AD: Love and Evil, Part One

I explored the question of why a loving God would allow a holocaust in my most recent book, The Gospel according to Moses. In a nutshell the idea is that God allows human evil to continue because he wants us to remain free to choose goodness, and unless evil exists as an alternative choice to good, we would not really have any choice at all, and so we would not really be free. Although God never condones our evil choices, He allows them for the sake of our freedom because He loves us.

A reader recently sent me a note about that, asking me to respond to the question, "How can God stand by when total evil is directed toward infants, causing them to suffer and die?" She offered a horrific example of the worst that man can do: the sexual abuse of an infant. The mind staggers at such an example, however such things do occur, and they must somehow be reconciled with the idea that God is love, unless we are prepared to abandon the notion of a God who loved the world enough to (somehow) die to save it.

As it happens, I believe the example she selected lends itself particularly well to this problem, because we know almost all child abuse occurs at the hands of people who were themselves abused as children. That in itself is a pretty good indication that original sin is true. Evil such as this does not spring from nowhere, and it is not a simple matter of people making bad choices. (Does anyone really believe one could be in complete control of one’s right mind one moment, and freely choose to fantasize about molesting children the next, without some compelling force at work?)

The self-replicating pattern of child abuse also hints at another point we should remember. As the creator of time, God sees all events in a continuum stretching backward and forward, which is all "now" to Him. This means God sees the abuser not only as a man in the grip of evil now, but simultaneously God sees the abuser as a child, also being abused right now (although for the abuser it happened thirty years ago). Similarly, God sees the baby in the reader’s scenario not only as a victim of abuse now, but also as an adult who is passing that abuse on to other children right now (although for the baby it will happen thirty years in the future). If God sees everything as "now," and if abused children grow up to be abusers, then whose free will should God suspend in this scenario, the man’s or the baby’s?

Of course our hearts demand protection for the child, and rightfully so. But the full answer is that both the man and child are ultimately the same in terms of original sin, so in order to exercise “equal justice for all” by removing the man’s free will, God must also remove the child’s. That said, if the child could express a preference, one assumes he would choose life as a survivor of abuse over life as a zombie. So we see that even in this, one of the most horrific examples of human evil one can imagine, still it is the lesser of two painful options faced by a loving God to let the evil continue.

This idea has at least two practical applications for the Christian. I’ll discuss them tomorrow.

Athol Dickson
Author of The Gospel According to Moses - What my Jewish friends taught me about Jesus.