God and Evil

Let’s get spiritual today and talk about the problem with the Judeo-Christian God and the problem of Evil. Why would an all-good, all-powerful God allow evil? The only conclusions I see are: (1) God is not all-good; (2) God is not all-powerful and or; (3) What we diminished mortals perceive as evil is not actually evil as the all-knowing God sees it.

Let’s forget about (1) because almost any definition of God includes that she is all-good. Hence, if God is not all-good, she really isn’t God. (2) is more interesting. Maybe God can’t do anything about evil. Maybe evil was not created by God but chosen by beings of free will, whether they be Angels or humans, and man’s God is stuck with it. This isn’t as silly as it may first appear. Maybe there are certain attributes of nature that were not created by God but evolved from less perfect beings exerting the choices that we all make with free will. Or, maybe there is a deity that represents evil or created evil and God and the deity are peers when it comes to power so God can’t overthrow this thing called evil.

Let’s examine (3). While we participate to some degree in God’s divinity since he created us, we obviously are less perfect than God in every way and we cannot as mortals perceive his Divine plan and thus we call things evil that if we were God we would not perceive as evil. This is basically the Roman Catholic position that I was weaned on. It made some sense to me in Sister Marie Francis’s 2nd grade class but threw me straight into agnosticism by the time I was in college. Nobody can explain to me how the maiming and killing of innocent children somehow works in God’s overall plan. Again, how can God be all-good with this kind of macabre plan? But this argument is not so easily dismissed. If you believe in Heaven, and if you believe that these children who are killed go there immediately after death because they are innocent, are they not luckier than we miserable bastards who are left on earth to constantly struggle? You know the old saying, “he or she is in a better place”. It’s a plausible argument. How about this one, though. What about the five year old who contracts cancer and lives in constant pain for the next five years before succumbing? How is this suffering in any way a good for God, the person writhing, or those of us mourning who are left behind? Maybe evil is at work here and God can’t do anything about it. Certainly the five year old did not choose the fate or earn the fate, unless you are a Hindu or a Buddhist, or believe in karma, and certainly the parents didn’t choose or earn this fate for their child, unless you believe that the sins of parents are somehow visited on their children.

No, the only thing that makes sense to me is (2) above. God either screwed up in the creation process and Evil somehow came out of this mishap, and now he can’t fix it, or God has nothing to do with Evil and is powerless to stop it. In either event, the conclusion reached is that God is not all-powerful. Any other suggestions?