FOREWORD
Religion says God makes only good and evil is not a force but an absence of a good that should and could be there but is not. So the answer to, "How can an all-good God create evil?" is, "HE DOES NOT!"
This may seem elegant and profound but it lies in wait to deceive and it is more complicated than that.
DEFINITIONS: Evil as a Mere Lack: Evil isn’t real on its own; it’s just the absence or corruption of good—a weakness or flaw that depends on good to exist.
Evil as a Real Substance: Evil is an actual, independent force or power that can act on its own and influence the world directly.
NOTE: Many think evil has to be one or the other. Others say both may happen.
NOTE: No matter how people define evil, we detect elements of supernatural thinking in them.
THE CASE AGAINST EVIL BEING OUTSIDE THE CREATION QUESTION
How can evil and suffering happen in a world made by an all-good and all-powerful God?
Well, pain and evil are not the same thing. Pain warns and suffering degrades. A toothache does not strike at who you are the way depression does. Depression effectively or virtually wants you to hurt for the sake of hurting.
A God who allows pain may not necessarily allow suffering.
Depression is the biggest human torment and pain etc is nothing in comparison.
There is probably no point in reading on. We have shown that if depression is that terrible then who cares if evil is a lack or a substance. It is like a person dying from an infection and being more interested in what bacteria is doing it than in the person's plight.
But I'd ask you to read on.
Arguably, depression completely contradicts the religious claim that evil by definition is only a lack. There is a risk of saying it is a substantial moral evil that the person has created - self-abuse. Or that it is like a spiritual infection that got into the unwilling victim. Either view would demonise the person as dangerous.
Also depression and sin are linked as follows. If depression is a good thing but in the wrong place and time so is sin. The link is there even if it is in the background and not spoken of. Depression and deliberate human evil supposedly arise from good not being good enough and falling short. They reflect each other.
Depression is an evil that wants you to be crushed for no reason except harming you. That arises from nature. Perhaps it means nature produces persons who would be as cruel as depression is. Not necessarily. Nobody would want to be as evil as a depression is.
Depression is experienced as and acts as substantial evil. If it is not substantial evil, then who made it so like it that it might as well be? Maybe God.
We get the blame for making evil but how can we? Nobody knowingly sets out to make a path for an evil that vicious. Yet the teaching is that we know to keep the Pandora's box shut and we open it. Hating humankind would be inevitable.
There are believers in God out there who say that God does not send depression and you make it yourself. So now suffering people have to be accused of making this evil to sustain the notion that a good God has not made it. They must have some intelligence and skill when they can make what by all accounts is substantial evil or as good as - despite being a mere lack. God being smarter and more powerful must have something to do with it! Sufferers are told to love God which means, "You fail to love God properly when you are to blame for your evil depression and also how evil it is. How dare you do this to him!" That's far from compassion!
Nobody should whitewash over the love of God. The love is based on how abhorrent it is to do wrong when he cannot endure it. This is very harsh.
Religion says that sin is spiritual disease. And that disease is where health is missing. But to look at disease and look at the gaps where health could be and is not is not looking at the disease. It turns evil into a matter of taste and perception.
Religion says God does not make evil for it is a mere defect. There is nothing there. It does not deny that evil strives to look and feel and seem real. So evil is inherently a lie. So it will only let you see the tip of the iceberg. Plus you only want to see the tip which is another problem. Do you really think that anybody trying to bring down government corruption is going to go beyond exposing a few officials without digging down to the roots?
Every problem is actually a mass of problems many of which you don't notice. So you have to streamline. You pick out what you think can be dealt with and work with that and ignore everything else or explain it away.
Thus evil is like a murderer in the mist and you shoot arrows and hope they hit. But they likely will not. You are doing this for you want to tell yourself you see and deal with the evil so it is about you being right. Your arrogance is behind this. Your attacks on evil are not because it is evil. So there is evil in you. That will create another murderer in the mist scenario, an internal one. Most people feel hopeless about the majority of evils they think they see and it is no wonder.
If evil is a lack then why does it go as far as it does? There is no excuse for a God letting it escalate and shift into something that is so crafty it is hard to deal with. It shouldn't be able to do it if it is a mere void. It is true a loss can do great harm. You may say that the escalation of evil does not necessarily prove it is more than a mere lack. But it doesn't either. You may have to toss a coin. It is certainly evil how religion stresses that despite escalation, evil is a lack. God belief emphasises that.
For many evil will be indistinguishable from a non-lack, a substance. They swear they encounter it as a real darkness, a real active force, an unimaginable agony. Their view has more weight than some Jesus or theologian who has not experienced this.
What is the point of saying evil is a lack not a substance when it is the same as a substance? Religion waters down evil to get it to fit the preconceived notion of an all-good and all-powerful God. They say God can let it happen for it is not real. It is an absence of a good that should be there but is not. So why can't God do evil things then rather than just letting them happen? Letting John fall off the cliff can be a way of murdering him.
Evil supposedly feigns being good and attaches itself to good. Thus you think by attacking it you are ruining the good as well. It would surely want us to think that it is somehow a pathetic void if it is a bigger threat, a substance! So God belief could be in fact its best friend.
And if an evil is a lack of a good that should be there but is not, then why is God not filling the hole? Okay John is murdered. His life by every test is absent. But what if God who can do things we cannot even think of, is in fact preserving John? What if he was recreated in another universe so that his life goes on and he thinks it was uninterrupted? If God is filling the holes then it does not matter what you do. You can attempt to cause a lack but there is no lack. If God is not filling the holes then God himself is immoral.
A gap may only seem like one. Even in physics, an empty space is not an empty space. You are always thinking things are absent when there is something there. As with what seems to be evil, there could be something there. If the gap is evil and evil thrives on lies it follows there could be good there for all you know. Once you doubt if the gap is a gap To call the void evil is to say an illusion is at work meaning you cannot really be sure the void is a void or a void as in evil. As only evil sees evil where it might not be, the evil then is in you.
It makes no sense to say that evil hides in a void and that you can be sure it is there instead of saying, "There is good there and though I don't see it, it is there." I thought morality was supposed to give the benefit of the doubt?
Religion says that evil is a lack, something missing. It adds that God wants good to be there and it is not. Now somebody wanting it to be there does not mean that love and justice are satisfied by having it there. If it is true you have no duty to help a beggar, meaning helping is an extra, a gift not an obligation, then it follows that being loving and fair is not necessarily obligatory. A person who gives equal treatment not because justice says so but who does it from generosity is better than the person who does it out of duty. The doctrine that morality must not be pressured does not fit how it is presented as a duty.
You can say a lack is a lack and it is not about good or bad. For example, if you are enjoying your birthday party you lack a chance to educate yourself about physics instead and that is a lack but is not good and not bad. A lack is only a problem if somebody wants it to be there and it is not. Or is it? You can say a lack is a lack and it is not about having to be good or having to be bad - ie duty. But we have seen even that is unclear and nobody is consistent about it.
Why can't God be, "I want justice or love or respect or compassion to be in that situation and they are not there but I want it the same way as I want John to put sugar in this new coffee"? In other words does it have to be a moral want? It is not anyway and God knows that. So he must be going out of his way to declare it one. He is trying to catch people out by making judgemental laws against them.
Is this: God makes laws → They’re traps → Why? Because He made them → Therefore, they’re traps.
No. It is this. God makes laws → They’re traps → Why? Because He made them WITHOUT NEEDING TO → Therefore, they’re traps.
Let us leave that thought aside. If you are an all-powerful and all-good God you can guide circumstances so that even a person trying to be unfair does not get very far so the situation ends up fair after all. God is not running the universe for fairness but unfairness.
It seems obvious that if you want say fairness, in a situation that this has to be a moral want. How could it be anything else? Can it? Fairness being chosen does not mean it is chosen for being fair. If you see it as a kind of rule or law or even a nice word, that is what matters to you. It is like how a person can marry and yet it may be about the idea of marriage not marriage.
This incoherence caused by God belief shows that the notion that he gives us the power to choose good or evil and life or death is very misleading. It plays on how human nature sees things as plausible when they in fact are not.
We mean real not in the way a brick is real. We mean real as in morally significant. Religion says that turning away from good is real even though evil is not a substance but a lack. That is a deliberate distortion for the teaching is that you turn from the good you should aim for for a lesser one and the side-effect of that is harm. Seeing harm as collateral is the problem with human nature. It is why we worry about what we aim for and feel the collateral is not really our fault.
Whatever evil means, lack or substance, religion and faith and God are not solutions. They are obstructions.
Whatever evil means, religious or secular, religion and faith and God are not solutions. [The religious see it as some ungodly supernatural opponent of good. The secularist sees it as simply grave harm.] They are obstructions.