IS THE ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF EVIL DOWN TO THE FACT THAT MAYBE THERE IS NO END TO HOW GOOD WE CAN BE?
How can an all-good God make it right to stand by and do nothing while an innocent person suffers?
The Christians say,
“A creature is not God and so is limited and always will be. This makes us prone to temptation and evil and making mistakes. There is no limit to the level of goodness that we can obtain. For example, if we suffer a countless million centuries to save some person from eternal torment we can suffer more and more than that and more than that and so on and on forever. We will always be imperfect for God alone is infinitely or fully perfect. God cannot stop us from sinning or suffering for it is logically impossible for him to make us literally perfect. Better some evil than no evil for no evil means nobody exists.”
Translation: I cannot prove God so God is a theory. So despite my theory
putting human beings down I still love and endorse it. Our theory in other
words is saying that innocent people are not that innocent! Imperfection
is a choice enough of the time to class us as terrible.
This theodicy, argument that evil can be tolerated by a perfectly good and
perfectly powerful God, attempts to explain why we are made imperfect for it
says that no matter what God does we will not be very great. It is wrong for we
don’t suffer enough to make us holy enough. If sacrifice is all God wants from
us then if I break my heart to care for my ailing son then why can’t I double
the pain and the sacrifice at will without really harming myself? Why can’t we
automatically double our pain at will when serving others? God is not doing
everything to make us good so he is evil. The theodicy contradicts Christianity,
especially Catholicism, which says we can be perfect in Heaven. It proves that
since God is perfect we will never have full union with him though the Church
says we can. When God needs to torment us to make us perfect he never should
have made us at all. What kind of parent makes a child for it to suffer or that
is meant to suffer but doesn’t?
The holier you are the more malicious your sins become for then the less reason
you have for committing them. Nobody is that good that they would suffer forever
to do good. The theodicy says you sin all the time in this your attitude. A
sinner cannot do real good.
It says we will not get into a heaven – ever – for God can’t be friends with a
sinner. God would not have made us if we cannot be with him or if most people go
to Hell forever.
The smaller the sins the closer you are to perfection. God has no need and no
right to let us sin seriously. But there is another perspective. If the sins are
small then you have less need to commit them. In a sense committing evil when
you have less need to do it is extremely malicious. They are not so small after
all. All sin is releasing a Pandora’s box, so all sin is serious.
The Christians will reject the theodicy on the basis that though we will not be
as perfect as God we will be as perfect as we can be and so that is enough
perfection and God will not ask for more. But that gives no reason to reject the
theodicy. A thing is perfect when it fulfils the purpose for which it was made.
For example, the perfect knife is sharp. But a letter opener which looks like a
knife is perfect for being blunt because it is not a knife.
If my dog is in the peak of his health and safe, how can I say that I am doing
something better for him if I injure him in some way?
This theodicy will not be inspirational to people who wish to do good but to
people who wish to do evil.
If evil is something that has to happen for a creature is necessarily limited then the idea of being perfectly united to God in Heaven is nonsense. You will always be his friend and then his enemy forever. Reincarnation or the spiritualist notion that no spirit is ever perfect in the afterlife and never will be fit this better rather than saying you are either delivered from sin and evil at death permanently or abandoned permanently to them.
