In my first article post, I explained how the Creator of the universe had to be a good God, and how something cannot come from nothing. But the question was inevitable: if He is completely a God of goodness, and if everything that exists came from Him, how is it something like Evil came into being? And another thing: how is it a good God can allow bad things to happen?
The issue known as the ‘problem of Evil’ has long been talked about by Christian intellectuals, and I have heard more than one good conclusion on it. For a while the first part of the issue had me really baffled, but there is an answer, as there is to all truths. Here I’ll share with you my current take on the subject, and hopefully it will make sense of the problem if you are unsure about it.
First, I’m going to talk about the origin of evil. Prior to any conclusions, it is important to define what evil is. Most make the mistake of thinking it is an independent entity, the equal opposite of good: the dark side that counters the light, or the mysterious nothing that counters the something. But if this were true, there would have to be a God higher than both whose law defined why one was right and the other was wrong, and you’d have the same difficulty defining evil under this “greater God” that you did with the first.
In fact, as Christians believe, evil is not an entity, but a state: an aberration, a rebellion against good, something that was once right but has been put out of whack. Says the author J.R.R. Tolkien through his character Elrond, from his famous book trilogy The Lord of the Rings: “For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron [the main villain of the story] was not so.” Evil came about because what was once good rebelled against God, because it wanted to be God itself. This rebellion is what we call sin. We call it wrong because it is not right. It is a direction, which leads away from God rather than toward His perfection.
“But wait,” you’ll undoubtedly say. “That still doesn’t answer how wrongness can exist.” Of course, wrongness is a direction that points away from God, but it would have to be pointing toward something…and if God is the source of all that exists you cannot point to anything that did not come from Him, right?
Allow me, however, to give an illustration of what the essence of this wrongness is. Imagine a figure who had its parts rearranged, who had a hand where its head should be, a foot where its arm should be, its head where its foot should be, an ear where its nose should be, or an eye on its finger (please, try not to get sick!). You could say that all of this person’s parts were very much parts of him…and yet, would not the setup be totally wrong? So it is with evil: it is fragments of the good things of God assembled in ways that make something that is totally ugly, or “not right,” (1). These false combinations are not God, but they are very much something that He, with His eternally vast imagination, could think up, just as we could imagine a person with a setup as wrong as the one described above, (2).
And this leads to the second subject. If God is good and not evil, why is it He would even think up these bad combinations in the first place? Why does He let bad things happen or even exist in the world? If He is all-powerful, why did He allow the things He created to sin and cause all this wrongness in the first place?
Well think of it this way. If you were an author, how would you write a story? There has been a statement, and most writers agree on this, that what makes a good story is conflict. Now if you wrote a story, and made everything ok for the characters from start to finish, with no adventure to brave, no villains to battle, no struggles to overcome, would you not have a very boring story on your hands? But normally good stories come in this pattern: things start out good, then something goes wrong, a struggle ensues, until at last the evil is conquered and things are restored to being right again, in the best cases better than before. Each phase of the story is as important as the “happily-ever-after” at the end, which would not seem as meaningful if there was not first something to overcome to reach it. If there was no evil to overcome, the good found at the end would not seem so meaningful. There would be no need to be warmed if you were not first cold. No need to feel comforted if you do not first feel sadness. There would be no need of the princess for her prince if there were no dragon or evil sorcerer to imprison her. And there would be no great joy for the person who finds a friend if he were not a lonely person to begin with. You cannot be clothed if you do not know nakedness. You cannot have resolve if you do not first have a conflict.
At the end of Peter Jackson’s movie The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, based off the second book in Tolkien’s trilogy, the character Samwise Gamgee is able to find resolution despite the desperate situation he and his master Frodo Baggins have found themselves in because, as he explains, “There is some good in this world, and it is worth fighting for.” In the story of The Lord of the Rings, where darkness seems to hold dominion and evil to be supreme over the world, and possess the greater power, good appears small and hard to come by. But that’s what made it all the more precious. The greater the opposition, the more worth fighting for what is right becomes, the harder we hold on to it, and the greater is its triumph at the last.
That’s why God put evil in His Story: so that in triumphing over it He might show us His goodness and power, and be glorified in it. Like Him, we put conflict and forces of evil in our own stories to create opposition, not because we have “villainous sides” that must be given place to, but because battle and final victory is what makes a story worth telling. This is the reason for evil in God’s Story, and we can remember that when we go through hard times and wonder at His sovereignty.
I guess that’s about all I have to say. May have gotten a bit carried away, but I hope I’ve communicated the right points, and helped you toward finding answers on these issues. Here is an outline of the Christian message on the subject, in case you are confused: God has made all things in Creation. Everything He made was good and in order, until what was created desired to be God and sinned, throwing all Creation into disorder, causing evil as the result. And all this God ordained to show His glory, that He might triumph over evil at the last.
What is your say on the matter? Think carefully, and God bless you!
Romans 9:21, 22: “Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory…?”
Notes:
(1) The well-known author and theologian of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, had something similar to say in his book Mere Christianity, and it was this that gave me the idea. Here is the illustration he used to explain the nature of morality: “Think of a piano. It has got two kinds of notes on it, the “right” ones and the “wrong” ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law…is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct)….” Thus, wrongness can be described as a composition of notes that do not work together to make the perfect tune that is God, but rather a painful discord of tuneless noise.
(2) Of course, I do not encourage you on this basis to redefine what you know to be right and wrong. By all means, if you have a strong sense of right and wrong do not throw it away. These points are meant to explain how evil can exist, not to explain what can and can’t be classified as good and evil. That is Morality, the subject of another discussion.)
