The Problem of Evil

08/17/11 The Problem of Evil GUMC Youth

There has been a question that has bothered people for literally hundreds of years. It is this, "If God is all-good and if God is all-powerful, why is there evil in the world?" The basic issue is that, if God is really all-good and all-powerful, there would not be any evil in the world, because such a god would not allow evil to exist. Basically, God would prevent it. This question is so famous that it has a name. It is called "The Problem of Evil." This is a question that comes into the spotlight every so often in the wake of some significant tragedy. For example, when the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11th, 2001, while many people found refuge in the midst of disaster in God, many others raised doubts. They said things along the lines, "Why run to God in the midst of tragedy? After all, where was God when this happened? If God is really all-good and all-powerful, could he have not stopped it from happening? Clearly, if God couldn't have protected those people from this, why should we follow him?"

The question was raised again recently in an interview with Rob Bell, a prominent pastor from Michigan, which took place right after Japan was hit by the earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. The question was asked, "Is God not powerful enough to help the Japanese or is he powerful enough to do so, but just doesn't care?" Though it is a bit of a weaker way of putting it, we could say that the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people" is basically the same as the problem of evil.

I imagine that most of you have either asked this question, or something like it, yourselves, or you have heard other people ask it. Even if this is a totally new idea to you, the fact of the matter is that it is such a favorite topic of atheists, you will hear it at some point in your life. Nearly every time anything bad happens on the national or international level, someone posts something online about how this disaster, and those like it, destroy faith in God and should demonstrate to everyone with half a brain that believing in God is a waste of time at best, and dangerous at worst. I want to spend tonight thinking about this problem, some of the main ways it gets dealt with, and how I think that we should approach it from a completely different angle.

You see, when someone asks the question, "If God is all-good and if God is all-powerful, why is there evil in the world?" there are really only three ways to answer it. We either have to say that God is not all-good, that God is not all-powerful, or that evil does not exist, or that it is not really that big a deal. Let's take those one by one to see where they lead us.

First, what if we respond and say that the reason that evil exists in the world is because God is not all-good. To be honest, for many religions throughout history, this would be the way they deal with the problem of evil. Why is there evil? Because god, or more likely, the gods, are simply not all that good. If you ever read any Greek mythology, for example, you will find that the gods aren't all that good. They are jealous, they are angry, they are vindictive, and they are unbelievably selfish. A common criticism of Greek culture made by the early Christians looked something like this. "You say that children should look to the gods to see how they should behave, but then, when they go and do what the gods do, you punish them for it. How can you worship such terrible gods?" We need to remember that the Judeo-Christian tradition is just about the only one that insists that God is absolutely good, so good that he is the definition of all that is good.

The early Christians made a very important point. If the gods are so far from being all-good that they are not even any better than human beings are, why should we follow them? If God is not all-good, it seems that we would be better off finding a great human teacher that we could follow instead of listening to God. Clearly, as Christians, we must not, we cannot give up the fact that God is indeed all-good.

So, we turn to the next possible solution of the problem of evil. What if we were to say that the reason there is evil in the world is not because God is not all-good, but because he is not all-powerful? If we are dealing with a God who is not all-powerful, does not the existence of evil makes perfect sense? After all, God is just doing the best that God can; he is merely suffering along, just like you and I are. Perhaps the best example of thinking along these lines is the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, who developed something called Process Philosophy, which has had a tremendous influence over certain portions of the church. In this philosophy, God gives everything that exists new possibilities that they either fulfill or don't fulfill and, if we don't fulfill them then we are not what we are meant to be, but that is not all. If we do not fulfill them, according to this view, God cannot be what God is meant to be. It is interesting to notice that Whitehead developed this view after he lost his son in World War I.

But, as Christians, does this really solve the problem of evil? Is the claim that God is simply not able to deal with evil comforting, or even remotely commensurate with what we read in the Bible? It really isn't. After all, one of the main points in the Bible is that God is radically against evil, that, in Jesus Christ, God has waged and even already won the war against evil. It is precisely because the Bible and the whole Christian tradition state so clearly that God is indeed powerful enough to overcome evil that the problem of evil got started in the first place. If God cannot defeat evil, then what good is it to follow him? If God cannot save us from our sins and deliver us from the clutches of evil, we are just wasting our time. Clearly we cannot, as Christians, take this route.

But what about the third option to deal with the problem of evil? What if we ask the question as to whether evil really exists, or whether it isn't as bad as we might think it is? To me, to deny the existence of evil is kind of silly. After all, we can look around us, even in our own little corner in Iowa, and see that things are not as they ought to be, that evil has permeated every aspect of life. I think it is very hard to say that there is no evil, or that evil is not a big deal, if we take any time at all and look around the world and see all the pain and suffering at the hands of human cruelty that exists.

However, since lots of people have taken this approach, let's look at it. One response might be, "Since God is all-good and he loves us, God had to give us free will (since it is not good and loving to make people into nothing more than machines or puppets). If God gives us free will, though, evil becomes a distinct possibility. If God were to prevent evil at the expense of removing our free will, there might be less suffering, but we would cease to be real human beings." If we take this view, evil is no longer God's fault, but ours. At first, that might not seem so bad, and maybe there is a nugget of truth in it, since human beings are often very much to blame for the evil in the world. However, if our free will is made so central that God can no longer be seen as interacting with our world of space and time, can we still be Christians? If we really take this view seriously, how can we avoid the conclusion that, since God cannot prevent our evil without destroying our free will, God cannot bring about the triumph of good over evil without destroying our free will, so we are on our own? Again, in light of the fact that the Bible teaches us clearly that God does indeed engage with our world, we can't really affirm this view, either.

Another variation, with a long and glorious tradition is to say that, because God is all-powerful, nothing ever happens by accident, but happens directly because God expressly willed it to happen. That means that if I were to throw something at you and break your nose, you could say that I broke your nose, but in reality, you would have to say that God broke your nose, using me to do it. Because God is all-good, we would have to say that, if we interpret something to be evil, it is only because we do not understand that what has happened has happened only because God has willed it. If God wills it, it must be good. Even John Wesley, at a moment that is far from his best, wrote to his sister, who had just lost her infant child, that God had brought it about to save her the troubles of motherhood. A particularly famous pastor from Minnesota was diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years ago and said that his cancer came directly from the hand of God and that it was ultimately the pure and good gift of God and that everyone who has cancer should realize that it is simply the gift of God, regardless of what might seem bad about it. According to this view, there really is no such thing as evil, since God is good and God causes everything that happens. If you think there is evil, the problem isn't with God, but with you.

Another way to downplay the seriousness of evil is to claim that we live in the Best of All Possible Worlds. This view, which is closely associated with the philosopher Leibniz, is that bad things happen, but they do not happen for no reason. They only happen in order that better things might happen. Everything that happens is for the greater good. This means either that, when tragedy strikes you, it is only so that something even better can happen to you, or so that something better can happen to other people. Nothing is really totally bad because everything is, as the philosophy says, "for the best."

But do you see what this means? It means that evil has to happen, that it is built into the perfect plan of God. There is something about evil that makes it absolutely necessary for good to take place. It means that whatever we might want to say about God being all-powerful, we don't really mean that he is all-powerful, since he is not powerful enough to bring good about without having to inflict evil on people. A French writer named Voltaire wrote a work called Candide, which shows how this view is not helpful and, actually, quite absurd. Later, the Russian author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, wrote a long book, The Brothers Karamazov, part of which includes a discussion of the evil that happens to children and poses the question, "Is it worth all this evil to call God good?" The answer given in the work, which I agree with, is that it is not. Not only because I find it deeply offensive, but because I do not think it bears even the slightest relation to what we learn in the Bible.

The closest that the Bible ever gets to dealing directly with the Problem of Evil is the book of Job, where Job, the righteous and wealthy man, is attacked by Satan, who wants to show that hardships will drive anyone to curse God. Throughout the book, Job loses everything and his friends come and say, "You must have sinned. Nobody suffers like this unless there is a good reason for it." However, in the conclusion, the question is never really answered. God never gives a reason for human suffering. If this sounds somewhat weak, let us consider a passage from the Gospel of Luke.

"Now on the same occasion there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. And Jesus said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Jesus does not give a reason for why some people suffer and others do not. According to the Bible, evil is real, incredibly deadly real, but it is also absolutely irrational. There is no reason for it, and if we try to find a good reason that evil exists, we will always lose our way and distort the whole issue.

I mentioned at the beginning that there were basically only three ways to answer the question, "If God is all-good and God is all-powerful, why is there evil in the world;" to say that God is not all-good, to say that God is not all-powerful, or to say that there is no evil, or that evil is not that big a deal. But every time we looked at one of those ways of answering, we found that we couldn't really agree with any of them as Christians. What are we do about this? If none of the possible solutions to a problem work, what options do we have?

The fact of the matter is that, in this as in other cases, we are dealing with a question that is a false question, that is, the problem of evil, as it is usually stated, is a question that does not have an answer. The reason it does not have an answer is not because it is not an important question, nor because we haven't thought hard enough about it, but because it is an absolutely wrong question. When we ask it, it certainly seems like we know what we are talking about, but it turns out that this is not the case. When we ask the question, we presuppose that we know what the goodness of God is, what the power of God is, and how serious evil is. In point of fact, if we can ask that question, it shows that we don't know any one of the three! In the end, it is only when we look to Jesus that we realize that our usual way of thinking is distorting and unhelpful and that we get a clue to a real solution.

How do we often think about the goodness of God? We tend to think of God's goodness as goodness at a distance. We want God's goodness to be like the love of a distant relative, who cares for us and sends us money and does favors for us from a distance, but doesn't actually come into our lives and make a difference. We want God's goodness to be a kind of impersonal benevolence. We want to define God's love in terms of the things that we don't like, that God isn't certain ways and that he prevents certain unpleasant things.

But when we look at what God's goodness actually looks like, when we see God actually come among us and show his goodness to us in a remarkably personal and concrete way, what do we see? We don't see a God who was content to simply send a messenger to tell us what to do, to give us a list of things to do and a list of things to avoid, but a God who comes among us himself. We see a God who encounters the brokenness of the world himself, who puts his own life on the line to join with us in our trouble. We realize that God's goodness is not a goodness from far away, but a goodness that comes close, that meets us where we are.

How do we often think about the power of God? History teaches us that, when we think about the almightiness of God, we tend to think about human power and multiply it by a million, or something like that. When we think about the power of God in relation to the problem of evil, we tend to think of a God who just has to snap his fingers and the problem of evil vanishes. We want the power of God to be a power of sheer, brute force, that asserts dominance and forces everything else to fall into obedience. But when we see God enter into our world, we see God's power is the power of suffering love, a power that allows evil to have its way with it and overcomes it anyway. The power of God is a power that does not prevent the crucifixion, but allows it to take place and triumphs in the resurrection.

This is closely related to our mistake in understanding evil. Even when we want to say that evil is serious, once we raise the question of the problem of evil, we have trivialized it. When we ask that question, we show that we don't think that evil is that big a problem, since God could just speak a word and do away with it. However, when we look at Jesus, we see that evil is quite a bit more serious than we ever imagined. Think about this, if evil is such a serious problem that nothing short of the second Person of the Triune God becoming a human, being hated, mocked and mistreated, and finally crucified can wrench humanity out of the clutches of evil, than evil is a huge problem, a problem that costs God everything to deal with. God does indeed triumph over evil, but we must not think that it is a small thing that God has done. It is, in fact, something so great that we can only dimly understand it.

So you see, evil really is a problem, but not in the way we tend to talk about it. In reality, it is the greatest problem that humanity has ever had. It is not an abstract question that we can answer in a classroom or by reading a book. It is an incredibly practical problem, because our whole lives are infected with sin, and it needs a practical answer. That practical answer from God is not a theoretical argument but the simple fact that God himself has dealt with evil, at tremendous cost to himself. Christ himself has died for us that we might live, so that we might not be ruled by evil, but that we might stand strong in truth and righteousness. So, as you go to face school, which is undoubtedly a place where you encounter evil on a daily basis, remember that, though evil is a problem, God has not abandoned you to it, but has endured it and overcome it, has taken its greatest attacks and has even allowed himself to be crucified by it, but is truly the victorious one as the one who is resurrected from the dead. Take courage. Let us pray.

AMEN