God and evil

31 July 2024

By Balisa Finca

Without a sovereign and personal Creator, the idea of good and evil is meaningless.

It's not enough to have an immanent ethereal deity, He must be personal. Evil must affect Him personally.

Ethics have meaning in so far as they have an objective source. And without God, there can be no objectivity.

Let's take theft as an example. In the absence of God, what would give anyone the right to condemn it, if it is consistent with the thief's own ethical standards? What if stealing is the thief's truth? Who would we be to impose 'our truth' on the thief?

To do that would be coercive, even in that case. But even coercion and bullying would also be neither good nor evil as there would be no such concept.

One imagines that in a counterfactual world like that, power would be the only real currency. A much more extreme version of our current reality.

Imagine living in a dystopian world like that!

Even the question of the (im)morality of suffering and death falls squarely in that category.  Evil is only wrong because it violates an intrinsic objective standard of ethics that we instinctively understand.

This is why the question above, when it is posed in a universe without a sovereign God, can only be meaningless.

Everyone, including the author of the question, is profoundly haunted by the presence of evil in the world. Not merely by its effects but the fact that it exists!

We instinctively understand that morality is built into the very fabric of the universe and that it is profoundly more than just about our individual preferences.

This both troubles and comforts us.

It troubles us because we know that we are ultimately accountable for our choices. Accountable to an immanent moral standard that is not determined by us.

It comforts us because it means our sorrows matter profoundly.

It is implicit in the enquirer's question that he assumes a universe governed by objective morality, where suffering and death ought not exist.

By necessity, he therefore concedes to the existence of an objective source of that morality - God.

Correctly, he assumes that suffering and death are objectively evil, hence he is sufficiently troubled by its occurrence to ask this valid question.

Counterintuitively, the presence of suffering and death in the world, rather than undermining it, in fact reinforces the case for a sovereign, morally good and personal God.