Complete series of Self Helps :
2. [SELF HELP] Why God Allows Evil to Exist and Why Bad Things Happen to Good People
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(MUST-READ ESSAY!)
INTRODUCTION
There is a surprising amount of confusion among the religious, even among
clerics and scholars, when it comes to understanding why evil exists and why
God stands aside when so much suffering happens throughout the world. I’ve
heard nothing but lame excuses and naive, illogical reasoning from them when
they try to justify the existence of evil.
Most of us express wonder when we see some horrible catastrophe happen, or
when we see evil individuals, companies and institutions wield so much power.
Some people even go so far as to blame God for the evil things that exist in
this world, since if God had desired, He could have prevented
such things from existing or happening in the first place. Others
take this even further, using the existence of evil as proof of God’s
non-existence. How can a good and supposedly all-powerful God stand by while so
much evil happens? Where is our God?
I cannot follow a self-contradictory, unpredictable and illogical God,
which is what God is as taught by many teachers of religion. Since I do not fit
the criteria for becoming an atheist (being intelligent enough to reject the
incoherent religion taught by my parents and teachers, but not intelligent
enough to fix these incoherences and find my own path to God), what I have done
throughout my life is to go back to Scripture and re-invent God based on its
teachings, getting rid of all the cultural baggage that has entered into common
religious belief to go back to the focus of all religion: The Understanding and Worship of God.
There are good, perfectly logical explanations for these things, deep
explanations that elucidate the purpose of this universe, our place in it, and
our relationship with God, and through this give us perfectly good reasons for
the existence of evil.
Why Evil Exists
What is the point of the existence of this world anyway? Many mistakenly
think that the purpose of this world is to be a permanent residence where
people judge whether God exists or not. They think that they can gauge God’s
“level” of existence by the things that happen around them, so that given the
right set of events, they will decide He is alive and active, and given others,
they will decide He doesn’t exist, because if He existed, the world wouldn’t be
the way it is.
A friend said that he once went on a trip abroad, and before he left, he
asked God to protect three things that were most important to him in his life.
During his trip, he lost all three, which included the dying of loved ones, and
this made him decide that God doesn’t exist. He is a Buddhist now.
The above case is an example of earth-centric thinking, that considers this
world a goal in itself. This is the core mistake that leads to millions of
people misunderstanding, even disliking, God. That is a mistake because this
world is nothing besides a testing hall where humans can freely choose to do as
they like, to prove their worthiness of God’s approval or wrath. This world is
not meant to be a permanent residence.
Most religions teach that an end of the world is coming. Regardless of
religion, the universe is on track to become a dark, lifeless mass as the stars
and galaxies die out. Everything is going to end, and what remains is the
record of our deeds, kept by God. Even if we manage to create the greatest
empire on earth, or write the most wonderful novel, none of our accomplishments
will last.
One day the universe will shut down as if it never existed, and on that day
what significance can our achievements have? This world is not meant as a
permanent home of peace, but as a test. And a test requires that the possibility of failure should exist. If all humans
acted according to God’s wishes, evil would not exist. But since God has given
humans the freedom to disobey Him, they have the ability to do evil.
God is good, and evil is the absence of goodness, the same way that
darkness is the absence of light. If God is Light, we cannot blame Him for the
darkness we encounter when we turn away from Him, distance ourselves from Him,
and act against His wishes.
Why didn’t God make the universe a place of wholesome goodness lacking in
the possibility for evil? Because if evil could not exist, humans wouldn’t truly
be free beings.
To be free, humans require the freedom to act against God along with the
freedom to act for His sake. God wants to give humans perfect freedom to act
and grow, so that they can be the best or the worst they want to be. Since
humans have the freedom to act against God, and since to act against God is to
create evil, humans have been given the freedom to create evil.
God did not make this world a perfect place because that is not its
purpose. Imagine if you were a maker of creatures. If the creatures you made
were controlled by their nature to do exactly what you put in them to do, they
could never be truly your friends. They would be subservient robot-like
machines that cannot help doing whatever you put in them to do.
But imagine if one day you wanted something more. You
wanted to make creatures that could truly be your friends. The only way to have
a true friend is to create a creature that can choose whether to be your friend
or not. And so, you make creatures with free will, who can act according to
whatever they wish, rather than according to your programming. Some of these
creatures will choose to be your friends, others will ignore you, others will
choose to be your enemies. They may fight among themselves, doing much evil to
one another, and blaming you, their creator, for the evil they do, when in
truth they should blame themselves, for they are the ones choosing to act the
way they do. They have the freedom to be good, and many of them choose to be
good, but some of them choose to be evil instead.
The only thing we can blame God for is His creating us and giving us the
freedom to be evil. This is a pointless blame. This is our reality and our fate, we cannot escape it. We have
been thrown into this game regardless of our wishes, a game that forces us to
choose to be either good or evil. We can debate the ethics of forcing people to
choose between good and evil. But at the end of the day, we are forced to play
this game. There is no dropping out.
Our Creator has done this to us, possibly against our will, but we cannot get hung up over
this fact, because our future holds something very important: Either eternal
reward, or eternal punishment. Blaming God will not help our future. It may
make us feel better now to hate God as so many do, but by making us think badly
of God, this will reduce our chances of future success. The future is coming
whether we want it to or not, and we have the power to make it a good or a bad
future.
Not all evil is done by humans. Droughts, floods and other natural
disasters can cause much evil and suffering, and we can lose loved ones through
car accidents and illnesses. Why doesn’t God prevent these things from
happening if He loves us? Because, in order for the testing hall that is this
world to be a true and consistent place of testing, God shouldn’t interfere
with the functioning of nature. The laws of nature should
behave in such a way that makes sense even without reference to God. If we were
as intelligent as we are, and yet we saw that nothing bad ever happened on
earth, no car accidents, no illnesses, nothing, that everyone died in old age
of natural causes, then this would be undeniable evidence of the existence of a
higher power that protects humans.
God wants us to have the possibility of being atheists. It is one of God’s
self-imposed rules that it should be impossible to directly detect His
existence. And that requires that the functioning of this world should make
perfect sense according to predictable scientific laws.
God wants us to believe in Him without seeing Him or knowing that He truly
exists, because if it were possible to prove His existence, it would reduce our
freedom to act against Him. God wants our universe to seem to make perfect
sense without any necessity for His existence. This
way we are given the freedom to discover Him and His Scriptures, and through
our knowledge and conscience, we gain the ability to either follow His way or
disbelieve in Him. Once we are given this knowledge, there is no turning away
from the choice between good and evil.
God wants our test to be a perfect test, in which we have perfect freedom
to be good or evil. This would allow us to take credit for our actions. If
God’s existence were proven, we’d be turned into slaves who cannot help but do
as He says. We’d become merchants who act in our best interests by following
God’s commandments. This is not what God wants. God wants us to be honored
creatures who befriend Him not because we are forced to, but because we choose
to. This is what gives worth to our friendship.
There is little honor in an employee acting according to his or her boss’s
wishes, this is the expected behavior. While even this amount of obedience to a
boss justifies reward, so that even if we had proof of God’s existence, we
could still be rewarded for obeying Him, God wants to take us beyond this boss-employee relationship. He wants
to raise us to the status of honored friends, who act out of love and
friendship, and out of our own efforts toward remembrance of God,
rather than acting out of practical compulsion.
God wants us to be the servant who continues to love and serve his master,
even though the master goes away for years, decades. What incredible honor and
reward can await such a servant who faithfully loves and serves his absent
master for 50 or 60 years, until he dies, even though the master never returns?
God, by creating the possibility for the existence of true friendship
between Himself and the humans He created, had to also create the possibility
for the existence of true enmity between Himself and them. He wanted friends,
but He knew that they couldn’t truly be called friends unless they had the
option to be His enemies.
The evil done by humans on Earth is a doing of humans when they act against
God, it is not a doing of God, therefore humans should be blamed, not God. And
the evil done by nature is nature’s own doing, caused by the rules of physics,
and God does not want to interfere with it because constant interference with
nature would cause His existence to become apparent. It is necessary for
disasters and accidents to be possible, as these prove to us the validity of
nature’s rules, and allows the atheist the freedom to use these to prove that
God doesn’t exist.
God and Nature shall always be apart, or seem to be apart, so that each one
appears to function without the other. This is necessary, as this is what
enables humans the freedom to choose between faith and disbelief, between good
and evil. The world needs to make perfect, logical sense without having to
refer to God in our thinking. It should be possible for us to believe that the
world functions on its own without anything supernatural existing, this is what
gives us the freedom to believe and disbelieve in God.
We need
to be able to believe that the Master is absent. This is when the true nature of the servant comes through. Bad servants
start to misbehave as soon as the Master looks away, and if the Master is away
long enough, they entirely give up serving Him. They will start to loot His
property and defile His name. But the good and honorable servant, even as he
sees all of this happen, continues to have love and loyalty toward his Master.
It makes no difference to him even if the Master never comes back. He keeps the
remembrance of his Master in his heart, and he admonishes and encourages
himself to continue to be the best servant he can be.
The world, the way it is, gives us the perfect opportunity to be this
honorable and admirable servant. If evil did not exist, and if bad things did
not happen, then there would have been no way for such servants of God to
exist. We’d instead all be lowly and menial servants who never had a chance to
disobey, and thus never had a chance to prove our loyalty toward God.
A world without evil and disaster would be a dysfunctional testing hall that cannot
differentiate between the best and the worst of us. Without evil and disaster,
God’s existence would be so clearly visible to us that most of us would cower
in front of Him. A few people might be found who are daring enough to disobey
God even in such circumstances, but the majority of people would kneel before
God as they would before a great emperor, regardless of whether they had any
loyalty toward Him.
A world that seems to be ruled by the cold, harsh laws of nature, and that
completely hides the existence of God from our eyes, gives us the perfect
opportunity to prove our loyalty to God. This world, with all of its problems,
is the perfect testing hall that, because of the
problems it has.
