Problem of Evil Good, Evil, Essay

If all falls are "lucky," then we truly live in the best of all possible worlds.

While we may avoid accusations of Candidean naivete by announcing that "God" must not exist, this all-or-nothing stance lacks rigor. The persistence of evil is incompatible with certain ideas of God, but in itself this only indicates that our ideas are imperfectly refined. At its best, this approach deepens our definitions of the divine and how it interacts with both our logical systems and our lives.

Perhaps, for example, God is perfectly benevolent but has voluntarily accepted constraints on divine omnipotence in order to express this perfect love in a more sophisticated way -- we could call one such constraint "free will" and assign it responsibility for various forms of evil. Or perhaps God's omnipotence, extent, and/or benevolence, while profound, are still approaching perfection, in which case evil reveals the as-yet-unfinished process of refining human nature, creation, or both. Or perhaps God transcends human reasoning and so apparent contradictions like the existence of what we would consider evil ultimately have no bearing at all on divine nature.

In any event, all of these hypothetical approaches to the problem proceed through investigating what might have otherwise been nebulous conceptions of the divine, evil, or both. At least in a Christian context, the human condition reflects both the reality of evil and the ability to discriminate between it and its absence. In any event, suffering comes all too easily to us, but the more closely we can interrogate it and our anthropological relationship to it, perhaps the more clearly we can conceive of a God who may or may not exist…in relation to it.