God and Evil

“If God is so loving—why the Holocaust, why cleansing + worldwide starvation? Perhaps our God just set everything in motion + is just watching?” Our sermon suggestion this week is a good question—one that merits an entire book. There are several I can suggest, such as C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain and Peter Kreeft's Making Sense of Suffering. If you want to read deep considerations of this problem by Christian philosophers written for a general audience, those two books are the best ones I've read so far. But since the implied promise of our sermon suggestion box is that I will present as good an answer to the question as I can come up with in the span of a week, I will try to at least give you a reasonable response within the confines of a sermon.

The problem of how evil can exist in a world created by a good and all powerful God is an old one. Various philosophers have tried to resolve the conundrum by questioning the premises we've just laid out. They say either God is not all powerful and so can't prevent evil, or he is not entirely good and so has no interest in preventing evil. Our sermon suggestion seems to point to the latter. Perhaps God is just watching how his experiment is working out, unemotionally taking it all in, like a scientist watching a population of microbes. Or perhaps he is like a Roman emperor, just enjoying the spectacle of people fighting and dying in a cosmic coliseum. This makes God either amoral or immoral.

The atheist solution to the question is that there is no God. The problem is this eliminates any basis for their moral outrage at anything, including religion. If there is no Creator, there is no objective moral law. There is no “ought to” or “should have.” What happens just happens, without any direction or goal. Your morality is just your personal preferences imposed on others. On what basis can you declare anything morally good or bad in a universe where, from an evolutionary viewpoint, everything can be reduced to “My genes need to be passed on, so whatever works for me is legitimate, where it's cooperation or coersion or killing”? Animals fight and kill each other. We're just animals.

Weirdly, though, if there is no God, religion still spontaneously arises in every society. Studies have shown that civilizations can't be created without religion to foster the massive amount of human cooperation necessary. Scientific evidence also shows that religion has mental and physical health benefits for individuals, including 3 to 4 years more life. Which is odd if belief in God is a misperception of reality. It would be as if bad eyesight gave one a better chance at survival and a long life than good vision. Anyway, removing God from the equation doesn't get rid of the problem of suffering and evil.

We Christians hold that God is not merely a psychological phenomenon but a reality and so for us there remains the question of how to reconcile a good, all-powerful God with a world that includes evil. And following the lead of our question, I am going to deal only with the problem of moral evil in this sermon. That's going to be complex enough without looking at what is called natural evil, like disasters and earthquakes.

For our purpose, we will define evil as the intentional infliction of harm on other people and/or the desire to do so. The question is therefore why did God make a world in which people can be evil?

Let's try to imagine a world in which people can't hurt others. At first it sounds nice. People just sing, play, paint, maybe work if they like. But they never hurt one another because they can't. Now imagine one of them falls and suffers a compound fracture of the leg. What do the others do? They stand around in distress because they don't know how to help him. If they help him stand, he screams in pain. If they merely touch his leg, it causes him pain. Since they can't hurt him, they can't help him. They can say nice things, bring him food and water and put a tent over him but he will be left to either painfully recover on his own and be forever crippled or he may get an infection or throw a blood clot and die. No one is going to do what a doctor in the real world will do, which would involve repositioning the leg, possibly even pulling and resetting the bone so it heals properly, despite the initial great pain this will cause. No one in such a world will discern that there is sometimes a difference between hurting someone and harming them. No one will develop the idea that fixing things may involve having a negative impact on someone in any way. The only fixes in such a world would be easy ones that offend no one, rather like the world of the Teletubbies but without the high drama.

More importantly, no one in such a world could really be good. Being good is a choice. You aren't actually good if you couldn't possibly choose not to be good. The singing and dancing figures in Disney's It's a Small, Small World ride could never go evil. They can only do what they are programmed to do. Asking for a world in which evil is not possible is asking for a world in which people are either robots or puppets, unable to do anything the creator doesn't want them to.

It would also be a world without love. If no one can choose to do evil, they can't choose to do good either. Which includes what most people consider the ultimate good: love. Because genuine love is a choice. I'm not talking about mere attraction or infatuation. Those may lead to love but they can also fade. Love is a decision. If you fall in love with someone and then they have a disfiguring and disabling accident, and everything that attracted you to them is gone and you still choose to stick with them and take care of them, that is love. That is a decision. 

After all, how would you feel if you found that the love of your life was programmed to act that way? What if that person couldn't not love you? How would they be different from a robot? In the science fiction movie A.I. a childless couple buys a totally realistic boy android whom they can program to love them. And the tragedy is that after they have a kid of their own, the android boy can't be unprogrammed. He far outlasts his human “parents” and can't stop seeking them because he has no choice. But is that real love? Would you prefer a machine that acts like it loves you to a real person who has gotten to know you and decided to love you?

But to be a part of a world with no evil, you would also have to be a robot. You would have no choice but to do only what you were programmed to do. You would, like the android, have made no consent to your condition. In the 2009 TV series Dollhouse, people's brains are wiped of their memories like computers and they are downloaded with personalities made-to-order to serve a very rich clientele. The people, or “dolls” as the company calls them, can become anyone—a hostage negotiator, an art thief, a bodyguard, or even the dead wife of an internet entrepreneur who never got to see him become a success. In one horrific episode, we discover that the “doll” in question did not enter the program willingly and sign the standard 5 year contract. Instead, she was the former girlfriend of a rich man who forced her into the program so she could be reprogrammed and never reject him as she had before when she had free will. Now she is programmed to love him, but on his part, it is rape. She did not consent to this.

God is love and real love doesn't force itself on others. God woos us by persuasion, by giving us his word and by acts of love, like becoming one of us in Jesus in order to save us. God offers us his love and asks us to consent to be part of his family. We are free to choose him or reject him. God created a world in which real goodness and love can exist because it is possible for people to choose otherwise. And, as we see, they do. Evil is the result of us rejecting God's loving ways of thinking, speaking and acting.

Ok, then why doesn't God use persuasion by making his existence undeniable and his presence visible so everyone knows he's watching? Imagine something like the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings gazing down on you every minute of every day. If that's too creepy, how about the laughing baby-faced sun of the Teletubbies? Everywhere you go, there's a visible sign that God is watching everything you do. And you can't even lock him out of your bathroom or bedroom like you might do with your dog.

But would that be enough to deter people from doing evil? If so, then you would expect surveillance states like China with its network of security cameras everywhere to dismiss their police forces. But they don't because while most of us won't do bad things when other people or the authorities are watching, that doesn't stop others.

Ok, then why doesn't God intervene when people get out of hand? Why doesn't he, like a human parent, break up the fights, stop the bullying, put bad people in Time Out? Well, how about, if you did something wrong, this Eye of God, or the flaming baby's head if you prefer, spoke to you and told you to stop. And did so in James Earl Jones' voice, just so you knew he was serious. And yet we know even that wouldn't stop some people. So what if he zapped people who were disobeying, like a dog with one of those invisible fence collars? Or what if he hit them with a freeze ray?

Welcome to the Village! This was the setting of the 1967 TV series The Prisoner, where former spies are involuntarily kept in what appears to be a quaint English village. In that show, a giant sentient ball chases and engulfs anyone trying to escape or misbehave.

It is interesting that freethinkers like atheists generally condemn universal surveillance and police state intimidation tactics when it's done by humans, but criticize God for not doing precisely that to prove that he exists and that he is serious about stopping evil.

Let's concede that God visibly stalking everyone is creepy and that him dishing out instant karma is not a lot less coercive than us being programmed to love and obey him without being able to do otherwise. What if he were subtler? What if God stayed invisible but caused heart attacks or comas in anyone who did bad things? What if Hitler had a massive stroke after he started the war or had the death camps built? What if God made explicit what we know: that what is morally unhealthy is also physically unhealthy? So if you do something bad, it's sudden death or disability. No second chances, no opportunity to repent and change your ways. That's not any less coercive and actually a great deal more terrifying.

And why wait until Hitler's already built the death camps to strike him down? Why not stop him earlier? Before he came to power? Or after World War I, when he was a decorated soldier but before he joined the Nazi party? But we know he hated Jews and non-Aryan people before that. Should God kill Hitler as a homeless young man? As a teenager? As a child? Now we've entered the territory of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, in which people are arrested and imprisoned for future crimes, ones they didn't actually commit but would have if they weren't stopped. You do the time before you actually do the crime. Which you can't ever do anyway.

In these scenarios, you don't get an earthly paradise but a prison. People are good, not out of choice but out of terror. And if you are wondering why I'm using all these sci-fi references, it's because speculative writers have explored all of these options, and most have realized that these efforts to make the world a utopia actually result in a dystopia. Yet in the real world, dictators keep trying to make the world better through coercion and fear.

As opposed to these “what if?” worlds, the world God actually made is one where people can choose to love and obey him, and in which some do and some do not. Even so, it doesn't take too much wisdom to realize that there are negative consequences to not doing what's right but these consequences are not usually immediately nor invariably fatal, so they are not coercive. God also has endowed us with the ability to think about long-term outcomes, which are definitely better if we choose to do good and worse if we don't. Unfortunately, we tend to go for short-term benefits. So we choose the more immediate rewards of intoxication, overindulgence, casual sex, inflated quarterly earnings or lying to get re-elected over the proven long-term benefits of an undamaged brain, healthy body, marriage, sound fiscal management and realistically solving your constituents' problems. Suffering the consequences of our own bad moral decisions is akin not to being struck by lightning but to camping on train tracks. You can change your mind. And if you get run over, you can't say you never thought it could happen.

A big problem is that someone else's bad moral decision can get you hurt. That was the real thrust of our sermon suggestion question. The victims of the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, lynching, slavery, drive-by shootings and many other sins are innocent, at least of those evils. Why does God allow people to hurt other people? Here we have to keep in mind the laws of physics. How does the God who created the physical world make it so that we can kiss each other but not kick each other, so we can slap a friend on the back after a game but not punch him in the kidneys, so I can shove you out of the way of an oncoming car but not into the path of one? But then should God make a world entirely out of foam rubber? Should he cover us all in bubble-wrap? But there are other forms of harm than just physical. How can he make it so that only sounds carrying the truth reach our ears but not sounds carrying lies or distortions? How does God arrange the law of physics so that we can only impact the world for good and never for evil? I've never read or seen a science fiction story that explores how that would be possible.

So does that mean that the world we live in is the best of all possible worlds? Not yet.

One of the problems is with how we frame this question: literally like a photo. We assume that as bad as things are, they always have been so and more importantly they always will be. We assume that evil has always been in the world and always will be. And we assume that because we don't see God obviously stopping an evil at the moment that he is not doing anything about it. That's like looking at a snapshot of a man lying on the ground with a broken leg and, because we can't see the ambulance in the shot, assuming that he won't get help. The situation is more fluid than we realize and there are things we are not factoring into our evaluation of the situation.

We talk as if the only way to stop harm is to infantilize humans, by either eliminating our ability to choose or by making our choices inconsequential. Maybe God doesn't want to child-proof the universe. Maybe he doesn't want us to stay infants but grow up and learn not to do harm. God would rather we become people who want to do good. He's spelled it out, most fully in the Bible, but every culture has the equivalent of the Golden Rule. Jesus put it positively but most religions do it negatively: what you wouldn't want done to you, don't do to others. In most cases, the right way to act is not that hard to figure out, though it may be hard to do. Most moral problems are not really matters of ignorance. It's not that we lack knowledge, especially today; it's that we lack the will to do what we know we should.

Then there's the issue of what to do in the aftermath of bad decisions. What do you do to make things right once you've gone and done what's wrong? Again every parent knows what to do: think about what you've done wrong, admit it, apologize, forgive each other, give back what you took, and repair the damage. If the damage is huge, the parent will usually have to provide the resources to make the repairs. And so it is with our heavenly Father. Through Jesus he has begun repairing this world which we have broken with our tantrums, our sibling rivalries, our greed, our envy, our laziness, our lust, our gluttony, and our arrogance. He has paid the price for what we broke. He has sent us his Spirit. That's why I said that this is not the best of all possible worlds yet.

If God left the world the way it is, then, yes, he is either amoral, immoral or helpless. But he is working in the world. Historian Tom Holland has shown that the ideals of mercy, helping the poor, healing the sick, giving justice to the powerless, seeing the image of God in all people are only part of the modern world because of the teachings of Jesus. These were not virtues in the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Their gods and their cultures favored the rich and the powerful. They did not care about the poor or the equality of everyone in society, including slaves and women. Their gods did not love humans. They certainly would not die to save them.

But then Jesus came, proclaiming the good news that God loves everyone and will forgive and transform all who turn to him. Jesus showed this in his life, in his self-sacrificial death and in his resurrection. Then he passed his mission on to his followers. They set up hospitals, schools, and charitable organizations. And 2000 years later, even the secular world assumes a decent society should feed the hungry, give clean water to the thirsty, heal the sick, make the lame walk, the deaf hear, the mute speak, and bring back to life those given up for dead. Jesus introduced that to the world at large.

To say that the world is nothing more than a place of suffering is like going into a hospital and focusing only on the pain and injuries and disease there and not on the efforts to make those who are suffering better. God is at work in this world. He is at work through those who feel called to serve others. Most of the nurses and doctors I have met and worked with, most of the people who are working to do good in this world, like social workers, family therapists and teachers, are religious. There are very few atheists among those who are most immersed in relieving the world's suffering.

But what about those we can't help, who have been killed by the neglect or direct action of others? If this is the only life we get, then you would have to say that there is no justice in the world. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and those who had millions killed got away with it and those they killed will never get justice...if this life is all that there is.

But the risen Jesus is the big clue that it isn't. God isn't the God of the dead but of the living. No one will be cheated out of his reward by death, nor will anyone cheat God and check out without paying for what he's done. Nor will the damage done remain forever. God will reboot the whole of creation. There will be a new heaven and a new earth and new bodies for us. The God who pronounced his creation “good” will see it become that again. That is the hope we proclaim every time we say in the creed, “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

In the meantime, God has sent us out to show his love, not only in the words of the good news but in the good works for which he has prepared us. By investing our lives in helping and serving others we say that we agree with God that this world is worth saving. We show that there is more to life than evil and we show that evil does not get the last word.

A lot of people want to see evil eliminated, preferably by a lightning bolt. But how do you get rid of evil without getting rid of humans? God's plan is to eliminate evildoers, not by turning them into piles of ashes, but by forgiving them and turning them into his children through his son Jesus Christ. He took the most evil thing we could do to him and turned his death into the greatest act of love anyone has ever done. And he can do the same to our lives, however evil they have become, if we turn them over to him and join him in bringing healing and restoration to a suffering world.

Originally preached on February 7, 2010. It has been updated and revised.