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Anyone who pays attention to the world around them knows that there are certain constants out there. For example, the sun rising and setting is a constant. Spring turns to summer turns to fall turns to winter is another constant. These constants present themselves everywhere we look – nature, logic, science, mathematics, even the movies. Boy meets girl, girl see another boy, boy goes home crying. Inevitable. But as often as you see a young boy crying over a young girl there are some other constants that aren’t as funny (and I’m not saying that a boy crying over a girl is funny). Not too long ago a massive hurricane struck the gulf coast and wiped out most of the state of
In a conversation between two high school friends[1] over coffee, the topic of injustice, evil, suffering and religion are all placed on the table.
The Conversation
[After all the small talk] Omar: Hey, so what movie did you end up renting?
Ethan: I picked out an old one – The Shawshank Redemption. Yeah, Justin said it was one of the best movies ever.
Omar: Why is that?
Ethan: I don’t know. He just said “Yeah, it’s one of the best movies ever”. Well he said it was about a guy who was framed and was sent to jail. Something about an evil man following this guy’s wife home after work one day and he rapes and kills her. And some the murderer gets away and they pin it on the wife’s husband. I don’t know. I’ll take his word for it, it looks alright.
Omar: Typical. That’s so like this world. I mean, of course the man gets framed! How else is the movie, or the world for that matter, supposed to go? Like yesterday, I was reading about some trial that got dismissed because of insufficient evidence. The guy killed 7 people with a knife…how sufficient do they need? And what’s even stupider was that this guy was known to be a Christian.
Ethan: Well saying something is awfully easy. Just because he said he was a Christian doesn’t really mean that he was one.
Omar: Aren’t Christians supposed to do the opposite? Don’t they teach you to love and forgive people in church and NOT to kill people? Isn’t that against some kind of commandment you guys have?
Ethan: Yeah, it’s against one of the Ten Commandments. And yes they do teach us to love and forgive people. But man you can’t blame the church or God for what this guy did. I mean if I went out and robbed Smoothie King of all their smoothies it doesn’t mean that the church or God is to blame.
Omar: Of course God is to blame! I mean, if he’s real at all and he supposedly is “in control” of everything, then isn’t this all part of his plan or something? What kind of God would make one of his “people” to go out and do something like this huh?
Ethan: I don’t think God makes people do stuff. I think people are ultimately responsible for their own actions. It wouldn’t make any sense for God to make people do stuff.
Omar: Why not? Isn’t he God and all?
Ethan: Well yeah he’s God and all but I don’t think it’s like that. I think God gives everyone a free choice to do whatever they want even if it goes contrary to his own will. Like, we’re all able to do whatever we want because we have the choice to do whatever we want. For example, I know that the Bible tells me not to kill people right? But if I really wanted to, I could go grab a gun and shoot someone. I mean that’s my choice right? I’d get caught and there’d be punishments and junk and that would stink but I still have that choice to kill someone.
Omar: Then why doesn’t God just not allow people to do bad things?
Ethan: Uhh…I don’t know if he can do that.
Omar: Why not?
Ethan: It just wouldn’t make any sense for him to do that. I mean, it’d be like God creating a whole bunch of robots who does whatever God says. If God dictated everything that we did, then we’d lose our free will.
Omar: Well it would get rid of all the evil in this world. What about if God just said we can’t do bad stuff…we can do everything else but just no bad stuff. So we could have free will and no evil would occur because people couldn’t go off and punch other people in the face. Why can’t God do that?
Ethan: First off, I know you wouldn’t want to be told what you can or cannot do right?
Omar: Of course not.
Ethan: Well it’s sort of like that. It violates are “human rights”. Like I said before, if God created us to do only what he wanted, then there would be no free will. I think the reason why free will is so important is because God wants us to worship him freely. Because I think God could create us in a way where we just worship him and that’s all we do. Actually, I think God can create us just to worship him and put it in our minds that it was the good thing to do so while we’re worshipping him we feel like it is what we’re suppose to do. In that case, it would have changed the history of the universe. I mean, there would be no Holocaust, no Stalin, no
Omar: So you’re saying that God allows people the choice of doing whatever he wants and hopes that they’ll some day love and follow him? Isn’t that kind of risky? It’s like God is playing this huge chance game with us humans. I don’t even understand how God hopes for something to happen. I mean, he’s God right? Why does God need to hope for something to happen? It is as if his hands are tied and he’s just sitting around waiting for people to make the right choice.
Ethan: He’s not sitting around and waiting. Alright, let me try to explain what I said earlier. God gave us free choice right?
Omar: Ok, go on.
Ethan: And you got the whole can’t take away free will thing because of robots and stuff right?
Omar: Yeah.
Ethan: Then if that is the case, each one of us has the capacity to do whatever we want. For example, if I really wanted to I could become the worst person in the world. I can begin to hate everybody and build up this animosity towards God and start collecting guns and nuclear weapons and stuff. After that I would start scheming as to how I can make as many people miserable as I can. Right? It’s like me saying that I can become the next world terrorist. I might not necessarily have the means to do it because I’m poor but I have that choice to try to become that. Likewise, I have the same choice to become the best person I can think of. I can start volunteering my time at orphanages, homeless shelters and devote my entire life to making the lives of others better. In that sense, I can become someone like Mother Theresa. So what I’m saying is that in me and in everyone here on earth, we have the “free will” or the capability to become the best or the worst person in the world. And God gives us this choice to do so.
So when we see people on the news at night and we hear these stories about who shot who, it is because they have this choice. They could have been the next great humanitarian but they chose not to go that route. And that’s why there’s all this suffering going on in the world, because people chose to do it, not because God made them do it.
Omar: Fine, I’ll admit that there are bad people that cause a lot of suffering in this world, but that still doesn’t explain hurricanes wiping people out and volcanoes blowing up and killing millions of people. People do stuff to other people and that causes a consequence I’ll give you that. And people suffer because of somebody else but in natural disasters no person is involved in it. Nobody could have decided that they didn’t want to be swept up by a huge hurricane or blown up by meteors. And if you say that God is the creator of everything then isn’t God responsible for killing all these people. He can easily stop these things from happening can’t he?
Ethan: Sure God can stop these things from happening.
Omar: Then why doesn’t he? Is he not all-powerful?
Ethan: Of course he’s all powerful. I think God allows stuff like tornados, hurricanes, and all those natural disasters to happen because he’s trying to get people to trust him. Because I don’t think God does stuff randomly. There’s got to be some kind of purpose to what God does.
Omar: That makes no sense. Why would God want to build trust in people by letting these things happen to us? I wouldn’t trust you more if you stabbed me in the eye. So why does God have to physically punish me for something I didn’t do in order to make me trust him more. See…it makes no sense. And what’s even worse is that there were innocent people in all of these natural disasters. You have normal people, I’d even have to say “godly” people, that continue to be good people and still they get whooped by this stuff. If anything, God seems like a cruel guy in the sky that doesn’t want people to trust him. I don’t know how you can get someone to trust them by allowing them to feel pain and suffering. It would be like if a dad randomly slapping their kid and saying “it’s because I want you to trust me”.
Ethan: God doesn’t do stuff randomly. Yeah, if a dad slapped their kid randomly and frequently, then I’m calling the cops. But think of it like this: a dad and their kid are learning to ride a bike. The dad could hold on to the bike the entire time and for the rest of the kid’s life right? But if the dad did that then the kid would never learn how to ride the bike. He’s got to let go and see if the kid can ride the bike on their own (the free will stuff). But sooner or later the kid is going to fall down. Why? Because they’re just starting off. And it’s not because the dad came up behind the kid and pushed him. So the dad allowed the kid to fall. God is sort of like the dad in this story. He doesn’t jump out of the clouds and randomly put a beating on us, but he does let us feel pain some times. And when the kid does fall off the bike the dad runs to pick up the kid and clean him off. I don’t think the dad gets angry at the kid for falling. You know what I mean?
Omar: But that still doesn’t answer my question about natural disasters. How can we trust God if he kills us? How can we trust him if it seems like what he’s doing is completely random?
Ethan: He’s not random. There’s a purpose why God does what he does.
Omar: Then what is it?
Ethan: Man, I don’t know…I just know that God is trying to get us to believe in him and to trust him. I think that some things you can’t really explain all too well.
Omar: Well then God can’t be trusted. It seems like with all this suffering in this world and not just bad people killing bad people, but bad people killing innocent good people, then I have to question the realness of God. You have to be able to answer why do something right? Like you said, God’s not random in what he’s doing…
Ethan: Well you can’t confuse my ignorance for God’s insufficiency. And plus, we are his creations…why does God, the creator, have to give us nobodys an answer anyways? There’s a passage in the Bible somewhere that says, “Who is the clay to say to the potter ‘why are you doing this?’” or something like that. It’s saying who are we to question why God does what he does. And if he did have to answer to us, wouldn’t that make him lower than us because he has to answer to us?
And I think that even if God did come down and give us an answer, we wouldn’t be able to understand him anyways! I mean, the God who created the heavens and the earth and has kept it into being since the beginning of time trying to explain to us why certain things happen. It’s like a dad trying to explain to his 2-month old astrophysics or something.
Omar: I just don’t understand how you can trust a God like that though. If you say that this God does create everything, then that means that he is the one responsible for all of this. He’s the one who created sin in the first place. If God, as you said, is the author and creator of everything, then he is the creator of evil, and not just the creator of everything but the creator of time. So that means that God not only created evil, but created evil from the very beginning.
Ethan: God is the creator of everything - that is true. But I think you’re misreading what ‘evil’ really means. You think evil as something that goes counter to good. It is not like on one side you have 5 good apples and on the other side you have 5 evil apples. I don’t think it’s like that. Evil is the lack of good. For example, I go out one day to the supermarket to get my mother some cheese. Why? Because she loves cheese. Ok…when I get to the store I see a friend from a distance and they look like they’re buying something. Out of the corner of my eye I see a strange man whip out a gun and turns on my friend. Nobody else sees this happening but me apparently so I’m the only one who can act. I see the situation and I assess the situation. But I’m tired so I just pay for my stuff and go home. In that scenario, am I evil?
Omar: Of course you are! I kind of want to punch you now just for telling it.
Ethan: Yeah…well I’m evil because I lacked something. I lacked compassion right? Evil isn’t so much something that counteracts good so much as it is a lack of good. And I think evil has to work in relationship with good.
Omar: What do you mean?
Ethan: Say for instance I pick put on a good shoe, tie up my good laces, stand up on my good legs, and give you a good kick in your good face…I’m going to say that’s going to end really bad for the both of us. Well it’s wrong because in this scenario there was something was missing – namely my misuse of good things. I think that is how evil is to be looked at.
So God gives us the choice to freely do what we will because he has created us that way. And because we have the free choice to do what we will with it, we have the power to choose to do good but also the power to do evil. And this evil isn’t something that God made and threw out there and somehow we grabbed hold of it. But evil was the missing of something good. I mean, I know that I don’t have the answers to this, but you have to address the issue of evil one way or another. Either there is a God and he has a purpose that somehow addresses the problem of evil or there isn’t a God and you have to find some explanation for it. Because I agree with you, there is evil in this world and people do suffer unjustly but you do have to figure out where you stand. And with a theodicy that explains evil gives me a lot more confidence than one that doesn’t.
Omar: Yeah, I still don’t know but this conversation has been good though. But I have one more question though…
Ethan: What is it?
Omar: So does God predestined people to sin and to be evil? Like, is this evil guy in Shawshank Redemption predestined by God to kill, rape, and frame another person?
Ethan: Fine! We’ll watch Cinderella Man!!!
[1] Like most high schoolers, Omar and Ethan have their own understanding of how things work. You will see that Ethan (the “Christian”), like most of the Christians today, has trouble expressing his ideas to his non-believing friend. He responds with whatever he has been taught in the past but like in most cases, there is still room for improvement. Omar is the passionate, fiery friend that keeps coming up with all these doubts. I would say most of his doubts are legitimate because he proves to be our every-day skeptic.
