August 19, 2008

  • Did God Create Evil?

    I found the following article interesting and thought I would share it with you.

    Question: "Did God create evil?"

    Answer:     At first it might seem that if God created all things then evil must have been created by God. However, there is an assumption here that needs to be cleared up. Evil is not a "thing" - like a rock or electricity. You can't have a jar of evil! Rather, evil is something that occurs, like running. Evil has no existence of its own - it is really a lack in a good thing. For example, holes are real but they only exist in something else. We call the absence of dirt a hole - but it cannot be separated from the dirt. So when God created, it is true that all that existed was good. One of the good things that God made was creatures who had the freedom to choose good. In order to have a real choice, God had to allow there to be something besides good to choose. So God allowed these free angels and humans to choose good or non-good (evil). When a bad relationship exists between two good things we call that evil, but it does not become a "thing" that required God to create it.

    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 everyday. It is in the daily examples 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."
    http://hoosiercatholic.org/cgi-bin/ambo/ambo.pl?record=50
     
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    What is your input?

    Although this Cartoon makes light of Evil (light of evil hmmm) anyway it does bare some truth. In our willful disobedience to God we create evil. God gave us Free Will that we may Freely choose to love Him, otherwise it would have been forced love, coerced and not real love. He understood that this came with a consequence...That consequence is the rejection of Gods love...in the absence of Gods grace and Love that is where evil is born. 

    EVIL-LIVE  It is ironic that Sin leads to Death and obedience to God to eternal Life and that the two words are so similar as to spell the other word when written backwards.