Problem Of Evil Analysis

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“The Problem of Evil” emerges, not from man’s suffering, but from his inability to reconcile suffering with the notion of a purely omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God. Two issues cause this Problem: One is our inability to communicate the equivocal attributes of God; the other is our inability to see the world with His omniscience. Contradiction is not included in the “omni” of God’s “potence.” The ability to contradict oneself is no power at all. To summarize theology 101: God cannot create a rock too heavy for Himself to lift. The creation of an object with more substance than the Creator is impossible. Evil, then, is not too powerful for God to destroy, but it is against His nature to do so. Is God evil then? “Me genoiti!” By no means! Rather, …show more content…
Oftentimes, people limit God to their own conceptions. It is ironic that the one way in which God limits Himself, is the one way in which we expect Him to be so much higher and more creative than ourselves. To assume that God could simply make a “better” universe is such an offense. Certainly, He could make a different one, but not a better one. Freedom serves the purpose of self-conscience. A being cannot have a sense of “self” if there is no other being to compare himself to, and no medium through which to meet his comparison. In God, this describes the nature of the Trinity; in Man, this medium is nature herself. Nature is neutral, for if one should control nature, it would impede the free will of another. As C.S. Lewis explains it, this neutrality gives rise to either “courtesy or competition,” and we have the freedom to choose. It is clear, that men and nature have chosen competition, and the result is pain. God is known to interfere with the laws of His creation in what we call “miracles,” but if God induced a “miracle” to prevent every act of evil, we’d have no freedom at all. To preserve nature as a neutral medium, His interference must be …show more content…
However, God’s ideal cannot be so far removed from ours that He interprets the pain and suffering we call evil as “good.” In many biblical cases, He appeals to our own sense of moral law which can be summed up in one similarly equivocal word: love. Love is not passive kindness which only cares about happiness and the absence of suffering, but it is personal, venerable, moral, and affectionate. This is God’s love for us is extreme. Popular Christian belief states that our purpose on earth is to glorify God. His love is not so selfish as that. When placed in the circumstances of men, He demonstrated nothing but altruistic sacrifice. His motive for creating us is love, and His purpose for us is reciprocal. In short: God desires our good; since He is the only source of good, He desires Himself for us. Any attempt we make to seek “good” outside of God is futile, but the option must nevertheless remain. “If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows—the only food that any possible universe can grow—then we must starve eternally.” (C.S. Lewis) Eternal starvation, eternal damnation, is certainly not “good,” not because God is not good, but because He is the only good. The Problem is not with Him, but with us—that we have chosen everything but Him. Yet somehow, He loves us anyway. The notion of a world created by atheistic means, developed by competition and destruction,
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