Why Does God Allow Evil?

The previous post was about the nature of evil and what it is. But there's a more pressing question that a lot of people have agonized over, myself included. 

How could a good God allow evil? Why do bad things happen to good people?

The short answer is: free will. The long answer is slightly more complicated. 

Let me ask you this: do you act differently when your parents are around? Or do you act differently in public than you do in private? For most people, the answer is yes. 

A lot of people wonder why God doesn't make himself obvious all the time. Doesn't he want people to know he exists? But what they don't understand is that God doesn't want people to be sure he exists if they want to act as if he doesn't. 

I've heard many atheists make the argument: "If God revealed himself to me and proved to me that he was real, I'd become a Christian. I'd do all these good things. So if he's real, why doesn't he show himself?"

But don't you see? God doesn't want people to do what he wants out of fear. He wants people to do what he wants because they agree with him that its the right thing to do. 

Tim Keller calls this "The Divine Conspiracy". He wrote a book on the topic. Basically, God wants to be a parent hiding in the next room listening to their child play by themself. And in order to do that, God has to create a universe that operates largely on its own. The universe has to be fairly self-sustaining so that he doesn't have to constantly interfere with it to get it to work. That means the universe must operate according to its own laws unless interfered with. That's what we call "physics". 

In Luke 13 in the Bible, Jesus talks to people about a tower that fell down and killed the people nearby. Jesus asks "What do you think they did to deserve that? Nothing. The tower just fell down." Sin wasn't involved. It was just a structural weakness in the tower. Jesus is saying that the universe sometimes operates according to a set of laws independent of God's direct influence.

Now, God can interfere with physics. He just chooses not to most of the time. Physics is the rule. God is the exception because he's the one that made up the rules. He can change them whenever he wants. 

So the long answer to the question is: Bad things happen to good people because things happen to everybody, and some of those things are good and some of them are bad. 

I can't tell you how much of a relief this was to me when I first heard it. For years, I thought that every bad thing that happened to me was either because God was upset with me or because God was trying to get my attention. Every stubbed toe, every belly ache, every sunburn. I thought God was punishing me for something and I didn't know why. I was scared and in pain, because I thought I was letting God down. 

Praise be to God. One day I realized that sometimes you just stub your toe. Sometimes you just hit your foot the wrong way. I still remember the day that happened. It was like the world was new. I remember, I smacked my foot into a brick step on the way to class, and I laughed out loud for joy. 

What you need to realize is that God's work is not to make Earth as comfy as he can. God wants people to go to Heaven. Of course God cares when people suffer, but he's fine with them suffering for 0-80 years if it means they end up with 1000 x ${\displaystyle \mathrm{\infty }}$ years of perfect, unending love, joy, happiness, and peace. 

But God also respects when people want to be separate from him. For whatever reason, God thinks that free will is worth preserving even if it means dealing with the awful, indescribably disgusting, horrid cruelty and injustice that humans visit upon each other. And though I haven't always, today I agree with him. Whether we like it or not, that's the course of action he's chosen. And he's not known for being wrong.

God respects you enough to let you make your own choices, even if that means separating or hiding himself from you. God bless you.

What is Evil?

What is evil? 

I don't mean, "what kinds of things are evil?" That is a topic for another day. I mean, what does evil consist of? What is its nature? 

I hear this question a lot, even from people who grew up Christian. Once I tried to explain it to a relative of mine. He was concerned that since God created everything, God must have created evil, so mustn't God therefore be evil or evil be good? 

This is a common confusion because of the way people think about "evil". 

When people hear "good and evil", they think of two equal opposites. Like north and south, left and right, or the two poles of a magnet. They think that if you crashed good and evil together, they would cancel each other out. But this is not what we can observe. 

Let's start with an easier example.

Try to picture a perfectly healthy body. A body with no flaws or breaks in it. It operates successfully, and there are no missing or extra pieces. Most of us can imagine this hypothetical. We may not know the particulars-- we're not all doctors-- but we can imagine that a body like that could exist. 

Now try to imagine a perfectly unhealthy body. I don't just mean a body with a few flaws in it or one that is exceptionally sick. I mean a body with everything wrong with it. It's too hot and too cold at the same time. It's both swollen and emaciated. They have a double arm amputation as well as extra arms and limbs. Every piece is simultaneously fractured, absent, and malfunctioning all at once. You may picture a bunch of dust. My point is, unhealth is self-contradictory. There can't be a body that's completely unhealthy. There must be some healthy parts of it or else there's no body at all. 

Unhealth has to tweak some part of health too far to one side or the other. We can all imagine a perfectly healthy body, but we can't imagine unhealth without a body at all. 

Or try to imagine a crooked line that's not made up of straight lines. Well? Can you? I don't mean a curved line. I mean a crooked one. You can picture a straight line that's not made up of crooked lines, but a crooked line is just two or more straight lines joined improperly.

In the same way, good can exist without evil, but evil can't exist without good. They aren't equal and opposites. Good doesn't depend on the other. "Evil" is good things put together wrong. "Evil" is only what you get when you have too much or too little of a good thing. Evil is not good's opposite. It's good's absence.

In the same way that cold is not really an energy but the absence of heat energy, evil isn't really a thing. It's the absence of a thing. 

When you move away from a source of heat, you get cold. When you move away from a source of light, you get darkness. When you move away from a source of life, you get death. And when you move away from the source of good, you get evil.

God didn't "create" evil, because in a sense evil is not something that is created. It's what happens when you uncreate. 

There's another question here. "Well, if God can do anything, could he do evil if he wanted to?" Yes, but why would he? Evil, by definition, is worse than Good. It's not a question of ability. It's a question of why. 

We do evil because we can't help it or because we think it will get us good things in an easier way. God can help it and he knows that you can't get good by doing evil. So why would he bother to do evil? That's like taking out all your healthy teeth and replacing them with ones filled with cavities. It doesn't make sense. 

Evil is not some quirky alternate route or path that gives you the same result in the end. There's no such thing as a "healthy" amount of evil except "none". 

Anybody who says otherwise is either deluded or selling something. My money is on the later. 

God's will be done. God save us all. I love you.