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. 

God is Great

I write a lot about sad things. So I just want to make it absolutely clear that God is not just good. God is great. 

I originally wrote this post on my 21st birthday and I'm just publishing it now. In a single day, God honored me and blessed me more than I imagined he would for a long, long time. I did everything wrong the day before. I was convinced I'd have to fight to make my birthday happy. Then he saved me and poured out blessing on blessing on me. And on my birthday too. I can't help but think. "If this is how happy I can be now, how much more will I be happy for the rest of my life, and on the final day of this world and the start of the next."

We have to hold on to the happy times. Partially because it's so easy to forget them, but also because they are just a taste of what's coming.

Depression, pain, and unhappiness will ultimately be just a footnote in the history book of Eternity. That doesn't stop them from hurting now, but they will not last.

Almost everyone lives through something that makes them think "Nothing will ever make up for this. No matter how happy things are after this is over, nothing will ever be enough to cover over this." But there will be. And more than that. When God returns, Heaven will not just be enough to make up for every horrible thing that has ever been done in the world. But it will be so good- he will be so good- that it will be more than enough.

"I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened."
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

God's Perfection vs. Our Perfection

In English, we really only have one word for perfection. It's "perfection."

Basically, it means "complete, without flaw or missing piece." But it can also mean "total in all goodness, unbeatable, invincible, unstoppable." And as you might imagine, the two are usually confused. A lot of the time, people use the word without really thinking about which definition they mean.

When someone says "That paint is perfect," they mean "That paint correctly fits the vision I had in mind. It has no flaw in that role. It works well."
But when someone says "perfect soldier" they don't mean "A soldier who is currently healthy and fulfills his role adequately." That's just a typical soldier. They're thinking, "An unbeatable soldier. A soldier who will make opponents cry just to look at." That sort of thing.

There's a little confusion about what God's "perfection," means. Additionally, there's some confusion about our "perfection." Won't we be perfect in Heaven? But isn't God the only one who is perfect?

You can probably see where I'm going with this.

For the sake of completion, basically God is the only "perfect" being, in the sense that he is "total in all goodness, unbeatable, invincible, unstoppable." It's ridiculous to try to fight God or beat him in a game of wits. He has all good things at his disposal, and that means he has all strength and intelligence.
A short version of the attributes of God I like to remember is: Omnipotence (all-power), Omnipresence (being everywhere all the time), Omniscience (all-knowing), and Omnibenevolence (all-loving). God can't be beaten. He can't be gotten away from. He knows everything, and he's always morally good and loving. If your mental image of God doesn't have these things, we're not thinking of the same thing.

But each one of us will be "perfect" in Heaven, in the sense that we will be "complete, without flaw or missing piece." In a word, "Shalom." We might not have everything, but we won't be lesser for it. It's related to Tim Keller's idea of cosmic surgery vs cosmic car-wash, it you want to know more.

At least, that's my imperfect understanding.

Simulation Theory

For starters, I don't believe in Simulation Theory.

Do you know about this? It's the scientific/philosophical theory that our entire universe- everything- is just a simulation of reality, like the Matrix. Yes, people actually believe this. Some think our universe is just a hologram of itself. Some people think super-intelligent aliens are simulating this reality. It's a little more scientific than that, I think, but from my understanding, that's basically what some people, including scientists, believe.

I haven't really done enough research into the science of it to refute that. I basically object to Simulation Theory on one philosophical ground: in order for something to be a simulation, it has to be a simulation of something.

Imagine for example that you use a computer to simulate a chair. What's different about the computer chair from a real one? Well, the computer chair is a bunch of electrons making a screen light up in a way that corresponds with mathematical points calculated by the computer. Also, you can't sit in it. So far so good?
Now imagine you wanted to simulate a chair with wood. What do you do? You make a chair. Once you simulate something closely enough, you aren't simulating it anymore. You're creating it.

So the simple question is: if our universe is a simulation, what is it simulating?
And one possible simple answer goes "a universe with our specific laws of physics." The theory goes (I think) that the "real" universe outside the simulation doesn't correspond to the laws inside here. Or maybe the history is different. Or something.
But the point remains: if all it's simulating is itself, at what point does the simulation stop being a simulation and start just being reality?

However, there is something deeper I want to point out here. Where does the idea of Simulation Theory come from? Why is it such a fascinating idea? Like most world views, I think there is a hint of truth in it.
This world is a simulation. But not of itself.

This universe is a simulation of Heaven.
Earth is an old video game. It's a low resolution Atari game compared to reality- that is- compared to Heaven.

Earth is a massively multiplayer sandbox game where souls from Heaven and Hell can meet, interact, and talk with each other for one brief moment in Eternity. Just like how here on Earth, our massively multiplayer online games allow two different people from other sides of the world- from different backgrounds and countries- to connect in ways they never could otherwise. That's part of why its so important to stay here while we can. Don't worry, Heaven isn't going anywhere.

We are in a simulation, and one day we are going to wake up. See you out there.

Love Songs

I used to hate love songs.

They always seemed so insipid. So saccharine. And that was when I was four.

There's an old Disney song. "Love Goes On." In it is this line:

"Life is brief, but when it's gone;
Love goes on and on."

And I used to think, "But it won't. One day, it will die. Either they'll break up, or one of them will die." Yes, I thought about this as a kid. Maybe not in so many words.

You've got to admit, some of the promises people make in these songs are pretty insane.
"All you need is love?" Tell that to my debt.
"I'd walk a thousand miles?" Pretty sure you'd die first.
"I knew I loved you before I met you?" Uh huh.
"Never let you go?" Until you need your hands free.
"Never gonna say goodbye?" That's not totally up to you.
Or how about:
"I will always love you." Sure, until they put the silverware in the wrong spot or forget to tell you something you think is important or say something in a way you take wrong or...
Well, you get the idea.

Not to mention all the songs that just make love sound disgusting.


What compounded this was that I never really felt these things that the songs were saying. I had crushes as a kid, but they were terrible, painful, and terrifying. I always knew the other person didn't like me (I was always right), and I just wanted the feelings to go away. They all ended badly. Where were the songs about that? (The Postal Service, basically.)

Then something changed: I actually started feeling the things that the songs were talking about. But it wasn't about another regular person. It was about God.
I really felt I only needed God's love.
I knew God would walk a thousand miles for me, and I wanted to walk them for him.
I did love God before I met him. (Not that I know that song very well.)
I never want to let God go, and I know he'll never let me go.
We'll never have to say goodbye.
God will always love me.

The Disney songs especially reflect this to me. 
"So this is the miracle that I've been dreaming of... So this is love."
"I wonder... if my heart keeps singing, will my song go winging? To someone... who'll find me- and bring back a love song to me."
"One song. I have but one song... My heart keeps singing. Of one love. Only for you."

Plus, as a bonus:
"I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always."
Always.

Peaks and Troughs

I want to reiterate that almost none of what I say this way is new. Most of the way I think and what I say comes from CS Lewis, and usually from his book The Screwtape Letters. In it, there's an entire chapter dedicated to showing how human progress, appetites, spiritual fervor, and moods all go up and down in what Screwtape refers to as the "Law of Undulation."

That being said, I want to reiterate some of Mr. Lewis' points and add some application in case it helps anybody someday.

Many Christians think that Peak periods, times when things are going really well in life, are blessings from God and Trough periods, when things are going really poorly, are curses or punishments from God. This is nothing new. Luke 13:1-5 has a short story about a tower in the neighborhood Siloam that fell on people. Jesus asks whether that tower falling on them meant that they were worse people than everyone else. Then he answers his own question (as usual): "By no means." And you can point to other places in the Bible, like Job or John 9:1-3, where hardship is not a punishment for sin. It's just part of living in this free, sandbox world God has created and allowed.

So obviously, life going poorly isn't always or even often a punishment. Most of us know this in our heads, even if it's hard to believe sometimes.

But here's something most people don't think about. Troughs can be a blessing, and Peaks might not be.

Think about what happens in your life when things are going really well. You get comfortable. You start to think "Yeah, this is how things are normally." And even worse: "I did this. This is my work. My hand. I've worked hard to get here. I deserve it. And now I can just sit back, relax, and enjoy it." I mean, that's not just theologically untrue, it's also just setting yourself up for a rude awakening. And, hey, maybe things going well really is normal for you, but regardless, it won't last forever.
Peak periods allow the illusion of control to come flooding back in. It's easy to think that we deserve what we get when things are going well. After all, you have worked hard. I'm not denying it. I know you have. The problem is that working hard only leads to success when a bunch of other factors are also going in your favor. Hard work is no guarantee for success or happiness. Many of the hardest workers I know are also some of the unhappiest people I've met.
It's too easy for hard work to trap us in this thinking of "I deserve this." So every good thing that you get becomes "what I deserve." And every bad thing that happens is an outrageous, unfair indigence. How many leaders or even managers have you heard of that have justified terrible things they've done because "I work so hard the rest of the time."
When God allows things to go too well for us, we start to think it's all about us. That's dangerous and usually leads to some very sad results.

So in the same way, Troughs can be a blessing. When we're sad- when we're upset, alone, scared, and unhappy- it's a lot easier to ask for help. And when we ask God for help, it's like exercise. The more you have to deal with bad times in your life, the easier it will become. It doesn't hurt any less, but it doesn't have to. You will survive. And not because you deserve it or because you've earned it, but because you have had to practice relying on God.

I know this probably isn't going to make you feel better, because it wouldn't have made me feel better. But trust me. If you let him, God can take that pain and foster something incredible inside it. And you will become something... amazing. Something invincible. In the words of Charles Xavier, "If you allow yourself to feel it- embrace it- it will make you more powerful than you ever imagined."

So yeah, that's it.