Problem of Evil 2

6.2 God's Power and Goodness
Various thinkers have addressed the problem of evil by adjusting either their view of God's power or God's goodness. For example, Jewish thinkers like Harold Kushner and Walter Kaufmann preferred to think of God as willing but unable to prevent the Holocaust. God is good, but just not powerful enough to eliminate such evils from the world.

Similarly, process theology sees God evolving and developing along with the world. On the views of these individuals, God might very well get to the point some day when He can put a final end to suffering and pain. But God is not quite there yet.

Most people who believe in God, however, are not likely to question God's power. The notion of God as powerful seems to be one of the most fundamental understandings of what a god is in the first place. More often than not, explanations for the problem of evil address the question of God's goodness rather than God's omnipotence.

In his book, Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche boasted,

*I recognized early in life that if I were to give God credit for the good things that happen in the world, I would also have to give him the blame for the bad things as well.*

Nietzsche of course did not believe in the existence of God. He is known especially for the statement "God is dead; we have killed him." <1>

Yet his observation must surely be correct in the end. If Christians believe that God created the world out of nothing, from scratch, then we believe that God ultimately created at least the possibility of evil. God is the ultimate, though not necessarily the direct, cause of everything that happens in this universe, including evil. God created a universe where such things can and do happen. If God were entirely good, why would He do so?

Further, Christians believe that God is sovereign, king, over the creation. God does not have to fight against evil, as in some dualistic systems with two supreme beings, one good and one evil. Christianity is not like Zoroastrianism, where the good being Ahura Mazda struggles eternally with the evil being Ahriman. Yet God does not prevent evil from happening, despite the fact that God is capable of doing so.

However, despite the fact that Christians believe God created the possibility of evil, we find different approaches to how evil came about in the world. On the one end of the spectrum are certain extreme forms of Calvinism that believe God directly orchestrates all the evil of the universe. In its most extreme form, hyper-Calvinism would see God directing Satan to defy Him and making the first human, Adam, to sin, with the result that all other humans stand condemned before God as well. In His great "mercy," however, God saves a few of those He conspired to damn in the first place.

Calvinism is a branch of Christianity that takes its name from John Calvin (1500's). Calvin himself did not clearly teach that God had orchestrated the "fall" of Satan or the original sin of the first human, Adam. Rather, Calvin believed that it was possible that Adam might not have sinned against God as he did. But after Adam sinned, all humans subsequently have been born into the world "totally depraved," unable to do any good at all in their own power. <2>

However, in the most extreme form of Calvinism, God has determined on a micro-level everything that happens and has happened in the universe, as in Islam. Accordingly, no real claim is given that God loves anyone but those toward whom He shows favor. At the same time, "good" might be defined as whatever God does. Anything God does is good because that is the definition of good. <3> If God causes one of His favored ones to die of painful cancer, then that is good because God has done it.

This approach to God's "goodness" seems to make little sense of the idea of good or love. The normal understanding of love involves genuine desire for the benefit of the beloved. But in these forms of Calvinism, God makes people do things that anger Him and then shows His "goodness" by punishing and destroying them. Others He makes do things that anger Him and then He shows His great love when He punishes Christ instead of them.

Whatever this god is, it is not the God of Jesus or the bulk of the New Testament. <4> Most Christian thinkers would make a distinction on some level between God's directive will and God's permissive will. God's directive will relates to things that God directly causes. God's permissive will, on the other hand, relates to things that God does not stop, things that God allows to take place.

The hyper-Calvinist perspective makes everything a function of God's directive will. It seems impossible to consider such a god to be good in any meaningful sense of the word. Most other forms of Christianity, however, including mainstream Calvinism, have some place in their system for God's permissive will. They would not make God directly responsible for evil in a directive sense (cf. James 1:13-14). Rather, they would try to explain why God allows evil to take place despite His goodness.

<1> Thus Spake Zarathustra, *. This statement is usually quoted out of context. In the context of this novel, a madman says this to a group of individuals celebrating the fact that God was no longer around to judge them. The madman tries unsuccessfully to tell them that a world where people do not believe in God, chaos will ensue. In some respects, Nietzsche was thus a prophet of the twentieth century with its Holocaust and other atrocities.

<2> Calvin himself did not originate this idea. "Total depravity" is rather a doctrine that originated with Augustine in the early 400's. Both Calvin and Augustine of course believed that they found this idea in the writings of Paul in the New Testament.

<3> This form of statement is called a tautology, where the statement is true by definition and, thus, does not really say anything.

<4> Only one chapter of the New Testament comes anywhere close to sounding like this perspective. That is Romans 9, where Paul gives a theoretical argument that stands in significant tension with his actual missionary practices. See chapter * for further discussion of predestination versus free will.