Emotion vs. Evil

Many people view the problem of evil as an inhibitor to the idea of a God, or a good God, at least. They see what they feel to be rampant evil in this world and think that no God could allow such events to occur and thereby decide that there must be no God. Or, if there is a God, he certainly does not care about or have any involvement in life on our planet.

Well, I don’t mean to be insensitive, but this response is an emotional reaction to what we all would likely define as evil things happening around us. Emotions certainly do influence our decisions and behavior, but they don’t define the world around us, or the existence of God. To use emotion as one’s indicator of God’s existence comes across to me as decision or mindset void of any logic or reason - irrational.

The fact of the matter is that they are using a system of good and evil to judge the very events they say justify a mindset that God doesn’t exist or care. But that begs a bigger question. Where do you get this idea of good and evil? If there is no God (or if there is but He’s not good) what are you using as your measure of evil? If there’s no God, maybe it’s something you’ve made up in your head… and then what you’re defining as evil is only evil to you. If there’s no God, maybe it’s just a cultural way of thinking… and then it’s still only evil to you in this contextual place and time. But realize, now, that we’re no longer dealing with the problem of evil but with a question of morality at large, what defines it and where it comes from.

The moral argument is a classic one for the existence of a God (Lewis’s Mere Christianity for example)… though it is as equally as often countered or reinterpreted based on one’s worldview (as I mentioned a few examples). In the long run, I think it works as a decent evidence for the existence of God (as part of a much larger collection for evidences of the existence of God), but the emotional response component only seems to further support it, counter to what it actually claims.

My bigger concern here is the use of emotion to define one’s world and beliefs. But I’ll stop here and process that idea a bit more in a later post.