Blog@GraceJunction

Hi Abhishek,

I don’t know how to respond appropriately to your pain of loosing your eight year old son. I heard that he was suffering from Progeria due to which he was ageing much beyond his age. You told me that he had the body of an eighty year old when he died, a premature death, something that raises a lot of questions in our mind. I can understand your anger against God for allowing such evil but I cannot agree with your conclusion that therefore there is no God.

I still remember the days when I was the professor of philosophy at the University and you were one of the best students that I had. You were always a good thinker and used reason to good effect. In your last mail to me you told me to explain how an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omni benevolent God can allow evil. According to you both are not logically compatible. And since evil is the most proven fact in this world you deduced that there is no God.

However for the benefit of a few students with whom I have been having a discussion on the topic in the last few days and who have been copied on this mail I would like to explain your stand to them. An omnipotent God means He who is ‘able’ to remove evil from this world. An Omniscient God means HE who ‘knows’ how to eliminate all the evil in this world. An Omni benevolent God means HE who ‘wants’ to remove evil from this world.

Now you proposed that I can keep my God and continue to acknowledge evil only if I give up on one of these 3 O’s. However I know that you are laying an intellectual trap for me. Because if I give up on God’s omnipotence then you would say that if God ‘is not able’ to remove evil then HE should probably retire from HIS position and let somebody more capable take up HIS position. If I say that God is not Omniscient then you would say that since God is so engaged with other important things that HE does not know about the evil that exists in the world then HE is a good God but not worthy of worship. Finally if HE is not Omni benevolent then you would say that God loves to see the evil that is happening all around us. Then may be HE is God but somebody whom we cannot love but rather we should fear him and keep a safe distance.

However I choose to hold on to the O-3 nature of God despite the evil that I see around me. Why? Well, let me tell you that God cannot do certain things. Surprised? Before you jump to a conclusion let me explain. God has an eternally consistent nature which does not do things which contradict each other. For example, he cannot create a ‘married bachelor’ because both the things are contradicting each other. Similarly HE cannot make a ‘square circle’ because the statement is illogical and not compatible. In the same way when God created the world he wanted to create moral beings with the ability to do moral good but not at the cost of freedom. Meaning that a world of moral beings engineered by God to do only moral good would have ensured a world without evil but HE would then have to compromise on the free will that we enjoy today. That would have been a world free of evil but made up of ‘robots’ lacking free will or freedom to do what they wanted to do.

Therefore HE had to make a world of moral beings that were expected to do moral good but also possessing the capacity to do evil. So evil was not the result of an absence of God but rather arising out of the free will given to man. So when man was created he was given the ability to obey God and do good but at the same time the freedom to rebel against God and do evil.

This argument that I put forward was not to give you the reasons for allowing evil or justifying God but to explain that the presence of an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omni benevolent God and Evil are not logically incompatible. Rather it is a logical possibility. Hope this helps you in reposing faith in God without trying to play down the obvious pain and sorrow that you faced when you lost your son. Or you could come up with another argument which we can discuss in the coming days.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Love and prayers,

Prof Reese

Tags: death, Evil, God and Evil, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Letters, Navin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.