h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Evil does not exist.

world trade centre... september 11... 2001
Evil does exist. The beauty is that so does goodness... and so does God. The amazing thing about the horrible terrorist attack that occured was that we saw thousands of hero's in a city not known for hospitality. We saw people come together when they had been living apart. We saw a nation that has banned prayer in schools come together to pray.
Evil can manifest itself in horrible ways, and in this way it was in an incorrect understanding of who God is. However, God is more powerful than evil, and even though He does give us free will, He promises to be there to help us through the consequences of our actions. Sadly, sometimes it takes our personal world being shattered to realize our need for God.

Yes evil does exist. Yes goodness does exist. But only within the hearts of human beings. The question however is why in a universe created and maintained by an all-powerful, in fact infinitely powerful, God evil (and in fact imperfection in general) exists?

Why would a God capable of ANYTHING at ANY time in ANY place bother creating creatures so imperfect, physically, spiritually, mentally, and morally as humans? Why would an infinitely powerful God who could just as easily create a perfect world(s) full of perfect creatures at NO extra effort or cost to himself bother creating us and putting us in this situation? It does not seem to be the act of a perfect all-powerful, all-loving God; more like a cruel and vindictive creature who enjoys playing with and torturing his (deliberately made weak) creations for sport.

It's somewhat like a man with a whole car making plant to himself making it produce a whole litter of broken down wooden billy-carts with one wheel missing and crook steering when it could just as easily be producing surperb sedans with fantasic road-holding and suspension. It makes no sense. It is completely illogical, and yet everything else we know about the universe is very logical, it all makes sense. The laws of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are all very logical and reasonable. They are consistent and do not contradict one another. It's just when we try to explain God's reasons for creating us the way we are that logic and reason go out the window and weird contradictory and illogical things pop up and "faith" is called for. God is perfectly logical EXCEPT when it comes to humans (well life in general, but humans in particular), we are completely out of context and completely inexplicable for an all-powerful God to have bothered with creating in the first place.

In fact it sounds very much like the sort of thing we imperfect humans have always come up with when we try to imagine our gods. They always end up being very imperfect and illogical, capable of very human failings and emotions; very human. Just think of the gods of ancient Greece and Rome, in retospect we can see how obviously creations of mere human imagination they were. It's exactly the same with the Christian/Jewish/Moslem God. Very imperfect, illogical, and so so HUMAN. Constantly contradicts himself throughout the Bible: don't kill here, kill evil doers there, bring suffering down on the innocent as well as the guilty, gets angry, gets happy. Certainly not a perfect all-powerful spirit who created the universe we see around us. More a very human product of our very human imaginations.

I agree

The one that always trips me up is this:

If God is omnipotent and allows evil to exist, then surely he / she / it is just some games-player and we're merely pieces on a board - not a nice thought. Whereas if God is not omnipotent & evil exists as a balancing force then what's the point of worshipping a non-omnipotent being.

Personally I've come to believe that human beings have problems facing up to themselves - their urges, their wants & needs so they invent God(s) to shift the blame - someone else made them do it & it'll all be sorted out after I die. Heaven, Hell, Sin - these are ideas we use to distance ourselves from our own actions.

If you do something bad, then the Devil didn't make you do it, you just felt like it so live with the guilt because deep down in side most of us know right from wrong. And on the flip side, if you did something good then feel pleased with yourself for making the world a tiny bit better. Try and do what you know in your heart (& guts) is right and live as good a life as possible. Procreate if you feel like it - pass on your own moral standards to others. Try and be happy and make others happy. Make whatever time you have here on this planet as useful & enjoyable as possible.

At the end of the day your actions are your own. No one else. Face it.

It was not "evil", as some kind of force, that caused the terrorism on the World Trade Center. It was FAITH. The scary thing is that faith in a God can be just as damaging as belief in evil.

September 11th wasn't "Evil". It was faith. And that can be just as dangerous, as we tragically found out.

but the people aligned to Al Quaeda and the islamic fundamentalists didn`t see sept 11 as evil.
why should (our western) view be any more important or correct than theirs?

Evil does indeed exist--but in a subjective sort of sense. If there is to be any good, then there must also, in balance, be evil--the key lies in human perception of any event. What does not exist is the purely good--if we can percieve the good, we must also percieve the evil, and to try to stray into a perfectly good world would prove futile. However, there is no pure evil in the sense that there is anything that is in every sense evil. Even malicious acts are performed with the hope of some good, however small--nothing is truly "senseless".
Therefore, evil is not so much a thing inherent in itself (caused by god) but rather a human error in either perception or judgment--each seeks what he somehow percieves to be good, but sometimes fails to choose an adequate method to accomplish this goal. The beauty of God is that he created humans with the intent that all have free will and can seek their own method of accomplishing what they see as good (which can sometimes be a very selfish and/or erroneous view).

All this, however, doesn't help to solve the original paradox. Presumably, God's love is realized in his allowing man to reach his own conclusions. God would be happiest, presumably, if we did do good; however, he wants us to figure this out ourselves, like a parent who allows a child to make his/her own decisions, for bad or good. God's love, therefore, is so deep that he permits us to do evil--and forgives for we know not what we do.