The Free Will Paradoxes, Part 3: The Problem of Evil
In the previous two essays (Part 1 & Part 2), we defined a new term, Total Free Will, and looked at how it can help us solve certain philosophical paradoxes.
Total Free Will = Freedom of Choice + Consequences
In summary, our free will is not only a measure of the choices we get to make, but is also a factor of us being allowed to experience the consequences of our choices.
Today, we will use this concept to help solve the paradox of the Problem of Evil.
The Problem of Evil is the following: If God is infinitely strong, wise, and good, why do bad things happen? If He is strong, He is capable to stop all bad things. If He is wise, He is smart enough to stop all bad things. If He is good, He is motivated to stop all bad things.
And yet we observe bad things happening.
Most Christian thinkers answer that Evil exists because God wants to preserve free will. But this does not answer why He doesn’t constantly fix the results of our bad choices.
But our choices are not the only source of evil. We will briefly discuss here the three sources of evil. There are actually three different philosophical solutions to the problem of evil, with some overlap. In a way, there are Three Problems of Evil, differentiated by their sources. Those sources are:
Nature – The world is full of things that cause natural evil for humans. Wolves were a bane to European children for millennia. Malaria has hurt hundreds of millions. Ticks exist.
Fallen Angels – Satan took actions that tempted Eve to sin. It is strongly implied throughout Scripture that fallen angels are responsible for some evil, such as further temptation. An example of this is Christ in the wilderness, whom Satan tempted to turn stones to bread. Inspiration to rebel is also a demonic source of sin, as illustrated in the Garden of Eden with Eve.
Human Choices – Our free will and the consequences of our free actions can cause great evil. People chose to build gulags, gas chambers, and torture cells.
There exist many acceptable explanations for the existence of evil from nature. I will briefly describe the one that I consider the most complete.
Evil from Nature
God decided to make a world of competition. Animals and plants compete for resources against each other, and eat each other. While this nature red in tooth and claw is brutal, it also produces stunning complexity, and keeps life efficient and elegant. This competition, along with evolution and (I think) some tampering by God, is perhaps the best way to produce a biome that is always creating beauty and surprises. I think God did it this way because He enjoys the crazy complexity. The competitions also prevents the decay of species into fat, uninteresting blobs (as in the movie WALL-E). Thus the good from this competition far outweighs the bad, in the long term.
But what about the evil that comes from the non-living parts of nature, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, avalanches, lightning, droughts, and floods? These are necessary evils, in that the absence of the causes of these evils would be much, much worse.
For instance, earthquakes exist because the Earth has tectonic plates that move. But without these geological activities, there would not be enough nutrients in the ground to sustain agriculture or even significant foliage for very long. Australia is an excellent example of this. When European setters came to Australia, their wheat crops grew strong and fast, and the settlers were thankful for the fertile ground. But after only a few years, the crops began to fail. This happened because Australia has been geologically dead for a billion years. There are no volcanoes, and it is in the middle of a tectonic plate whose edges are not actively being sunken into or raised out of the Earth’s mantle. Furthermore, no wind regularly blows dust from geologically active areas onto Australia. The topsoil in that part of Australia was completely depleted of its nutrients by just a few decades of take-away-the-wheat-heads farming. Tectonic activity is a blessing much more than it is a curse.
And obviously, this can be extended to lightning (better than no rain), avalanches (better than no snow), tornados, and the rest.
A common meme passed around is shown below:
If the sun weren’t hot (powerful) enough to create UV rays, it also couldn’t give us enough energy to support photosynthesis at useful levels. If the sun were much cooler and less powerful with many fewer UV rays, then earth would have to be much closer to this smaller star, and the solar wind from that star would strip away our atmosphere. As things are, people groups that end up having to spend a lot of time in the sun slowly produce more and more melanin, which is a fantastic, biologically produced UV protector. I’d much rather live in a world of some skin cancer than no photosynthesis.
There is one more twist opened by the question: Why doesn’t God miraculously cancel out the negative effects that hurt humans while keeping the good? If He did regularly do this, we would never have to fight to survive in nature. What technology would we have developed? Even fire would have been unnecessary. And it is quite likely that the human struggle against the elements, along with the calories unlocked by fire, is what led directly to our greatest animal asset, our intelligence1. And more broadly, I would answer that question with another one: How would your children turn out if you never let them experience failure and pain?
Evil From Fallen Angels
As for the problem of evil introduced directly by fallen angels, I have much less to say. The only evil that we know surely comes from that source is temptation, and this influence does not negate our will to choose good or bad. If the fallen angels are allowed to regularly do more than that, as in the book of Job, then we cannot know it. And the motivation God has in allowing fallen angels to act in this world is, frankly, unknown. Thus, this Satanic problem of evil is much less a paradox, and more a mystery. We simply do not have enough revealed information to make reliable progress2.
Evil from Human Choices
What is left is the Human Choices problem of evil. This is the problem that has not had a good answer, in my opinion. Why does God allow the evil of our human choices to persist, when there is basically no good that comes from them? This has been a difficult paradox.
But this paradigm of Total Free Will is a more complete answer to the Human Choices Problem of Evil: If God did use His strength and wisdom to stop all bad consequences of our choices, then this would cancel out the consequences of our actions. It would rob us of Total Free Will, which is comprised of our free choices plus our experience of those consequences. Even if we had the ability to choose, those choices are meaningless without consequences. And without true, Total Free Will, we would have much less love and purpose. God allows the evil of our poor choices to persist in order to maximize our Total Free Will.
Evil (from Human Choices) exists because God would rather humans have Love, Purpose, and Evil, than none of them.
To summarize:
The evil that springs from Human Choices could be cancelled out by God
But then this would cancel the consequences of our actions
That would reduce Total Free Will, which is our choices + experience of consequences of our choices
Because God desires to maximize Total Free Will, He prefers to not cancel out the experience of our consequences of our actions
This is why He usually allows the Evil from Human Choices to happen/persist
Note that this is NOT some absolute rule for God. I am simply describing the way that I think God evaluates the world, illuminating the details of His priorities. He sovereignly chooses to go against this preference of maximizing Total Free Will whenever He desires. I just think that He generally follows the concept, because He very much wants to maximize our Love and Purpose.
Thus, the paradox of the presence of Evil from Human Choices is resolved, and we gain a deeper understanding of another truth about God.
Objections
But of course, we do think He does step in sometimes. But why not in the case of the horrors of Communism in sending tens of millions to gulags to die, or to Mao Zedong’s decisions that directly starved 30 million people, or to Hitler’s Holocaust?
I don’t know. I present here a framework as to why, logically, God would let our Free Will Choices play out. But those horrors are still tremendous.
I would say in reply that it appears that He has stepped in to stop some horrors. Cortez’s conquering of an entire empire stopped the regular, horrific human sacrifices that occurred regularly on the scale of tens of thousands of people, maybe every year.
Many historians that study the Cold War, especially the critical points of the Cuban Missile Crises, flashpoints in the early 1980s, and several very close calls involving false alarms in nuclear launch detection systems all say the same thing: It’s a miracle that all-out nuclear war was avoided. This would have killed two billion people. I personally have studied this array of incidents and the personalities involved as well. I think God intervened to prevent all-out nuclear war, something so awful that “genocide” is too small a word for it.
But when I see the Rwandan machete genocide, or what Pol Pot did, or the Soviet Holodomor in Ukraine, or dozens of other horrors, I don’t shy away or dismiss them. I mournfully ask why, even though I have a philosophical answer.
God is not a Hyper-Interventionist. This is because He respects us and loves us. We as a species have been handed over dominion of this planet. And if it were only for better and not for worse, this would diminish us. And diminished people are more like actors on a stage or robots in a factory than Free Will agents.
Love and Free Will are God’s dangerous game.
Yes, I did sort of mention evolution. Yes, I believe in an old earth. But I do believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and a God-breathed, literal interpretation of Genesis. I have found a startling way to reconcile them, which is coming in a separate essay. If it makes you feel better, I can pretty much prove that life did not arise without the help of an Intelligent Designer. Also, I believe Adam and Eve were literal people, and the first en-souled humans. So put the pitchforks away. I have an incredibly high view of the Bible and science, and I have mostly reconciled them. Consider this a teaser.
Logic is great when understanding unthinking systems, or systems which involve actors that think at or below our level, and have experiences common to us, or at least observable. But when evaluating the motivations and unseen action of actors with higher intelligence and/or different types of existence than us, logic alone does very little good. This is why the Bible is such an amazing treasure. It is literally our only reliable way to find out definitive information about God. Though I suppose we can infer some solid concepts from studying His handiwork, nature. The fallen angels have created nothing, so we know only what is revealed in Scripture, which is sparse.