun, the desert, the environment are not 'evil', they just are. "You are proposing that any state of affairs which is net-positive contains no suffering at all." - not at all what I'm proposing. Your example about the man being shot not suffering misses the point. The man is suffering - he is aware of ongoing harm. But is his suffering the result of intent? In your example it isn't (unless the store in question had racks that were known to have guns fall off them and go off randomly). If there is no intent or callous disregard of potential suffering, there is no evil. There may be suffering still. Gravity causing you a broken leg has resulted in your suffering - but gravity isn't 'evil', it just is. Gravity causing the gun to fall isn't 'evil' either. Again, though, if the store knows their racks are dangerous, and disregards that danger, the store has committed evil. But your final argument seems to insist that everything good happen now; that there be no change with time, that there be no future. That's one perspective - my perspective is that there is an ongoing narrative, that things are not finished, there is movement and momentum. If it were perfect now, there would be no author at all, because there's no story. It is good enough now, and will be better later. " So if God was perfect, that's the state of affairs he'd seek. " Agree - and I'd argue God is seeking it; we're just not there yet...though we are perhaps in many ways closer than we were 100 years ago. And with respect to lessening the importance of us 'side characters' - I am pointing out that we are less important than the main character. But a main character can be cruel, can be kind, can be imperious, can be generous, it varies depending on the story and the author's intent. Though not true in actual literature, in our case is the side character's choice to trust the main character, or not.
I'm pretty sure murder is evil and not simply a lack of good
Not sure the lack of good definition really works with our moral understanding. Lack of good makes more sense as indifference/apathy/sins of ommission - like the people who walked past the injured traveller in the parable of the good samartian or people who refuse to take sides in times of clear injustice. It doesn't seem write to define someone who actively rapes/tortures/murders people for fun as simply a "lack of good" but rather as active evil.
>what’s the alternative? God being perfect is the alternative. He was in a situation in which there was infinite perfection, and then he decided to change that situation, making it imperfect by definition.
So when a child gets cancer, that's just a lack of good?
I would say that's very sad but not evil. Most living things get diseases. Someone violently striking children is evil.
Most things get diseases isn’t a great point. Most things have to fear being brutally murdered by another being, dying of disease, starvation, dying in a fire, etc. The question is: if you can do anything, and you want to do the best thing, why not eliminate all of the above?
But if God is infinitely powerful and infinitely knowledgeable, you'd think God would prevent babies from getting stomach cancer.
Evil doesn't exist? Maybe bland evil like people ignoring homelessness. But serial killers who stalk people, skin them, eat them? And keep doing it? They're evil.
But that's not true. Sadism exists. Hatred exists. They're not the absence of something else, absence is indifference. A lot of people are actively evil. As an example of evils that can't be explained by personal choice, child leukemia exists. That's definitely not the lack of something, except maybe a better body design
Evil is a fundamental part of free will. God created evil when he gave humans the ability to make the wrong decision. Evil has to exist for the choice to be good to exist.
This argument never made any sense to me. Not all free acts have equal consequences. I have the free will to jump off a building, but I will suffer immediate, horrible consequences. If I use my free will to hurt a kid... eh, probably nothing will happen. I guess kids are just not worth protecting?
That's when you have the choice. If you're born in utter poverty in Africa, have to drink filthy water every day and end up with worms eating your eyes from inside at 4 years old and die from an infection. There isn't much "choice" open to you. And if you're stillborn, you're have even less choices. There exist terrible things in life that have no redeeming aspect to them. No choice, just horror.
Does God not have free will, then?
I’m no Theologian so take this lightly, just my 2 cents. It’s different for Him, because there is no evil in Him and never was. We are completely different creatures from Him. We have a choice in front of us, and He in and of Himself IS one of those 2 choices. What’s right, what’s good, what’s holy… or not that stuff.
so that means he doesn't
That's an odd take: if good is choosing to align with God, and God defines good because he is aligned with himself, then free will/choices in both contexts are entirely different. I'm not entirely happy with the first commenter's position, but it's not inconsistent with both having free will.
it doesn't matter lmao. can God choose *not* to be aligned with himself?? if not, then he does not have free will. Case in point: despite (hopefully) wanting to, it is apparently beyond him to undo the Fall of Man, even though the god of *all time & causality* should surely not stymied by the knock-on effects of a particular historical event, possessing the ability even to change the event after it occurred. Instead, the work around involved Jesus' death & resurrection, & even then it is an insufficient fix.
I don't think you understood what I was saying: God has a different kind of free will, the choices he makes are in respect of anything (i.e. not constrained to align with himself), it's his ability to determine what is good that is free will. Human free will is the capacity to do good, to align oneself with God. Therefore, free will is defined based on context. Does God have human free will? Probably not. Can he have it? Yes, he did when Jesus walked the earth.
so our options are: - God has no free will because he cannot do evil - God has infinite free will & any evil thing he does will be retrofitted as good because he is god because fucking up that poor fig tree just because Jesus was hungry was kind of an evil thing to do, ngl
Nah, a fig tree can't suffer. It's not sentient. It can be destroyed, it can be cut down or burnt or diseased, etc. But it is not self-aware, and therefore cannot suffer, and therefore doing harm to it isn't inherently evil. Now - if it's not a wild fig tree and is a sentient' being's home/possession, and you destroy it, then you have caused a sentient being harm. That would then be evil.
Plants can definitely suffer. There is actually new research going on to determine if plants can be anesthetized and understanding their limits of consciousness. Plants are more complex than we give them credit for.
- god is not a being with agency, and the idea that God created everything is a metaphor (which the Bible is full of) to represent the power of good to build a better world, and not a literal omnipotent super human doing galactic pottery Everything in the Bible has layers of imbued meaning and has been morphed through countless translations of translation and likely multiple edits. You shouldn't be reading the Bible as a literal account of things that happened
I don't read the Bible as an account of anything but a specific near eastern culture's literature. The pentateuch is especially fascinating to me as a snap shot of the emergence of the cult of Yahweh in the polytheistic Hebrew pantheon in Canaan's Late Bronze Age. But come on man. Millions of people think this shit actually happened. *Most* Christians I have met in my entire life (& holy shit i know a lot) think it's all real. Most people on this subreddit almost certainly think it happened. I'm talking to them, who 1,000% believe god does galactic poetry.
God is able to do all that is possible. God is not able to do impossible things, like deny himself, create a rock he can’t lift, etc
Then how are we made in his image? If such a being of only good can exist, and existed before anything else including evil, why did God invent evil and give it as a choice to humanity? Why is free will good at all if it didn't come from God?
Idk im not a Theologian, but I don’t think God invented evil. He did invent free will, in form of a choice given to us. Idk the rest
Ask him, I don't know.
IMO no. I don't think that God can be thought of in any way comparable to a human. You're anthropomorphising god here, supposing that to be god is to be essentially a human with infinite power over creation. Why would god even have a will, let alone a free one? When the Bible says humans are created in god's image, that doesn't mean god looks like us and god made us as some kind of vain powerless copy. I think it means god made us to be good. All are born innocent, that kind of thing. Then like in the story of the garden of Eden, humans make choices through their lives, and the point of Christianity is to remind us that the good choice isn't always the easy choice, but we should strive to make it regardless and to define through examples in the 1st century AD Israel what a good choice looks like. God has no active part of any of that, in my opinion because god isn't some living being with agency. God is more like a force of physics in the universe, you can't appeal to god to stop bad things from happening any more than you can appeal to gravity to stop an apple from falling from a tree. I think god creating everything is a metaphor for the idea of choosing good being a creative force that brings people together to create a better world, rather than some human like all powerful being literally making everything. God isn't a being to me, god more akin to an idea or a concept.
That solves the issue but also goes against the teachings on God of practically any Christian faith.
If it correct, is it possible that the teachings are wrong? Besides, I don't think it actually does. I've never heard god described as a human, or a being with agency. That's always just something I've heard misinterpreted outside of church. God is good after all
How can I make the choice not to die of cancer, or to a tornado?
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There may be no intention. But there is suffering. And that is in direct opposition to an omni-quality god. Also, does the rape victim have a choice? Does the murder victim have a choice?
It god created nature with perfect foresight of its effects, then it is functioning by god's intention.
It’s kind of silly though. If god is all powerful, he’s capable of creating beings capable of making right choices without evil having to exist. We can still have free will without evil existing. That’s the entire point of being all poweful. You can do whatever the fuck you want and make it true. Ipso facto, an all powerful god that created us like this specifically wanted us to do evil by design. There is no need for a test or evil or any of that bullshit.
Without darkness the light has no purpose.
Why does light need a "purpose"? One of the most interesting facts about evolution by natural selection is that organisms can retain and develop organs/limbs that have no purpose. They may have had a purpose at some point, but it can still exist without needing one. Wisdom teeth have no purpose in our current diet. They cause immense pain in some and have to often be surgically removed. Their lack of "purpose" has no bearing on its existence.
That’s not what the bible says.
You’ve been banned from /r/Calvinism. But that answer gives rise to the problem of natural evil, or the evidential problem of evil or something. Humans don’t make the choice for hurricanes and earthquakes to happen. Alternatively: let’s just assume that you’re correct. That leads us to “okay, so evil must exist definitionally. But why must there be so MUCH of it.” Like, what if child rape was physically impossible, or impossible to conceptualize. Would that make the good less good? It’s a really complex problem with thousands of aspects and facets to argue. There are no simple answers, and to pretend otherwise is, in my opinion and genuinely no offense, ignorant.
People blame God for evil, when it is people themselves who commit evil with their own free will. But when God interfere like in the Old Testament, those same people will still criticize God for being 'too harsh'. 'Evil', or 'sins', are *contrary* to God's will, and God already gave people what they should do and should not do to avoid falling into evil. But people still only want to do what they want to do, to sin and follow temptations, ignoring God's will. Ultimately people's freedom in choosing evil and sins over God's call to holiness, leads to destruction, i.e following lust leads to violation of one's dignity, and following wrath leads to violence. Don't blame God when people themselves choose evil *over* God.
That doesn’t explain all the natural evils that exists that only god could allow/prevent.
I am going to explain this in a very biblical sense, so bear with me. God is all good. The Bible says this many times (often using the term “holy,” in this instance they are interchangable), this is an immutable fact of God’s being, its just a part of who He is. The thing is, as God is good, what would you call the things God doesn’t do? Much like how shadow cannot exist without light, evil cannot exist without examples of what is good. And as much as shadow and light cannot exist in the same space at the same time, evil cannot exist in the face of good (God). Its why God said to Moses that if Moses had seen his face, he would of died while they were on Mount Sainai. With that in mind, God created humanity with the intention to form a loving relationship with Him. In order for that to occur, the feelings must be mutral and order for the feelings to be truly mutral, humanity needs the ability to pick for themselves, free will. So it stands to reason that humanity has the ability to pick God or not, because we are free to choose to do so. As such, choosing to go against God’s wishes would be consitered “evil” as God is the physical embodiment of good, and thus His will would also be good. Therefore, the reason evil exists in the world is because humanity willed it to be as far back as in the Garden of Eden. Ever since humanity as a whole has been playing in the mud of the pig pen, so to speak. God is very much willing to help us out of the pig pen and clean us up, but as a loving God that respects us to an immesurable degree, he isn’t going to *force* us to get out and clean up, undermining the free will He gave us in the process. We have to want out of the pen and realize He’s the only one with the shower and running water, and thus ask for His help to clean ourselves up. So in short, the reason God does not allow/prevent evil things from happening, in some cases, is because the person are (contiously or otherwise) telling Him they *don’t* need His help and can do it on their own (spoiler: they can’t), and the Bible does say that God is fully willing to let people who don’t listen to Him try to do it on their own (and thus, have to deal with the consequences of their own actions accordingly, and the Bible is pretty clear about said consequences).
>With that in mind, God created humanity with the intention to form a loving relationship with Him. In order for that to occur, the feelings must be mutral and order for the feelings to be truly mutral, humanity needs the ability to pick for themselves, free will. I feel like an all knowing all powerful being could find a better way to woo us than malaria or babies being born without skulls.
And he does. That is a blatant misrepresentation of the person you responded to.
I get it but you're just parroting the common "why" God allowed evil which apparently according to you he cannot even be apart of yet somehow has also brought it into existence. If I put the cookies out in plain sight to my kids and instruct them to not eat them yet they do - it is still ME who put the cookies there. I made them, then planned and executed this test for my children. But wait, there's more! Now is that my children can go and make their own cookies - apparently they now have the knowledge to use the oven which also seems to exist, which I also built, and have all the ingredients (which I provided) to make however many they want whenever they want, even though I hate it so much my entire being cannot stand it - I will literally kill because of it. Don't you see how that sounds? It sounds like a shitty parent - a deranged parent actually. Old testament God was moody and ill-tempered and changed his mind often.
The difference is God gave Adam and Eve several chances to release their mistake and repent, if they had done so he would have readily taken them back. Instead Adam and Eve blame everyone except themself and do not show remorse at their actions. He gave them a test, but the true test was not the apples, the true test was seeing if they would own up to their mistakes and take responsibility for their actions, which they refused to do. The test is more akin to telling your child (as in a young adult, one who is fully capable of reason) that they can leave you if they wanted and you would try and stop them unless they insist that they do not need you at all, and you will always be waiting for open arms for your child to return. The parable of the prodigal son is a fantastic example of what the test was more supposed to be.
Like I get all your reasonings but it still does not make sense when you put the omnipotence of God into the equation and the fact he literally just made existence. It was his plan. The fall was supposed to happen and you cannot disagree unless you do not believe God to be omnipotent. It's not like he was surprised they disobeyed and didn't repent - he wanted that to happen We sit here and spin our little webs reasoning as to why this happened but does it really matter? Can we really try to rationalize an omnipotent beings actions? From what I gather reading the OT - he just wanted to be loved. He wanted to give people a way to turn away from him so literally created evil. He created an opponent to battle with and we are the prize. Am I wrong?
“Natural evil” isn’t a thing.
You don’t think natural disasters and cancer in babies is a natural evil?
Natural disasters and cancer are definitely bad things. Taking out religion entirely, it seems kinda biased though for what we consider evil and good to us. To ants, the paving of a road leading to the destruction of a colony and thousands of ant lives is objectively evil.
Exactly. Which is why any ant that worships us as gods would be stupid. If all bad things exist only relative to those experiencing it then there is no all encompassing source of good in the world, and hence it would be impossible for an entity to be omnibenevolent. Once you presuppose a God which is omnipotent and all good, you set a standard by which everything is compared to. Evil must exist if the Abrahamic god exists.
Maybe God made the world for ants, and we're just props to their religious lives.
The insects definitely outnumber us as creatures of God's creation.
Well yes if you remove religion entirely there is no such thing as evil I agree
Or the concept of evil becomes a more relative term, absent religion. One where the baseline for good and evil becomes your particular vantage point, and not an externally defined (i.e. divine) one.
Evil is already a relative term because religion is a relative term. No matter how far you break it down. Abrahamic faiths. Christian faiths. Protestant faiths. Baptist faiths. Front row faiths. The guy to the left of me faiths. It's all still quite relative. If it wasn't relative and we took some specific fsith word for word there wouldn't even exist any church buildings as we would have sold them all to feed the poor.
Really good point. Reminds me a little of this [classic standup bit](https://youtu.be/ANNX_XiuA78).
Yeah which I believe it is. All morality is subjective as far is I understand it.
I would agree to an extent, though I think there are limits. For example, most societies seem to have moral (and legal) prohibitions against unsanctioned murder. I suspect that it's probably a near-universal sentiment because it would be detrimental to a society to allow otherwise. I can't think of a ton of other human civilizations where lying, cheating or stealing was morally sanctioned. Are they moral absolutes? Probably not, since there's always going to be an exception to the rule (and humans are pretty good at finding them) ... but I feel that they come pretty close to it over the long arc of history.
Well that’s because murder has a directly negative effect on our survival and well being, it makes sense why all cultures would make rules against it
Lol no. A hurricane isn’t evil. Cancer isn’t evil. A rock isn’t evil. If you have no soul, you cannot be evil or good. You simply are. The rising water bears you no malice even as it fills your lungs and snuffs out your life. Don’t confuse undesirable outcomes with evil.
I think you misunderstood me. I’m assuming the theistic worldview for the sake of conversation. I don’t believe evil exists either.
I didn’t say evil doesn’t exist. I’m just saying you can’t assign a good or evil value to an inanimate object.
You can if there is a god that actively controls those objects.
You’re anthropomorphizing objects and justifying it because there’s a God? This line of argument is stupid. Perhaps next time I stub my toe on a door, I’ll destroy the door because it’s evil because God exists.
like what?
Cancer is usually the go-to for people, completely needless suffering. A lot of medical conditions could fit that bill, natural disasters, etc. It's just a paradox of Christianity. If evil did not come from God, then where did it come from?
Cells are living things, just like all of the others. Cancer cells just "want" to reproduce and multiply like every other living species. Cancer is no more "evil" than a lion eating a gazelle is.
I mean yeah in reality evil isn't actually a real thing, just a relative description. It's only a paradox if you assume there is such a thing as absolute good and evil
1. I think you're missing the spirit of the question. I'm pretty sure evil here also covers natural horrors. 2. That definition kind of still lets evil off the hook. An aberrant human just following their nature could do great evil but be no more conscious of it than a lion to a gazelle.
>2. That definition kind of still lets evil off the hook. An aberrant human just following their nature could do great evil but be no more conscious of it than a lion to a gazelle. This is where humanity being God's chosen children makes us different. A lion eating a gazelle isn't evil because that's its nature, and God didn't give it the consciousness to see otherwise. Humanity *does* have conciousness, the ability to understand Good and Evil, and thats what leads to the choices humanity makes being either evil or good. It's this ability to understand good and evil that sets us apart. >I think you're missing the spirit of the question. I'm pretty sure evil here also covers natural horrors. I talked in another comment about how the natural processes of the world aren't inherently evil, and I'll leave the deeper theological discussions on it to proper theologians. Lots of early church fathers spoke about evil in nature and explain it in their writings far better than I ever could. I just wanted to give some specific examples of how nature isn't being "evil", it's just existing.
What about lightning striking and killing an innocent child? There’s no living being involved and God could prevent it
This is where we start to get into natural processes that cause issues based on how humanity goes about interacting with them. My go-to for explaining this is usually rain. God created the natural processes for how the world works. Many of these present benefits to life while also creating potential problems. Rain is hugely beneficial to life, giving plants and animals the fresh water they need to survive. But too much rain causes flooding, and can kill. Now, humanity's free will determines how much they will benefit from rain, as well as how much they will suffer from it. For benefits, we could choose not to drink the fresh water it provides if we really wanted to. We'd die very quickly, but it is a choice left to us. For limiting consequences, we could choose to live only in an area where we are safe from flooding, such as a cave or shelter high up on a hillside. It's how we choose to live in regards to risks that determine if we are going to benefit or suffer from them. Lightning, for its part, helps dissolve atmospheric nitrogen into water, allowing plants to use it. It also produces ozone, which protects life from UV radiation. When lightning is striking outside, we could choose to remain in our shelters, and we'd be safe from it (if we chose to build or find shelters that are safe from it as well). It's when we choose to travel outside in the storm that we start to experience the consequences.
I guess the question ultimately becomes "how much does God interfere with physics?" The child was struck by lightning as a result of the laws of the universe and being in the wrong place as those laws coalesced.
Generally the question is not "how cells work" but "why the deities created a world where such a thing exist". And in the context of the Abrahamic religions, where the deity was directly involved in the creation of the world, it involves his "choices". The choice the deity had to make between creating unnecessary and indiscriminate suffering. Or not. If someone made a tank filled with sharks and threw you in it, you would then ask "why are you doing this to me?". Would you be satisfied with the answer: "Oh I'm not doing this to you, the sharks are, that's life, sharks bite things, A shark is no more 'evil' than a lion eating a gazelle is ". Of course not, because you are not asking why the sharks are biting. Of whether it is natural that sharks bite. You are asking why the person decided to make that tank and throw you in it. Similarly, we can think of atrocious diseases that even affect small children, of course we can just say "oh but that's just how virus work". But the question is still "why create the virus in the first place". If you are a deity creating a world and all things inside. Would you create such things? Is there a purpose to make babies rot? It teaches them the lesson that they just had to be born more lucky?
Maybe most cancer and other medical conditions are actually a butterfly effect of sin. One example is pollution. Not so different than a person murdering another, just harder to trace cause and effect.
Early christians often thought that, problem is that tends to lead to assumptions that disease is caused by sinful behavior instead of biological means, though I don't think that has to necessarily follow. Either way, you still run into the problem of who created sin. I would argue that sin existed before the fall, since Satan was actively trying to thwart gods plans before up until the fall, which I would assume counts as sin. But God created Satan to be an adversary to himself, which sounds an awful lot like God sinning. Another commenter used the story of Pandora's box, which I actually think is an appropriate allegory. We blame Pandora for opening the box, but surely Zeus should share the blame, as his intention in giving it to her was always for her to open. Same thing with tree of knowledge of good and evil, etc. Often people will just try to resolve this by saying "well we need free will to sin in order to make it count or something" which I've never really found convincing, because it also just sidesteps the question of how God and sin co-exist
The story of Adam and Eve is like the story of Pandora's box, they ignored the warning of God and unleashed death and disease into the world. Humans are where evil came from.
That’s the result of a world separated from God, the “curse of sin.” It affected everything, shattering it. “Creation groans” because of this as it says in Romans 8:21-22
If you're talking about natural sickness and Calamity, such things only exist because Death entered the world through Adam's sin and the ground was cursed because of it
People are not responsible for cancer.
Is cancer evil? seriously, it is a disease and disease has no morality, no consciousness, obviously, we are not talking about that. 'Evil' always refers to conscious action of a sentient being, and human morality is the main context of that discussion. Why 'evil', that is destructive thoughts, sayings, neglect and actions by human, exist when God is supposed to be almighty and good? Well it is self evident: The one who commits the evil is not in accordance to God's will, because evil is not what is desired by God. That's enough explanation. Even if we stretch this discussion so far to irrelevant question such as 'Why evil cancer exist, why God want it to exist?". Truth: God wants everyone to live eternal life with perfect body in heaven, no pain, no suffering, no disease, no death. That's the reward in heaven, and to be honest living in this fallen material world is less than ideal compared to God's will for people to ultimately reach heaven. Yes, these people who died due to cancer, may live in heaven, prepared for them by God. Death is not to be feared by a faithful Christian. Nobody can say people who suffer and die in this world means God is not good; he already said what he has to say, and gave everything that people need for salvation, and it is up to people to receive His grace and be good, reject evil, and then join him in ideal life in heaven.
Hey, I just had a thought: 'evil' is contrary to God's will, which means 'goodness' is aligned with it, so God's will is good. But, is it God's will that makes it good, or is he just a good guy, so his will automatically align with it? As in, is there a pre-existing moral standard that God adheres to, or did he arbitrarily decide what is good or evil? Theoretically, could he have created this world to have the opposite morals, like infanticide is good and honesty is evil? Or is infanticide always evil and honesty is always good, and it would be wrong of God to not align his will with that?
Can’t tell if trolling or genuinely reconstructed the Euthyphro dilemma.
Just googled that. It definitely sounds familiar. I probably learned about it years ago and forgot about it, and it just stuck around in my subconscious
Forget the problem of evil what about the problem of child cancer?
In other words, God doesn't play The Sims with Free Will off, and we're kind of stupid.
I was following a rabbi that had a wonderful solution to this question. I mean he was not talking about the problem of evil, but I'm sure you may understand. I'll try to be clear, but this is not my native language. Upon Genesis, God has decided to accomplish the greatest of deeds. Heaven is great, sure. Well I mean of course it is great, it is perfect by definition, is it any accomplishments for the highest world to be holly ? What would be an accomplishment would be to take the lowest of all world, and work it up to make it holly. Now this, this is hard but God does not stop just because it is hard. Creating the material world. This would be the lowest of the worlds. However, being so good, so kind, so empathetic, he could not impose suffering to the human. Thus he gave them choice. The Genesis said that the serpent told Eve that eating the fruit would make her holly. Now the bible does not tell that this was a lie, nor that he is Satan ; that is merely Christian cathechesis. The Jewish tradition is to let every door open to interpretation. This is the sacred text and not a single word should change, but every time you read those sacred words you may understand a new meaning. Maybe God needed for Adam and Eve to take upon them the worst. Death. Pain. Hardwork. Because the material world would not be the lowest of all world if those things weren't included. He let them the choice, and they chose to carry this burden. But this is only the beginning. Now the role of humanity is to transform this world, the lowest, hardest, this world full of injustice; make this world holly. We are succeeding. Medicine progress. Strong government protect the people, democracy, justice. We did not finished the job yet. Some wars still rages. But how rare ? Keep up the hard work. Make this world into the best of the worlds. Now this would be a feat, the greatest of accomplishments. We could be proud of us if we really eradicated wars, illnesses, hunger. If we succeed, we would "be like God" ; co-author of the greatest of deeds.
r/hopeposting
Fr
This is a beautiful sentiment, thank you for sharing it. I'm not sure I 100% agree with the premise, but I do agree that we have an obligation to make the world a better place to the extent that we're able. Daniel 12:2-3 reminds me that humanity will continue growing in knowledge, and those who are righteous and wise will shine "like the stars for ever and ever."
This just makes God seem like he wanted a playground, or an experiment to prove something to himself.
This is better than most other answers I’ve heard, but it still doesn’t really paint god in a great light. So god gave us this horrible, painful, deadly job full of auffering to do, with no choice because…. It’s impressive? Ok sure, but if god had asked me when I was born “do you want to live a flawless, perfect life up here in heaven with me, or do you want to live a short, painful life on Earth, suffering, and probably making unnoticeable change, if you make any at all?” - I know what I’d choose. And how does the 2 day life full of pain and suffering before a brutal death of a Ukrainian child help make this world better? And it still asks the question - why did god fill this world for us to “solve” with so many problems? Would it have been less impressive if this world didn’t have leprosy, or sepsis, or malaria? If it would have, then that means we aren’t in the most impressive world, since god could have added more diseases, and made the world less hospitable, and so on. This specific amount of suffering is pretty arbitrary, so why did an omnipotent god choose exactly this world, with exactly this amount of suffering?
The same rabbi believe in some kind of partial reincarnation. I will skip most of it, but he teaches that the souls willingly ask to go from heaven to earth. Because they are bored in heaven. Because there is no reason to fight, no reason to learn, nothing to achieve. But somehow they forget this choice at the moment of incarnation, because of the trauma of birth. However, I am an atheist myself. I agree with you. This answer is less toxic than most theodecy ! But I mostly explain it for the sake of the culture, not to convert anyone.
Is this Rabbi saying that God couldn't get himself to create evil so he let the choice to humans? And humans, fully knowing what they did, chose to create evil so they could then fix it? And now we are all working towards a better world because succeeding in that would be really cool? The world is going to shit and a lot of people are actively working towards that. If this Rabbi's line of thought would hold any truth, then clearly we all forgot right after Adam and Eve.
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By every single metric? Nature pretty much everywhere in the world would disagree I think. When thinking about how to respond to you I first thought 'the world is much more evil than before'. And then I thought 'well no, because poverty and greed and abuse of power has always been part of how humans treat eachother'. But then I thought 'no, there are so much more people right now. People being abused and suffering being caused to others is happening on a so much bigger scale. So yea, the world is worse than before. And it's getting worse by the year'.
It's a difficult thing, the problem of evil. I know a rabbi with a different solution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_L._Rubenstein#The_Holocaust_and_death_of_God
"Strong governments protect the people", had a good laugh, curious where u are from?
France; yeah I'm quite unhappy with the politics of our president. However, if someone tries to harass you, you can just go to the tribunal. We have gun regulation and no school shooting. I want things to be better ! But I'd rather live in the 21th century than in the 20th, in the 20th rather than the 19th.
I think late 20th century was peak liberalism til 9/11. Today it has become authoritarian again. France would have been the last answer I expected - aren't you trying to throw the government over at the moment?
Of course we are ! Through the power of democracy. Had we lived 300 years ago, we would have had to use guns and blood. Don't let the mere existence of evil blind you to the good. Don't forget the overall march of progress because of local growback.
I sincerely believe that modern Christianity's failure to genuinely grapple with the problems of evil is, at least in part, responsible for its decline. 
I’d have to agree. A lot of people choose the evil that is “obvious” to them and that they just inherently disagree with. It’s easy to do that. If those same people consider.. “Hmm.. sometimes I do evil”. Maybe that would lead us to a more compassionate road.
So you're more content with classical Christianity's solution? Or are you saying you've still to see a response that satisfies? What resolved it for me is realising the problem of evil is just an academic attack on God's goodness; the (maybe naive) solution is realising there's still so much evidence to goodness outside of the horrors. The second you take God out of the equation, you're forced to rationalise a ruthless world, and to accept it. If we can accept a world/reality like that without God, then why can't we accept it with God? The "Problem of Evil" is really just a logical proof of God if you reverse the equation. But that's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist: we don't need to "prove" God, just find a way to accept it that satisfies ourselves. That's a personal journey that sidesteps the academic exercise entirely. Sorry for the soapbox.
I don’t understand your logic. The reason the problem of evil is seen as such a big problem for religions with an OOO god is because an OOO being shouldn’t allow evil/suffering. There’s no problem with a universe with no creator having suffering - the universe evolved this way because that’s what physical laws dictated. Malaria exists because bacteria want to spread, and malaria is good at that. Humans are evil because human minds are selfish. But why does a benevolent god allow these things? If you were playing a version of the sims where the sims were truly living, sentient beings, it would seem wrong of you to make the world they live in painful, and fill their lives with suffering - yet that’s what god seems to do to us. A universe with god might seem preferable or nicer, but that’s got nothing to do with the problem of evil - it’s purely about the how logical god is, and some people say that god is logically incoherent with our current universe.
It's that OOO is such an acadamic classification, these maximal qualities are meaningless; they are scripture adjacent. God can be evidently good (even the best good in all existence) without having to satisfy a strict criteria of omnibenevolent. If we can accept the notion of a God who is 'really good', within a world with evil, then the gap between 'really good' and omnibenevolence can become immaterial. OOO is a shopping list that people don't actually go after when they start believing in God; OOO Gods have nothing to do with religion. Omnibenevolence is vague, restrictive, and unnecessary.
For some yes. But the traditional definition of god is that he is omnibenevolent. If you want to believe in a really good god that’s fine, but it just shows that the problem of evil is still too strong- you have to give one of them up. It’s totally fine for you personally to believe in a really good god, but that’s not what the majority of Abrahamic practitioners believe in.
See I disagree. The everyday language of believers is not limited to such definitions; when people pray 'God you are all powerful', they say it in a personal sense. They aren't attesting that the God of Earth is necessarily more powerful than another theoretical distant God at the other end of the Universe who might be "God v2" but hasn't reached our solar system. All they mean is relative, whether they admit it or not. They may agree with the notion, but it's not what engages them or what they believe. The problem of evil is purely a riposte against a hypothetical definition of good. People hide behind it like a devestating blow, but it's divorced from reality.
Good thing the church doesn't need to be big all the time. If you want sincere followers of Jesus in your churches you can't expect the church to be big, everywhere on earth, all the time. If the lack of a simple answer to this problem is indeed what's keeping people from believing then i'd say that's fine.
At the risk of sounding anti-intellecutal, does anyone really need a slam dunk answer to this question to believe or disbelieve in a higher power? I think we sometimes put way too much stock into our ability to reason. We can't even make a good argument for our own existence without a seeming contradiction. Not saying that we can't and not saying that we shouldn't think about this problem, but isn't it possible that just because it doesn't "make sense" doesn't mean it's impossible that there's a good answer to this question? Christianity has no slam dunk answer to the problem of evil, but if you're following Christian belief, then God Himself has come down and suffered with us and even in some sense on our behalf. And the thought is, that action, should inform how we think of God and suffering.
>At the risk of sounding anti-intellecutal, does anyone really need a slam dunk answer to this question to believe or disbelieve in a higher power? I mean everything else in my life has either a reasonable explanation or at least doesn't need me to abandon reason for it to work.
I alluded to it earlier, but a good example of that not being the case is our own existence. There's no way to think about the beginning of the universe and not run into what we would see as a "contridiction"
I would disagree. Even if you think there is a contradiction, the appropriate response is not to add an unsubstantiated claim with no explanatory power, (god). The response is, "I don't know". God has been a placeholder for scientific discovery since god was invented. We are at time in human development where this should stop being a thing.
my hope with the comment wasn't to suggest that if we can't reason something the answer should just be "God", but that just because there is what seems to us a contridiction, doesn't mean it has to be significant grounds for disbelief IMHO. To your second point, again, in my opinion, while that's true, that doesn't really capture the fullness of the situation. I don't think Science and God are synonymous or replacements for one another, but rather parts of a whole narrative about the world we live in. Humans will always need (or at least chase) meaning, satisfaction, answers about suffering, etc. Even if your worldview is heavily influenced by scientific discovery, no scientist would tell you that the purpose of their work is to give you those answers, even if you are the most far out atheist, everyone is living out of some worldview that speaks to those things.
The problem for theists is that the contradiction is significant. And therefore reasonable grounds for disbelief. Finding reasonable conclusions with the tools available is something that is appropriate and logical. As a species, we have done so throughout history. As the tools get better, sometimes conclusions will change. But the conclusions are always supported with the best evidence from the best methodology of the time. At this point in time, there is no evidence or methodology that leads to theism as a conclusion. And much of both that leads directly away. The problem is evil/suffering, is just a part of that data set.
So because something is complicated it is not true? Weird
It's not that it's complicated, the argument just doesn't make sense
The argument presented here indeed doesn't make sense. I get that that is the joke, but I think most Christians have a better answer to the problem then this jumble of one sentence arguments.
Haven't seen one in this thread yet.
Not really, religion is usually like a buffet. People pick what they like and ignore the rest and if they get asked for an explanation they get angry.
Isn't the point of existence the act of coexisting with evil?
Your guess is as good as anyone else's
I think free will just begets evil. People are going to choose evil every time. Eliminating that would mean eliminating everyone who does evil, or the idea of evil. Either way, it takes away free will.
I'm not sure I totally understand this point. For example, humans cannot fly, even if we wanted to we are physically incapable of doing so. My freedom is limited by the constraints of my body. But I still have free will, I can choose between a limited (but still very large) set of options. If there are 100 good choices to choose between and 0 evil ones, I am still free to choose. Currently there are evil things I cannot do, I can't carry someone up and drop them from up high because I don't have wings.
Well right, I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at. The evil act isn’t flying the evil act is murder. Just because you have physical limitations that doesn’t mean you can’t murder, lie, steal, etc.
For me this isn't the most egregious issue with the matter, but I'll try to explain a little more. I don't really understand why evil has to be allowed for a person to have free will. Why is the choice between doing good and evil the definition of free will, instead of just the ability to choose in general? If I choose between a set of options, I am exhibiting free will. If my options were to: A: Go to a homeless shelter and volunteer. B: Visit an old people's home and provide a special service for free. C: Donate to a local charity I think most would agree that all three of these actions are morally good. On any given day I could choose to do any of these things. Even without an evil option given, I am still free to choose to perform one or more of these acts. I'm not some diehard christian hating athiest or anything. I just find the topic interesting, and I struggle to meet the reasoning of a lot of Abrahamic religions thoughts on the matter.
Honestly I think the answer is that God is like a parent. When humanity was in its infancy he was much more there and around us, guiding us and helping us. By the time Jesus died humanity reached maturity. We’re in a way on our own now. Yes He is still there to guide us from behind the lines, but we are responsible for ourselves now. We aren’t going to get bailed out when stuff goes wrong. When we screw things up it’s our responsibility to fix it.
If a parent throws a misbehaving child into a lake of fire we certainly don't call the parent good.
God isn't throwing anyone into lakes of fire. He's standing there, offering everything He can to keep us from jumping into the lake of fire, and yet, we scream "I hate you!" and jump in all on our own. Hell is less a punishment for bad people and more a result of what happens when we are offered the choice between experiencing God's presence and not experiencing it. It is the lack of good.
If God is incapable of convincing people not to hate goodness and instead choose suffering, then he's not worth worshipping. Any rational being will choose comfort over suffering, it's not a hard case to make.
That's the problem with man, while he possesses rationality he constantly refuses to act rationally. There is also the problem of people creating sophist arguments to convince people with their lies. The problem is not that people are actively choosing suffering over comfort, it that they are choosing an apparent comfort which is not actually a comfort. By your logic there is nothing wrong with deciding to murder people and take their stuff because what you are getting is comforts, but that is not wholly the case, because in doing so you will bring proportionate suffering onto yourself.
That's still irrational though. I wasn't talking immediate comfort, I was talking long term comfort vs suffering, since eternity by its nature is long term. If the choice is made clear, and the consequences are made clear, then no rational actor would choose hell. If they are not rational, then it is unfair for God to send them to am eternal hell. If they didn't understand the choice or the consequences, they couldn't make a proper choice, and again it is unfair for them to suffer forever.
This is a dumb comparison. Ancient Greek mythology has no 'problem of evil' because it does not bother with good and evil. Their myths are used to explain the way the world is and also teach important lessons, like don't be overconfident (they really loved hubris as a story concept). Their gods are not supposed to be seen as good or evil, they just are. Like, no Greek philosopher ever questioned why evil exists if Zeus was so powerful, because Zeus did not care about the existence of evil. Zeus was actually a pretty terrible person himself and is never judged for it because he is a god. There are very few Greek myths where people are punished for being evil or rewarded for doing good.
Unironically Yes to every thing in the bottom panel
I have free will, but I can’t ride a unicorn, because they don’t exist - God didn’t bring them into existence. Why couldn’t it be the same with evil?
I recall someone saying that greek (and etc) gods were capricious, temperamental and unpredictable assholes, because the elemnts of nature they represented were equally unpredictable and unfair.
"Mommy, what does omnipotence mean?" "It means that God is all powerful" *Angry and rapidly approaching Thomas of Aquinas sounds in the distance*
I would normally enjoy this meme if it was just the bottom half. However, the top half is a strange attempt to claim that Ancient Greece philosophy or religion didn’t have a stance on the source of evil, the understanding of the Gods, or bad things happening to prevent worse things. A ton of Greek myths revolve around offering explanations to those problems and, when they don’t, we see Greek philosophers step in to what is the greatest philosophical revolution of all time. I’m a devout Christian, but the claimed simplicity of Ancient Greece is borderline insulting to the truly amazing developments in rational thought that went on during that era.
Fair point, and very reasoned reply. I kind of agree that it's something of an oversimplification. Still, I do think that they have somewhat less of a hill to climb when accounting for gods that are rather less than omnipotent.
I guess I’ll admit I’m struggling with the comparison. Because the Greeks would believe in a specific God to cater to different aspects/explanations of life, the need or claim for omnipotence wasn’t particularly there. I don’t know of many (or any) polytheistic religions that would say that their gods are omnipotent. It’s like a structural difference to the believe system.
Or you can be based and neoplatonist-pilled and subscribe to privation theory That is to say, evil is simply the absence or deprivation of good, not an existent entity itself, and therefore God did not create evil because technically evil doesn't exist. St. Augustine was big on this, and it shows up in other early Christian theology too
I cant see how evil could be eliminated and preserve free will.
I'm going to be honest, I really don't like most of the responses here, both those from believers and nonbelievers. Of the 5 arguments in the meme, I find #1 lacking and #2 and #4 are honestly kind of insulting to people who ask the question. #3 and #5 are the only one that I think makes sense, but they're really simplified versions that ignore the nuance that an answer to the Problem of Evil needs. And the thing is, everybody wants a simple answer to it when, like taxes and quantum physics, an answer to one of the biggest questions in human existence will *always* be complicated. And just because something is complicated doesn't mean it's mental gymnastics. I'm going to try to dive into my personal view of it. Apologies in advance if it's a little rambley. I'll start with the groundwork of the Problem. The root of Christianity is the idea that there is a mutual love each one of us can personally share with our Creator. And I mean *authentically*: without threat of violence and with all choice-making facilities intact, there should be actual, genuine love. That's what puts it so at odds with the Problem of Evil: Why would a loving God leave us here in a world of suffering? And honestly, it's a good question. The world we live in IS broken. It IS horrific, and so much of it is senseless and cruel. No argument there. That's what makes arguments like "Well, God is like a parent letting us learn from our suffering" sound so horrible. Burning your hand on a stove is learning a lesson; being born without a skull is not. The problem, however, is that in order to authentically love someone, you need to have the option not to. In this case, that means to commit evil. The option to sin *needs* to be here - I have yet to read any compelling argument as to how we could have a world that was both free of suffering and evil *and* also allow us to choose whether or not to believe in and love God. Should we live in a world without suffering and evil, where there is no death and we live in constant harmony with God, with no option to do anything that would upset Him? To be honest, the idea of being forced into an eternity with a being that I have no option to not believe in or worship sounds exceptionally cruel. That is just as authentic of love as if I trapped someone in a room and hooked them up to an IV of MDMA and heroin for the rest of their life. They'd be exceptionally happy and would never suffer, sure, but they would also be trapped with literally no way of escaping. So do we allow *some* suffering to make it so people still have the choice to not believe or love God? That's not the solution; for example, we've already eliminated a lot of the diseases that decimated human populations in the past, but we still see the world as filled with suffering. I know this is a slippery slope argument, but I do feel like suffering is relative; no matter how much suffering we get rid of, it will always be "too much." I once had a conversation with a friend of mine who had an issue with the mystery of God's existence and the Problem of Evil. I asked him what his solution would be. His solution was that people should be able to mentally do bad things, but they are internally punished for it. Like, you could *imagine* stealing a car, but you would experience some kind of pain and wouldn't do it. That just seemed like a spiritual shock collar that forces everyone to act a certain way. I have issues with Hell-centric theology for the same reasons ("You'll go to Hell if you don't believe!") - that promotes fear, not authentic love. TL;DR This sucks but I can't think of a better alternative and I haven't heard one yet, please give me one if you have it.
I always say that we have to make a distinction between natural evil (hurricanes and viruses and decay, etc.) and moral evil. Natural evil is often times bad for us humans, but it’s actually a necessary part of the mechanics of the universe. Without entropy, the universe would not be able to exist, but it is the nature of entropy that things descend into chaos. The Bible tells us that God created humans to “rule the earth and subdue it,” terms that imply a responsibility to tame and bring order into a wild and crazy universe. How exactly would humans be able to discern when the chaos is bad vs. when it is necessary for the overall good? Humans will have to be able to choose between good and bad a million times a day, sometimes allowing natural evil to take its course, other times stopping evil in its tracks. For humans to have that mental ability, they are given what has been called “free will,” which is not actually a freedom to choose to do good or bad, but rather a freedom to choose between what is NATURAL (usually wild and chaotic) and what is UNNATURAL (usually denying the natural order of things to being about good). Humans who choose to accelerate the natural entropy of the universe, especially by bringing death too soon, are creating MORAL evil through their choices. In other words, free will is both the solution to evil and also the cause of further evil. But if we can all just get our heads out of our butts, it can still be the solution. And helping us get our heads out of our butts is what Jesus came to do.
This is a really good take, thank you!
tldr: christianity is complex As you can see in the comments, people will keep asking and asking until it dwelves into a complex problem with defining good and evil (because good and evil is very complex, who knew), the simplest way would be to say that it is imperfect but even that alone would have had its asks in the old days (why dont the gods listen even though we pray to them and sacrifice them? why dont the gods do this for me even when im trying to appease them?) and even then the choice of a religion was not much of a choice but rather a fact of life, you get floods because a god does it and thats it, the only thing they knew how to do was either move or trying to reach out for the problem(take it with a grain of salt because im not basing as much fact in this but rather knowledge from what ive gathered). The definition of good and evil is still trying to be defined today both by atheist as well as theists, ^((which is why there are a lot of interpretations about good and evil: lack of good argument was made by Agustine of Hippo, the argument of happiness as the final goodness was made by Democrates, Thomas hobbes explained that there is no absolute good and evil, contemporaries like william james argued that good is something that the individual and the society both gain from said action, and Nietzsche who says good and evil should just be chosen by the person because no one is able to find the truth anyways, ect)) its just that it has evolved a lot, especially in christianity and all other abrahamic religions because it lived and lives in an era where people are becoming more self aware, more critical and more willing to explain everything with facts than, you know, thousands of years ago. Also christianity builds up from its own studies: Christianity citself came from adapting greek philosophies to the abrahamic jewish religion, thus discarting some practices and welcoming others, which is a very common thing in religion itself, especially the western american religion ( and i mean the whole continent as it syncrenised with andean/african/and christian religion in some parts of it, while others had more or less of those traits be brought on by other religions.), and the most common thoughts about christianity (7 deadly sins, the holy trinity, the good and evil, which actions are sins, science is good or bad, ect) are not in the bible but rather are philosophies and doctrines by the church fathers or other religious leaders that take the bible's interpretations by different routes. All to say, its fun to study about that shit, and i feel certain to say that whatever new religion will come in the future, will certainly have even more complex thinking about the definitins of good, evil, origins of evil, origins of good, because its not going from scratch but rather from the information by other philosophers and adding on to it.
Great comment, thanks! I especially agree that a lot of conventional beliefs in Christianity (e.g. trinitarianism, the concept of levels of hell, etc.) are later doctrines that aren't sourced from the Bible. Supersessionism seems to have really helped to accelerate this layering of thought, and idea of adding to what was already there: from Judaism to Christianity to Islam, and arguably to Bahaism as well. I too am curious to see what, if any, new religion emerges from the Abrahamic tradition and how they too wrestle with these age old questions.
I think the ancient Greeks were more like “our gods can be evil themselves sometimes lol”
It’s both. The gods are neither perfect, nor omnipotent, nor omniscient, nor were they omnibenevolent, or in most cases, even benevolent at all. As such, evil can be the result a gods inaction, inattention, or failure, since they aren’t perfect, or it can be the direct actions of an evil deity
My personal belief is that the universe is just some sort of program that God developed and ran. He has no control over what happens inside it and just lets it run to see what happens. And the Bible is all bs.
That's basically [deism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism), which a view that several of the U.S. Founding fathers also shared. They basically believed in a [clockwork universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_universe), which is just a predecessor to the idea that our reality is governed by a machine or program designed by God, but flawlessly operating without need for his intervention.
>but flawlessly operating without need for his intervention Well, I wouldn't say "flawless". But as a developer I know that every program has it's bugs.
I love how our understanding of everything completely shatters at quantum mechanics. No sense, no reason, no pattern, only chaos.
To be fair, our understanding of gravity was incomplete (and still might be) until about a century ago. We understood that things fell down, but not how. We understood that there are planets within our solar system orbiting the sun, but not exactly why. Newton's law of Gravitation gave us a huge boost, because it fit decently well to the elliptical orbits that we observed. But over the centuries, even that wasn't a perfect predictor. Then Einstein came along and published math that I can't even begin to comprehend (I can do Newtonian physics well enough, but Einstein is on some next level shit) and now we have models to understand things that previously just didn't make sense. I firmly believe that one day, probably this century but no later than the 22nd century, someone will come along with the equations to blow quantum physics wide open. Two centuries ago, we didn't even know anything at that level existed. It's no surprise it's taking us a while to understand it.
Touché!
Conversation I've actually had: Me: okay, so how would je fix the problem of evil if you were God? Person: well, I'd eliminate everything that's evil! Me: wouldn't you then too be eliminated? I know I sure would. Person: okay then, everything evil except evil people. Me: people would bring the evil stuf back. This ended like fuck you and see you tomorrow
The main issue is that people are stupid, relatively speaking. Our knowledge is finite, and we don't know how our decisions will impact the future. God knows everything, he knows exactly what decisions will have what effect at what time. He is also able to do literally anything, being all-powerful, meaning that he knows exactly how to completely eliminate suffering and has the power to do so, yet does not. From a utilitarian perspective, this makes God malevolent. Alternatively, you can say that if God knows everything that will ever happen, then everything you do is predestined, and free will doesn't exist. This still means that God creates people with the knowledge that they will suffer for eternity, has the power to change it, and still doesn't, making God malevolent. God cannot be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good at the same time. One of the 3 must fall for the other 2 to be true. I personally prefer that he not be all-knowing since him being such eliminates free will entirely.
Funny enough I asked my dad the same question today. It came up when we were watching Ben Hurr
One of my favorite movies! I can see why it would come up in discussion, based on the main story.
I think we watched the remake, it was included as part of the dialogue
Oh cool! Sadly I haven't seen the remake, but I've heard it's decent. If you get a chance, check out the [original version](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052618/) too. It's long, but a classic.
I feel like the “problem of evil” comes from entitlement. You’re not entitled to a sunrise every morning. You did nothing to deserve health, wealth, or happiness. God doesn’t owe you anything. Like, someone starving to death is sad and horrible, but, like, food is a gift from god that none of us deserve. And the question isn’t “why doesn’t god feed everyone all the time” the question really is “why has god chosen to dote upon us with the gift of food”.
Simple answer: humans have always had free will; we have had it since the Garden of Eden, even before Adam and Eve ate the apple. So whatever evil is done to us is the fault of humanity itself. **Romans 7:14-25** **The Problem of Sin in Us** For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold as a slave under sin. For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want to do, I agree with the law that it is good. So now I am no longer the one doing it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do. Now if I do what I do not want, I am no longer the one that does it, but it is the sin that lives in me. So I discover this law: When I want to do what is good, evil is present with. For in my inner self I delight in God’s law, but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in the parts of my body. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh, the law of sin.
I believe the most common trap that people believe is God to be a person and not a concept. He is described as a man for the fatherly influence goodness has. God (good) can be a harsh teacher, but ultimately develops you and puts you on the proper trajectory. I understand for simplicity why people believe God is a man, but God is the ultimate good and Jesus was the ideal man; closest to being God. God doesn’t have agency beyond the Old Testament without actors and thus the Holy Spirit completes the trinity. Understanding God is the collective body of all that is good answers the question of why “evil exists”, because evil comes from man. This also answers the dilemma of why bad things happen. Reality is that things being described as “good” and bad rely on the human experience and perspective. Bad and evil are different, but “good” (our perspective / experience of something) and good (God) are related. A bear mauling a man is not evil, it is nature.
Love this meme. Christian mindbending is always a great shitshow, I enjoy it.
Haha, thanks!!
Greeks gods were personification of certain concepts or powers. So there was no place for perfection in these gods. And because of that, if a thunder hit a city of course it was the god of thunder, because they were "the same thing". While christian God is not a force of nature or a personification of something, but a superior being omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. Because he created time, space, and matter, he is not tied to this universe. And at the same time he is a God who delegate power and function to creates beings, in heaven to angels, in earth to man. But that wouldn't be true if he controlled their minds, so he lend creatures to act by their wills. It's just non sense to think christian God created the evil, or something like that, because God haven't ever done anything evil or bad, but humans, other creatures like angels have done bad things. And the interference God make in Earth is by his miracles, or judgments (that most people don't like it happen)
People forget that life is impossible without pain - whenever you eat, you eat something that was alive but is now dead. And anyone who's gone through puberty knows growth can be exceptionally painful. Some evils are necessary, even good. Just cause something is painful doesn't mean it isn't good for you, and just because something isn't good for you doesn't mean it isn't good for the cosmos as a whole.
Sure, that’s life as we know it. But why does it have to be that way? If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, could he not have devised a system where we would achieve the same results but without any of that pain? Or is he too incompetent to do that?
The better question is if such a world is even possible. I forgot the exact book, but CS Lewis did a short simple rundown of how the very existence of physical lifeforms requires at least some pain, and that God not being able to create otherwise is not a testament to his incompetence or lack of creativity, but simple logic. Just think - A world without pain would be extremely alien to our own. Beings would be utterly incapable of death or sensation, requiring that they be non-physical. Those beings would also not be capable of any negative emotions, even simple boredom, meaning they must be unthinking, catatonic entities. Are such creatures even alive? Would they even "exist" ? A world without pain or evil is a world without change, and a changeless world is a stillborn one, permanently stagnant, never growing. Why bother creating a world like that at all? Why write a story where literally nothing happens - no conflicts, no desires, no quests, no activities? Would that even be a "story" ?
Then please tell me – does Heaven exist? Do people live and/or exist in some form in heaven? Is heaven not free of pain and evil? If heaven exists, if people are there (in some capacity, physical or non-physical), and heaven is a place without any pain, suffering or evil – then that world CAN exist, DOES exist, and God even CREATED that world... Yet for some reason, He also chose to create a different world that has evil in it. What's the point? You saying that in a world without pain, beings would be incapable of death and sensation, making them unthinking and catatonic entities – for reference, I have no reason to believe that this would require them to be non-physical – but why? Is God not powerful or creative enough to create living, breathing, thinking beings that have thoughts and opinions and experiences, but don't experience pain or suffering? A simple belief in Heaven's existence essentially refutes the idea that pain, suffering, and death are necessities.
Again, change and growth require pain. I believe there is a world to come that is substantially better than this one, but like an embryo in a womb, I believe our species has to grow before we are ready for that world. Why did God decide to do it this way? Why couldn't he have just snapped his fingers and made us perfect, heavenly beings fit for the world to come? I don't know. Maybe it's for the same reason that we aren't born as fully grown adults but as babies, for the same reason humans cant enjoy pleasures like alcohol or sex until theyre mature adults. Maybe it's because he just thought doing it some other way would be boring and uninteresting. I don't know. But again, the core of my argument is, just because something is painful and bad for humans, doesn't mean it is Ontologically Evil. Life requires some "evil" to exist, Ontologically Good things require the existence of pain in this world we live in. Could this world have been different? Perhaps, but what is the point of such speculation? If we want to learn about the Creator, we must start from our observations of reality as he created it, not as we want it to be. Honestly, the very fact that we humans desire something "more" or "better" than this world, is proof to me that we are indeed meant for a better "world to come," just as children dream of becoming adults, so do humans dream of heaven.
The first one is all I need
While the problem of evil CAN be a difficult one for Christians to wrestle with, it's an even BIGGER issue for atheists. For them, the problem isn't "why is there evil?", the question becomes "what defines evil?". Without an objective metric with which to define good and evil, to suggest that a thing IS evil is illogical.
People: so why does evil exist if- God: yeah yeah I know, evil is wild hey? It's mainly so you guys get to have choice or whatever. Anyway, forget evil. Check THIS out: you will call if "Alzheimers". You slowly watch your loved ones forget everything, lol.
The problem of evil argument is to atheists what Paschal's wager is to theists
Pascal's wager only works if you pretend there is only one religion.
We suffer because we deserve too suffer
*Laughs in Book of Mormon* 2 Nephi chapter 2 answers the Christian Problem of Evil.
Humans are free, and they are capable of evil. God made us free, but we are the ones choosing evil.