THINK ABOUT THIS: Why Does God Allow Evil In The World?
One of the inescapable facts of reality is that there is evil in the world. There are unjust wars, deadly plagues, malevolent political and social movements bent on genocide, violent crimes by individuals against other individuals like murder, rape and child abuse, and the list goes on and on and on. No wonder a familiar maxim in the news business is “if it bleeds, it leads.”
“God’s Crime Scene” author J. Warner Wallace (Screenshot from YouTube)
Among the results of the presence of evil in our world is that it leads many to doubt the existence of God. We read of a terrible act and wonder how can there be a good God if He would tolerate such a horrendous thing to happen? It’s an obvious and logical question.
In the following 11.19 video featuring J. Warner Wallace, the former Los Angeles Police Detective who specialized in solving cold murder cases, addresses this issue. He does so using the same basic analytical approach he used to solve dozens of murder cases that had defied explanation for years.
You may not agree with everything, or anything, Wallace says but I can guarantee that he will give you things to think about on this question that you’ve never before considered:
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It has been a long and complex journey for me in trying to understand the nature of God. My first wife died of cancer when she was only 35, leaving me and my children. During her illness, I prayed constantly for a miracle to save her. She was such a good woman and didn’t deserve the horrors visited on her. But still, she died. My prayers went unanswered.
Then someone gave me the book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” I no longer have that book, but it helped me deal with what I saw as the unjustness of it all. I do believe in God, and I do believe that He loves us unconditionally. But I have also come to believe that while He watches over us, he doesn’t intervene. Instead, it becomes so many random chances of what happens or befalls us. But in the end, we will leave this world for the next. Just as we left the womb to be born. There is a world that we cannot comprehend, but is waiting for our arrival. And I know that my wife will be there to meet me, along with all the other people who have died.. And that arrival is what I am looking forward to. The rest of my life matters not, just that I try to be a good enough person to meet back again with my wife.
The question is not “Why does God allow it?” The question is “Why do WE allow it?”
God neither plays dice with the universe nor micromanages.
The video is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Wallace points to seven key questions, and I don’t disagree with him, although I think three are most fundamental. What is evil? What is life? Are we created with free will?
What is evil? I believe it is any act that separates us from God. I understand that if people don’t want to believe in God, there’s no stopping them. Yet I also believe they will never solve the problem of transcendent evil because they deny the existence of transcendent good.
What is life? Does it end when our physical bodies die? Many people believe it does, but I don’t. If life does not end when our physical bodies die, then the proper comparison is a human lifespan with eternity. Physical challenges with our bodies cannot be considered evil because they do not separate us from God and, besides, are temporary. (Wallace says a human life compared with eternity is a fraction of a millisecond. Not true, mathematically anyway. Compared with eternity, a human lifetime is not nearly that large. It is literally zero. That’s very temporary.)
Why is free will fundamental? Because if God forced us to love our neighbor at all times as we love ourselves, there would be no evil. All people would be equally good meaning there is no point to heaven. Or, as I think Wallace says, true evil requires God.
But if God does not force our behavior, if free will exists, then people have the freedom to behave unkindly toward one another – and thereby conclude God does not exist. The abuses listed above and discussed in the video are all behaviors. They are often called “man’s inhumanity to man”. It seems very clear that much if not most of what we experience as “evil” are the consequences of abusive behavior freely exercised by others. Not by God. By humans exercising their free will.
The easiest answer to why there is evil in the world is also the one that most people never mention. It’s in the Bible. God has already judged the world. Sure, there is day of judgment coming when the Books will be opened and all will give account of their lives. But there has already been a judgment. It’s in Genesis. In Genesis 2.17 God tells Adam and Eve they may eat of any tree in the garden, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for on the day you eat of it you shall surely die.” Genesis 3 relates the judgment for breaking the command. They died, being separated from God, and eventually they died physically. And all their prodigy are born died. Rom. 5. 12-14. See also Eph. 2.1. Paul tells us that the judgment of God is ongoing. See Rom. 1. 18-32 as mankind descends into evermore perversion. John tells us, John 3.17, that God did not send His Son into the world to judge it, but to save it. Why not to judge? Because it has already been judged. The world was in need of saving, not judgment. See also John 12.47.
Why is there evil in the world? Because God has judged the world. So bad, evil things happen. I image evil things will (and are) happening in hell as well. No sinless creatures there.
If God created shadows, it was to better emphasize the light. Pope John XXIII.
If God does not exist, we should never have arrived at the question in the first place. C.S. Lewis.
Nice ‘cast. He mentions a “book”, but doesn’t give a title. He’s published several. It would be useful to have a reference.