Probem of Evil
To attempt to justify the existence of evil based on an idea of Earth serving as some celestial soul-making machine places too much faith on a bizarre assumption. The idea of the soul machine is dependent on the duality between good and bad, since there would supposedly be no way to produce any persons of character without first showing them certain things to avoid. Hick closes his argument with the sentence "Second, if we ask whether the business of soul-making is worth all the toil and sorrow of human life, the Christian answer must be in terms of a future good which is great enough to justify all that has happened on the way to it." Satisfactory enough for a Christian, but absolutely unacceptable to anyone who doesn't follow the religion. It's difficult to believe the doctrine of a religion that professes to have a benevolent, omnipotent God when you're watching videos about the Holocaust, and I would highly doubt that Mengele was just trying to help people build character.
Hick argues that evil is derived from necessity. If people didn't get stabbed every now and then we would all be living in a cartoon, and such a fantastic way of life is stated as being meaningless. This would mean that it's impossible to have any sort of personality unless you've overcome some sort of hardship to acquire it. Even without arguing about whether or not the previous statement is actually valid, this doesn't explain the Christian God allowing certain people to exist in the first place. If someone lives a life filled with nothing but suffering, there's no dramatic buildup where they walk out a better person. When Joseph Fritzl locked his daughter in their basement for 24 years while periodically raping and assaulting her, she left it psychologically scarred and anemic. The argument goes that the afterlife justifies this existence. Having never personally died and never having been able to question a dead person on the matter, I can't speak about whether or not this is correct, nor can anyone else. What does strike me as odd about this scenario is the absolute cruelty of the concept of life. You are tossed into it without your consent, expected to figure things out on your own, and given no legitimate explanation about where you go when it's done.
At this point it's required to make a modification to the Christian model of God. You are tasked with deciding whether you should sacrifice omnipotence, omniscience, or benevolence. By sacrificing omnipotence you create a God that can see what's going on an really wishes he could help, but is unable to do so. By sacrificing omniscience, you have a God that loves everyone and could help you out easily, but doesn't know what's going on and is thus rendered useless. Sacrificing benevolence is a bit more unsettling, creating a God that knows people are being tortured to death, but decides that this is perfectly acceptable and lets things carry on accordingly. You can also choose to sacrifice two or three, but after a certain point you can't really consider this being to be a God. With the simple explanation of "God did it and you'll figure out why later" ruled out, it's necessary to try and come up with an adequate reason as to why evil exists.
Present in the nature of man is what we refer to as free will. This is a very troubling concept, since it seems to have no place in contemporary physics. Given that the universe exists with certain established physical laws, that would imply that if you knew the motion of every elemental particle in existence and determine where it's going and how it will react with all the other particles, you should be able to predict the future. When every action is explainable with a mathematical equation, it denies the existence of free will, yet we feel that we have choice in our lives, and the mechanical nature of things makes us wonder why we're sentient and our computer isn't. This might be explained away by the uncertain nature of quantum physics, where there are still laws that govern the universe, but they're flexible and based more on probability than rigid, determinable outcomes. There's room to move, and perhaps gets closer to explaining consciousness.
From this model, the universe was created by the Big Bang, and carried along its course of patterned particle interaction over the course of several billion years, until eventually the Earth formed and had just the right specifications to develop life, which slowly turned into modern humans by the process of evolution. Though having a noticeable order to it, since we can study the development of fossils and the creation of stars, on the subatomic level this was a process of chance. The probabilities are rigged in such a way that an ordered outcome is likely, but not necessary. In Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos, he wrote the about the functionality of entropy. There's always a chance that when you break an egg on the floor, it will reassemble itself, though incredibly unlikely.
One interpretation of creationism is that God made the Big Bang and then stepped out of the picture, but this doesn't excuse him for the daily occurrences of evil in the world. Though it's demonstrable by physical laws that evil exists by chance, it's still taking place in the framework that God created. If God is to maintain his omniscience, you have to declare that he would have seen all the problems ahead of time and figured out a way to stop them from occurring. By creating a set of spacial and time dimensions in which acts of evil may take place, as well as allowing the creation of a planet that would ultimately be populated by a species that subjects its own members to scaphism, God is merely the guy setting up all the props for the play. This also has the side-effect of completely annihilating any possibility for free will to even exist in the first place. If God knows every action that will occur in advance, there's no way for you to have any choice. Any perception of choice is merely an illusion, and an act of God's initial design.
The problem of evil is only a problem as long as you try to blame it on something. If I can't point the finger, I am resigned to simply accepting that evil exists by a natural game of chance. Though unfortunate, this is entirely understandable and there is little that can be done to avoid it or prevent it in the future. Human nature allows for hatred and animosity because it came about in the course of evolution for the sake of self-preservation, and though it's no longer desirable it remains as a vestigial character trait in certain people. Perhaps if we manage to survive our own technology long enough it may even be bred out of the species eventually.
To address the issue of the creator in this case, it's possible to turn to theoretical physics for a possible explanation, though it comes with its own problems. One of the main problems with our theological ideas of creation and God is that we seem to operate in a strangely limited view of the world. We experience time as a straight line leading from the past into the future, and we travel along this line in a single direction at a standard pace. With this model, there should logically have to be a point where this line started, and it's debatable whether or not it needs an end. We don't know what the future holds, but we can see into the past and the idea of the Universe having always existed, though not necessarily impossible as a theory, is at least impossible to comprehend. We thus create the idea that there must have been some being at one end of the line that put everything in motion, a theory written about by Thomas Aquinas.
String theory, last I checked, stated that strings operate in something like 10 dimensions. That means there are at least six more dimensions that we do not experience, nor are we able to comprehend. To do so would be like explaining sight to someone who has been blind their whole life. Within this new expanse of dimensions, it's not unusual to suggest that time shouldn't be confined to a line. Stephen Hawking wrote about the concept of spherical time in A Brief History of Time, saying that it would eliminate the need for there to be a God, since there would be no start or beginning of time. Though mathematically possible, what begins to happen is perhaps even more disturbing that eliminating the possibility of God. It begins to look like we can't even make an accurate judgment or debate the question rationally, since we're incapable of experiencing existence in the dimensions in which it actually operates. We're like an engineer tasked with trying to build a tank by looking at a cross section. The question can never be answered, and any possible theories are trivial and uninformed.
This is, of course, based on a theory of quantum mechanics that has an unintended side-effect of being anti-metaphysical. It may very well be wrong, in which case we are left to our old devices. One of the more interesting arguments uses, borrowing from St. Augustine, is that there is actually no such thing as evil. "Evil represents the going wrong of something which in itself is good." Though perhaps an interesting thought to entertain, it's an entirely meaningless statement. It's more a game of language than anything with an application. I can refer to the inside of a cave as being dark, or I can say it has an absence of light. What the statement really does is try and replace evil with neutrality, but this doesn't work. Neutrality is your average state of being, in which you are impartial to the world around you. A sudden gunshot wound will quickly shift this feeling of neutrality towards the negative side of the spectrum, and attempting to change the word association doesn't do much to stop the pain. Hick also starts talking about the duality of good and evil while simultaneously trying to say that there isn't one, writing "Evil - whether it be and evil will, an instance of pain, or some disorder or decay in nature - has not been set there by God, but represents the distortion of something that is inherently valuable." If everything is good and evil is merely the parasitism of good, it would still make sense to refer to that process of degradation as evil. It is not an instance of matter and empty space, but two polar opposites of a spectrum of experience.
Ultimately, I can not incorporate the idea of God into any models of the world that actually seem to make sense. Evil exists as a negative force in the world opposite to good by natural order, and any attempt to look for someone to blame will either lead to a disappointing creator or an absence of one. Understanding the minor workings of the universe makes our human experience look incredibly limited and provides no answer. I might argue that the best option is to simply endure the storms that nature throws at us and at least try and work the negative character attributes out of our collective psychology, but that's assuming that such a process is possible. Or we can hope that everything will be fine and God will buy us a drink in Heaven to make up for having to be stuck on the Judas Cradle.
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Lol @ writing things while stoned, at 2:00 AM the day it's due. Use physics to try and kill Christianity, it's always a good time.
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