For most of us, more than anything else, the appealing depth and extent of human suffering, together with own selfish reasons and greed for more, which possess so much of this, that makes the idea of our beloved Creator seem debatable and disposes us towards one of the various naturalistic theory of religion.
What we think of “evil”? Something incompatible to God’s will or physical pain , mental suffering, and moral wickedness. The last is the cause of first two, for a plenty of human pain arises from our own imprudent inhumanity.The pain, which includes poverty, injustice, indignity, oppression and persecution.
As a challenge to theism, the problem of evil has traditionally been posed in the form of a dilemma: if God is perfectly loving, He must wish to purge all evil. If God is supreme, He must have abolished all evil. But evil exist, therefore God cannot be omnipotent or perfectly loving. To say that evil is the illusion of the human mind is impossible within a religion based upon stark realism of the bible. It reflects the characteristic mixture of good and evil in human experience. They record every kind of sorrow and suffering, every mode of “man’s inhumanity to man” and of our painfully insecure existence in the world. Evil is dark, menacingly ugly, desolating, and excruciating and so, it is real and in no sense, an illusion.
I just came across a word free-will defense, at least where moral evil of human wickedness is concerned, in Christianity, for christian thought has always seen moral evil as related to human freedom and responsibility. This involves being free to act wrongly as well as rightly. There can therefore be no certainty in advance that a genuinely free moral agent will never choose wrongly.
If by free actions we mean actions that are not externally compelled, but flow from nature of agents as they react to the circumstances in which they find themselves, then there is indeed no contradiction between our being free and our actions being “caused”. However, there is a contradiction in saying that God is the cause of our actions and that we are free being in relation to God. And so we are genuinely independent persons in relation to God. If all our thoughts and actions are divinely predestined, then however free and responsible we may seem to be, we are not free and responsible in sight of God. Such freedom would be comparable to that of patients acting out a series of posthypnotic suggestions, they themselves appear to be free but their volition has been predetermined by the will of hypnotist, in relation to whom the patients are therefore not genuinely free agents.
So, what do you think? If any such divine entity as God, does exist, would He create sons and daughters having free-will or human puppets who move as per His commands?
Really a thought invoking article. Commendable job.