My Thoughts: God, Superheroes and The Problem of Evil
Evil is everywhere.
Like some giant slobbering mass, the aggregating imperfections of our world are impossible to ignore. It goads, pokes at us even, often forcing us to ask the same question — Why?
The question of this evil and the belief in an all loving, all powerful God is one that provokes debate of incompetency or neutrality on the part of the divine. Can a truly all loving God sit back and allow the rampage of death and destruction? Or is it something God doesn’t stop because God isn’t powerful enough to?
These conclusions surmise that God is either not all loving or not all powerful, but importantly, he can’t be both. In essence, God can’t truly be God.
GOD IS A SUPERHERO
It is possible to think of evil done to another human being in two ways — possibility and desire. Evil in this form exists in the question of probability and choice. But which of these is the greater tragedy? The fact that there is a chance that someone takes a gun and shoots his/her entire classroom or that there was a desire for it to be done?
In truth, the greater evil beyond the existence of evil in this fundamentally flawed world is the desire to do evil. What drives a man to break the law? The idea of superheroes answers the first question of evil. They show up just in time to stop the thief from stealing the woman’s purse. They reduce the chances of evil, but even they, god-like as they are, can not fully eradicate evil. They can’t save everyone. The only instance when DC’s Superman fully eradicates evil? When he becomes a murderous, tyrannical dictator.
This paints a picture as much as it asks a question. If the only way to stop evil is to eliminate choice, then there is a fundamental problem with humanity’s capacity to choose between good and evil. In a perfect world, people should have no desire to do evil. They shouldn’t be ignorant of what evil is, they should know what it is but still choose good all the time. We don’t live in a perfect world, however, and as history points out, the desire to do evil often outweighs the desire to do good.
If I am a perfect being, all knowing, all loving, and all powerful. How exactly do I solve this problem? It is possible that I could stop every murder and killing that occurs within the next 10 minutes. Beyond ten minutes? let’s say that I stop every act of terrorism in the next twenty four hours? Beyond twenty four hours? Let’s say that I stop every act of killing in the next ten years.
This sounds good, doesn’t it? For ten years in human history, there would be a total lack of bloodshed. But a pattern emerges here. For this solution to work, I would have to keep stopping every single act of evil through to the end of time. In short, there is no definitive solution to my problem, I can only ever keep managing humanity’s shortcomings.
Law enforcement and Superheroes are humanity’s best imagining of solving this problem. If either were fast enough, they could stop every wrong act. But therein lies the problem, there would be on end to stopping these acts. They would need to be stopped through to the end of the time.
Why? Stopping every single act of evil doesn’t get rid of the fundamental problem. It imagines evil as only an act, say murder for instance, but perhaps what it should recognize is that evil may be part of man’s fundamental nature.
If evil is a fundamental part of the nature of man, then an appeal to the divine to destroy evil may as well be an appeal to destroy man. Would an all loving God be willing to completely annihilate his creation solely on the premise of stopping evil?
GOD IS GOD
How could a being obsessed with perfection be content with such a tacky solution?
The only solution a perfect being can have for imperfect people is perfection. In essence, to solve the problem, God has to make us like him, perfect.
The desire to do evil represents the root cause of our problem. In simple terms, bad things happen because there are people who want it to happen. Superheroes and law enforcement can reduce the probability of evil, but they can’t help the innate morality of a man. A truly all knowing God recognizes this fundamental truth.
That evil exists is not in itself the greater problem. As soon as any law is passed, there is an immediate opportunity for it to be bent or broken. What a perfect and all knowing being would need are people who have no desire to break the law. Not people who have no free will or choice, but people who choose on their own to not break the law.
The true evil of desire is gone and the man becomes perfect in will and virtue.
Consequently, all the things that provoke a deep sense of injustice and sorrow in the human psyche — disease, famine, war, terrorism etc. could be considered merely symptomatic of something else that is fundamentally flawed — Nature, Humanity.
The only way to truly solve this problem then, is to fix what is flawed, to make it perfect.
So, does evil happen because God can’t stop it? Or because God doesn’t really care? Or is the answer perhaps bigger than the two boxes it has been constrained to? If I merely said that God allowed evil because it is the choice of creation, I would be falling into the failings of my own critique. It appears that God allows evil because it is the choice of creation, and that may very well be true, but what may not be apparent may be a grander plan on God’s part to perfect imperfection.
The seeming tolerance of evil may be nothing more than a consequence for the time being until the perfection of God’s plan. Something that God allows because by virtue of his incomprehensible wisdom, there is a much better end that he is working out.
In conclusion, the very presupposition of a divine and sovereign being demands a certain level of a knowledge/understanding gap on the part of much more limited and deficient beings, such as ourselves. Making peace with this may begin a path towards better understanding the problem of evil.
