Alden Farrar PAR 101-002 Dr.

William White October 27, 2010 God, Evil, and Freedom of the Will "Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?" This quote by Sam Harris eloquently demonstrates just how necessary and unavoidable evil is in the course of human life. We are born to live lives ridden with loss and evil. It is simply a fact of nature. The question comes down to how we will deal with this evil. There is a simple choice to be made: will we give in to temptation and allow evil to overtake us, as Eve did in the Garden of Eden, or will we recognize this evil and choose to fight against it with kindness and love? The answer to this question relates directly to God. By bestowing in humans the gift of free will, God presented us not with evil itself, but the opportunity to choose good over evil in the face of temptation. Bruce Russell as well as Voltaire maintain that an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God cannot exist due to the vast amount of suffering and evil that exists. According to them, a 3-O God (omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent) should be able and willing to prevent such evil and since this evil persists, the God of classical monotheism cannot exist. Russell adds, [God] would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering he could, unless he could not do so without thereby losing some greater

good I believe this to be an extremely telling and important statement in the argument over the compatibility of evil and God. By preventing evil from occurring, God would be sacrificing the very greater good that Russell speaks of in his argument against the existence of God. This greater good is the opportunity to choose good over evil that I spoke of previously. If God were to prevent evil, the human ability to overcome and resist evil would be lost. This is one of the most fascinating and beautiful aspects to human existence and losing it would be a monumental loss. Therefore, it seems to be the obvious choice for God to allow us the chance to choose good over evil as opposed to forcing good upon us; even if great evil occurs as a result, there still exists the potential for greater good and improvement in the future. The bible offers numerous accounts of Gods interference in the ways of man. In the instances of the Tower of Babyl and the Great Flood, God intended to prevent sin and evil from thriving by using omnipotence to destroy the evildoers. However, it seems that the wrath of God is not a very effective learning tool for men. No matter how much evil was prevented by these overt actions, humans continued to sin and encounter evil. God realized through these experiences that the cure to evil is not divine action. Humans must make the conscious choice to prevent evil and embrace good and the most effective way for God to allow this to occur is by granting us the power of free will. God has enough faith in mankind to allow us this privilege, in hopes that we are naturally good enough to overcome the temptation of evil in time. The atheist argues that it is somehow Gods responsibility to prevent evil from occurring; however, the vast majority of the evil that occurs is caused by human error and

poor choices. Surely it is not Gods responsibility to make our choices for us. One could legitimately argue that natural disasters are a prime example of evil which man has no control over. This is true, but could it not be possible that these disasters are Gods reminders to resist evil or we will be subject to Gods wrath? This seems plausible to me given the fact that we have yet to achieve the level of benevolence our creator deserves from us. The argument from evil against the existence of God is a total failure. It fails to recognize that God has a master plan for us. Although we may make that plan harder to carry out through acts and instances of evil, God still has faith that we will live up to his image of omnibenevolence. The human species has a long way to go before ridding ourselves of evil, but it is an achievable goal that starts with a conscious effort on the part of the individual to adjust negative attitudes, make positive choices, and to fight against evil with kindness, tolerance, and acceptance. This is what God expects of us. It may seem like a daunting task, and there are surely many people that have proved themselves unworthy of this task by committing terrible and heinous acts of evil. Gods master plan remains the same however, and our plan to recognize evil and choose to fight against it with kindness and love should remain as well.