Before we start, let’s define exactly what is the problem that we have with evil. Our problem is that evil exists and this contradicts Christianity’s notions of an all powerful God. You will hear the argument something like this: there are three characteristics of the Christian God. He is all-knowing (Omniscient), He is all-powerful (Omnipotent), and is all-good (Morally Perfect). Though straightforward, the problem lies in the meshing of these three characteristics. A philosopher might tell you that all of these characteristics can’t be true at the same time. The complicated words for that is the phrase ‘mutually exclusive’. All three of those characteristics cannot all be true at the same time – two of them could be true, or one of them true, but not all of them.

            Why is that? Well, if God is all-knowing, he would know how to stop evil from coming into this world. Since evil indeed exists, He must either not be all-knowing or He must not be powerful enough to stop it (not Omnipotent). Already our notion of evil and the Christian God contradict. Well, that seemed too simple. What if we go ahead and assume that God was all powerful? Well, in that case He would prevent evil from existing. But since it does, He must either not be all-powerful or He must not be all-good (Morally Perfect) and want evil to exist. But let’s just assume that God is Morally Perfect. If He is Morally Perfect, He would want to stop evil from existing. Since evil most assuredly exists, He either must not be all-good or He must not know how to stop it. And we are back where we started from. Do you see the problem? If all three of the properties are true, then there is a contradiction. When there are contradictions, something is wrong or doesn’t make sense. The main thrust of many college philosophy professors is that since there is a contradiction, the concept of God is wrong and doesn’t make sense.

            It seems like a nice and tidy argument doesn’t it? It seems almost too good to be true, right? Indeed it is. Let us figure out why. The first step though is to confirm our foundation – our premises for discussion. Any living, breathing human in their right mind will agree that evil exists in this universe. As with anything, some will deny this. However, it meshes with common sense and observations of our everyday world to know that evil exists. Merely ask a Holocaust survivor. Ask someone who was in a Japanese Internment camp. Ask someone who lived during the crusades. During slavery. During the many sad times in human history. We all generally know what evil is when we see it.

Having determined that evil does exist in the first place, what we shall see in the following arguments is that upon deeper examination, the existence of evil does not contradict either God’s knowledge, His omnipotence, or His goodness. In fact we find it does the exact opposite. But before I get ahead of myself, let’s start at the beginning.

What exactly is evil and what is the cause of evil? To answer this question we must first realize where we are arguing from. The ‘Problem of Evil’ is a question that probes the internal consistency of the belief of Christianity about God. It is a question that says, “Well, Christianity says this, this and this. However, those things are contradictory and do not make sense. Therefore Christianity – and the Christian God – must not be correct.” In response to this question we will show that the beliefs of Christianity do make sense with themselves and are internally consistent. So in determining what evil is and what it is caused by, we are required to follow the Christian interpretation. Let us then go to the Word of God – the Bible. I John 3:4 says that “Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.” Psalm 18:30 says that “As for God, his way is perfect; the word of the Lord is flawless.” (NIV) Additionally, Psalm 19:7 explains that “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making the wise simple.” What is it that all these verses saying? To summarize, it says that sin, or evil (1 John is making a statement saying that sin and evil are the same thing), is disobeying God’s law. What do the verses say about God’s law? It says that God’s word is perfect or perfection. Sin or evil then is the act of missing the mark, missing the target, or not reaching that perfection which is God’s law. Sin is the act of missing perfection. We also see in Mark 10:18 that the only one who is good is God, and James 1:17 says that every ‘good and perfect gift is from above’. This means that everything that is good is God. Therefore everything that is not good (or evil) is not God. Evil is the exact opposite of what God is.

We have answered our first question of what evil is. That leaves us with the question of what is the cause of evil. Is it God? Is it something else? Did God create evil? Well let us ponder that. Our first conclusion is that God could not have created evil. Why is that? It is because evil is not something that can be created. In fact, it is not a ‘thing’ at all. What do I mean? I’d make the analogy like this: evil has similar properties to darkness. There is no such ‘thing’ as darkness. Darkness is merely the absence of light. A shadow is the same thing: it is your body blocking light that is traveling towards it. You can’t pick up a shadow and put it into a box. You can’t pick up darkness and put it in your backpack. In this sense it is not a thing – it is the absence of another thing. Referring back to sin then, we see that in the same way sin, or evil, is an absence of good. It is missing the target, missing bulls-eye, missing perfect. Sin, or evil, is the act of choosing something other than God. Evil then, isn’t something that can be created. It is a choice. It is an act of the will.

Back in the beginning – according to Christianity – God did indeed make us perfect. Since God is all that is perfection, He gave us the ability to choose Him, to choose perfection. But he also gave us the ability, the potential to not choose Him (i.e. choose evil). In other words God gave us the gift of free will.  

Evil then was not brought into this world by God - God is good so God can’t create evil. However, He gave us the ability to choose Him or not. We all know the story of Adam and Eve – they sinned and fell short of the glory of God. They committed evil – they chose something that was not God. And we as humans have been doing this ever since. We as humans, in making the decision of not choosing Him, chose evil and brought it into existence – we are the source of the evil, not God. (As a side note, a more accurate statement would be that we chose evil and took out of existence the good that was already in us). The cause of evil is us.

We have now answered both our questions. In answering those questions however, we have stumbled upon an even deeper truth. In our act of choice, we can choose either perfection (God) or something less than perfection (Evil). Inherent to our free will – built in to our act of choice – is the choice of evil! The choice of evil has to exist – otherwise we do not have free will! We see then that the existence of evil has nothing to do with God not being powerful enough, good enough, or knowing enough to stop evil from happening. It does not contradict any of those qualities. The choice of evil is forced to logically follow in the concept of free will. Instead of contradicting God’s eternal qualities it does the opposite. God being the good God that He is, gave us the human race the gift of free will. He gave us the choice to choose Him or not – He did not force us to believe in Him.

‘But wait a second!’ some say. Why even make a human being that is capable of choosing evil since God is good? Why not just make them incapable of choosing evil and give them the choice of everything else? Well, the key idea is to realize what it means to have free will. If God were to intervene whenever we went to do something wrong or evil, we would quickly see that life wouldn’t really be life as we know it any more. Think about it – what if every time we went to hit our neighbor with a big stick, the stick turned into jello. Or every time a murderer went to go stab somebody, the knife turned into paper. What if every time you were about to see something you might covet, God stopped the light bouncing off of it from hitting your eyes. What if every time you starting to form a sinful thought, God stopped it from forming in your brain tissue? Of course, it is immediately seen that we wouldn’t have free will at all any more. You wouldn’t be able to make any choice but to follow God because that’s all you would be able to do! I’d make the following analogy to make it a little clearer. What if you had a husband or a wife who in reality was a robot. If you programmed your wife or husband to love you, would you really feel true love from that robot? No, of course not. The robot has not made the choice to love you. It loves you only because you made it love you. If you truly loved your robot husband or wife (this is a somewhat weird analogy), you would give them the choice to either love you or not to love you. It is the same way with us and God.  The only way to have true freedom is to have the choice between good and evil. The only way for someone to truly love God would be to choose Him of his or her own free will.

We have now essentially provided all the evidence we need to come to the conclusion that the ‘Problem of Evil’ is not a problem at all. It is exceedingly clear that the choice of evil is a necessary byproduct of true free will. We need not actually choose evil – but it is a choice that is present. The God of the Christians retains His qualities; omnipotence, omniscience, and being morally perfect. Because God is logical (God makes sense) having evil be a necessary possible choice by no means infringes upon His being powerful enough or knowing enough or being good enough. God conforms with His own nature and His nature is to be logical. The choice of evil – and the possibility of it being brought into existence – is a logical necessity of free will. There are no contradictions.

As an interesting side note, more often than not the ‘Problem of Evil’ is brought up by people seeking to prove not only to themselves but to others that God does not exist. Often this argument is brought up by atheists to debunk Christianity. Having seen that the ‘Problem of Evil’ does not debunk Christianity, I would put it out there to you that instead of causing a problem with Christianity it causes a problem for atheism! This is because atheism has an inadequate answer to the ‘Problem of Evil’. Why is that? Think about it – we all agree that evil does exist in this world. However, if you look at evil from a God-less perspective it requires that you have some other sort of perfect good by which to compare evil with. How can you know what true evil is without knowing what a faultless good is? It’s the same as asking how you would know what darkness was if you had never seen the light. Yet if you are an atheist, everything in this universe was created by something other than God. I would assume that most would say everything came about by the process of evolution. In this case, everything in existence came about by random chance. Things such as perfection and goodness, things such as wrong and evil have no definition. They are merely a curious byproduct of our human mind.  The question of why evil exists is irrelevant and in fact illogical to an atheist. But as stated before, we all generally know what evil is and that it indeed exists! Atheism has no answer to our question of why evil exists. Christianity however not only explains the problem of evil in the world, but it also gives it meaning. Atheism takes away its meaning and doesn’t answer the question at all.

Now that we have understood what evil is and why it exists, there remains the problem of how we respond to it. Though that is a topic for another day, I’m sure Christianity has something to say about that.