INTERVENTION AS A METAPHOR?
Christianity says that all things utterly depend on God to even be there. So it says that as God is good, evil is really just a distortion of good. It is not a power like good is.
This is defining evil as an attempted rebellion against God, a defect. (So its harmfulness, etc., does not matter. Evil is used to justify the God idea. It amounts to looking at people suffering and the first thing you think of is, “How can I use that to have a faith in God?” Talk about mercenary!)
It is nothing and pathetic before God.
Religion says God is goodness itself, so it follows that even when you do evil you are using God or good, so you cannot really get away from them.
We are asked to hold that whatever is not good like God is evil, but that is judgemental. A falling short in a math exam is not evil. Just because it is not good does not make it evil. We may say that ending a life in murder is not like failing in maths. True. But if God has all in his caring hands it can be. And it would be. In reality we want to wish evil into existence in this sense. We want murder to be evil and wrong and abominable. If it does not need to be and is not really, then the nearest thing to real evil is our moralising. To call murder bad and abominable through and through contradicts how they say that everything has good in it even if it is twisted.
God supposedly only lets us do harm out of respect for our free will, and he has the power to make good overcome it. So even when we rebel we are controlled, and even the rebellion is parasitic on God’s good creation, his power.
Many hold that a God who intervenes to bring good from our bad and to do miracles such as instant healings is only a metaphor. He does not really intervene, for he creates and sustains all and is closer to every creature than it is to itself. They say it only looks to us like God does nothing and then acts. So it is a metaphorical intervention based on how we see things. There then is no real intervention from God, not even when Jesus dies and rises again.
THE FREE WILL OBJECTION
The doctrine that God gives humans free will is often conflated with the idea that God does not interfere in human actions. Christian teaching sometimes claims that when humans commit evil acts and God “stands by,” this demonstrates respect for human free will. However, non-interference is not equivalent to granting freedom; it is simply refraining from action. Allowing someone to act without intervention does not create the capacity for moral choice—it merely allows events to unfold. For example, if a rock falls and kills children, it is not meaningful to attribute “free will” to the rock; non-interference in such a case does not generate moral agency.
To respect free will would require giving humans the actual capacity to make meaningful choices, not simply refraining from preventing harm. Observing evil and suffering does not, on its own, demonstrate divine respect for freedom; it merely indicates that God is not intervening. It is therefore insufficient to infer complex metaphysical conclusions about free will from the mere fact that God allows evil to occur.
Hypothetical scenarios can clarify this distinction. Considering “what would we do if X happened” helps reveal our moral intuitions and priorities. Within Christian thought, the statements “God may not interfere” and “God gives us free will as a gift” are both asserted. Yet when examined, they may imply tension: if God truly allows all human choices to unfold freely, non-interference may be morally neutral, not inherently supportive of freedom. Choosing between these claims highlights the difficulty of reconciling non-intervention with the notion of divinely granted free will.
LACK DOCTRINE
Another problem is how can you say God is good and is the only real power and say that evil pushes him out? That it is a lack of good and therefore of God? Religion says God gives us the power to consent to evil and respects our free will so he will depart.
So he is not really pushed out then? If evil cannot push him out then he is just leaving.
What if he could be ejected? Is evil more powerful than a God who is everywhere? Is an evil in a person, which is nothing compared to the whole universe and which would not be able to register as a speck if there were a machine to detect it, able to do this to almighty God? It is no answer to say evil is a dot and God is unimaginably great, for it is not a quantity thing but a quality thing. It is about principle.
Whatever evil is, even if it is powerless compared to God, it is not powerless in its patch. The powerful sun does not mean that the grain of sand cannot cast a tiny shadow. The shadow is not nothing. It is nothing in comparison to the sun but it is not nothing.
The doctrine that evil is nothing compared to God has no impact on us, for it matters enough to us. Yet that teaching is deceptively put out there as a deterrent to doing evil. It does the opposite.
How sincere is the “evil is lack” teaching? It clearly says WE THINK WE ARE DOING GOOD OR WHAT IS AT LEAST NECESSARY. If you really think you are doing wrong then what? Thinking it does not mean you are doing wrong at all.
The real reason why we do “wrong” is because we aim for good and think everybody else, despite doing bad things, gets on reasonably well after. Many of us do evil and suffer short-term results and then start to rationalise when things get better that it was all worth it. We repent and that can be reversed by nightfall. We forgive in the morning and that can be undone by noon. The flip-flopping happens without us even noticing.
The teaching is not sincere simply because a morality that makes excuses for everything you do is not a morality or practical. Also, they contradict their view that evil can fool you by getting you to do it as it poses as good or needed.
Nobody really relates to the lack teaching. We tend to think of what a deed will result in. Yet the teaching says morality or immorality are not about the results. An act is just bad or it is good, we are told. The lack teaching is too abstract, and nobody really thinks that giving somebody drugs to depress them is “making an absence of happiness.” It is degrading and harming them.