I'm switching gears with this article, and it's going to be completely different from anything I've written so far.
Back in March, I started reading the Bible. And back in March I pretty much stopped reading the Bible. It wasn't intentional. After finishing Genesis, I thought I'd take a few days off. Maybe read another book, so I could start crossing things off of my "reading list" which has continuously grown since high school but seen little progress.
Pile of Booksc1.staticflickr.com
So I started reading "Out Of The Silent Planet" by C.S. Lewis. It's fairly short, and written very well… But I couldn't get invested in the story. Which is an odd thing to say. Lewis is a great writer. There's one passage where he is describing the inner workings of a spaceship, and this concept would be hard to describe while visual pointing to each component and explaining it to someone in person. Yet on page, he effortlessly makes sense of this complicated contraption.
C.S. Lewis' "Out Of The Silent Planet"c1.staticflickr.com
But the story itself didn't pull me in. So I slowly tackled the book; so much to the point that seven months later, and I'm only about 50 pages in. I can't seem to find the willpower to pick it back up.
Thus, returning to the Bible, met a similar date, where seven months later and I've forgotten to continue with Exodus. When I started reading the Bible, I was listening to a podcast "Exploring My Strange Bible" by Tim Mackie to help explain things and do a deeper dive into the material. Out of the blue, I decided to listen to it yesterday and it made me focus on something that I have always had a hard time accepting.
Evil in the world is mostly seen as proof that there is no God. People seem to exclaim that "If there was a God, why is there so much suffering?;" or "how can God let wars and famine proceed like this?"
I don't see how evil in the world acts in opposition to God's existence. How would there be any good without evil? It would all be the same thing. Night and day complement each other; without night, it would not be day, because there'd be nothing to distinguish it. It would just be light. Good and evil works in the same manner, I would argue.
Free Will c1.staticflickr.com
But the real issue I have with this notion is the idea of free will. We have free will to choose anything and everything in our lives (within reason of what we can or cannot control). In a world of free will, we have the option and capacity to do evil things. The evil we comment on, for the most part, is that of human contribution. So the reality of evil falls under the supervision of free will.
God created us and offered us the chance for free will. So evil does not, therefore, negate or deny His existence. I think using the presence of evil to justify claims against God is ignorant.
The flip side of that is that if God is all knowing and powerful; how could He allow such evils to occur and be commonplace? To ask for no evil asks for no free will. You can't have both ways.
Most of us only pray when we are in need. God only becomes relevant when we need help or guidance. And when answers don't appear according to how we see fit, we assume He isn't listening or really isn't even there at all. That's not only ignorant but also arrogant.
He is all knowing, and for us to assume we know anything past our own lives is a futile deposition. Freedom of will means that God cannot interfere with the evils of the world, because then it means we are not free of any will. The Bible is filled with stories of God choosing people to do His bidding; no one is ever forced, they are shown and taught by man, and thus have the choice to follow or ignore.
I'm not a philosopher, and I'm not looking to claim that my thoughts are the answer to what hundreds of years of speculation from various philosophers have not been able to adequately explain. But it is my opinion, and I have the freedom of will to decide that this is the answer that is right for me.
I don't know if I'll write more theology based articles, but listening to Tim Mackie's Podcast moved me to write this.
A visual depiction of God
c1.staticflickr.com
