EVIL CONTRADICTS THE DOCTRINE THAT GOD DOES NOT LITERALLY INTERVENE BUT IS FULLY INVOLVED IN EVERYTHING
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.
1 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!]
2 It is nothing and pathetic before God.
3 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.
4 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.
5 God supposedly only lets us do harm out of respect for our free will and he has the power 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.
6 Many Christians 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 like to us that 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.
QUESTION: DOES GOD NOT INTERVENE WHEN WE DECIDE TO SIN?
Christianity bases its moral rules on the notion that God has made us free agents who can do good or evil.
The doctrine of God giving us free will is confused with his non-interference. I mean they say, "When we do evil and God is standing by he is upholding our free will." But non-interference is just standing by. It is not the same as upholding free will. If God can avoid interfering with what we do, he can also avoid interfering with other things. So does the rock rolling off the ledge to kill the children have free will now as well?
If you don't interfere when you can stop a murder this is just being a bystander. It is not the same as "respecting" their free will. It is not the same as giving them the faculty with which they can exercise freedom. If people are looking at evil and suffering and deciding it shows God is not interfering it only means that he is keeping out of it. There is not enough there to read a pile of metaphysical free will theories into it.
Try the hypothetical. It is a good test for what we are really like, what we really need/like, and would be like if x happened. If x is impossible that does not matter. It is about what we would do if it were happening and could happen. That shows what is inside us. Now for believers, "God may not interfere", and, "God gives us free will as a gift" are both true. What if you had to reject one? Which one? If God works like a prop and gives us power to use free will, that is as unsatisfying as somebody else seeing for me when I am blind. Or somebody holding me up when I want to stand and own it. We prefer God to stand back and let us be free. We want him to not interfere. Even if we are free and this is his gift, what we care about is his keeping out of it.
Despite the free will idea being used as to make the God idea look good and sensible, even it fails to do so. It is not our thing. People simply go along with religion and faith but that does line up to what they really want inside.
Incidentally, religion is clear that pride is the greatest opponent of God. It says those who think they are humble are in fact exhibiting pride. This creates the problem of how those who see their pride now think they are humble for noticing it and admitting it. This makes no sense. They say pride lies and hides itself even from the prideful person. So no matter what you do you cannot win. Your vision of God is just a construct made from a place of pride.
QUESTION: DOES GOD INTERVENE TO DO MIRACLES?
People seek divine intervention as in miracles. They want God to change nature and send a discreet jet of wind that nobody knows about so that the rich person's cash [which he stole from the poor anyway] will fall out of the wallet. They hope to find it and feed their children with it.
People too often hear of miracle claims such as instant healings where the crippled walk and the blind see. This is down to the noise made by the fans. It is not down to the miracle's merit. Interestingly no miracle of an amputated foot being regenerated or a cataract just vanishing has ever been reported. This is not surprising. There is no chance of misdiagnosis. That aside, most if not nearly all, miracles are of the following type. John has a cancerous tumour that is clearly killing him. It turns into a benign tumour. Joan cannot hear at all and we are told she never will. But then she bangs her head and somehow she can now pick up some sounds through the bone near her ear. It is an unimaginable level of twisted to turn what was clearly a medical mistake into a miracle. Doctors misdiagnose. Many doctors are secretly pleased when the patient shouts, "miracle". Anybody could be a doctor if you can tell Ann she has terminal cancer and make excuses for why she is in perfect health fifty years later. Principles matter.
Some want intervention in their own lives. Others want the intervention to have really happened to somebody else such as Jesus so that they can see it as an invitation to faith and a validation of faith. Most want both.
Some argue that divine intervention is the wrong wording for intervention suggests God is not there and has to move and be there. He has to enter into a situation he was not in. I argue that we should clarify that it means not that God is out and coming in but that God is clearly acting and doing something. So this view is that even when it looks like he is not present and doing nothing, he is present and helping. The view that God stands by and only helps occasionally is dismissed.
It is warned that divine intervention says that we think the world looks like something that runs itself and works like a clock until God does some stunning thing such as raising a dead man to life. The warning is about how this risks us failing to see a little flower growing as much an act of God as Jesus rising would be. The warning is that you are showing that no matter how much faith you have there is another side that suspects there is nothing only the universe. This is telling. It is easy to dress up having little or no faith as proper faith. You tell yourself, "There is something. Maybe I do believe". Believing you believe something actually shows you are trying to fool yourself. And as faith involves belief and devotion telling yourself you have faith when you only believe you do, that is far worse.
Intervention then is only a word when it comes to God. Does that make sense to us? Do we need to think that a God or power will truly intervene? YES. If all is clockwork after all even if God is winding up things we don't want to know. We are not made that way.
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 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, 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.
People do relate to this teaching, "If God lets evil and suffering take place though he hates them, this is for good to come of evil. The good may be just a prevention of some evil. Or it may be provision of a new good. Or both."
There is no real connection, no organic relationship. The good has to be done around and after the evil. It is all aimed from the outside. It is a response to the evil and does not rise from it.
The purpose thing makes you shallow and careless regarding evil. It makes you think the good is what really matters so your condemnations of evil end up being too shallow.
What could you expect but all that hypocrisy? It is natural for religion gets totally incoherent when it tries to tell us concrete things about evil and what it is.
If God lets evil happen so that we may learn to soul make, ie become kinder, more loving, more just and so on, then what if you feel that he wants you to let harm come to others for that reason or just hurt them? He can delegate his power and authority to improve the human heart with suffering and pain. If you believe in God you have to admit that Jack might have got the divine mandate to harm people.
As for a God who can make harm for a good enough reason and can delegate that, some say we are already claiming to have a mandate. What do they mean? Well if you are kind to Joan you know that everything you do for her is good but also bad. Her cakes, her tablets, her trips in the car - there is a problem side. You are already ready to harm her in the name of what you think is best. You go by good intentions. You could give her a cake that kills her for there is glass in it. Good intentions only mean you didn't know you were harming but they do not entitle you to claim to be harmless. If you claim your intention must be seen as good you are a liar and a do-gooder. People often do good to look good in their own eyes and do not truly care about the people they help.
Having say to euthanise on the battlefield is terrible. But there is something unnecessary and twisted about wanting to bring a God into it and say it is his holy will. It does not need any more validation. It is like you want to validate it when in fact you should wish you didn't have to. It is also like you are not that sure so you need God as a crutch. At least you admit that God and non-violence don't go together! You are using evil to help Joan too.
Religion says that "Our intellect cannot discern what God is doing and why he is permitting evil to happen though he opposes it. This is in general but in any specific happenstance we cannot see what he is doing either. Maybe we just see a bit. It depends." [Seeing a bit when evil and good are mixed and when evil tries to look needed when it is not means we are arrogant if we say we notice signs of God's love at work in the situation.] Notice that this is denying God the power to use what you see to teach you about his purpose and what it is. It denies the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So now we have religion trying to protect its God ideology by denying God. God is not really respected as much by religion as it wants you to presume. So no surprise there! This is taking advantage of how we know only a little of anything. It is clearly about manipulation. And don't forget the most insane doctrine of Christianity is that the Holy Spirit guides it. It is obviously and shamelessly untrue.
If God cannot intervene to solve the good and evil problem then how can we think he can intervene to bring Jesus back to life after he lay in death for three days? If God intervenes to do that when there are more important issues then what right have we to assume he is right?
We need to say something about prayer here. Prayer is defined as raising the heart and mind to God. It is believed that if you let God in, blessings will happen. So even if you are not asking directly for them, you are being treated as if you did. So in that sense all prayer creates good change. Many however do ask for help. Some say that if you ask God for your country to win the war, then you are asking God to ignore the person in the enemy nation who is praying for their country to win. Are they asking God to pick a favourite? Are they saying your prayer is not as important as their's? Are they asking him to toss a coin? Every complex plan will involve a lot of coin tossing. God's plan is supposedly like that. You are potentially asking for luck to fall your way when you pray. To call prayer unifying and lovely when there is that side to it, and when that side is hidden, is absurd.
The Bible says that evil spirits such as Satan can possess human beings and make them fall into the fire and so on. So if it makes no sense to say God intervenes then what about Satan? People can intervene and Satan is a creature without a body so he can intervene. It is undeniable that despite the philosophy, people only worship a God who they think does intervene. If they want that then Satan will have to answer the prayers for intervention is beneath a God who makes all and who is in all things. The doctrines sell Satan as an object of devotion rather than God.
The notion that spirits really intervene mean that God not intervening is virtually irrelevant. If he made unimaginably powerful godlike angels to govern all they can intervene even if he does not.
CONCLUSION:
Divine intervention might fit in a polytheistic worldview where gods or goddesses might help when they feel like it. But not if you think God is creator of all from nothing and who sustains - stops all things going back to nothing. He in fact is the reason you do all you do, he is the reason you are not nothing and he is the energy that you use for everything. If all utterly depends on God then there is no random or chance. If there can be no real random then any divine standing by is orchestrated. Yet despite religion on paper saying it does not take divine intervention literally, the fact remains that it sells itself on the basis that prayer has power, that sacraments heal, that Jesus rose and so on. So it uses it to pull the crowds in and their purses and wallets. Nobody really means it when they say they don't want an interventionist God. Christianity and Islam and Mormonism and many other religions are just shams.
