Some "Evil" Thoughts

I just got done commenting on a post at one of our favorite blogs, Beyond the Firmament. The post is titled The Problem of Evil. This is a tough topic for Christians and outsiders to Christianity to wrestle with. I definitely recommend reading Gordon's post. Here's some further thoughts on the subject from myself:

Philosophical debate about "the problem of evil" often proceeds with the deck stacked beforehand. We accept the assumption that there is nothing worse than physical pain, no possible result of an event worse than death.

But most cultures throughout history (including the cultures that gave us the Bible), have believed there are plenty of things worse than pain or death.

Our misunderstanding is commonly reflected in our Western understanding of the cross. How many Good Friday services have you been to that described in gruesome detail just how painful the crucifixion was, telling us how he had to push himself up with his feet to breathe, how much flesh was torn because of the cat of nine-tails, etc? Or how about Mel Gibson's passion movie? Talk about graphic violence.

Certainly Christ's death was extraordinarily painful. But I challenge you to find one statement in the New Testament that points out or emphasizes how excruciatingly painful his death was. You won't find one.

On the other hand, you will find statements all over the place about how Jesus was humbled/humiliated in his death. This is because Jesus' choice of humility over honor is much more significant to the Bible's original readers than his choice of pain over comfort. To them there are plenty of things worse than physical pain.

Furthermore, I have been reading straight through the Bible and am in the middle of Kings. And I have not found one tiny hint of concern for the afterlife or trembling fear of death that we in Western culture are obsessed with. We think of death as the worst possible result of life, but to the ancient Israelites, there were plenty of things more important than life's end, such as concern for your descendants. I think they were smarter than us, because eventually death comes for us all, no matter if it is soon or far off!

This leads to some problems for people who rely heavily on the certainty that there can't be a God because of evil in the world. Here's a typical YouTube from an atheist who shows pictures of starving children in Africa and challenges us to tell those kids there's a God.


Apparently these kids would have been better off never being born???? Chances are the kids already believe in God, so I don't have to tell them there is one. But I challenge an atheist like this one to go relate to those starving kids what is said in his/her video: If there was a just God, he would not have created you, because your life would be better off never happening. I'll go out on a limb and say the kids disagree.

Obviously, people suffering as a result of the unfair dealings of men is a tragedy that the church should be ashamed of not doing enough about, as that atheist rightly points out. But to argue that the presence of pain and death proves there is no God is to make two mistakes:

1. It devalues the lives of these starving children, because it diminishes the value of the very gift of life, telling starving kids that if there were any justice in the world they wouldn't have been born.

2. It wrongly imposes our attitude about what ultimately matters most on the majority of cultures in the world who didn't think like us at all. It's a philosophical arrogance to say that we know what's really bad and good compared to non-Western peoples.

Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of evil. That discussion is still a good conversation to have. But hopefully this post illustrates some problems with the debate as it's usually carried out.

The moral of the story? Leave the God-proving to the experts: