Good and Evil are two fundamental features of any reality that are important when discussing the nature of God and existence in general. God is mostly considered to be Good or Benevolent. It is not clear why humans have never appreciated the Evil or Malevolent God. The existence of Evil, however, is a serious challenge to a Benevolent God; as such, the existence of Good is a problem for a Malevolent God. God is considered to be Omnipresent, Omniscient, and Omnipotent additionally. It is then natural to ask why a Benevolent God with all these Omni attributes didnât create a Good reality in which Evil does not exist. One can also ask another question: Could a Benevolent God create a world in which Evil is possible at all? The answer to the first question is simple and yes. We can imagine such a world; therefore, it is possible. The answer to the second question is a little trickier, but it is still simple and no. Why? Because the Evil must be an ingredient of creation somehow, and that is not permissible in the act of creation by a Benevolent God. Moreover, only Good can come from Good in a Good creation. Therefore, a Benevolent God cannot create a world in which Evil is possible because the act of creation is Good, and from Good only comes Good in a Good creation. The same types of questions and answers apply to Malevolent God. Good and Evil, however, exist in our world. This means God cannot be ONLY Benevolent or Malevolent. God is, therefore, BOTH Benevolent and Malevolent.
I think they have. Some Gnostic cosmogonies see the creator of the world as evil, which is keeping the soul from unifying with its source (a higher God). There are even Christian narratives that seem to indicate world is under malevolent control, possibly interpreted from Bibilical quotes like the following:
Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who donât believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News. They donât understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God. 2 Corinthians 4:4 NLT
The problem of suffering, whether or not that suffering is intentional, is a better way of talking about evil. If God is truly benevolent, then suffering is necessary for whatever ends he/she/it has planned.
The absurdity of trying to square the circles of religious dogmas can be done away with by just giving up on such a project. The plurality of views alone make the unification of belief a kind of myth. Who are the believers who have the right beliefs? Why would thought account for so much when ultimately, from a point of view of lifestyle, we all resemble one another despite our peculiar faiths.
Because there would be no point. Weâd all be âhappy robotsâ. The possibility of failure, death and suffering are intrinsic to existence.
The problem is modern people expect God to be an efficient manager, someone who wants to fix everything and make life as comfortable as possible. But that image is born of generations who have no real understanding of the role of suffering in religion.
Yes, the Demiurge. And there are many Protestants who think of God as cruel and jealous but also all good. He certainly seems a bit of a cunt in the Old Testament, an enabler of slavery, misogyny and genocide.
Sure, as above. But which God are you thinking of and how do you know whether human understanding of reality and the world match up with Godâs understanding- assuming you hold to theistic personalism wherein God is like a magic sky wizard.
As others note below, they very much have.
Two of the profoundest books I know are Job and Ecclesiastes.
The climax of Job is God speaking out from the whirlwind, finally answering his puny critics who hilariously hope to hold him to their standards.
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding⌠When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
The plot is poor righteous Job being tortured by God, for no good reason. His âfriendsâ insist that he, Job, must be guilty, because God wouldnât do that. Jobâs wife, seeing the pathetic man scraping boils off his body with a shard of pottery, tells him to curse God and die.
But Job wonât curse God and he refuses to pretend he is guilty.
Iâm an atheist unless you count this God as a face on Nature, no more lamb than lion.
Note that Godâs âjustificationâ of his torturing of a faithful servant is just bragging about the splendor of the world. And thatâs the genius of the book. Iâm amazed that someone snuck it in.
Feuerbach brilliantly traces the tendency of our inherited anti-pagan monotheism to despise nature, treat it as mouth-stuffing resource rather than wonder, which is implicit in creation ex nihilo.
Creation is the spoken word of God; the creative, cosmogonic flat is the tacit word, identical with the thought. To speak is an act of the will; thus, creation is a product of the Will: as in the Word of God man affirms the divinity of the human word, so in creation he affirms the divinity of the Will: not, however, the will of the reason, but the will of the imagination â the absolutely subjective, unlimited will. The culminating point of the principle of subjectivity is creation out of nothing. As the eternity of the world or of matter imports nothing further than the essentiality of matter, so the creation of the world out of nothing imports simply the non-essentiality, the nothingness of the world.
Being Omnipotent means being able to do anything, and everything. So God can be benevolent and also malevolent or neutral if God wants to be. It is up to him. It just confirms and proves that God is omnipotent.
This is a false dilemma based on a misunderstanding.
Letâs use an analogy to clarify the point:
Imagine a completely secular society with no laws whatsoeverâeverything is 100% subjective. In that world, there would legally be no crime. Acts like murder or theft could still happen, but they wouldnât count as âcrimesâ because no objective standard exists to define crime versus non-crime.
Now suppose the society introduces clear objective laws: âDo not murderâ and âDo not steal.â Suddenly, the distinction between âcrimeâ and ânot a crimeâ comes into existence. The positive standard (the law) automatically creates and defines its opposite.
This is exactly what God is saying in verses like:
âI form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things.â (Isaiah 45:7 ESV)
Because Godâs ontological nature is good, the opposite arises automatically. This is not God consciously choosing to create malevolence or evil out of crueltyâthat would contradict His own nature as good.
The âcreation of evil/calamityâ is simply the unavoidable shadow cast by the establishment of the positive standard itself. Without that standard, there could be no genuine moral distinctions at allâand therefore no real good.
Thus, just as we wouldnât say the lawmakers are criminals for creating the category of âcrimeâ by establishing laws, we cannot conclude that God is malevolent simply because His goodness necessarily creates the possibility of its opposite.
Omnipotence doesnât mean God can do âanything and everything.â It is impossible for God to contradict His own nature:
ââŚso that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lieâŚâ (Hebrews 6:18 ESV)
True omnipotence means God can do everything that is possibleâthat is, anything that does not contradict His own good nature.
We know nothing of the nature of God. All we know is what men have said about their gods and that has changed radically over time.
We can know one thing for certain: if there is truly no objective standard of truth, then your own statement is nothing more than your own subjective opinionâand it has no authority to declare what the rest of us can or cannot know about the nature of God.
Omnipotence is a such a powerful concept, that it means it can do anything the holder of the quality want to do. Hence when an entity is omnipotent, it implies the entity can do even what is not His own nature if necessary.
This directly contradicts the entire Biblical witness concerning Godâs nature:
âFor God is not a God of confusion but of peace.â (1 Corinthians 14:33 ESV)
âIf we are faithless, he remains faithfulâfor he cannot deny himself.â (2 Timothy 2:13 ESV)
ââŚin which it is impossible for God to lieâŚâ (Hebrews 6:18 ESV)
âEvery good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.â (James 1:17 ESV)
âGod is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.â (Numbers 23:19 ESV)
The Bible is crystal clear: God cannot act contrary to His own nature. If He could, He wouldnât be God.
I think I should have said, âIt is not clear why humans have never appreciated the Evil or Malevolent God as much as the Benevolent God.â Thanks for your contribution.
By Malevolent God, I mean a God who lies, betrays, is jealous, is mad, ⌠and the one who is responsible for suffering.
There are two problems here: 1) Suffering is not acceptable in a world created by a Benevolent God, and 2) Any Good end can be achieved without suffering.
The fact that there are different believers indicates that God is Evil as well. In fact, it is quite ironic to notice that a God with all Omni attributes could not convey his message properly and leave people with different sorts of beliefs.
We would be happy creatures. Do you see anything wrong with that? Do you think it is a good idea to make happy people unhappy?
No, these are Evil and are attributes of an Evil universe.
I didnât say that God is supposed to fix everything and make life as comfortable as possible. We could contribute to life, grow spiritually, ⌠in a Good world as well. Instead, we are set in this pitfall. People have different beliefs, they are killing each other, they are stealing from each other, children die because of cancer, children are abused, ⌠Could you please tell me what the points of a Benevolent God are in creating such a universe?
I have never said that our understanding of reality can match that of God. I am just saying that God is both Benevolent and Malevolent.
God cannot change His nature, and His act is according to His nature.
Because youâve likely not heard of the privation theory of evil, which is the most popular stance on evil in theology today. In privation theory, evil is not a positive substance (meaning it has existence, or ontology), but an absence of a substance, namely, the existence of good. If privation theory is true, then evil is unable to exist on its own. A few good reasons to suppose that the privation theory is true, compared to other theories on evil, is by observing acts of moral evil in our daily existence, and to analyze the grounds, or motives, for these acts of evil. For example, if someone is pickpocketed in London, then you might ask to yourself, âWhy did the pickpocketer commit the crime of pickpocketing?â I am not a pickpocketer, nor am I a journalist who goes out and conducts interviews on such types of people like pickpocketers, but we can employ reason to suppose why the man would pickpocket. And the main reason I would suppose for the man pickpocketing is because he is likely impoverished, hence why he would make a career stealing money from unfortunate victims, and so would be pickpocketing as a way to alleviate his impoverishment. Now, taking it on the face of it, if one of the pickpocketerâs family membersâwho themselves live in povertyâasks what the pickpocketer does to uphold the family financially, and he replies, âI ask people around for money,â the family might find that strange, perhaps a little concerning for the pickpocketer and for his safety, because of him working out on the city streets of London, but they might stop digging into him, because he puts himself âat riskâ for a good cause; to feed himself, and to feed his family. In the same sense, if we didnât see, ultimately, the unethical means that somebody we know in our lives might use to attain some good, we might suppose that they are wholly good, even though their line of work is not so. What this means, then, is that what we call evil cannot exist independently from what we consider good; evil could be considered a disordered means to attaining what is good, in the same sense as pickpocketing is a disordered means to achieving financial stability, even though financial stability, by itself, is almost unarguably good. Therefore, because of this, evil cannot exist apart from good, and because this is so, the very notion of an evil God is incoherent, because it would first presuppose the existence of a good God, and so the good God mustâve existed before the evil God, due to the fact that evil is parasitic, rather than an independent substance. And if a good God existed first, then it would be unnecessarily evil for it to devolve into an evil God, and so by nature of the good God being good, it would never allow itself to become an evil God. This is all, then, the reason why God could only be good, rather than only evil, or an amalgamation between good and evil.
This became much longer than Iâve thought, even though youâve also brought up the problem of evil in your response. Iâll respond to that if you want, but for now, this is where Iâll close off.
What about the problem of neglect that arises out of divine hiddeness? If the discovery of what is good is obvious, then there would be no need for the an indirect revelation that fails to address moral minutiae. Godâs good standard or divine law might be insufficiently communicated.
Was it wrong to burn Marguerite Porete alive in 1310 for writing her little book?
It is a serious dilemma, and it is not false, unless you show otherwise. In fact, theologians have been busy with the problem of Evil for ages.
Some people murder because they crave killing, the same for rapping, child abuse, ⌠That is either a part of their nature or they are influenced. So who is responsible for all these?
So you are arguing that moral responsibility is not possible in a world where Good and Evil do not exist together. This means you agree that God created Good and Evil. Therefore, He is Benevolent and Malevolent. What is His point in creating such a world in which we are held responsible for our acts, in your opinion? Our end is either Heaven or Hell. He could have created us in Heaven in the first place, so everybody would be happy. What is His purpose in creating such a world, separating good and bad people, having fun with good people in heaven eternally, and letting bad people suffer in fire in Hell eternally? God, in fact, has Foreknowledge, so He knows in advance the fate of individuals. Why create bad people at all, and then keep them in Hell as a result of their bad deeds?
If there is no way to determine the truth of the matter then there is no way to determine that the nature of God is known or is knowable. What would it mean to claim that the nature of God is known if there is no way to determine that it is? We remain ignorant.
We can for sure say certain things, for example, whether He is Evil, Good, or all the Omni attributes.