Political Forum - View Single Post - How can God represent goodness if he allows evil?

Force-of-the-Truth · #9 (**permalink**) 04-06-2007, 02:12 PM

You're fairly young, Locke, so I don't want to risk indoctrinating you in any way. I warn you, therefore, that I am a Christian pantheist and I hold some very unconventional ideas, some of which are undoubtedly wrong. With that disclaimer, I can now give you my best guess about what philosophers call the problem of evil.

The12thMan makes a good point about free will, but the free will argument only goes so far in theodicy (justifying the existence of evil). An atheist could counter by asking why an all-powerful, theistic God could not create a universe in which there was simply no such thing as evil. After all, evil is by definition something against God's will, and so in the traditional way of thinking, if God created the universe, He must either have created evil and so not be perfect or there must be some creative power other than His, thus negating God's status as all-powerful.

The theist can correctly counter with the sweeping statement that if God is all-powerful, God defines good and evil, making the problem of evil irrelevant. However, in traditional theology, evil is said to exist. It is at this point that I reached an impasse in which I was forced to question the underlying assumptions of the theism vs. atheism argument.

The traditional theist sees the act of creation in terms analogous to psychology (the mind creates, while matter is neither created nor destroyed) but sees the processes of the universe as analogous to those of physical science (hence the compatibility of the laws of motion with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition). I am now inclined to invert those analogies. I see creation as analogous to physical science in that I think that everything that is now always was and always will be. In a sense, of course, that negates the idea of creation itself, but that brings me to the second analogy. I think that the processes of the universe are comparable to those of the mind. In this way, creation becomes a process rather than an isolated act.

The image I now have of the universe (all that is) is that of a fragmented mind attempting to unite with itself. This would, if true, answer many questions. God exists in that an infinite mind exists (mind, by nature, is infinite), evil exists in so far as this mind may fracture, goodness is the union of this mind and finally the problem of evil can be solved by comparing the universe with the human mind: Just as your mind or mine can have conflicts with itself and yet be one, so can the universal mind, that mind in turn being God. I think that the increasing indeterminism of modern physics points to the universe being more "mental" than "physical". Of course, my ideas are so unconventional and held by so few people that I wouldn't discount the possibility that they are the products of my mental illnesses.