If God Is Perfect, Why Is There Evil?ნიმუში

Day 1: The Reality & Types of Evil in the World

The Bible teaches that “God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). He is the absolute standard of goodness. And as the sovereign Lord, he is both all-knowing and all-powerful.

If these things are true, why is his creation so full of evil?

God planned the universe, and he continues to control every detail. Yet the world abounds with destruction and misery. Isn’t God the one who’s ultimately to blame?

Join me as we tackle this legitimate and important question over the next 8 days.

2 Types of Evil

Evil is traditionally divided into two types: natural evil and moral evil.

Natural Evil: There are many evils in the “natural disease-death environment” (a term used by Hugh Silvester in his book Arguing with God). These evils are hard to reconcile with the purposes of a loving and omnipotent God.

For example, thousands of lives are lost or ruined each year due to earthquakes, floods, plagues, and other natural disasters. People all over the world suffer the agonies of slow and cruel diseases and other organic defects.

It’s easy to find examples of situations that show no intelligent purpose. Nature seems to disregard justice and mercy as it indiscriminately attacks the righteous as well as the wicked.

Animal pain and suffering are another area of concern. The natural order is full of beauty and wonder, to be sure, but it’s also full of death and destruction. Most animals and insects maintain their existence by destroying others. The survival of the fittest—as the theory of evolution proposes—seems to be true.

Does God approve of this might-makes-right environment? Or is something else at play, invisible but just as real as what we see in nature?

Moral Evil: By far the greatest evil is man’s rebellion against God. According to the Scriptures, man’s sin (defined as anything contrary to the character of God) has devastating results.

But couldn’t God foresee that people would disobey him? Why create humans at all if he knew they would disobey and spend eternity in hell?

Moral evil also includes humans’ cruelty to other humans. As painful as the physical disease-death environment may be, mental anguish is more fearsome. Totalitarianism, war, greed, jealousy, hatred, and pride cause tremendous anxiety, fear, and insecurity. Sin begets sin in a vicious circle that is constantly spiraling downward.

There’s no question that we are directly responsible for the pain and destruction caused by all forms of moral evil. But in a secondary or ultimate sense, isn’t God responsible for planning things this way?

One writer, Edward Carnell, summarizes the basic ingredients of the problem as follows (I’m paraphrasing from his Introduction to Christian Apologetics):

1. God wants to stop evil, but can’t.

2. God can stop evil, but doesn’t want to.

3. God can’t and doesn’t want to stop evil.

4. God wants to AND can stop evil.

Of the above options, Carnell points out, option 1 would make God impotent. Option 2 would deny his goodness and mean that he is evil himself. Option 3 would mean God is both impotent and evil. The final option—the correct one—leads us to further wonder at this mystery of the origin of evil and ask why he doesn’t stop evil even when he can.

Facing the Problem of Evil

The Bible clearly teaches that evil exists even though God is omnipotent and good. The question of how this can be true is “the problem of evil.”

Many attempts over the years have tried to solve this problem by minimizing God’s goodness or omnipotence or by denying the reality of evil. Tomorrow we’ll look at some of the inadequate solutions to this “problem.”