The Problem of Me-vil

If you’ve ever been to church . . . no, if you’ve ever heard of church, you are familiar with the story of the Garden of Eden. You’re familiar with the concept of sin. You’ve caught wind, I venture, of the notion that everything wrong with the entirety of creation came about because of the sin of one couple. Everything was perfect, the story goes, until Adam and Eve disobeyed God and screwed everything up.

If you’ve dug deeper into theology, you’re aware that, more or less, the general Christian consensus is that this was all part of God’s plan.

Back to things you’ve probably learned in church or church-adjacent settings: God is good. If God is really good and has any power whatsoever, it takes some explaining to synchronize that assumption with everything you see when you look around. It’s commonly called the problem of evil. How can there be so much bad if the all-powerful creator of the universe is perfectly good?

I don’t want to get too deep in the philosophical weeds on this one. I want to focus instead on the psychological impact of explaining this question with the free-will-necessitated sin of humankind.

When you and I look around and survey the devastation that exists across this globe, when we’re hit in the gut with cancer and suffering children and poverty and world hunger and natural disasters and downright evil acts committed against one another . . . and, frankly, the fact that every one of us is doomed to die one way or another . . . when we think about all that and conclude, you know what? It’s kinda my fault? That’s messed up.

So let’s reverse it. Let’s take it apart and look at why anyone would ever think this way.

The world is amazing. The world is imperfect. At some point, when beings with the power to wonder and reason and ask why considered the amazement they felt when they witnessed the beauty of creation, they asked the question, “How did this happen?” The general answer, “Well, someone must have made it,” is not a dumb one. It makes sense to think that. And when the most powerful, smartest, most creative observable beings around lacked the power to just whip up universes from scratch, it wasn’t idiotic to think someone more powerful made it happen.

But those same people looked around and saw a lot of problems, too. And they felt to compelled to ask and answer the question, “Why aren’t things perfect?”

I don’t doubt for a second that, when these two questions were first pondered together, some people looked at the evidence triggering the second question and viewed that as sufficient cause to rethink the popular conclusions about the first. Maybe all this amazing stuff wasn’t made by a perfect being, I presume these people thought.

But I’m sure there were just as many (or slightly more vocal) people who thought, No, no, no. I’m sure we’re right about the first question. Let’s run with that. There must be a reason why the Creator allowed all this crap to happen.

You can use your imagination to figure out how things proceeded from there. Go ahead and take a minute to do that if you’re so inclined.

But then I just want to ask you: do you think everything we don’t like in this universe exists because someone just like you and me made a mistake? Or is it possible there’s just stuff we don’t like because this natural world isn’t perfect?

People who believe in God will often ask people who don’t, “Do you really think all of this exists by chance?” But where’s that energy when they consider the question, “Do you really think all this so-called evil exists because of fruit?”

Maybe neither question yields a super satisfactory answer, but I feel completely comfortable in saying, the problems of this world are not your fault.

Doesn’t mean we can’t help solve a couple.

Thank you for reading Under Deconstruction. This post is public so feel free to share it.