Did God Create Evil?
I caught this on a message board this week and it struck me as a fine piece of wisdom.
The university professor challenged his students with this question:
“Did God create everything that exists? ”
A student bravely replied “Yes, he did!”
“God created everything?” the professor asked.
“Yes sir,” the student replied.
The professor answered, “If God created everything, then God created evil since evil exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are, then God is evil.”
The professor was quite pleased with himself and boasted to the students that he had proven once more that the Christian faith was a myth.
Another student raised his hand and said, “Can I ask you a question professor?”“Of course,” replied the professor.
The student stood up and asked, “Professor, does cold exist?”
The professor replied “Of course it exists. Have you never been cold?”
The students snickered at the young man’s question.
The young man replied, “In fact sir, cold does not exist. According to the laws of physics, what we consider cold is in reality the absence of heat.
Everybody or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body, or matter, have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (- 460 degrees F) is the total absence of heat. Cold does not exist. We have created this word to describe how we feel if we have no heat.
The student continued. “Professor, does darkness exist?”
The professor responded, “Of course it does.”
The student replied, “Once again you are wrong sir. Darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light. Light, we can study, but not darkness.
In fact we can use Newton’s prism to break white light into many colors and study the various wavelengths of each color. You cannot measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you know how dark a certain space is? You measure the amount of light present. Isn’t this correct? Darkness is a term used by man to describe what happens when there is no light present.”
Finally the young man asked the professor. “Sir, does evil exist?”
Now uncertain, the professor responded, “Of course, as I have already said. We see it every day. It is in the daily example of man’s inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil.”
To this the student replied, “Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God’s love present in his heart. It’s like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light.”
The professor sat down.
Cute, but I don’t buy it for a second.
I think I just like the in-your-face aspect of it more than anything. And its cute.
That’s a road well traversed. Using reason and logic to define something undefinable is hard. Where does the line between scientific knowledge and reason end and belief start? It is impossible to gain an objective viewpoint as no matter the case, we are always the subjective observer, and there will always be a piece of our awareness in everything that we do, from logical reasoning to baking a cake.
For example, if I was to literally take the youngling’s argument as fact, then my absence of Christian faith (and corrosponding godhead deity) makes me an evil person, filled with darkness. But I know that is not the case. One thing that i do know for fact is that I am experiencing subjective reality at this moment which is made up of the million pieces of stimuli entering all of my senses, being processed by my brain and body, creating emotion and thought (then ultimately music…) And I do not buy the professor’s argument either, as like I initially stated it is impossible to define something undefinable.
One thing that i do like is exploring religious beliefs as a whole, and what is it that makes up our ‘spirit’. It is undeniable to me that the human ability to experience awareness creates an infinite loop of thought process, a self perpetuating paradox. The ability to believe in something greater than ourselves, a form of energy that is both omnipotent and all-knowing (deity,god,christ,bhudda,etc), I think, and believe is a product of our mind’s ability to throw a wrench into the mystery of Self knowledge, the paradox of our awareness being aware of itself, and the awareness of that, ad infinitum. In essence, it is a product of the evolution of humanity as a whole. Though, in a lot of cases, these belief systems are so strong they seem to create a lot more bad than good (Holy Wars). We’re still working it out. Hopefully we will continue to evolve into more peaceful beings as a whole, and I think the ability to believe in God, or a God is a piece of that puzzle, the essential of our future evolution. Spreading my awareness of Self out even further (remember, it’s all subjective!), I can see the whole of humanity, and how we are still very much in the infancy stages of human existence. It’s amazing, beautiful, and terrifying. The point? As far as I know so far, for me it is love and music, and embracing the mystery and darkness, and not having blind faith in something I cannot experience, but knowing that the ability to have faith itself is one of the more positive functions of a human being.
Anyhow, see ya soon.