The Problem of Evil
The
first of these is the atheist position:
Proposition
# 1: If God is all-powerful He could destroy evil.
Proposition
# 2: If God is all good He will destroy evil.
Proposition
# 3: But evil is not destroyed.
Proposition
# 4: Therefore there is no all-good and all-powerful God.
So
the atheist concludes that either God is all-powerful but He is evil. Or he may
conclude that He is good but not all-powerful. But ultimately the atheist will
conclude that there just isn’t any God and evil exists but God doesn’t. This is
the position that evil is eternal. But he doesn’t even have the right to make
those propositions. For example, if evil is eternal then it is normal, and if
evil is eternal and normal then what that means is you can’t really distinguish
between good and evil. All human viewpoint concepts go back to the chain of
being where everything is within one circle. That means you don’t go outside
the circle to get some absolute value of what is good or bad, it is determined
by what is inside that circle. So their concept of good and evil is generated
by the creature. In Christian terminology we would say the circle really describes
the creation. In divine viewpoint we have the creator who is distinct from the
creation. So atheists are generating their values from within their own
experience, from within the framework of creation itself. Ultimately, if evil
is eternal then that means that any distinction between good and evil breaks
down and their position destroys and real substantive meaning for good and evil
because they are determined on a relative basis. How do you know this is good
and this is evil? It doesn’t work for us. That is what our society has
determined. That is what our group has determined isn’t right for now but it
may be right or wrong for another culture or another group. So that it becomes
fluid. Well once it becomes fluid then the meanings of something being good and
something being evil are completely destroyed. You can’t even communicate any
more. You don’t have the right to say this is good and this is bad because, Oh,
in the 1920s homosexuality was bad and marriage and fidelity was good; but now
that has changed. So what gives you the right to even use terms that imply
absolutes? What we see is that in their very discussion they are borrowing the
meaning of good and evil as absolutes from Christianity. You can’t let an
unbeliever do that. Where do you get the concept of good and evil? How can you
say that? That is one approach. You have to ask the basis for their definition
of good and evil.
What
we see happening here is something we can be very guilty of ourselves, and we
have to be careful of this. Don’t develop abstract concepts and then make God conform
to those abstract concepts. For example, don’t come along and say, I have an
absolute concept out here of power. This is what the atheist does. He says,
Okay I’ve got a definition of what omnipotence is. But what is embedded in their
definition of omnipotence is that omnipotence means you will restrict evil in a
certain time period. They don’t bring that out; that’s in the closet. Then they’ll
also talk about goodness, but embedded in their definition of goodness is the
concept that if you are really good there is no reason that you would allow
this kind of suffering to take place. So they develop an abstract category, and
abstract value, and they say, God, if you are God you have to conform to omnipotence
and goodness. In other words, they are approaching God is if out there somewhere
there are ideals, some sort of yardstick or measuring device that God has to
measure up to. That is an intellectual form of idolatry.
There
is a passage where Isaiah deals with this in Isaiah 40. Isaiah is writing about
200 years before the Babylonian captivity but from chapter forty on he is
writing as if he is in the captivity to comfort the people while they re living
in a pagan environment. So God is speaking to them, and in verse 12 He begins
to challenge them: “Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and
meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a
measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?” He
is challenging their concept of knowledge, that man empirically may be able to
estimate certain things but he doesn’t have comprehensive knowledge. He can’t
give you an exact precise measurement because that would mean he would have to
have an infinite data base that could handle all that information. The point of
His questions is to show that man’s empirical knowledge is finite and limited.
Verse 13, “Who hath directed the Spirit of the LORD, or being his counsellor hath taught him?” That
brings out the idea that God is not taught by anyone. His knowledge is not our
knowledge. We learn everything; God never learned anything. God’s knowledge
does not increase or diminish; no one teaches Him. Verse 14, “With whom took he
counsel, and who instructed him, and taught him in the path of justice, and
taught him knowledge, and showed to him the way of understanding?” Who taught
God justice? No one did. If you taught God justice there would be this external
ideal of justice that God would conform to. What Isaiah is saying is that God
doesn’t conform to some external category of justice; what He does is just. That
is the measuring rod. When we go through the essence box and talk about the
fact that Gold is sovereign and righteous and just, etc, these are not abstract
categories that God measures up to and because this being measures up to these
categories we then say, Okay, He is God. God is who He is He radiates these
categories. So God is the measuring device, He doesn’t meet up to some
measuring device. Verse 18 is the point of Isaiah’s confrontation here, “To
whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him?” There
is nothing external to which you can compare God or to liken God. He is the
standard. If you set something up as a comparison that you are going to use to
understand God, then what you are doing is setting that intellectually above
God and that then becomes an intellectual idol. This is a very sophisticated
concept of idolatry. It is mental idolatry. What it is, is man in his independence
wants to define God on the basis of values and categories that are generated by
the creature. It is a complete breakdown of that creator-creature distinction
where the creature wants to define the creator and the creature is going to
generate his own categories, his own values, his own definitions, and then say,
God, if you are just and righteous then you have to do this. In other words,
You have to dance to this, and I’m not under your sovereignty and control. The
thing that we have to recognize is, how do we know what God is? How can we even
define what omnipotence is? How can an unbeliever define what goodness is? Isaiah
brings this out a second time in verse 25, “To whom then will ye liken me, or
shall I be equal? saith the Holy One.” There is no point of analogy. God is incomprehensible
and He is above us that we could understand Him. We can know Him to some degree
but we can’t have comprehensive knowledge.
So
the atheist concludes that if God exists He is not all-powerful. So therefore
if evil exists God must not exist. Or in some case the atheist would conclude
that if God exists He is not all-powerful.
The
other hidden assumption which undergirds almost all human viewpoint reasoning
on this topic is that if God wanted to destroy evil it would have been
destroyed by now. How do you know? How do you know that there is not some
higher purpose? Well, I can’t conceive of one. So in your limited empirical
knowledge you know enough to know that there can’t exist anywhere at any time a
higher good that is being accomplished by God’s extension of evil and allowing
evil to run its course in the universe. There are hidden assumptions in each of
these points and we need to be sure that they are understood. The assumption
there is that God would destroy evil if He could. That presupposes an
omniscience about evil and the purposes of the unive4se on the part of the
creature that is cannot be derived from either empiricism or rationalism. He is
just assuming this.
Now
the Christian has an answer to this that has been formulated:
1)
If
God is all good, and He is, then He will destroy evil.
2)
If
God is all-powerful then He can destroy evil. He has the ability to destroy
evil at any point in time.
3)
Evil
is not yet destroyed, therefore evil will be destroyed eventually. Evil in the
biblical world view is limited, it will be destroyed. Because the Christian
position recognizes that there is a plan and a purpose to history and there is
a reason. We don’t have to understand it fully for there to be a reason. Just because
it is incomprehensible doesn’t mean it is unknowable or irrational. God is
rational, He has a plan and a purpose, but as we saw with Job He is not
required to let the creature know all the information. That is the arrogance of
the human viewpoint position.
In
pantheism there is the view that God exists but evil doesn’t, it is just illusion.
This is the Hindu position. In America this came up in Christian Science. To
accept that position they have to deny the data of empiricism. In other words,
whatever we know or learn from our senses it is not really true. Well if evil
is an illusion, good is an illusion. You can’t have it both ways. You have to
ask the question, how do you determine that good isn’t an illusion? Or maybe it
isn’t that good is the reality and evil is the illusion but that good is the
illusion and evil is the reality. So in pantheism they not only have to ultimately
deny that empiricism can provide any factual, reliable data whatsoever.
Second,
it would deny all scientific data in relation to disease and historical
disaster. It denies, of course, the biblical data about the reality of sin and
evil. This is one way the unbeliever copes with evil. In the first position the
atheist has to cope with evil by ultimately reducing its significance by making
it normal because he can’t handle evil in all of its biblical reality. The
escapist, the pantheist, can’t deal with evil either so it doesn’t really exist.
He is just living in a state of psychological denial. This again shows that all
unbelieving positions either trivialize evil or act as if it doesn’t exist. Those
are the only options.
A
third position that has been popularized over the last few years is that God
has lost control. So what we see again is the same basic fallacies that are in
the other positions, a creaturely imposed definition on the creator. This is
what good is and, God, you have to meet my idea of good. It is once again the
creature trying to dictate to the creator.
What
we have to realize as Christians is we must always start with God and not with
human reason or experience. Revelation always precedes experience. You go to
the Scripture to find out who God is and you start with God’s revelation of
Himself, and that is what sets the standards. Then you come along and utilize
those standards. But God Himself is the standard. One of the classic examples
that you run into with people is that four-letter word, fair. God is fair. What
do you mean by fair? Where do you get your definition of fairness? What is the content
of that word fair? So God is fair, and God is isolated into an abstract category
and God has to meet that category. Well God wouldn’t let that happen because God
is fair. Well who sets the standard? This is a radically different way of
thinking about God. We’ve all fallen into that trap, it is a heritage from our
Aristotilian, Platonic Greek heritage in western civilization to think in terms
of these categorical values as autonomous, abstract ideas.
Illustration:
If you saw someone down and out and suffering in the street, you would help
them, wouldn’t you? I would say, yes. I don’t want them to think that somehow
they on their own power can change their circumstances. They are in the gutter
because they have rejected God, they are reaping the consequences of their own
bad decisions. So leave them there in the gutter. I don’t want to come up with
some sort of solution for their sin, making them think that somehow they can
live in unhappiness and meaning and value in life apart from God. I’ll give
them the gospel, talk to them, and things of that nature, which was the
foundation of true, genuine Christian compassion—soup kitchens, missions that operated
in the slum areas. But they always gave the gospel with the food. But the
illustration is that if you saw someone down in the street, you’d help them,
wouldn’t you? Well how can God sit back and look at the whole human race and
all kinds of wars and everything and not help us? He must not care. But see,
once again what happens? They are exporting to God their own value systems.
Furthermore, they don’t understand the nature of freedom—freedom of choice
means freedom to succeed and freedom to fail. For there to be true freedom you
have to have freedom to fail. To have love, and God creates man to love Him, to
have genuine love that is marked by obedience. We see that again and again in
the New Testament: “If you love me you will keep my commandments.” So obedience
is linked to love. So for there to be genuine love there has to be genuine
freedom, and to have genuine freedom there will be freedom to fail and freedom
to succeed. Real freedom in choice means that the more significant the choice
the more radical the consequences. If you have a choice between worshipping God
and not, and obeying God or not, then the consequences are radical. This is
what we saw in Genesis 3 where the consequences of man’s negative volition are
quite radical. Therefore we have to come to grips with the true dimensions of
suffering, disease and evil, and that all of that came into the whole cosmic
system as a result of disobedience to the creator.
Another
approach that people will raise is, What about the innocents? What about the
little babies? What about birth defects, natural disasters? Once again, the
question betrays a shallow and superficial view of evil. What we see in
Scripture is that evil is something that was like a poison that penetrated
every dimension of the universe, and that is the way God constructed reality. Not
that God is the cause of that but because reality couldn’t be any other way. He
is demonstrating that the creature cannot survive at all independently of the
creator because his negative decisions affect everything, not just the
immediate situation.
Sometimes
people will ask why God had to visit that curse on the animals and the natural
world. Actually, what we see here is more of a consequence. The word “curse” is
only used two times in Genesis 3 in verse 14 and verse 17, and both times it is
used in the passive. The serpent is cursed. He received the action of cursing,
but who performs the action? In verse 17 the ground is cursed, but who performs
the action? The judgment on sin was spiritual death, separation of the creature,
and there are really two options. Either God causes the negative consequences,
which would make Him the direct author of evil and calamity, or evil itself is
constitutionally structured in such a way that the simple act of eating a piece
of fruit in disobedience to God would change the structure of the universe. That
is what the bible is saying. It is not that God caused the earth to be
different. What caused the earth to be different was Adam’s choice. Evil
changed reality. It permeated everything. That means the believer has a
profound understanding of what evil is, much more profound, much more real than
what the unbeliever has. But that allows us, then, to also deal with it in its
reality.
When
the unbeliever comes to evil he has three options in terms of coping. First of
all, to deny the reality of the evil. This is done a couple of different ways.
One is the irrational approach: it just doesn’t exist, it is an illusion, there
is no real evil. Another way is one that plays out in personal life. Apparently
Mary Baker Eddy had a lot of unhappiness in her early life and she was trying
to escape personal suffering. Such people try to cope by denying that it is
real. Or, the second option is to come up with saying good and evil are only
conventions of language and culture. I can’t really deal with the fact that I
have certain proclivities in my nature and temptation, it is so much easier to
just say this is really okay. I’m really miserable if what I am doing is a sin
and it is wrong. I have a struggle and a fight. But if I can say it is not
really wrong then I can do away with that struggle and fight. So good and evil,
then, in human viewpoint become merely conventions of language and culture.
That makes it fluid and good becomes evil and evil, good. That is pure
relativism.
The
second major solution that you see in modern thought is the existential leap
into the absurd. They know evil exists but they can’t explain it. There is no
God so somehow the only way I can really survive suffering and misery is I have
to give it some meaning. If you read the existentialist, they can’t get meaning
from God, they can’t get meaning from some external absolute, they can only
assign it from their own thinking. They generate the meaning. In real existentialism
it is no real ultimate moral difference between pushing a woman in front of a
car and helping her across the street. As long as you do something to validate
your existence. It is the absurd. If I’m going to survive I’m just going to
give it my own meaning. So I assign meaning, I define everything.
The
third coping strategy is the one we find so dominant today: escapism, or let’s
just anaesthetize the pain. They know there is evil there but they have no
solution to it whatsoever. That is why all the unbeliever can do is cope. The
believer has a solution; all the unbeliever can do is escape. That is why drugs
are on the rise. Leave God out of the equation and you are left living a really
miserable life. You can’t deal with the pain. Or, you get involved with just
pleasure, sex, pornography, music and entertainment. Just immerse myself in
this so that I don’t have to face reality as it is. There are all kinds of
escapism, like immerse yourself in work so that you don’t have time to think
about reality. Many things aren’t necessarily wrong but they are used to avoid reality.
The
believer can handle problems. He can solve them. The Christian answer is not
just coping. The basic problem-solving devices handle evil in his own life.