Evil: Who is to blame?
Our world is full of evil. Even if you don’t really use words like “good” and “evil,” you can agree that our world is full of less-than-ideal circumstances and situations, often created intentionally or through negligence by the people who inhabit it.
Rape. Murder. Greed. Malevolence of all kinds.
The existence of these things is often used as an argument against God’s existence, or sometimes an argument for why God, if He does exist, is not a good God.
I want to ask this question, however: If there were no God, no Devil, no supernatural, then who would be to blame for those things? Where would the responsibility lie for fixing the moral atrocities at which we are quick to shake our heads and wag our fingers?
The existence of such malevolence would clearly be the result of humanity’s own selfishness. And the responsibility to fix it would fall on the same humanity who created the problems in the first place.
Does the existence of God change our responsibility?
Now, if we can agree with that idea, I’ll ask another question: How does the existence of God somehow absolve humanity of it’s role in the malevolence in the world? And How does the existence of God somehow absolve humanity of it’s role in fixing the problem?
My answer: It doesn’t.
What I’m about to say does rely on the idea that God’s existence doesn’t negate humanity’s freedom to choose their own course of action. I understand there are some differences in opinion on that subject when it comes to God. However, in my opinion, we live as though we have the ability to chart our own course. Our laws and the punishments for breaking those laws rest on the idea that we can choose whether or not to perform the actions we perform. If we really believe the world works this way, and it seems as though we really do, then humanity is responsible for the malevolence in the world whether there is a God or not.
Rule and Subdue
In Genesis 1:27-31 we see an account of God creating man and woman and then charging them with ruling and subduing the earth. That’s very interesting. Rather than God ruling himself, he delegated the authority over the world to humanity. It’s right there at the beginning of Genesis. Maybe the evil we see isn’t because God isn’t doing His job, but it’s because we aren’t doing our job.
God actually gave us the freedom to shape the world we live in. He gave us all the raw material we would need and the freedom to mold it and create with it. Sometimes humanity uses this creative freedom in really constructive ways. Often we use it in really destructive ways. What if the evil that we see is humanity reaping the harvest of it’s own misaligned priorities and poor governance of the authority and freedom it’s been given?
What if the commandments of God weren’t put in place to subjugate humanity under the tyrannical rule of a narcissistic God, but they were put in place to help a faltering humanity regain control over the world it’s been destroying through greed and selfishness and neglect? What if the same responsibility we would assume for making things better if God weren’t there is the same responsibility God expects us to assume because He is there? What if that’s actually what He’s charged us with as His image bearers and the delegated rulers of the earth in which we live?
We can all look around and see things we wish didn’t exist. We aren’t meant to just observe it. We aren’t meant to just ask why God isn’t doing anything about it. We have been charged with making it better. What if people aren’t seeing God because they aren’t seeing God’s people ruling in the world the way He created them to? Only we can change that.
The Endeavor 