I wanted to ask for your thoughts to a response you had to one of my claims. I was proposing yesterday that if god created good, evil, and the future. Then this would mean that he set Adam and Eve to fail since he placed the tree of knowledge of good and evil in an accessible area before giving them the command to not eat the fruit. Would you agree with this or disagree? –May 24, 2024
------------, June 11, 2024
Thanks for the question and my apologies for taking so long to respond! I haven’t been able to make the last few weeks of discussion but the two weeks I was there were good times interacting with each other. I appreciate your willingness to enter spaces of disagreement and to dialogue with those who disagree. I find you to be open and challenging.
Let me take your question a piece at a time. The question you raise, and the attendant concepts are deep. First, I want to go back to the passage you brought up and allude to in your question. In the discussion you cited Isaiah 45.7. I think you cited the King James Version (1611) which reads, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” You drew attention to the fact that this passage states that God creates “evil.” Many modern translations choose to translate the phrase in something like the following manner:
· “creating calamity” (New American Standard 1995—NASB95)
· “create disaster” (New International Version--NIV)
· “create calamity” (English Standard Version--ESV)
An Old Testament scholar with a specialization on the book of Isaiah has helpfully written:
“The older translation made needless trouble by rendering ‘I create evil’; the NIV correctly has create disaster. Out of about 640 occurrences of the word ra’ (which ranges in meaning from a ‘nasty’ taste to full moral evil) there are 275 instances where ‘trouble’ or ‘calamity’ is the meaning. In every case the context must judge. In this passage, full of historical calamities coming on people through Cyrus [see Isaiah 45.1ff], this is what ra’ means.”[1]
This meaning fits the larger context of Isaiah’s prophecies. God is claiming sovereign control over negative consequences. He has the sovereign right and power to bring judgment against nations who defy his majesty through wickedness and idolatry. This is confirmed by the usage of ra’ in Isaiah 31.2, “Yet he also is wise and will bring disaster [ra’] and does not retract his words, but will arise against the house of evildoers and against the help of the workers of iniquity.”
I spend the time delineating this so as to avoid the impression that God is somehow claiming to make some evil kind of substance. He does bring judgments and the Bible is not shy about attributing to him the authority and power to bring judgments.
I want to turn to your claim that God “set Adam and Eve to fail since he placed the tree of knowledge of good and evil in an accessible area before giving them the command to not eat the fruit.” I don’t think this is an accurate manner of describing the situation. God did not set them up to fail. He did put a test in their midst, but they had resources to resist the temptation, according to traditional Christian theology. Now God did foreknow that Adam and Eve would fail the test and some Christian theologians and philosophers go further and say that, in some sense, this was part of God’s plan. This does not nullify the responsibility of humans, but I can see how the question of “why?” would come up. Why would God knowingly (foreknowingly) allow (or even plan) for the fall of man into sin? The fourth-century Christian theologian and philosopher, Augustine provides some perspective that might serve as a beginning point:
“He foreknew that some of the angels, in their pride, would wish to be self-sufficient for their own felicity, and hence would forsake their true good; and yet he did not deprive them of this power, judging it an act of greater power and greater goodness to bring good even out of evil than to exclude the existence of evil.” --The City of God (22.1)
“Now God foreknew that man would sin by breaking God’s law through his apostasy from God; and yet, as in the case of the angels, God did not deprive man of the power of free choice, foreseeing, at the same time, the good that he was going to bring out of man’s evil.” --The City of God (22.1)
“Then is there any reason why God should not have created men in the foreknowledge that they would sin? For that made it possible for him to show in them and through them what their guilt deserved and what his grace could give; and with God as creator and disposer of all things, the perverse disorder of transgressors did not pervert the right ordering of the universe.” --The City of God (14.26)
The existence of evil is allowed by God in order to bring a greater good out of it. This is a version of a “greater-good defense.” In allowing evil, this allows for the opportunity for God to pursue an even greater good in the defeat and overthrow of evil. I think this “greater-good” strategy is a good one in pursuing the answer(s) to the problem of evil. One of the preeminent philosophers of religion, Alvin Plantinga, has developed a variant of this greater-good strategy called the “Felix Culpa” theodicy. Plantinga argues that a world with sin and suffering (like our own) and yet also containing the incarnation and atonement of the Son of God, Jesus Christ is a world with more good than even a world without sin and suffering. The display of the character of God in his love is a central piece of this greater-good defense. Here is how Plantinga states it:
“Given the truth of Christian belief, however, there is also a contingent good-making characteristic of our world—one that isn’t present in all worlds—that towers above all the rest of the contingent states of affairs included in our world: the unthinkably great good of divine Incarnation and Atonement. Jesus Christ, the second person of the divine trinity, incomparably good, holy, and sinless, was willing to empty himself, to take on our flesh and become incarnate and to suffer and die so that we human beings can have life and be reconciled to the Father. In order to accomplish this, he was willing to undergo suffering of a depth and intensity we cannot so much as imagine, including even the shattering climax of being abandoned by God the Father himself: ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ God the Father, the first being of the whole universe, perfectly good and holy, all-powerful and all-knowing, was willing to permit his Son to undergo this suffering and to undergo enormous suffering himself in order to make it possible for us human beings to be reconciled to him. And this in face of the fact that we have turned our back upon God, have rejected him, are sunk in sin, indeed, are inclined to resent God and our neighbor. Could there be a display of love to rival this? More to the present purpose, could there be a good-making feature of a world to rival this?”[2]
Even a world without sin and suffering would not contain as much good as this incarnation/atonement-filled world! Plantinga, again:
“I believe that the great goodness of this state of affairs, like that of the divine existence itself, makes its value incommensurable with the value of states of affairs involving creaturely good and bad. Thus the value of incarnation and atonement cannot be matched by an aggregate of creaturely goods. No matter how many excellent creatures there are in a world, no matter how rich and beautiful and sinless their lives, the aggregated value of their lives would not match that of incarnation and atonement; any world with incarnation and atonement would be better yet. And no matter how much evil, how much sin and suffering a world contains, the aggregated badness would be outweighed by the goodness of incarnation and atonement, outweighed in such a way that the world in question is very good.” Plantinga, “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa’,” 9.
I think that this framework provides the big meta-picture of why God allows evil. This, of course, does not address the reason for any specific evil that one experiences or sees in the world. There may be other micro-reasons why God allows these evils. But the big macro-perspective of why God allows evil is so that he might demonstrate his glorious character in the incarnation and the self-giving love of Jesus Christ on the cross for people’s sins.
I have more fully laid out this approach in a lecture I did on the problem of evil. You can find that HERE[3]—start at about the 18:00 minute mark. More to be said but I hope that helps begin to lay out a cogent reason why God allows evil.
[1] J. Alec Moyter, The Prophecy of Isaiah: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 1993), 359.
[2] Alvin Plantinga, “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa’” in Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil; editor, Peter van Inwagen (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 6. Available online: http://www.andrewmbailey.com/ap/FelixCulpa.pdf. Note: page numbers refer to online edition.
