Did God create “Evil”, which brings suffering to the world?
The Problem of Evil has been studied hard by many intelligent and faithful Christians for a very long time. Among them is Augustine of Hippo. He starts by clarifying the term “Evil”.
What is “Evil”?
“Evil” is not a substance that can be created. Augustine says that it is a “privation”, or a lack of something, in a substance. It is similar to “darkness”. What is “darkness”? Darkness is there when a place is in lack of light. When there is no light, there is darkness. Augustine tells us that a thing is evil when it lacks some particular good that is appropriate to it.
The world is good when it was created as declared by the Creator. So, what went wrong that let “Evil” creeps into the world, or using Augustine’s term, what is lacking that corrupts the goodness of the world?
Free will is the key to the whole problem of evil, as Augustine would tell us.
Free will is a good gift from God to humans. Without free will, there can be no love, mercy, righteousness, and a whole lot of other virtue that make us human. What is “love” without free will? Suppose someone points a knife at our throat and threatens us to love him or he will cut open our throat. Can we love him? I think both him and us understand that no love can be created out of such life-threatening situations. That kind of “love” does not come from our free-will, which means it is not love at all.
Free will is good. However, it can be abused and so cause pain and suffering. A student can choose to spend all his time on social media and totally ignore his schoolwork. He can’t even get to college because of poor school grades, and so he suffers from not being able to pursue his dream career. A person chooses not to find a job to support his living, but instead he chooses robbery. He is caught and suffers in jail.
Therefore, free will is a good gift from God. However, we can abuse free will and corrupt the good. That leads to “evil”, which is synonymous to “pain and suffering”.
How and when does a person abuse free will and causes evil? Augustine believes that evil happens in “the movement of the will from immutable to transient goods”. What he means is that when a person pursuits happiness by chasing for temporal things, such as wealth, rather than eternal things, such as the relations with the Creator, then evil starts.
The above is the basic idea of Augustine’s “Free Will Defense”.
Does the “Free Will Defense” solve the Problem of Evil?
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