The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.
The question of evil is a vexing one for a believer, whereas it only serves to energize today’s atheist debaters. We might even say that were it not for evil, atheists would not exist.
The atheists’ argument has been around for ages (and so has the answer to it, of course). Here are the steps in their reasoning:
- Evil exists. We all can attest to the occurrence of horrible crimes and appalling disasters.
- A compassionate God would want to prevent these from occurring, just as we humans do.
- An omniscient and omnipotent God would be able to prevent these from occurring, whereas mankind is not able to the same extent.
- An omniscient, omnipotent, and compassionate God is the only valid option for monotheistic believers; an ignorant, impotent, or uncaring God is not really worthy of worship at all, and does not deserve the name of God.
- Therefore the existence of God and the existence of evil are mutually contradictory; one cannot have both in the same world. Given the existence of evil, God has to go.
- Therefore God does not exist.
- To make matters worse, a Creator God would be held responsible for the evil He created, contradicting the popular belief that God is Good.
Let us start with the idea of a world in which nothing ‘bad’ happens. There would be no death, period, since any form of death would at the very least involve some psychological trauma. So that immediately rules out all carnivorous life. We should eliminate all pathogens in the environment while we are at it, which pretty well puts an end to evolution as we know it. Since evolutionary change, disease, and death are off the table, we would have to be transformed into innocuous entities who gradually, peacefully, populate every corner of the universe if they reproduce (but why would they want to?) and float around in a bland, lukewarm atmosphere, free of sharp objects or any encounter with unpleasant physical facts such as burning, drowning, or falling down stairs. Maybe, just to be safe, we should abolish gravity and a few other laws of physics as well.
If God and evil are truly incompatible, this is the world the atheist debaters would allow Him to make for us – a sort of heaven for dummies. If their version of a compassionate, omnipotent God is going to actually do anything, He will have to make do with a cream-coloured, bubble bath of a cosmos for coddled, complacent jellyfish who have never shed a tear or a drop of sweat. Compare that with heaven as a prize awarded to real people who have struggled through grief, fear, and defeat in a previous life and who both deserve and are grateful for something more than room-temperature materialism. As a compelling story, as eternal justice, which version makes sense? Which one feels right? (Or which one is less nauseating?)
So never mind the heavenly scenarios, an atheist will say. This world, the one we are in now, is simply bad – so bad that it will not admit God . . . (yet we have to accept it.) For many people, however, hope in God is what makes all this badness tolerable. If we have to live in a materialist dungeon, at least keep a window open so we can see the sky. A good atheist, however, will not listen to that nonsense. Slam the door, lock it, and swallow the key, of course, but also brick up the windows for the sake of consistency with the colour scheme of the walls around us.
This seems to be a nightmarish, self-harming reaction to the fact of ‘bad things happening to good people’. The believer, the optimist, is able to shrug off the bad and say, ‘But there’s so much good out there, too.’ And not only that. As the case of the insipid jellyfish heaven illustrates, ‘bad’ and ‘good’ are inseparable. Remove one and the other starts to fade as well. If God is All Good, says the atheist, then why is there anything bad in this world? The answer: because good would be unrecognizable without it.
The GOD You Already Know 