Skip to main content

...Why the "Problem of Evil" Doesn't Pose a Problem to Christianity

Evil sucks. And it sucks because it truly is evil, not some personal dislike or other preference choice. The whole force of the objection to Christianity is based on the idea that a good God would not tolerate evil to the degree it exists.

Throughout the ages, the formulation of this argument has changed. It started as a deductive argument, and has since moved to more evidential and probabilistic models, but the thrust is the same: Evil as it exists seems incompatible with a God who cares about the world and has its best interests at heart. Yet I will show that simply is not the case.

Alex O'Connor poses a thoughtful objection to the theodicies (explanations of why a good God would allow evil): If God can build a world without evil, why not just do so? Why the intermediate step where animals die in forest fires or tidal waves send thousands of fish and other creatures to their deaths? Yet, when I look at this issue, I see precisely why there are natural and moral evils present here, and by the end of this discussion, I expect you will see what I mean.

For me, I see this world as a story being played out. Unlike the stories we tell through books, plays, movies, comics, and other art forms, we are living out the story. It is for this purpose that evil (both natural and moral evil) is necessary for the God whom Christians profess.

To see this, imagine writing a story that contains no natural or moral evil in it:

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess. One day a prince came from another country. They fell in love, and lived happily ever after. 

Simply put, this story is meaningless. Not because there is anything bad in it, but precisely because there isn't. The Greek tragedies were stories exposing the evil in powerful men, evoking pathos in the audience and causing them to examine their own lives for similar evil tendencies. But no such evil can be exposed if the world the story takes place in has no evil. Likewise, our fairy tale above has the classic beginning and end, yet the "messy middle" where all the action takes place and gets us to celebrate the result is missing because the element that sparks it (the evil that must be overcome) doesn't exist in that world.

This raises another question: Couldn't a world allow moral evils without natural evils? Could we have the world allow people to start wars, kill and torture people, without having fluffy bunnies getting crushed by trees when no one is around to hear them? 

Again, consider such a world from a story perspective. No natural evil means need for careful building design as there will be no earthquakes to destroy bad designs. No one dies from anything, so eventually the world fill up with life and either creates a natural evil through overcrowding, or the pattern continues as Earth life spreads across the universe like kudzu. Nothing dies, so there is nothing to recycle, and therefore all life must use new materials. 

Natural evil, it turns out, is just natural process that in the natural course of action produces evil, and the only way to stop the evil is to stop the process. That, however, is where heaven comes in. Heaven is that "happily ever after" that comes after the moral and natural evils are addressed, and we see who feels the moral resposibility to address them and who is content to sit back and complain about them. Those who fought the evils in this world can rejoice at their absence in the next, while those who traded in them would find the "Fractured Fairy Tale" world above boring and want to start something. This world is God's sorter, showing who can learn to recognize evil and turn to Him to aid against it vs. those who relish in evil and turn to it to aid themselves. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 ...Walking through Spell Design I would like to take this time to walk through the how the Torg Eternity spell design looks today with examples of how current spells would appear as "on the fly" designs with explanations of the entries. To recall, an "on the fly" spell design takes the important aspects of the spell and divides them among the four magic skills. Each one would then be put into a Dramatic Skill Resolution and played out. When doing deliberate spell design, the process is done in a controlled setting over time, so each step would have effectively unlimited attempts at them. But what a deliberate spell design wants to do is create a new spell to add to the caster's repertoire, and what it values is balancing the amount of time spent working on the design with the final Difficulty Number of the spell. So a casting effectively repeats all the steps into one casting action, so counts as a Multi-Action on the four skills using the main skill for that s...
Post a Comment
Read more
 ..."Looking At" vs. "Looking Along" C. S, Lewis wrote many things in an attempt to explain Christianity as he knew it. One such writing was an essay called. "Mediation in a Toolshed" for which  an excellent video  has been made. It highlights an imbalance in our thinking that has only gotten worse over time. The essay begins by noticing that while in a dark toolshed, a sunbeam had through a crack at the top of the door. He was able to see the beam, with dust floating in it, and it seemed to be the only thing there. But when he stepped into it, all that vanished and he saw outside the leaves, the sky, and the sun that had produced the beam.  The first observation was him looking at  the beam, while the second observation was him looking along  the beam. One gives an outside account, while the other gives the inside participatory account. Other examples he gave are the person falling in love vs. a scientist measuring the physical reactions of the lover, o...
Post a Comment
Read more
 ...Spell Trappings, Part 2 This post is the conclusion of Spell Trappings, which was published just before this. Prerequisite A spell that requires another spell or Clearance Level to learn qualifies for the trapping of Prerequisite, The difficulty of obtaining the prerequisite determines the degree of Difficulty Number reduction. Restriction Most spells can be cast over and over. When one Fireball  ends, another can begin. Spells that place limits on how often they can be cast qualify for the Restriction trapping. A Restriction's value in reducing the Difficulty Number is based on the amount of time that must pass between castings. Self In the original Torg, there was a trapping for Touch. In that version, an unarmed combat  or similar test needed to be made to transfer the spell effect to the target. Torg Eternity 's Aysle Sourcebook specifies that Touch spells do not actually need to touch the target; merely being close enough to touch the target is good enough. So in...
Post a Comment
Read more