One of the main holes that the monotheistic religions dig for themselves consists of claims of their God’s greatness and power – in fact, he’s not merely powerful, he’s omnipotent. He can do anything that isn’t logically contradictory. And he’s so incredibly good, that when he gives a commandment, it’s the best possible thing and a cornerstone of any positive ethics.
And then someone says, OK, if this God is omnipotent, why is there evil in the world? The first thing an omnipotent good God would do is eradicate evil.
“Err… well, evil is the result of free will. You can’t have free beings if they are unable to use their freedom to choose to be evil and to do evil things. But God will eventually put things right when it all ends.”
Excuse me, but not all evil is due to human actions, evil or otherwise. The main causes of human suffering are inherent to the world God created – sickness, disease, natural disasters. Earthquakes, floods, droughts, plague, malaria, cholera, locusts – none of it has anything to do with human volition, so the argument stands.
In a desire to praise their God, they inadvertently do him a great disservice by blaming him for most of the evil in the world, and this isn’t any kind of rhetorical trickery that can be easily dismissed with some clever argument. It’s a serious problem for monotheism. What I will do now, is tell you how I would answer this conundrum.
I see God as both one of the forces that manifest their influence in this world, and an alternative to this world. God is not the supreme power in this world; in fact, this place seems to be designed as an alternative to God, a place where God’s influence is diminished to the point where it becomes possible to doubt his very existence. God occasionally manifests in this world as “light that is not overcome by darkness”, as this or that shining beacon of truth and light, but not as a sovereign ruler. In fact, I see no reason to believe that this world was at all created by God, or even that God had a hand in its making. I see it more like this: God is the highest reality, but this place here is not. In fact, it is probably the lowest illusion. It’s everything that is not God. It is limitation, ignorance, suffering and evil. It is the world of pain, death and ignorance, and is exactly opposite to the light and beauty that I know as God. I see God as a promise of what is possible if we remain faithful to beauty, knowledge, reality and truth, if we resist all temptations and cowardice and keep our faith until the end. I don’t see God as a white ape in the sky who will solve all my problems or else I’ll sulk and not believe in him. I don’t see God as a magician who will wave his hand and make all the difficulties disappear from the path of those who believe in him. I see him both as a way and as the goal, as truth which you need to choose, reality which you need to live, knowledge you need to gain, and eternity that will be yours if your choices in life are on the God-vector.
God is not someone who’s so powerful that he can make all the horrors of this world go away. God is someone who is the eternal beauty and wonder beyond this world, whom none of the horrors of this world can touch, and who is an alternative to be chosen and a way to be lived.
God is limited. He is limited by his nature and by his word. He is not in both good and evil; no, evil is something that goes beyond the limits of God, it leaves God to depart into the sphere of nothingness, the great void beyond all that is real, beautiful, true and worthy. And if God allowed there to be a place where the laws would be such that He is not the supreme power, then such place can indeed be, but don’t blame God if this place is evil, and don’t blame God for not being here, because that is by design, and evil is what you get if you remove God from your life.