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...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. 

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