I was asked these questions a while ago by some friends: “If God is all good, then why is there evil?”, “If there is evil, and God created everything, then did He create evil?”, “If God knows what is going to happen in our lives, is it really free will?”, and “If God knows what is going to happen in our lives before we’re born, then why would He let someone be made who was destined for hell?”
The first two questions (If God is all good, then why is there evil? And if there is evil, and God created everything, then did he create evil?) are kind of hand-in-hand. The first question you have to ask yourself concerning these two questions is: Does evil exist? Is it its own unit or is it just a lack of good? Does cold exist or is it just a lack of heat?
For those scientists out there, the answer to the latter would be, cold does not exist. It is merely the absence of heat. We use the word “cold” to describe the absence of heat that we feel. Just as a “vacuum” is not a “thing” but a word to describe the absence of…everything...we use the word “evil” to describe the absence of good.
God created everything “good”. He even said, “It is good,” at the end of every day of creation.
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.” – Genesis 1:31-2:1 (NIV)
God created each of us with free will. We have the choice to be good or bad and to love or hate. When we choose to love God, it is so much more special to him than if we were all created to just love him with no options. God put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden with the one rule that Adam and Eve could eat of any tree except that one. Adam and Eve were given the option to obey God and love him, or to disobey him and do whatever they pleased. They chose to disobey. For someone to be truly “free”, they have to have choice. To make Adam and Eve really free, they had to have options and the choice to obey or disobey, hence why he put the tree in the garden in the first place.
In the cmspin.com article by Saraiah Faith Gracie, “Did God Create Evil,” it states that because all of God’s creation was declared to be good, evil did not come into this world as a product of creation. However, it did exist from the beginning, as a choice within the ability for created beings to make decisions. As Saraiah said in her column, “Because of this, it could be said that while God did not create evil itself, what He did create was the potential for evil.” Evil existed merely by freedom of choice.
That leads to a question of “Why would God even permit the mere possibility for evil to exist?” In reality, if God had not created freedom of choice, humans, as well as angels, would serve him because we would have been nothing more than mindless beings that followed him like sad puppies. We would trail after him, not because we loved and honored him, but because we would not have had the aptitude to do anything else (http://www.cmspin.com).
Free will leads into the next two questions (If God knows what is going to happen in our lives, is it really free will? And if God knows what is going to happen in our lives before we are born, then why would he let someone be made who was destined for hell?) which also go hand-in-hand.
An idea I read somewhere said that just because one knows what is going to happen doesn’t mean that free will is then gone; if you put a bowl of ice cream in front of a child and a bowl of vegetables, you know which one the child is going to choose, but that child still has the free will to pick whichever one he/she wants. Just because God knows you are going to put on your black shirt instead of your red one, doesn’t mean it still isn’t free will for you; and if He knows you are going to lie to your boss today instead of just telling him/her the truth, doesn’t mean it still isn’t free will. God is outside of time. He is there before you are born, he saw what you will do tomorrow both before and after it happens, and he can watch you in the present make that decision. One thought I have had is that God being all knowing means that he knows every single choice you can make in an instant, and he knows what will happen with each and every single choice you make, he knows every possible outcome (again that is just a thought that tumbles through my mind occasionally). Knowing these things though, he knows what the possible outcomes are, but he knows the ones you will make, thus being able to fulfill the dire need for his son to die on the cross for us, because of the way peoples’ choices turned out.
As I said earlier, God is outside of time. He created time, why should he be confined to it? To ask about God in a specific tense is to confine him to time. Just because he knows the future does not mean he controlled how you turned out. My pastor created an interesting image (that I am going to attempt to recreate) of our linear time and God being completely outside of it:
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