Whence Then is Evil?

Either God wants to abolish evil and cannot; or he can, but does not want to…If he cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked…If as they say God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it why is there evil in the world. (Epicurus, as quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, by James A. Haught)

Evil is as old as humankind. The first evil act was committed by Adam’s son, Cain, who murdered his brother, Abel. Credit is usually given to the Greek philosopher, Epicurus, for presenting the problem of evil in the context of an Omnipotent God. Christopher Hitchens (god is not Great) formulated the Epicurean postulation recently in syllogistic form as follows:

Is He willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is he impotent?
Is He able but not willing? Then is He malevolent?
Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

There is another way in which this problem is formulated (Dr. Norman Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, 1999). It is as follows:

God is the Author of everything.
Evil is something.
Therefore God is the Author of evil.

There is a fallacy in such syllogisms due to the belief that God is “All Good” (Omnibenevolent) also. Countless generations of human beings debated this issue, and they still do, without finding any satisfactory resolution. There is internal contradiction inherent in the way God is usually defined. He has indeed been over-defined with the consequence of internal inconsistencies.

For instance, when we say that God is omnipotent we generally mean that He can do everything. Everything includes evil. So an omnipotent God should be capable of creating evil. But we also believe that God does not (cannot) create evil because He is All Good. We have a paradox at our hands. Similarly there is the well-known “stone paradox:” Can God create so heavy a stone that He cannot lift.

There are problems with the definition of omniscient and ‘all good’ God also. To illustrate them, let me quote from Introduction of the “Averroes’ Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence),” which is translated by Simon van Den Bergh:

Let us imagine a child and a grown-up man in Heaven who both died in the True Faith, but the grown-up has a higher place than the child. And the child will ask God, “Why did you give that man a higher place?” And God will answer, “He has done many good works.” Then the child will say, “Why did you let me die so soon so that I was prevented from doing good.” God will answer, “I knew that you would grow up a sinner, therefore it was better that you should die as a child.” Then a cry goes up from the damned in the depths of Hell, “Why, O Lord, did you not let us die before we became sinners?”

Ibn-e-Rushd (Averroes) wrote his book in response to Ghazali’s Incoherence of Philosophy and refuted all the objections raised by him against philosophy. At the end of the above narrative, it is written, “Ghazali adds to this: ‘the imponderable decisions of God cannot be weighed in the scales of reason…’” Thus, in order to justify the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient God, Ghazali shut the minds of the true believers.

These and other similar paradoxes have been debated incessantly but no resolution is found (possible). You cannot both eat the cake and have it. God is either omnipotent or He is not; He cannot be both at the same time.

Considering the problem of evil in the world, can we escape the paradox by suggesting that it is the Devil and not God who created the evil? This also has one insurmountable problem. One may ask: Who created the Devil? We then come back to God who indeed is believed to have created the Devil. Devil is an epitome of evil. If God created the Devil, effectively, He also created evil.

Essentially then evil is the paradoxical stone that God has created and cannot lift.

Another escape route from such a paradoxical fix that is provided to omnipotent and omniscient God is that of Free Will. The argument goes that God created man with a free will – he has a choice of doing good or doing evil. Thus God created a potential for evil in the form of free will and man is the actual committer of evil acts. In this way, God has a basis for rewarding the good with eternal bliss in the Paradise and burning the evildoers in the eternal fires of Hell. It is implicit in this argument that God created evil so that He could sadistically burn the evildoers. No matter, how you cut it, if God is indeed omnipotent, He is also responsible for creating evil directly or indirectly by endowing the human beings with free will.

The problems of evil and free will have been discussed by the philosophers over the last couple of millennia, to death. But the problem of rationalizing evil and omnipotent God is like squaring the circle. From purely logical viewpoint something needs to give before the inherent fallacy can be removed. We should either be content with a less omnipotent God or accept that “evil is good.” Since majority of the people cannot accept the latter view (because evil is defined as “something not good”), we need to redefine God with a lesser “Almighty” attribute. The monotheists have refused to accept this view and hence the problem continues to persist. A logical mind will come to the conclusion that God of theism simply cannot exist.

God in this sense is more than a metaphor as Khalid Sohail has suggested in one of his articles (God is a Metaphor, chowk.com, April 8, 2007); He is a paradox.

According to Bishop John Shelby Spong, “Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So, most theological God-talk today is meaningless unless we find a new way to speak of God.”