Why did God create Evil - Thought Catalogue 2
I stumbled across a post in Thought Catalogue - ‘13 atheists explain why they don’t believe in God.) Link below. I couldn’t go past it.
Number 2 in the article
If God is the only creator, why did he create evil, and how could he do that if he is good?
“The concept of God is logically inconsistent. How can anything imperfect come from a perfect God? How can there be evil in the world if God is good. Who created evil? If God is the only creator, why did he create evil, and how could he do that if he is good? How can God have a nature at all if he is omnipotent?
Response
The problem with this argument is easily exposed. It is not the concept of God that is logically inconsistent. It is something else.
Let’s say there is no God. Okay, great. Everything is just physical stuff. And it all started by some great accidental event or it’s all eternal (which it must have if there is no divine mind to give things purpose or get things started). And so, everything must happen without purpose. Utterly. This follows directly from the universe existing or arising as an accident. Accidents have no purpose. And since this is so - evil is a non-category. In a purely materialistic universe, there is no good. There is no bad. There just is. And is does not equal ought (Thanks David Hume.)
CS Lewis exposed this issue in Mere Christianity. If I reject the idea of God because things are crooked then where did the idea of straight come from? Why should I expect things to be straight and complain if they aren’t. Fredrik, above, has a problem - if there is no God he can’t complain about evil. Since there is no God, there is no ought, it all just is.
As to the question, how can there be evil in the world if God is good? This is a very simplistic binary picture of reality. (Which I suspect Fredrik doesn’t hold in most areas of life. ) Why couldn’t a good God create a universe in which evil could exist but out of that evil a greater good could come? Before you rush to say this is ludicrous, ask any parent and you’ll find out that a good parent will sometimes let their child skin their knee or allow them into situations where they might skin their knee. But isn’t this a good parent allowing evil to happen to their child? Yes, they are. Why? It’s not because they don’t care about their child but because they do care. They allow a small evil to befall their child for the child’s sake - for what is good for the child.
And you could even argue, that the parent in a sense created this evil for in our example, the parent, most likely, could have stopped the child from skinning their knee or created circumstances in which a bike was never ridden.
But we can go further than this. When it comes to the Christian God, the shock is that this is exactly what God does. He allows evil to happen and plans for it to happen to himself.
The sweep of the New Testament asserts that Jesus, is God, the god-man in the flesh. And he comes into our world to experience evil and to suffer from evil. The endpoint of this experience is his death on the cross. This according to the Bible’s worldview is the greatest evil the world has ever known. God allows evil to fall upon himself.
So, why does Jesus do this? So that evil would be overcome and good would prevail. Death would be conquered. Wickedness would be judged. Forgiveness would be made available. (See some text from the book of Acts below.)
What all this shows is that God doesn’t ignore evil. And it isn’t outside his plan. Evil matters to God profoundly. In order to break the rule and power of evil God took on flesh and overcame evil with good at the Cross. Once you understand the plotline of the New Testament and indeed, the whole Bible, what becomes clear is just how good and logically consistent God really is.
Though there is a mystery still here. Why would God suffer evil for us?
Peter from Acts chapter 2 verses 22-23
“Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.
And a few sentences later
Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”
Link to the Thought Catalogue article