This particular post is more from the Creationist standpoint, asking the question, "If there is a Creator, why is there evil in the world?" If you consider your faith faltering, or you want to believe in a Creator yet cannot bring yourself to do so because you do not understand why their is evil in the world he created (he created the world, not evil), this post will be good for you.
I'm not interested in arguing whether or not good and evil is absolute, or whether there is has some relativity under Justice, or whether it is completely relative based on what people would have done to them. Know that I have a well formed opinion on the matter; however, that is for another post. Whatever evil is, I don't think anyone is going to argue that it exists. Even if we aren't talking morals, there's also pain and sadness and hatred in the world. So while this post considers moral things to be evil, murder, stealing, lying, etc., it also considers pain and sadness to be evil, since it is just as compelling to ask, "Why would God create a world with pain and sadness?"
Allow me to point out that it is often people that do evil. People murder, steal, lie, and do all sorts of wrong things for their own gain.
If I'm not mistaken there are some arguments against this, one in particular that I can think of is Naturalism (I may be mistaken on the terminology). It claims that man is completely subject to his surroundings, his upbringing, etc. For instance, if a child grows up among thieves and scoundrels with no psychologically healthy family to speak of, that child is not simply very likely to become a thief and scoundrel, he has no say in the matter. He will become a thief; in other words, he has no choice.
Now, under this philosophy no one can do evil. I suppose there still could be evil in the world (of this I am unsure), but no one's actions could be evil. Why? Because evil is a choice; the option to do good or evil is first placed in front of you before you do evil (more on that in a later paragraph). If it is as Naturalism says, people do not have the power to choose. They are robots, obeying the pressure of their surroundings. Therefore, they cannot do evil.
I think this philosophy is wrong for simple reasons. For one, how does it account for enmity between people and their situations? If something bad happened to someone in their past, they would hate the fact that that situation happened to them. Why? Because they know that it could have been better. Read that last sentence again, it's important. How is it, if we are indeed completely subject to our situations, that we can speculate about our situations being different? If people and their situations are one in the same, how is it that people can speculate about their situations being different?
This inherent ability to speculate indicates a level of insubordination between people and situations. If you were indeed subject to your situations to the degree that Naturalism may suggest, you would not be able to "see beyond" them. Sure, someone brought up among scoundrels is likely to become a scoundrel upon growing up. But do you suppose that he doesn't understand that he can "not" be a scoundrel? Even if it seems a ridiculous or harmful option, he did indeed choose to become a scoundrel.
Besides this, think of people brought up in said situations who did not become thieves, or became thieves and later turned from their ways. How could they have done that were they subject to their situations?
As it is, we can and do do such things, so we could not possibly be subjects of our situations to such a degree that we cannot do evil. Situations around us are a factor in this, but they cannot control our ability to choose, they can only influence it. This is an accurate depiction: situations place before us the good and the evil from which to choose. Just because they seem to present more options under "evil" does not mean that we have to choose evil. Besides, to every evil there is a good. For example, if under "evil" there is the option "become a thief", there is always the option "don't become a thief".
Bottom line: Naturalism is proven untrue on account of our ability to see through and change our situations
So people can do evil. But why? Why would a Creator create us with the ability to do evil at all? Why not simply strip us of that power? Well, allow me to argue that without the ability to do evil, we would not have the ability to do good. This is because the existence of good and evil is dependent upon the presence of one thing: a Standard. This Standard defines what is good as that which upholds the Standard, simultaneously condemning everything that does not measure up to the Standard as evil. Since good and evil are dependent on the same thing, the presence of a Standard, you cannot have the ability to do one without the ability to do another.
Think of how this plays out in reality. Whenever you have the option to do good, do you not also have the option to "not do good"? And whenever you have the option to do evil, do you not also have the option to "not do evil"? Whenever a standard is set, there will always be that which does not measure up to the standard. To every one, there is the other.
So the Creator created us with the ability to do both good and evil. Why? I suppose we must assume that he thought it was worth it. I cannot answer why the Creator thought it was worth it (though I do believe it was worth it), I can only assume that he did. And in the end, whether we think it is worth it to have good and evil in the world, we still have the explanation as to why people can do evil.
Bottom line: people have the ability to do evil as an unfortunate side-effect from the ability to do good
Some of you may be thinking, "Okay, fine. So there's evil in the world because people do the evil. But why would the world be created with natural disasters and other lethal, tragic occurrences in it that have nothing to do with people?" Now, allow me to present to you an idea, which I will later back with tangible representations. Imagine people as they are, interacting with each other. Now imagine the universe as a medium through which their interactions pass to get to each other. Now, in order for someone to do "something" to someone else, that "something" must pass through the medium to the other person. If someone does "something" good, the medium carries that something to the subject. If someone does "something" evil, the medium carries that something to the subject. Now, does not the medium have to be capable of carrying evil for people to do evil to each other? In other words, does not the world have to be capable of evil for people also to be capable of evil? Besides, are we not part of the world in which we live? And if we are capable of evil, surely the world in which we live is too.
Allow me to explain myself, since I am sure that I have you thoroughly confused. Imagine this: someone punches you in the face. They wronged you. Why? Because they inflicted pain upon you that you did not deserve. Back up. Pain. Now, we suggest that the Creator ought to have created a world where only people could do the evil (as the price for good) but their surroundings were perfect. In order for that to be fulfilled, a punch from a person would hurt. However, falling and hitting your head on a rock would not hurt in the slightest. How could the Creator create a world like that? Well, I suppose he ought to be able to do whatever he wants. Still, making a world where rocks don't hurt would likely require a serious reshuffle in the laws of nature, which I imagine would have upsides and downsides of their own.
Even further, in such a world someone hitting you with something, say a tree branch, wouldn't hurt. We couldn't use swords or knives or even guns to hurt each other. Humans, for a large part, have control of the earth. We are the only animals on it possessing enough power to annihilate it. We often have to scale back our best efforts to keep from killing off a particular animal. We can use nature for our own ends. Painful as it is, nature has to be able to go along with us when we use it to do evil. Besides all that, I wonder if the world would be capable of good if it were not also capable of evil?
Bottom line: in order for us to do good and evil, the world in which we live must be capable of good and evil
"Okay okay. Fine. I get it, the world has to be capable of evil. But did the Creator have to create natural disasters that huge? I mean, couldn't he have scaled it back a touch?" This line of thinking is warranted, yet naive. Think about this, what if he had scaled back the disasters? What if every tsunami (hypothetically) killed fifty people rather than today's one-hundred? Even if tsunamis were less intense than they are today, would we not still think them intense? Imagine two separate worlds: one with fifty-kill tsunamis and one with one-hundred-kill tsunamis. Don't you think that each people would complain just as much about their tsunamis? After all, they have no comparison for how bad their tsunamis are, all they see is a lot of people being killed by nature.
Imagine even further. Imagine there were no natural disasters. Might we still complain about, I dunno, people drowning in oceans? People dying of heat stroke? Don't you think we are taking our complacency a little far? We know that the world must be capable of evil, and we know that we would probably complain no matter how truly disastrous nature was. Now, can we stop complaining about the earth (which is just so bad, right?) and opening our minds and trying to understand why? I have found the answers, and what I found I wrote to you. Listen well to the words; I am certain that they are good and true.
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