The Necessity of Allowing Evil

I. Introduction

The issue of evil and suffering in the world has been a topic of discussion for thousands of years. Philosophers such as Epicurus laid a foundation of questioning both the existence and character of God. Epicurus stated that if God is all powerful and all loving then how can evil exist? Either God is not powerful enough to eliminate evil, or not loving enough to do so.  

Atheists, such as the late Christopher Hitchens, used versions of the Epicurus objection believing it was a kind of ‘gotcha’ argument to deny God’s existence, whilst at the same time, could not provide any reasoned arguments for their own origins, or offer any answers as to the purpose of human existence other than to create your own meaning for life. 

Atheism is a very temporary condition as both Epicurus and Hitchens have discovered, and furthermore, both now understand the purpose for which they were given the opportunity of life and realize they have wasted it. 

In this article I want to briefly examine the classical approaches to the issue of evil, and propose that we will never understand this issue unless we begin from the question of God’s purpose in creating humanity, that purpose being the deification of those made in God’s image. Please watch my video entitled ‘little gods or deification’ if you are not familiar with these terms, as they do not mean the same thing. If you would like me to discuss why God seems to not intervene to prevent evil, or other issues on this topic, please leave a comment. Here, I wish to establish God’s purpose and how it relates to salvation, and explain why we may conclude with a doctrine of the necessity of allowing evil. The doctrine of evil, that is theodicy, is discussed in depth in chapter 11 of my Practical Systematic Theology: Reclaiming the Doctrine of the Early Church.

II. Classical Approaches in Brief

Both David Hume and Protest Atheism use the Epicurus objection or versions of it. Both demand that if there is a God and He does not intervene to prevent evil, He is an evil God, however, both would be the first to object if God restricted their freedom to choose. Therefore, such people demand that God use their particular standard for good or evil, and choose to deny His existence if He doesn’t.

Augustine, Calvin and Luther used predestination arguments. No person is permitted to question God, His sovereignty over-rides free-will to the extent that God becomes responsible for evil, although such theologians claim He is not.

Alvin Platinga offered the free-will defence. If evil is not a real possibility, then there is no real free-will. If a person cannot independently choose to commit evil, then neither can they choose to love and loving God is the greatest commandment.

Leibniz claimed the world was made up of ‘monads’, a rather complicated and novel idea which, when boiled down, was similar to the early Church writers notion of evil as a necessary element in our becoming like God, an educational process.

Irenaeus, taught that there is perfection in Eden but it is infantile, incomplete. Perfection in this sense  means perfect in innocence, or untainted by sin. Irenaeus believed that an encounter with evil is necessary for completeness.  Irenaeus may be suggesting that God allowed evil because (1) humanity needed to make choices in order to begin to 'become like God', and (2) that God planned the incarnation so that humanity could be deified through Christ. Irenaeus sees the Fall as essential for the goal of humanity becoming like God. Keep in mind that Genesis 3:22, after the Fall states, ‘the man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil’.

John Hick held a similar view to Irenaeus and Moltmann emphasized that God gets involved in suffering, an argument John Lennox also often uses.

Paul Helm offered six theological models regarding the problem of evil.

1. Evil as Privation. In short, while God ordains, sustains and foreknows the evil action, He does not positively will it, as He positively wills good and gracious things. Here we have a distinction between God ‘ordaining’ an evil action in the sense that He upholds all things, and God positively willing the action.

2. Divine Permission.  General permission attempts to maintain a degree of free will in which God can have no control or sovereignty over human action. Specific permission posits that God grants a specific permission for free will, but permits an abuse of the permission in order for humanity to exercise free will.

3. Decree and Command. This model is tied to the issues of predestination and election and most often ends up with an appeal to God’s secret will.

4. The Free-will defense. The Eastern position has an emphasis on God’s plan for the deification of humanity. Human freedom is essential to that plan. Western free-will models are grounded in Augustine’s inherited sin which, when taken to its logical conclusion, limits free-will in the extreme. The Eastern position claims that we have voluntarily become slaves to sin, whilst the Augustinian position states we were slaves from conception.

5. Middle Knowledge:  William Lane Craig, a defender of the middle knowledge position, explains the theory in this way;

Since God knows what any free creature will do in any situation, he can, by creating the appropriate situations, bring it about that the creatures will achieve his ends and purposes and that they will do so freely.

6. Process Thought: In process thought, God is considered to be an imperishable entity within an evolving world of other entities. This idea is not unlike Hegel’s philosophy of God as the developing ‘Absolute’ realizing itself in the process of history, a similar idea to Buddhism.

III. Evil as necessary for God’s plan of Deification.

My proposal and answer to the question of why God allowed evil is primarily based on several important facts. Firstly, that God knows the future and obviously, knew every sin and atrocity which would be committed by the creatures He was planning to create. Secondly, that God's love is undeniable and unconditional, and therefore, He would never have allowed evil to dominate His creation unless it played an essential role in His ultimate plan for humanity. Therefore, the key to understanding why God allowed evil is in understanding His ultimate plan for humanity.

1. Why did God Create Us?

Irenaeus taught that God's ultimate plan of creation was to offer His creatures the means to be deified, to be like Him. The Christian faith confirms this, for becoming more like Jesus Christ is the goal of every Christian. I believe that God loves everything about Himself, His absolute holiness, His unconditional love, His justice, mercy, forgiveness, etc. God cannot be other than who He is, and the absolute pinnacle of any form of existing must be to be like God, to experience being absolutely holy, loving, just, merciful and so forth.

God is also an autonomous being, He is a law unto Himself, He answers to no one but Himself. God's autonomy is one of His Divine attributes, that which is encompassed within His Sovereignty as God. In earlier videos, I proposed that the desire for  autonomy, like the desire for knowledge, perfection, etc, is one of the many seeds of the Divine that every human being has inherited because we are 'made in God's image', and that this desire for independence may be the reason for the Fall, rather that a result of the Fall. 

Therefore, if human beings are to have any chance at beginning the process of becoming like God, we must also have the opportunity to make choices, to be autonomous as He is autonomous. As Alvin Platinga points out, this would be impossible without the possibility of real free-will, of being able to choose evil over good.

Here, then, is one of the most difficult paradoxes of Christianity. When we exercise our autonomy, essentially becoming more like God, we have then committed a sin against God in demanding to rule our own lives independent of Him. This is the same paradox which Satan used to deceive Adam and Eve. In order to become more like God, knowing good and evil, they had to disobey God and eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

We witness this desire for independence in every child as it goes through stages of cognitive development, and, as Irenaeus points out, Adam and Eve were also as infants in Eden. We are given the freedom to choose and all of us have succumbed to this inherent desire for independence and chosen to rebel, and consequently, all have sinned, except for Jesus Christ who never crossed the line of demanding His will. 

We might also argue that if autonomy is one of God's infinite attributes, and we are made in His image, then seizing our autonomy was inevitable, even natural. But to realize our own autonomy we must rebel against a higher autonomy, and thus in rebelling against God we sin. Unlike our Creator, we have not used our autonomy as He has, for we are not perfect in holiness, love and justice. 

Rather, human beings, as undeveloped creatures, have used our autonomy for evil, to try and rule each other, to put self in the center, and the result has been wars; world wars, national wars, neighborhood wars, wars in marriage and relationships, and even wars within us as individuals as we become slaves to our autonomous egos. 

God has allowed us to create this situation so that at least some of us might recognize the evil we create with our autonomy, and through the Holy Spirit's conviction, come humbly to the cross of Christ, and surrender that autonomy under His Lordship. When we do this, we are then surrendering our wills to His will; we are saying, 'Lord, you gave me the opportunity to demand to make myself like you my way, but now I recognize that the only way is your way'. 

This takes us right back to the Garden of Eden. Eve was tempted by Satan to 'be like God'. Her sin was not in the desire to be like the Lord, but in rebelliously believing she could achieve this her way, rather than God's way. 

Driven by her desire to be like God, and her desire to enact her autonomy, she and Adam brought death into the world, for they consciously disobeyed our Creator. Now, through the blood of Christ, we can be reborn and begin the process of deification God's way.

2. Proposition Outlined

Foundational Criteria.

1. God is Love: A God whose fundamental character and being is love, and who can foresee the future, would not allow the atrocities of history unless it was necessary to fulfill a Divine plan which far outweighed the evil. Consider also, that God not only saw the atrocities which His creatures would perform, but the millions who would share an intimate relationship with Him forever. 

2. God desires that all are deified. The goal of creation is that all humanity are taken up into the life of God for eternal fellowship. Human beings must have a part in choosing to be with God or else the relationship is empty. In contrast to this, the traditional doctrine of predestination (Augustine, Luther, Calvin) means that no human ever makes any real choice to be like God, the 'chosen' are simply programmed to a predetermined set of actions. How can there ever be a real relationship with the Lord in this scenario? 

3. Autonomy is part of the nature of God. Human autonomy, although grounded in God’s image, can only be exercised in demanding our independence and this is in contradiction to God’s sovereignty, indeed it is the root of sin. God has chosen to love with His autonomy. Humans have chosen to sin and create every form of evil. To be born again and begin the transformation process into Christ-likeness, individuals must surrender their autonomy to God's autonomy and will.

4. John says that we love God because He first loved us. I propose that we cannot fully understand the love of God until we see our sin in light of God’s love. It is when we understand what we as humans have done with our autonomous power that we stand in awe of God who has chosen perfect love and holiness as expressions of His eternal power. This recognition becomes the basis of repentance and foundation of an eternal relationship of trust and love.

In summary

Without free will human beings are mere robots programmed to either obedience or disobedience. God could have programmed obedience and love, but would it be real? Would God be satisfied with creatures who offered pre-programmed obedience and love, would we? 

In this age of modern robotics we have the capabilities to create artificial intelligence and human-like robots capable of interaction. Such a machine can imitate love and affection as programmed, but could a person be satisfied with that kind of relationship?

There would have been no need for our universe if such a relationship had been satisfactory for God. He could have created millions of obedient robotic creatures in heaven to say 'yes Lord, I love you Lord'. But none of these creatures would ever be making conscious self-determined choices to be like God, to obey God or to love God. Such creatures would never be capable of freely obeying the first and greatest commandment, a commandment which echoes God's purpose in creation, to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, strength and minds.

By creating us in His image, God planted within us a seed of the Divine (Ecclesiastes 3:11), a desire to be like Him, to know as He knows, to experience as He experiences, to love as He loves. But within that image is also the desire for autonomy, the desire to make our own choices, just as He is autonomous. By gifting us freedom of will, and planting His image within us, He foresaw that we would demand our autonomy, demand to go our own way, for such is the nature of autonomy. 

He also foresaw that we would act out that autonomy on one another, bringing wars, hierarchies, slavery, and every atrocity, as our autonomy enslaved us to sin. We became slaves to the power of sin by trying to be gods without God. Humanity became caught in the great paradox, a desire to be like God, a desire to experience perfection, and a desire to rebel against the only One who is perfect.

But God provided a remedy, an opportunity to recognize our hopeless situation and begin again with a clean slate, this time in the knowledge that by ourselves we are doomed forever. Through His grace and revelation, God brings to the cross those who seek, where we see two undeniable realities. Firstly, a picture of sin in all its manifest evil, poured out upon the Son of God, an evil so deep that we humans murdered the One who gave us life. 

Secondly, we see the price of God's love, the price He paid in order for us to love and be loved. We cannot truly understand one picture without the other. It was, therefore, necessary for God to allow evil into the world. 

It is only when we recognize the evil that dwells within our hearts, the evil which manifests itself in pride, jealousy, hatred, etc that we begin to hate the self-centered ego we have created, that we are enslaved to, and come in humility and surrender our self-rule to His rule as Lord and Savior. At that moment we are re-born, born anew, new creations, and we begin the process of deification and purpose of creation.

Steve Copland