God and Religion: An Analysis of the Validity of God and the Issue of Evil

 

How a God, if there is a God, can allow evil or, at the very least, bad things, to exist has been a sticking point for some people for centuries. In many cultures, this issue was dealt with through a pantheon of gods who were very similar to humans – just with greater powers. But with the advent of Judaism and, eventually, Christianity, people were being presented with an omnipotent and omniscient God, who created the cosmos as well as life on Earth yet, at the same time, allows evil to exist in the world. How could this be? After all, is it not a blatant inconsistency for an all good God to have any evil, anywhere, at all? If the argument is made from the Bible, then its legitimacy, along with the very validity of God, has to be established. This essay will describe some of the philosophical issues of evil vis-à-vis God as well as dealing with whether God is and if the Bible is to be relied upon.

Evil can be broken down into two parts, as John Hick explains, moral evil or wickedness is basically man’s inhumanity towards man and non-moral evil is that pain and suffering caused by the calamities of the world around us – hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc. (144) Either produces suffering for people in the world on a daily basis. Whether it is a child dying in a burning house due to a lightning strike, a woman being raped, a village consumed by a tsunami or the numerous genocides throughout human history, suffering on a narrow or wide scale occurs with a regularity that seems to argue strongly against an all loving God.

Two statements advanced by B.C. Johnson basically argue the same thing. Moral urgency and building virtue (139) are two sides of the same coin. With this theory, we humans are allowed to or tasked to endure suffering in order that we may become better after the tragedy than we were before. Without any urgency, then there is no requirement to act and no virtue built. Without the end result of building virtue, moral urgency would have no raison d’être. Johnson dismisses both ideas as spurious since God does not have to allow for any of this suffering to go on. Therefore, according to Johnson, since He does allow for it, God most likely has evil within Him or is completely evil (142).

Hick counters by stating that to think evil and good came into being together is a mistake. Augustine gave voice to the classic Christian teaching that “evil represents the going wrong of something which in itself is good” (143). While Hick gives Augustine credit for developing this, the teaching is really as old as Hebrew Scripture. What God created He considered to be good and when He was done on the sixth day, He looked at all that was and stated it was “very good” (Gen 1:31).

The good, unfortunately, did not stay good. Lucifer (as Satan was known in Heaven (Isaiah 14:12)) was created as the most beautiful angel and good angel (Ezekiel 28:11). Then, when pride came into his heart (Ezekiel 28:15) and caused him to want to be God, he was cast out of Heaven to earth (Isaiah 14:12-15 and Ezekiel 28: 11-19). When he arrived on earth, Adam and Eve were still in the Garden of Eden. He, as the serpent, tempted Eve to eat of the tree of good and evil, the only tree from which she and Adam were not allowed to eat from. When she, and then Adam, succumbed to the tempting to be like God (Gen 3:5), they were eventually banished from the garden. This is the “fall” of mankind and the earth “fell” as well. In the garden there was complete harmony: no death or suffering. Once outside, the thorns and thistles began to grow (Gen 3:18) and death was to be their end (Gen 3:19). From this point, suffering, both moral (such as Cain versus Abel) and non-moral (the drought in Egypt during the time of Joseph (Gen 41)) came into the world.

With the introduction of Scripture to this essay, it is important to take a moment and discuss two areas that arise when utilizing the Bible. First is the basic existence of God and second is the reliability of the Bible.

The scientific reasons for God existing are put forth by A. Cressy Morrison, an astronomer, who states that “The conception of God rises from a divine faculty of man, unshared with the rest of our world – the faculty we call imagination. By its power, man and man alone can find the evidence of things unseen.” (111) He also uses the argument of design to state that the complexity of even the “simplest” organism belies anything but an intelligent design.

Richard Dawkins disagrees and states that all life can easily be explained by a series of infinitely small steps, many of which failed, but, through natural selection, proceeded to produce what we now know as life. “These small steps of chance are caused by genetic mutations, random changes – mistakes really – in the genetic material…A minority of them turn out to be slight improvements, leading to increased survival and reproduction.” (114) He readily admits that the existence of DNA cannot be accounted for by evolutionary data in the fossil record. He states that it “seems to mean that there must have been some earlier hereditary system, now disappeared, which was simple enough to have arisen by chance and the laws of chemistry and which provided the medium in which a primitive form of cumulative natural selection [for the development of DNA as we know it today] could get started.” (116) He also admits that he cannot explain the origins of life, leaving that to the physicists. However, he states that “even if the physicist needs to postulate an irreducible minimum that had to be present from the beginning [as Dawkins implies there must have been]…that irreducible minimum is certainly extremely simple.” Given that a simple explanation is far more reasonable than a complex one, this simple explanation (of the irreducible minimum) is far more acceptable than a complex God (117). The fact that his explanation for an extremely huge number of very small changes over a long period of time which ultimately allowed each creature to be so similar and yet so different (e.g. dogs and cats are very similar yet they cannot breed with each other) is tremendously complex and seems to escape him. The idea of an omnipotent God merely speaking the world into existence is far more palatable from a simplicity standpoint than Dawkins’ faith in the evolutionary process.

Another issue with Dawkins is that he assumes the advancements along the evolutionary chart follow a linear progression. The orderliness of life belies the “mistakes” Dawkins claims that it took to move evolution forward. Where are the mistakes in the fossil archives? Certainly some “mistakes” lived on long enough to deposit a sufficient number of fossils to be discovered by modern man for all the different species that we now observe.

Additionally, Dawkins does not address the vast differences between humans and the rest of the animals. As Morrison pointed out regarding imagination, no other animal has ever developed, or has ever shown the potential to develop, the abilities to ponder its past, its current reality, its future, create art, poetry, study the world both macro and micro and write all those things down to pass on to its progeny. Every other animal on earth does what it has always done: it is born, it lives, it reproduces and it dies – no more, no less. Man is alone in doing more. So much more, indeed, that the difference is as far as the east is from the west. Evolution does not explain this vast difference.

Civilization is another area where the slow orderly progression of evolution does not fit. The building of cities, written laws, a cohesive society, all started around 4000 BC in Mesopotamia. Modern Humans have been around for 30,000 – 45,000 years. But only in the last 6,000 years has man produced a civilization. Is it logical to believe that in the 24,000-39,000 years prior to the first civilization that man stayed as he was – a hunter/gatherer in small groups – never changing? But then, somehow, in the last 6,000 years (starting around 4000 BC) he has gone from simpleton to the moon, the depths of the oceans and into the sub-atomic universe. Why did this not happen 40,000, 30,000, 20,000 or 10,000 years ago? What caused this sudden spark? There is no logical reason why it took as long as it did. Indeed, a simple survey of the animal kingdom would show anyone that humans should not have changed at all and should have stayed the same. There has never been a spark that made the same animal, other than humans, suddenly do and accomplish more than it had ever done before.

The Bible states that the creation took place around 4000 BC (using the dates given in the Bible and extrapolating in reverse with the ages of the prominent characters given). It states that the earliest civilization was in Mesopotamia and that people spread from there to the remainder of the world. That there was a great flood (evidence of which is found throughout the world along with over 140 stories from different cultures of the flood and the ark). This great flood can also be shown to have made the fossil formations and explain vast deposits of fossil fuels that we keep discovering. The Bible also has been proved correct in regards to its depiction of the walls of Jericho, its prophecy regarding Babylon (that no one would ever rebuild once it was destroyed) and a host of other examples. The Dead Sea Scrolls have an intact book of Isaiah as well as parts of the rest of the Old Testament (except the book of Esther) which read, when translated, the same way the Bible you pick up at your local church reads even though the scrolls are from the 3rd century BC. The tablets of Ebla are another ancient verification of the accuracy of the Bible. Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century, writes of Jesus and how He was crucified by Pilate. Even the “contradictions” that Michael Martin attempts to point out in his Argument from Incoherence (169-171) can be explained with a fuller grasping of the doctrines of Christianity; the Trinity, God’s justice, mercy and judgment just to name a few. (A complete or even partial rebuttal to Martin is outside the scope of this paper) Although skeptics continue to say that the Bible cannot be trusted, the facts continue to prove otherwise.

With the Bible and God justified (to the extent that it can be done in a paper of this size), what else does the Bible say about good and evil? Since man is fallen, he has a “sin nature” within him. His heart is set against God. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) and “For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” (Matthew 15:19) These two quotes show that man can do some very evil things to his fellow man all by himself. But there is also the added hand of Satan in the background who encourages, tempts and instigates evil. From the incident with Adam and Eve throughout human history, Satan makes war against God’s people here on earth. “Then the dragon [Satan] was enraged at the woman [the church] and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.” (Revelation 12:17). Why? To cause man to turn away from God (“Curse God and die” Job’s wife told him (Job 2:9)). This is primarily the moral evil, but the non-moral evil came about after the fall of man as well.

So why does God allow evil to persist? Because He loves man and wants to give him a second chance. This is God’s mercy. If God were only judgment and justice, then he would have wiped man from the face of the earth long ago. There have been times that God has exacted judgment (the Flood, Sodom and Gomorra, Aninias and Saphira (Acts 5:1-10)) but his mercy has always been greater. That is why there is a John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” We, however, must choose good or evil; God or not God. In the meantime, the evil that was loosed by Adam and Eve plagues us until that great and powerful day of the Lord. For while it may seem that God tarries, He wants as many as possible to have the opportunity to choose Him and not death. “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:14)

Bibliography

Burr, John R and Goldinger, Milton. Philosophy and Contemporary Issues. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc., 2004. Print.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.