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Concerning the Problem of Evil: An Essay
Windbit
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Since becoming an agnostic, I've spent a lot of time wondering about the nature of a possible higher power. Based upon my reasoning, I've come to the conclusion that the Christian God, and by extension all possible deities, cannot be omnibenevolent. I've written this essay to collect my arguments, and I'd greatly appreciate that you read, evaluate, and critique my essay honestly.
Windbit wrote:Concerning The Problem of Evil
All things are meant for the further glorification of God through Jesus Christ. Good things are gifts given to us that we do not deserve. Suffering is meant to try our faith and bring us closer to God.
God knows everything. Because He knows everything, we can infer that He knows who will come closer to Him through tribulation, and who will turn from Him. We can further infer that God already knows who will be saved and go to Heaven, and who will be condemned to Hell.
Christians maintain that God wants everyone to go to Heaven, but that we choose to disobey Him. If God wanted everyone to go to Heaven, though, wouldn't make sense if Hell was not eternal damnation? Surely a second in Hell is more than enough to convince the unbeliever of God's existence. However, these people may be defiant, even in Hell, and refuse to worship God. That begs the question: Why are these people so defiant of God?
God made us all different. A person's genetic make-up, his "nature", along with his experiences in life, his "nurture", combine to form who that person is. A person's nature is obviously beyond his control, and it is also obvious that people don't choose the events that occur in their lives. The way a person reacts to suffering in life is therefore not truly his own choice. God knows who will choose to worship Him and who will refuse Him, not only because He knows the future, but because He made them that way. If this logic is correct, then God condemns people to Hell for making the choice not to worship Him, even though he genetically programmed them with a predisposition to not acknowledge Him.
Here's another point: If God wants to worship Him through Jesus Christ, wouldn't he want it to be apparent to His creation that Christianity is the one true faith? Once again, the statement that people choose to refuse God is not completely accurate. Sure, there are atheists, but there are also Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and countless other religious sects. The choice isn't as simple as "Jesus is my Lord: True or False?" Instead, it is a multiple choice question "Which is the one true faith?" and every way of believing conceivable is a choice. Even if only one of the choices is correct, it's difficult to know which one it is.
My third point: The "Original Sin" is supposedly Eve's act of disobeying God and eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, isn't thinking ill of God in your mind a sin, too? So the act of picking the fruit wasn't the original sin, but Eve's thought of picking the fruit. Free will inevitably leads to sin. Free will could not exist without sin; if not for sin, we could not think sinful thoughts, meaning we do not have free will. God created Adam and Eve with free will, so therefore God created sin. To say that sin did not exist until Eve disobeyed God is to say that God did not create sin. According to the Bible, only God can create something from nothing: humans can't do it, angels can't do it, the Devil/Satan/Beelzebub can't do it, only God can.
Which leads to my next point: Humans do not truly have free will. Even though we have the capacity to choose to sin, nature and nurture effect what choices we are predisposed to make. All things, even suffering, are intended to have the end result of God's glorification. People often say that God made us with free will so that we could choose to worship Him or not; he doesn't want robots to mindlessly worship Him unless they choose to relinquish their freedom to Him. However, in the course of typing this, I have concluded that whether God exists or He doesn't, humans do not truly possess free will. If God does exist, the people who become Christians are robots built for the purpose of worshipping Him. The people who do not become Christians are robots built for the purpose of being a contrast to the robots who glorify Him. I belong to the latter: God created me to be intelligent, but also to have a diminished capacity for faith. When I inevitably die and go to Hell, it will be for his glory.
As an artist myself, I draw things for my own pleasure. The act of creation pleases the creator. If I create something I do not like, I destroy it. However, God is perfect and does not make things that he does not like.
Which brings me to my final point: By human reasoning, God cannot be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. If God is completely good, that means He cannot do evil. If that is true, then not even God has free will, since He cannot choose to do evil. It states in the Bible that even thinking about evil is sinful. It also means that He is limited in what He can or can't do: if He is all good, then He can't create anything that is evil. However, unless humanity or the Devil can create something from nothing, God obviously created evil. That leaves us with four possibilities: A) God does not exist,God exists, but is not pure good, C) the Bible is not the Word of God, or D) God cannot be comprehended by the human mind. A Christian would probably choose D. However, that means that it is impossible to know God, and that His existence is completely alien to the rest of reality. Furthermore, any description of Him in the Bible cannot be accurate, as the Bible was written by humans, and humans cannot describe what they cannot comprehend.
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You're not an agnostic.
a good place to start might be saint augustine.
i think you've presented some interesting issues, but none that haven't been discussed before. as such, it might be worthwhile to see what others have said on the topic.
Because it would confuse too many angry, disillusioned high schoolers.
- Soren Kierkegaard
Augustine and Aquinas are both good foundations if you're really interested in the subject, but they both have very obvious motivations. Hume does too, but I feel that his end-goal is toward exploring rational critique.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is another good one by Hume.
It's 3am here, so actual feedback on your OP might have to wait until tomorrow. I hope these recommendations are handy in some way.
-The assumption of the nature of omniscience.
Some people believe that God doesn't know everything that will happen but everything that might happen.
Much in the same way strategists forsee tactical options of thier opponent, but they do not know which option they will pick.
-The nature of evil.
In your discussion, you assert that evil is a creation of God. A counter view to this is that evil does exsist, but evil is a lack of good, or a lack of God. Similar to to relation between light and and shadow. There is a shadow cast by the tree, beacuse it vlocks the light. The shadow is a lack of light. The sun did not create the shadow, but the tree blocked the light.
Just a thought or two.
Look up Calvinism? The Calvinist Church came to exactly this conclusion and seems perfectly happy about it. You might check up on their reasoning.
The light/shadow argument never made any sense to me. I've always felt like darkness (or lack of light) is the default, and that light is the absense of darkness, that it is actively altering the natural state of things.
I don't feel the same way about good and evil though, since they strike me as distinctly human things with no absolute value.
His will doesn't change - it's the progressive revelation of his will that enables us to understand more of his will as scripture is written.
Still an all-powerful God would have to alllow such a lack for God. Hence God allows Evil
The issue is, of course, the assumption that God is inherently good.
Within some religions, such as Judaism, God is not good, but neutral, and it allows for the circumvention of this entire argument.
Worth noting about Judaism as well is that the rabbinical teachings of Judaism state that even from ill intentions can come positive results, which only helps to blur the line between good and evil even more.
The idea turning in to, we as humans should strive to do what is good, but it is also important to recognize what is good even within the bad, and take advantage of those things.
Or rather, the arguement only holds against religions that hold to a good/evil standard, which is, as I recall, a rather new invention in religion, and from the looks of things, a bad one at that.
to be fair, the concept of good and evil within religion is not at all a new thing, but rather, it is new within monotheistic religion.
In a polytheistic religion, it is easy to have both good and evil, with seperate gods being the representatives of seperate forces.
There is a difference between allowing evil and creating evil. While it is a thin/blurry line, there is a line.
Just a couple of thoughts:
Man created evil by perverting/removing God/good?
Not only is God good, but God is just as well? Thus punishing people that are not good with hell?
The Judeo-Christian creation story contradicts this, though.
God creates the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and instructs man not to eat from it. While it is viewed by christianity as man's failing for eting from the tree (which is known as the original sin, a concept that christianity originated, and is NOT carried by Judaism) it is still made clear that it was God himself who created the tree.
At the very least, God explicitly created the possibility for evil. This does indeed contradict the idea of a purely Good god.
Depends on how you percieve it I suppose. Maybe the tree itself was not inherintly evil? Perhaps just the act of eating the fruit (doing some thing God said not to) was the evil part. Yes he created the possibility of evil or allowed man to make the choice, but he didn't create the evil, man chose to do the evil thing (ie creating it), not eating the fruit, but disobeying God.
If he created everything though, then he created man's inquisitive nature which would lead to his disobedience. He also created the environment man lived in. Essentially, he was directly responsible for the creation of every single force involved in pushing man towards the "fall". I cannot see any way he is not the one who "created" evil as well.
Genesis 1:2 KJV - "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
Interestingly, according to the Bible not only did darkness exist before light, but water existed along with it before Creation.
Genesis 3:5 KJV - "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then you eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
It can be inferred from this verse that evil already existed before the first sin. God had also said that eating the fruit will cause them to die. This can either be evidence that God lies, or it can interpreted that He meant "spiritual death."
I thought it was that A&E were immortal, but that by eating the fruit/disobeying and getting kicked out, they lost that immortality, thus would "die", albeit not immediately.
First off, this isn't a discussion on creation in general, just on the problem of evil, so the water bit is irrelevent.
I was refering to light and dark in more of a literal sense (darkness is a lack of light--lack of photons) in the post you quoted, but if you are using light/dark in this passage for a metaphor of good/evil, then yes perhaps evil exsisted before god created light good. But that was because there was no light, thus darkness = lack of light. But when God made the world, the He "saw it was good" (light), and completely "seperated from dark" (evil). Thus the default in the world was light not dark. So man could've introduced the evil into the good world.
I don't diagree that evil could've exsisted before this, just not within the God-created stuff. How can that be inferred? Perhaps once they 'knew good and evil' they realized the first sin was evil? It was then they realized disobeying God is evil?
These are just some ideas/views.
I agree that he created all those things, but (assuming free will) it was still man's choice in the end. God designed man with the capability to sin, He didn't design so that they must sin.
Again, these are just ideas i'm tossing around. I don't claim to know everything. This is just the way I see it.
In hebrew, the word for water is maiyim, and the word for sky is shamaiyim.
This is significant because in the second or third (i believe) day it say that god seperated the waters of the heavens from the waters of the earth.
again implying that that the initial waters refered to are not waters as we know them.
There really are a lot of issues inherent in analyzing the wording of the bible in anything other than the original hebrew, because the hebrew language is often not entirely paralell to the language of translation. Not to mention that biblical hebrew was a language that was far more open in its meaning and usage of words. Very often it will have many words for one thing or one word for many things.
If god was a being of pure good, why would he create the capability for evil, though?
I could grant some kind of logic behind saying that man developed that capability himself, were it not for the fact that by giving man acess to the tree, and then instructing him not to eat of it, God explicitly did create that capability.
According to Judaism, of course, God himself has the inclination both for good and for evil, and as such man has these inclinations by virtue of the fact that he is created in God's own image.
Truthfully? I don't know. Answering any 'why?' about God is tough (if not impossible--we can't wrap our minds around Him). But my guess (as far as my concept of God is concerned) is that if God created man with no capability for evil, we would obviously worship Him. No questions asked, because we wouldn't have a choice. And I think God wanted us to chose to be with Him, not forced to be with Him.
This is all ignoring the context of the passage.
The dark is not ametaphore for evil, because it explicitly states, a couple of verses later, that God names the darkness night (and the light he names day)
You are useing the implications that words hold in english in order to make interpretations, ignoring the fact that those implications may not be inherent in the original hebrew.
That is a fine rationalization, but the issue with it is that God's choices are rather non-sensical.
And the religious answer to that is that we cannot understand the will of God.
That's where that line of thinking fails in its logic. That's not to say that it is false, just that is is the end of where a logical argument can be presented.
True I realize the english and the hebrew are different and I don't pretend to know hebrew (or english for that matter) well or at all, but I was running on the assumption that's what Windbit meant. If not, I'm sorry for misunderstanding.
The point I was making is not that the tree was evil, but rather, that God place the tree in the middle of the garden where man lived, rather than placing it out of his reach.
Ah, sorry to misunderstand, then we both agree that God created the possibilty for evil.
Once again, true. That's why I stated it as a guess. That's just my idea.
Maybe God isn't logical? Or has a weird sense of humor?
I don't think so.
Gen. 3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Gen. 3:23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
Granted this is kind of ambigious (no... in the Bible!?) Maybe Adam and Eve would have lived forever in the garden. Or maybe God is saying to himself "Wow, good thing they didn't eat of that tree too, or else they'd live forever in or out of the garden."
I want to say that I've seen different translations of 3:22, with words like "they would become Gods like us" or some such. Like, knowledge of good and evil + immortality = God. I don't know. It seems to me that A&E weren't immortal ever, but they could have been had they eaten of the other forbidden tree.
THis is relevant because fo the statement of the serpent in Bereshit 3:5, "you will be like God, knowing good and evil.", as well as the statment of God himself, in Bereshit 3:22, "'Man has now become like one of us in knowing good and evil."
For the record, the word "knowing" in the latter passage is lada'at, but it is the same word, due to the construction of hebrew verbs. The was hebrew works is that words have a three letter root, and then, depending on tenses, and with various changes made in the instance that a certain letter or combination of letters occurs in a specific place within the root, various rules are applied up the word to change it for use in any given situation.
The root for "know" is yud daled eiyen. the word yode'ah is spelled yup vav daled eiyen, and the word "lada'at is spelled lamed daled eiyen taff, so while the words may not seem so similar to those of you unfamiliar with the language, I can assure you that they are the exact same word, merely in deifferent tenses.
I'm not sure where, but I know I've seen/heard interpretations that since the Garden was supposed to be a perfect place, and death is a "bad thingâ„¢" that they would never have died had they been allowed to remain.
Should I be worried when I know more hebrew than God?
:P
For the record, here is the text that I am working off of right now. The structure will be a bit confusing for anyone unaware of Jewish torah reading customs for the sabbath, but I assure you that if you keep pressing forward or back, you will find the verses that you are looking for.
http://bible.ort.org/books/torahd5.asp?action=displaypage&book=1&chapter=1&verse=1&portion=1
I haven't read ALL of the translation, so I cannot state that it is all literally accurate, but I do know enough Hebrew to be able to give you all a good idea if it seems to be straying from the hebrew to any large degree.
I haven't double checked the text, but as a little Evander, whatI was taught was that it was the continual eating of the tree of life which would have granted them immortality, but since they were banished from the garden, they could no longer eat from it, and so eventually died.
Kind of like saying that you will stay young forever if you wash your face in the fountain of youth every morning.