When I was much younger, I was troubled with the definition of the word PERFECT in its relationship to GOD. If God is perfect how could anything evil emanate from a perfect being. Afterall, if something is pure gold, one cannot get silver from it. Yet does perfect imply that God can formulate evil if He/She so desires? Does a perfect God imply all-loving? I’m still puzzled though I am much older. Your comments, please.
Well, I don’t have an answer for you. I’m agnostic, so if I did have an answer it probably wouldn’t be very trustworthy.
I just want to point out that, historically, you’re in excellent company. Philosophers and writers have wrestled with this very thing for centuries. Of course now I’m blanking on which writers. The only one I can remember is Nathaniel Hawthorne … perhaps Augustine was in sort of the same boat. Anyway, I recommend you check them out to see if they’ll shed any light.
You’re getting into matters of free will vs. predestination here.
Yes God is perfect. Beings that he created are not. When He created the angels, they were given free will; that is, they were given the choice of obeying Him or rebelling against Him. A handful of them, led by Lucifer, did indeed rebel against Him. And thus, evil was made manifest.
So, in that sense, God “created” evil, in that He created beings who themselves created evil.
Of course, philosophers and theologians have written volumes about the subject without reaching a conclusive or satisfying answer.
My $0.02.
I’ve always found that explanation a little dodgy, rasta. Why would God endow other beings with the power to create anything of that nature? Isn’t the power to create things like good and evil reserved to God and God alone?
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
A lot of people have trouble believing in religion for this very fact, if there IS a GOD why do bad things happen to good people? The notion of a perfect God creating people with free will to not be perfect is a little bit of a cop out, to maintain the perfection which people find it necessary to have their God as possessing. I am Catholic, I do not believe in a perfect god, in fact my understanding of God is not what others believe, it is not a creator, it is my place to go inside myself and as I mentioned in anther thread, my spirit. It may not be anything at all, sometimes it is my diary. nothing tangible and nothing real or capable of being perfect of of creating the world.
This is not exactly well written, but my thoughts are somewhat blurry at the moment due to Christmas party celebrations. so sorry
pldennison
I think that we have to look at why God created the angels to begin with. Presumably it was for His enjoyment, love, and fellowship. If they did not have free will to decide for themselves whether or not to love/obey Him, then their love and obedience would be meaningless.
Maybe we can make an analogy. If I buy a dog, the dog will either:
a) Come running toward me when I call him, play “catch” with me, and otherwise become my best friend.
b) Snarl and growl at me, poop on my floor, or otherwise become a nuisance.
Or I could buy one of those Japanese robotic dogs currently on the market. The dog would always “love” me, but its love would be meaningless.
Therefore, Lucifer and Co. exercised their free will, given to them by a perfect God, and thus pooped on God’s floor. hee hee hee
The fact that your dog shit on the floor does not mean your dog created shit.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
Phil - I think you’ve got a point, but I’d personally move the troublesome part a couple steps further down.
Assumptions:
- God is perfect; completely good.
- God created other beings. The ‘why’ (love, fellowship, someone else to talk to?) isn’t important, IMO.
- God wanted the created beings to have the freedom to choose whether or not to like him.
- God created the universe with the possibility of evil inherent in it, in order to preserve a genuine freedom of action for his creations.
- Some of the created beings decided to take God up, to the max, on his offer of freedom, bringing evil into creation.
The first 4 steps don’t strike me as a problem. The problem for me is between 4 and 5: if God created these beings so that they were originally created good, how did they get the desire to do evil? I honestly have no clue.
Mostly, I don’t worry about it too much; I knew there was evil in the world before I was particularly sure there was a God. How evil came into the universe, if God’s perfect, is less important to me than His presence which, in addition to being my answer to the evil in the world, helps me (I hope) become part of the answer to evil in the lives of those around me.
Yeah, see, to me that’s akin to taking a bomb, setting the timer (but not starting it), putting it in a building, then saying, “All I’m doing by setting the timer is allowing the possibility for the bomb to go off. If it does, it isn’t my problem.” I don’t think we would approve morally of a human who did that, and I’m not at all certain why we should approve of a superhuman who did.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
You guys are asserting the objective reality of an abstract thing called “evil.” Therein lies an error.
Any action can be seen as good, evil, or morally neutral. In the third case, the results of that action will sooner or later lead to a causal sequence that we would classify as good or evil, and so it ultimately reduces to one of the first two.
What I see is that no abstract category of act is intrinsically good or evil. There is no such thing as “a sin” in the sense that one may say “X-ing is a sin” in a broad-brush definition mode. Any act may be good or evil, depending on the circumstances in which it happens. Admittedly, many examples would require a complex scenario and an ingenious structuring of events to be considered “good” and there are probably as many requiring an equal degree of stretching to be considered “evil.”
I would submit that what God did was to create. Period. In the course of creating entities other than himself, he was forced by the laws of logic to either make them robotic or to endow them with free will. Anyone with a child or significant other and a VCR can tell you which is the more pleasurable to interact with. For free will to have any real meaning, the possibility of the creatures going against the will of the creator and of each other would have to exist. The term has no meaning unless the possibility of choice exists. All “sin” consists in the actuality of the going against of God’s or another person’s will.
Didn’t explain that well enough, I can see. RT, have you ever heard the old chestnut used by ministers about “Nobody gets up in the morning saying, ‘Oh, s#|t. I’ve got to go and commit some sins today.’”
My point is that every act that is seen as “sinful” has some purpose, good to the doer, that is “evil” in some larger context (as against someone else, society, his relationship with God, or whatever). Every vice is a virtue misapplied.
I’m not sure about that, Poly; I’d say treating a person (or Person, as the case may be) as something less than that is sinful, right off the bat. And if there’s any truth to the notion of Lucifer’s rebellion taking place before the creation of our universe, then I would think that would have to be the sort of sin taking place.
Phil - Poly took the words out of my mouth in responding to your post. God could have created free agents or robots. If robots, they would have been perfectly good, but would it have mattered? If free agents, it’s hard to imagine we would have been perfectly good, and the fact that we’re far from it is a never-ending source of bad news. If God decided to open Door #2, that beats the alternative, IMO.
So if you were God, which choice would you make? Or is there a better one that we’re not considering? (This isn’t rhetorical, or a slam; I’m serious. This, IMO, seems to be the best route to attack the old ‘why did God make such a nasty world’ question: what were God’s alternatives?)
If the inevitable result of free will is evil, maybe free will isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Also, it’s always seemed to me the, “Well, you can have free will and get Hitler, or be mindless robots” is a false dichotomy of some kind, but I can never bring it to the surface.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
Hm. Well, the argument does assume that our free will to do evil is not infringed in any way, which I don’t think is true. Hitler could be as evil as was physically possible, but he was limited by the rules of nature, i.e. he couldn’t exterminate all the Jews by flipping a switch. So you could ask, why doesn’t God physically limit evil a little bit more? I propose force-fields that automatically pop into existence around a child whenever someone is attepting to abuse them. Doesn’t really infringe on the bad guy’s free will any more than being physically limited from abusing as many kids as he might want to, and I think we can all agree that an immediate cessation of child abuse would be a Good Thing.
“…There must have been some magic
In that Phrygian cap he wore,
For when they placed it on their heads
His initiates were reborn…” Happy Mithrasmas, all!
Well, according to the (Orthodox) Jewish religion, evil does not come from G-d. Rather, evil is what occurs when other beings, using their G-d-granted free will, choose not to obey G-d.
This topic has been debated quite thoroughly in oher threads as well.
Chaim Mattis Keller
cmkeller@compuserve.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
skelton4947 wrote:
Sure you can! Just knock 18 protons loose from the nucleus.
Of course, doing so will be really expensive – it might cost over a million dollars to turn 50 atoms of gold into silver successfully. Plus, the silver you get will almost certainly be a radioactive isotope. But it can be done!
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.
Good idea, Gaudere - and I’m not being facetious. Believe me, I’ll bring that up with God, the next time I see Him face to face, rather than through a glass darkly. (OK, so that’s after I die. BFD. It’s the best I can do.)
I’m sure that if God had built such force fields into the construction of the universe, we’d be hollering about something else He should have done that for, in addition - but that wouldn’t have made it wrong for Him to have taken it that far. So why didn’t God do that? Any flaws that I’ve missed, at first glance?
tracer - if I’m going to go to that much trouble, I think I’d prefer to knock protons off lead. 
personally, I would rather have good people on this earth. I don’t know why “good” equates with robotic. How nice it would be if we didn’t have to lock up everything we own. Or a female can walk down a street in the evening without fear of getting raped. Plenty of variances can exist all under the umbrella of “good”. Plenty of disagreements certainly can co-exist without the requirement of “evil” and plenty of choices.