Some Christians think that God being all-good and all-powerful and all-knowing could have created a world without evil. Maybe. But it wouldn’t be our world. It wouldn’t be the story of the incarnate Son of God sacrificing Himself to the Father. From that main theme, we can consider salvation of the individual and salvation within the communal Body of Christ.
But, God can’t have created all that is not Himself, else He would be the Creator of evil. Surely, we can say evil has another source. Maybe a great servant of God, call him the Angel of Light, was given a good substance but he chose to rebel and to oppose the all-good God, becoming evil in the process. Then we have to deal with the nature of the will which first chose to rebel against God. St. Augustine and others have tried to sneak by the issue by saying that evil isn’t something that exists but rather a privation in being. Try telling that to those who’ve survived or even studied the horrors of the Nazi death-camps or the horrors of war or those of nasty diseases. Those few German scientists and assistants who survived Marburg Disease a few decades back had gone through such pain that they were insane, having extreme forms of schizophrenic symptoms. We can speak about children with incurable cancers or burn victims. Is HIV retrovirus a privation of being? In a sense, it is something of a regression from a more complete form of life, but some more complete forms of life also inflict great suffering upon other creatures.
Maybe we have no right to question God’s Creation in this way? Maybe we show ourselves to be the morally insane thinkers which Hermann Melville though all Americans to be? Maybe we should accept Creation and try to learn about the story God is telling, the story which is this world? Try to learn about the story and try to play our parts well?
Evil remains, whether we truly believe in the God of Jesus Christ or not. This includes the sort of morally disordered behavior which harms others, including future generations, even if it allows us some sort of false sense of freedom. If we believe in that all-powerful God, we have to accept that He created a world in which evil can appear and sometimes grow into great monsters or sometimes remain in the shape of a man who drives home drunk most evenings or a mother who refuses to respond to her children’s emotional needs. The Jewish scholar Martin Buber took the position, somewhat controversial amongst other Jewish thinkers and unthinkable amongst nearly all Christian theologians and philosophers, that the story of Adam and Eve was really a revelation by God that He could create a world with both good and evil without the evil touching His own Being. The story God is telling seems to not just allow for evil but to use processes which do lead to results we human beings consider evil. The Catholic novelist and Thomistic thinker Flannery O’Connor was particularly good at showing that the good under development can take on grotesque shapes, shapes of evil and suffering and great pain. There is every reason to believe this is a result of God’s shaping of this particular concrete, thing-like world and not the result of some fall of man or cosmic fall.
Created being, at least the thing-like created being of this world, has the potential for good or evil. Volcanoes can wreak horrible suffering and death and so can power-hungry men as well as men who think they can bring the world to a radically better state of affairs.
Our Manichaeistic ways of thought lead us to believe that evil has invaded the Creation of a God who is all-powerful except when He’s not. Surely, says Mani and his followers, evil can’t be a part of true being, however defined. It must be a result of some defective and false being or even an Augustinian privation of being. I suspect this is why Catholic theologians and ecclesiastical leaders assumed that the birth-control pills (and related technologies) were the source of the breakdown in sexual moral order in recent decades. Suppose instead, a single technology brought both great good, the relief of suffering, and also the possibility of sexual moral disorder, a disorder which was realized the decade before the birth-control pill hit the pharmacies, a sexual moral disorder which plays a major role, at least in my opinion, in the general breakdown of Western Civilization, the destruction of political and economic order which can be seen as the destruction of vast amounts of material and immaterial capital.
There is a study indicating that Penicillin, Not the Pill, May Have Launched the Sexual Revolution. In the referenced article, we can read:
The rise in risky, non-traditional sexual relations that marked the swinging ’60s actually began as much as a decade earlier, during the conformist ’50s, suggests an analysis recently published by the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
“It’s a common assumption that the sexual revolution began with the permissive attitudes of the 1960s and the development of contraceptives like the birth control pill,” notes Emory University economist Andrew Francis, who conducted the analysis. “The evidence, however, strongly indicates that the widespread use of penicillin, leading to a rapid decline in syphilis during the 1950s, is what launched the modern sexual era.”
A little later in the article, we can read:
A few physicians sounded moralistic warnings during the 1950s about the potential for penicillin to affect behavior. Spanish physician Eduardo Martinez Alonso referenced Romans 6:23, and the notion that God uses diseases to punish people, when he wrote: “The wages of sin are now negligible. One can almost sin with impunity, since the sting of sinning has been removed.”
Such moralistic approaches, equating disease with sin, are counterproductive, Francis says, stressing that interventions need to focus on how individuals may respond to the cost of disease.
Noble goal. Replace moralism with individualistic utilitarianism. Neither is very attractive. Neither passes any good sniff tests for what might be vaguely labeled `truth’. Both are extremes in a way of thought which can be seen as Manichaeistic in a general sense, a rejection of concrete reality in favor of idealistic views of created being which isolate good and evil. These sorts of views, Catholic `Jansenism’ or Protestant `Puritanism’ or the original pagan `Manichaeism’, sometimes even extended to blasphemous ideas of the Being of God Himself.
I’ll not write the dozens of pages it would take to repeat even a summary of my struggle, largely on this website— Acts of Being, to produce a better view, one which considers modern empirical knowledge in light of the Christian revelations which are a major part of the foundation of Western Civilization.
An intelligent understanding of reality, including human reality, can’t be based upon the imposition of so-called ideals, a priori schemes, upon a reality which won’t obey orders from human thinkers. Nor can any intelligent understanding of reality be based upon a literalistic reading of alleged truths from facts. An intelligent understanding of reality recognizes that `brute facts’ themselves, even the most brutal of `brute facts’, cannot be understood directly. An attempt to do so will result in literalistic distortions of reality; some philosophers have labeled such distortions of reality, distortions of created being, as `Gnostic’. In many cases, perhaps most, `literalistic’ and `Gnostic’ are pretty much the same.
Neither moralism nor cost-benefit analyses form a suitable or adequate basis for understanding man as a moral being. Neither leaves open the possibility of some sort of true nobility in our human natures. Neither could play a role in the formation of any form of human community which we could possibly consider desirable.