I truly sympathize with their dilemma. I, too, would wish to believe that the world we live in is created and is still (in some important sense) ruled by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good Being. But there is no good way of reconciling that notion with the evidence of the world.
If there were a truly satisfactory answer, the religious thinkers would have come up with it. But there isn't. But some answer was needed to explain all the brokenness in the world, so they came up with one. Unfortunately, their answer doesn't work.
What they came up with, to identify the sources of evil, have generally boiled down to some gesture in the direction of something called "free will." Humans are free to choose, they say, and when people choose evil it's their fault.
The idea that Evil originates within humankind does salvage that image of the all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God. But it does so at the expense of blaming the victim. (Which in so many ways seems to be a deep dynamic embedded in civilization.)
But worse, the "free will" answer protects the "given" about God at the expense of making sense. (While some notions of "free will" make sense, no idea of "free will" both makes sense and solves the problem of explaining so much evil in the Good Lord's Creation.)
The problem with the "free will" answer the religious thinkers offered is not so much that it's false as that there's no way it could be true. Just like 1 + 1 = 3 can't be true.
(Posted on the Series website here is my argument to justify my dismissal of the "free will" answer. It presents what I claim to be a logical proof of almost mathematical tightness that there is no conceivable concept of "free will" that serves the purpose of putting the ultimate responsibility for the existence of evil on human beings. What I claim to prove there is this: Yes, we choose, just as we experience ourselves as doing. But the ultimate source of the way we choose must necessarily lie outside of ourselves. This piece is a passage from my 1989 book, Sowings and Reapings: The Cycling of Good and Evil in the Human World.)
Much that is important for understanding the human story -- the challenge we face as a species, our possibilities for meeting that challenge -- is visible in the contrast between the "free will" explanation, which places human sinfulness at the root of evil, and the explanation that I will offer here, which finds the root at an entirely different level.
One view focuses on the concrete manifestations of evil-doing--people doing destructive things. The other steps back from the immediate and focuses on the forces at work in the overarching system into which we are born, and by which, inescapably --from conception onward-- we are shaped.
One asserts a logical impossibility-- the creature self-creating itself ex nihilo, driven by choices formed outside of the nexus of causality. The other sees us as necessarily the fruit of the world, inescapably enmeshed in a large and dense network of cause and effect.
One blames the victim; the other shows us to have stumbled innocently into an impossible situation that inevitably unleashed a force of brokenness--a force that injures and damages us, that turns us into agents of brokenness, and that still reverberates in the human world.
Let us look further now at the systemic forces -- of brokenness, but also of wholeness -- that humankind has been swept up in.
Follow the Pattern of BrokennessThe human story is not specifically a story about evil. It should be understood, rather, as the story of a creature that, like all life, strives toward the fulfillment of life's needs.
But the problem of evil did arise when this creature, enabled by its unprecedented strengths, stumbled into territory into which no other creature had ever before ventured. And as a result, in this terra incognita, this creature unleashed into its world a force of brokenness. All with the result that, for millennia, it has had to contend with the problem of evil.
Thus it is that the answers to the questions about the nature and origins of evil dwell inextricably in the heart of the human story. And, accordingly, these answers are part of what makes the understanding offered here "A Better Human Story."
As I have argued in earlier installments (especially #4 and #5), that --with the rise of civilization-- brokenness was unleashed into the human world through no fault of humankind, and for reasons that no way demonstrate evil to be inherent to the nature of the human creature.
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