Last night I was learning to play bridge (long story) and thought I’d try playing a hand or two at yahoo games. While on there I saw someone in the bridge chat room explaining why they were a Christian, but not really satisfying his enquirers. I do love these conversations. So as the melee began I entered in an asked a few pertinent questions to the people he was talking to and quickly was in a fairly decent apologetics discussion. We remained mostly in the arena of philosophical apologetics and it was nice not to have to prove the universe had a beginning for once, and therefore something/someone that began it, since he believed that Einsteins theories proved that space/time were one and began at the big bang (to which I reminded him that a Roman Catholic priest trying to prove Genesis actually came up with the big bang theory - Hubble merely confirmed the theory with his observations, and Einstein took years to accept it).

Anyway, all that aside, we eventually talked about the “If God is omnipotent, and evil happens, is he therefore malevolent?” (paraphrase) question [he actually misquoted originally but I know what he's getting at - I've included the full version of the quote below] - its an oldie, but for some reason still catches some people out. His first study was to create a hypothetical garden in which two children were playing while I watched. One child decides to kill the other, why would I not intervene? I do love questions like this, though unfortunately this one isn’t much of a challenge. If anyone has any better questions then do send them to me!

Unfortunately at that point someone started spamming the chatroom, so we swapped email addresses and I sent him the following reply (which includes the answer if you’re interested!). It took nearly an hour to write out and then the bandit email address bounced! He was genuinely interested so hopefully he’ll contact me, and I’ve been back to the chatroom to see if he’s around (but without any success!).

Anyway, I decided that I wasn’t going to have spent nearly an hour writing out this reply for no-one to read it, so you’re lumped with it - though I have cleaned up some of the English to make more sense and change the odd bit now I’ve re-read it. Having said that, no-one usually reads long blocks of text so I could say anything here and no-one would know… oooooh. Anyway. Here’s my take on the omnipotence / malevolence question:

–

Hi Neil,

Ok, continuing the pretty Garden story - we’re talking about “if God is omnipotent, and evil happens, does that make Him malevolent?” (paraphrased) [actually here's the proper quote: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able, and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able, nor willing? Then why call him God?" -Epicurus)

So, first lets remove the kids from this hypothetical Garden we were talking about - they don't really represent your average human as children require a parent to make decisions for them and are yet to come into adulthood. Lets put a bunch of adults in the garden - adults that have free will, or, without getting into an argument about free will, (I've had many a boring discussion on that topic!) they at least have the ability to choose between:

A) Right vs Wrong, (lets leave whether morality (ie: right and wrong) can be evolved until later in the discussion)
B) Being with God vs having nothing to do with God.

So, ok, as you said, one occupant of the Garden is about to kill another. Why does God not step in?

There are two reasons:

1) Because we ourselves could stop this tragedy. The person about to do the murder has a choice to make: right or wrong. He has the ability to choose not to kill this person, therefore why does God need to step in? The murderer-to-be already has the power to prevent the murder - it doesn't require divine intervention. In the same way we have enough food to go around the world and prevent the starving kids in poor countries dying of malnutrition, there's enough drink to go around too - that too does not require divine intervention. Most evil and suffering has, at its cause, humans - humans that have free will, and therefore the power to say no and choose right and to do good.

2) Because, speaking generally about humanity, we don't want God in our lives - looking at the message humanity is generally sending out we've always shunned God. You heard me going on earlier about 'God is about freedom' - and he's about choice. So if humanity as a whole wants nothing to do with God then he has to respect that and stay out of our world. God respects our decisions and if we decide that we can 'do it on my own' or 'I did it my way' to quote some songs, then he will let us do that. God's hands are, FOR A TIME, (important!), tied because he gave us free will. He promises that one day that time will come to an end. If you've ever walked into a room where one person is happy to see you but 50 people want you to leave you'll know exactly what I mean(!)

You asked: If God created us, why did he do it? Why earth? What's the purpose? Earth isn't bad but I could imagine a better place, etc! These are great questions, and one thing I've learnt is that there is no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid answers! The following is my attempt at a more rational answer that you often get...:

So go back before the hypothetical garden was made to when nothing exists but God. Imagine that God, although not lonely, knows that if he were to create some humans He could love & that could love Him that it would bring much Joy & pleasure to both the humans and Him. Sounds like a good idea!

But, however, here, right at the outset, He faces an extraordinary problem. I used to be a computer programmer (in games) and it's an interesting problem. You see, I could write a program that says that it loves me but I know it would only be doing so because I told it to do so. I would hardly be 'feeling the love', really! In other words: love, real love that is, cannot be coerced - the decision to love has to be made in a context where you are free to reject, free to say 'No, I will not love you', freedom to say anything. The potential lover needs the freedom to will that it wants to, or will that it doesn't: it needs to have free will.

And so God created free will, but again, right away, is faced with yet another problem. You see he could have these humans in heaven with him, but with all the delights of heaven, and a full understanding/meeting with God the humans' free will would be rendered useless - because of course they would choose to be with God in heaven! All those delights everywhere! What a place to be! And what if they said no - where would they go then? No, he needed these humans to be in a place of their own where he could visit if they wanted - rather like courting/dating I assume(!) - humans also needed a place where they could shut the door and say "stay out - we've broken up!" (to continue the dating analogy!) to God if they wanted to. And so God created the universe, and humans - how & when he created it/us is beyond the scope of our discussion - lets just stick to why God would make us/the universe: ie, the questions of purpose & meaning.

The only thing that the humans had to do was to want to be with & love God and they would do that by not becoming independent of God - in the (metaphorical?) story of Adam & Eve the way they would become independent of God would be to "Eat from the tree". We'll never know what might have happened had early mankind not chosen independence from God but I reckon it might have worked out quite well for humanity - but, alas, God knew in advance that man would choose to walk away...

BUT! (gasp!)

God, having installed in humans that same free will that He also enjoys, knew that in general most of us would not choose to be with him, that no matter what He said most of us would do things that he would ask us not to do, and some people would choose to do truly terrible things to other humans. And yet, that was their choice, and he would respect it. He knew in advance the vast majority of humanity would say 'no' to Him and never want him to step into their lives, and still he would respect that decision. God hates suffering, but his hands are tied because he respects, nay, created & wants us to have & defends our freedom to choose. (What about miracles? What's the point in following God now if He can't change my situation? I think miracles happen when people pray (talk to God) and invite him to do something - enough people, enough praying, enough time, I don't know the formula, but sometimes there's enough free will saying "please come and do x", and he's able to overcome the majority of humans saying "Keep out of our world!" - but often we do not pray or fast or get enough people praying for the breakthrough. So God can move and do things here, but it requires prayer and continual invitation or petition for him to do so).

So, in answer to those questions that you might be thinking:
- God created us to enjoy us & love us, and for us to enjoy him & love him forever.
- Earth is a good enough place for us to make a free will decision to love & be with him, without being too influenced by Him, or heaven's joy - ie: we can reject him here as many do, or we can choose to be with him.

In fact, there is no better way of creating free humans that choose to love him than by: creating earth & giving us free will and putting us on earth! No quicker / less painful / true way than this. You see "our existence here is not the best existence, but the best way TO the best existence" - if we choose to be with God that is (...and to paraphrase CS Lewis. He was an interesting guy, he was an out and out atheist for all his life and eventually had to concede - he was the most reluctant convert Christianity has ever known, but he went on to be one of the greatest theological minds of the 20th century).

That pretty well much explains the omnipotent / malevolent question. But I hope that it too provides some insight into the my attempt at rationalising the meaning behind my & your existence. So in response could you talk about the meaning of your life especially in that it comes from random chance / atheist explanation, and think about whether morality can be evolved, and finally, about this thing behind our eyes called 'me' that somehow seems constrained to my body exists - the real me - just how did that me come about? -[snip]-

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