The Problem Of Evil... Still an issue.

The problem evil is still one of the number one objections to the Christian faith. Logically the problem goes like this:

1. God exists
2. God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, so He can, knows how, and should want to eradicate evil.
3. Therefore, if God exists and is truly all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, than evil should not exist.

This is a problem for the Christian faith. But luckily many great minds before us have wrestled with this question. First of all, in order to answer the logical problem above, one must understand God’s omni-benevolence (perfect goodness). Although it is true that God is good it does not mean He would eradicate evil, and this is because God must have a good reason for allowing evil. Now, it might be impossible for us to completely understand why God would allow evil to exist, or know exactly why, but some great Christian philosophers have given several reasons to why God in His goodness would allow evil to remain.

The human will argument
The human will argument is this: The reason God allowed evil to remain is because He saw that giving humans the choice to do wrong was of greater value than making them do what is right without their consent. For example, one would rather have his wife give him a gift because the wife loves him, not because she was forced to. Consequently when Adam and Eve were given this choice between God and sin, they chose sin, which made original sin, or the sin nature, enter humans, which resulted in an evil world. According to Augustine evil is the “perversion of the will turned aside from God.” Therefore, in his argument, the absence of God is evil, God created man with the capacity to turn away from Him, and man in his will turned away and created evil.

The glory argument
Some object to God allowing evil by saying, “If God is in control of everything, why did he not just create everyone good so He would bring more glory to Himself?” But to answer this question one could say that God allowed sin in His sovereign will in order to extend more grace and bring more glory to Himself through the cross. If God did not allow sin to enter the world, then the story of the cross, and Christ entering the world for our forgiveness would not be needed. So it actually brings more glory to God and more joy to believers to allow sin and bring justification, reconciliation, forgiveness, and grace than it would to just create a perfect world. We could never know what forgiveness is if we had nothing to forgive, we could never experience grace if we did not need it.

Evil actually proves God
Although the problem of evil is actually an objection to the Christian faith, the odd thing is that no other religion or worldview has any answer to why evil exists. Eastern religions say evil is an illusion, and atheist say there is no such thing as right and wrong, making evil non existent. But as C.S. Lewis said, “A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.” What C.S. Lewis is arguing here is that the knowledge and desire in man to eradicate evil proves that there must be a standard or law that people think the world should live up to, and if there is an absolute law then there must be a law giver, which is God, because that absolute standard and that idea of justice could not come from nowhere.

So the problem of evil is actually not a problem at all, but a defense for the existence of God.