evil

Evil in God's world is a painful problem, and so is the suffering of good people. How can we square evil and suffering with the idea that God is good and all-powerful? If God is both good and all-powerful, why does God let bad things happen to good people? Trying to answer this question is called "theodicy".

There are a few answers that traditional thinkers give, none of which satisfies me. First, in his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides says that humans can't measure good and evil accurately. Because our perspective is skewed, we cannot judge the balance of Good and Evil across the whole wide universe. To this I say: sure, some suffering is just mine, but that doesn't make it any less real. Even worse, some horrors are beyond debate.

The second answer is that God is unknowable - humans cannot understand God’s master plan. Really, that's no answer at all, just another version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. In the same way, only insensitive fools say things like “Maybe his brother died at nineteen in order to make room for someone else to cure cancer.”

The third answer is that an afterlife will balance the scales. This requires a belief in something extraordinary. Even more, an afterlife might be so far off as to be weightless in the balances of good and evil. So the “death of death” doesn't have much value to me today.

Then there's a very old explanation. You'll find it in Deuteronomy. It says there in chapter eleven that if people obey God, God will provide rain, crops will grow and we will eat. If not, we will suffer. Basically, that means that if you do good, you will do well. Our sins cause our suffering.

Of course, we all know that the world doesn't seem to work quite that way. We each know too many people who are pretty blameless and seem to suffer, get sick or die anyway. If we're really unlucky, we even know some really vicious people who seem to have a pretty easy time in life. Quality of the person and quality of the person's life don't seem to match up.

Maybe there's another way of looking at this. Maybe, our sin permits our suffering. If not for our blemishes, this world could be a better place. That is, if humanity didn't have flaws that make us greedy, cruel or worst of all, indifferent, then we wouldn't suffer so much. Each person suffers for the sins of everyone else. What's more, being a bad person has its own punishment. Truly wicked people are empty inside. "The soul that sins shall die." (Ezekiel 18:4; G. von Rad, Genesis, pp. 207-210)

Why are we flawed? I don't know. Maybe God couldn't make us any other way. I think that God wanted us to be free to choose: good or bad, even living with God or living without God.