Evil Proves God
By Dominic Taranto
The Problem of Evil is often used by atheists and agnostics to try to disprove God. How could an omnibenevolent (all-good) and omnipotent (all-powerful) God allow evil? He is either not all powerful because He cannot stop it, or is not all good because He wants evil. However, I would like to turn this problem on its head. The existence of evil does not disprove God. It proves Him. First, let me dispel the myth that evil disproves God. There are two general formulations, one of which is logical and the other is emotional. The logical formulation is as follows:
If God is omnipotent and omni-benevolent, then it is logically impossible for there to be evil.
There is evil.
Ergo, God could not be omnipotent and omni-benevolent. Therefore, God (as we know him) does not exist.
This argument is the weakest formulation of the problem of evil for two reasons. One, it assumes the existence of good and evil, neither of which can exist without God (I will explain this later in the article). The second reason is that it assumes that all evil on this earth is ultimate evil. It assumes that God cannot bring good from the evil. In the Christian worldview, this world is the prologue to the book, which is the restored earth promised in Revelation. As long as God does not do something to impinge on a person’s everlasting life in a negative way, this argument fails
The second formulation is more emotional. How could a good God allow these terrible things to happen? Children are born with disorders that they die from, natural disasters kill millions, and humans murder, maim, and rape fellow humans. What kind of good God would allow this? The answer is very similar to the answer to the previous formulation. The Kingdom of Heaven and the New Earth are infinitely better than anything we could ever dream of on this earth. Anything done to our physical bodies here is ultimately moot when it comes to our everlasting well-being. I rest easy knowing that no matter what happens to me here, I have an infinitely loving Father who will do all He can to draw me closer to Him, and that I will ultimately spend all eternity with Him.
In order to articulate the argument that evil proves God, we need to define evil. Evil is the absence or privation of good. There cannot be evil without good and evil does not exist in and of itself. It is a distortion or subtraction of good, so one could even say evil is not a thing. It is the absence of a thing. Murder cannot exist without the good of human life, rape cannot exist without the good of human consent and sexual purity, and psychological illness cannot exist without the good of mental health. One may object to this by saying that physical pain is an example of evil without good. This is incorrect for two reasons. Firstly, pain is the absence of some good. It is the absence of physical well-being. Secondly, even if you could prove that the evil of pain could exist without the good of well-being, pain is not a moral evil. The reason that torture is evil is not because someone is in pain. It is because the torturer is rejecting or subtracting from the good of human wellbeing. For every evil you could name, I could name the good that it is a subtraction of.
So if good must exist for evil to exist, where does good come from? It cannot be evolution. At best, nature and evolution describe what is, not what ought. Humans have evolved as social animals in order to better survive. We form social bonds, families, clans, and tribes in order to further our individual genes and our species as a whole. But nature cannot explain why we ought to further propagate our genetic material. If we are simply balls of meat wandering through the universe with only natural parts, why should we place any good on the propagation of our genes? Better yet, why do we value the propagation of genetic material on other continents? I have never been to Germany, but I think it is valuable for Germans to have babies. Why? Nature cannot explain this, so something supernatural has to explain it
How do we get from a supernatural thing that is the root of good to God? This question is answered by the nature of God. He is an uncreated being. Many early church fathers describe God not as existing, but as existence itself. For this to be the case, he would need to be uncreated. This is important. Created things cannot make laws that other created things need to follow. You may point to civil laws as an example of this as a case of created things making laws. But civil laws used to form a society do not dictate what is good. I believe abortion is evil, yet it is legal in many forms in the United States today. When I say created things cannot create laws by which other created things live, I mean that they cannot make laws that manufacture or dictate good. To ask why a created being cannot make laws for other created beings would be equivalent to asking why a triangle is three-sided. It is simply the nature if the thing. A triangle cannot have four sides. For a created thing to have dominion over all created things would be be just as impossible as having a four-sided triangle. So if there is an objective moral law that all created things must follow, it could not have been created by another created thing. This is why we need God. He is the only being logically capable of making laws that bind created things.
Now to examine and pull together the threads in this article. Evil cannot exist without good. If evil exists, then good exists. If good exists, then God exists. I think it is very reasonable to believe that evil exists. Every healthy human has an innate sense that murder, rape, and abuse, among other things, are truly evil. But how could these evils exist without good to pervert? And how could this good exist without God? I say they cannot. It is for this reason, that evil proves God.