The presence of evil

One of the most common questions that my atheist friends ask me is "If there is a God, then why do bad things happen?"  I can hardly blame them - after all, I spend a fair amount of time asking myself that.  It's one of the most fundamental questions about our religion and probably the one that I have the most difficulty answering.  So these are my thoughts - written down so they're easier to keep track of.

I believe that bad things happen for three reasons:

• It's part of God's plan
• The weakness/sins of humanity
• The presence of Satan

Ok so the first one: It's all part of God's plan.  This is seems like the common, clichue saying that all of you have heard, somewhere in your life.  But the fact of the matter is that it's probably true.  I used to hate hearing this and sometimes I still do.  I hate that God maybe makes decisions that kill millions of people, that take away our loved ones, that cause suffering.  Isn't our God supposed to be a God of love?  If he loves us, then why would he make us suffer?  Often I just admit that I can't understand God's thinking, and that it's an insult to believe ourselves on a level of thinking equal to God.  How COULD we understand the plan of an all-powerful, omnipresent being?  This makes it much simpler for my poor brain (lol).  This paragraph seems really ironic seeing as how I just saw The Adjustment Bureau last night.

"The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the Earth had come, and that every inclination of his heart was towards evil" - Genesis 6:5 reveals how evil man can become.  The weakness of humanity.  Well, the reality is that God gave us as humans free will.  God didn't and doesn't just want us to be little automaton minions that walk around high stepping and saying "praise God" in a  repetitive monotone.  He GAVE us choices because he wants us to be able to love him of our own choices.  And as terrible as it is, the fact is that humanity is weak.  All humans sin.  I sin, you sin, we all sin.  God knows that and it's a sacfricie he's willing to make for free will - after all, you can't only have the benefits and be rid of the negatives of something like free thought.  So as long as humans have the ability to think and make decisions of their own, they will always make bad decisions.  They will always sin.  And so there will always be the repercussions of that sin (say, World War II? Hitler messed up...)

And finally, Satan DOES exist.  Often we forget that and blame God for everything.  But remember, Satan hates humanity.  He wants to see us fail, so he strives to tempt us and fill us with resentment. 

A good place to look in the Bible to go along with this post is the book of Habakkuk.  The whole book kinda goes along with this so I'll just put down his "first complaint" - something that we may feel at times.

"How long, O lord, must I call for help,
     but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, "Violence!"
     but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
     Why do you tolerate wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
     there is strife, and conflict abounds.
Therefore the law is paralyzed,
     and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
so that justice is perverted.

I'm including an excerpt below by CS Lewis, from a devotional of his that I have. 

FEBRUARY 19

Fixed Laws of Nature and Freedom of Will

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound-waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call miracles, is pan of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare. In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him—if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking—then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world; fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

—from The Problem of Pain

Stay strong in your times of struggle this week, for you have a mighty God. 

- Bradley