CHAPTER 5: Thoughts on "Evil" and "Free Will"
a) What is “Evil” and Where did It Come From?
This needs a separate discussion in chapter 6, but I would like to introduce another concept here first, about our definition of evil. The "Eastern" mentality purports that there are two gods, Ying and Yang, Good and Evil, "the Force be with you" and "the Dark Force be against you". How does this jive with the concept of One God? If there is indeed one God, then isn't this other thing we call "evil" in His mind as is everything else? How can that be? Perhaps the answer to our dilemma is in the definition of "evil". I believe that God created "free will" in all His thought world characters. But you need to have a choice to exercise free will. He offered us a choice (Deut 30: 18-20) between "Life" and "Death". This "Life " is everlasting life. This "Death" is everlasting death.
I look at “Good” as the set of all choices we can make that will lead to a productive, quality life. Conversely, I look at “Evil” as the set of all the choices we can make that will lead to a self-destructive life. Timing is not a factor, in that these choices may have both immediate and long-term consequences. It’s just that we start down the path and open up a plethora of more choices along each path we choose. Generally we make choices for which the long-term consequences are not obvious or perhaps our assessment of them is incorrect due to our inexperience. We can see an immediate gratification in a choice we want to make, but often we cannot see the long-term consequences. This is why we would trust loving parents, who have our best interests at heart in their advice and yet have more experience.
For example, you might have some shady friends, who you want to spend lots of time with because you think they’re Cool. Your parents might object based only on their experience with such characters and not on knowing these in particular. You can’t accept their assessment so you run off with them anyway. Down the line you get into big problems with this bunch and only then can you see the wisdom in trusting your parents until you have more experience yourself. On the other side, if you survive the ordeal, then you have gotten the missing experience and now you can parent someone else.
So, these kinds of choices lead to a progression of consequences that become
more and more self-destructive, ie to death. We call the consequences of evil
choices, “sin”. This is why we say
that, “The wages of sin is death”.
On the larger scale, mankind deteriorates to the point where he would
kill his own source of life, ie his Creator, if given the chance. His continued
bad choices lead to the point where he will destroy everything around him,
including himself. As we view the situation in its deteriorating state, we say
that “sin” is in the world.
I believe that this is what the Bible is telling us happened to the fallen
angels, before the creation of mankind. God created choice and many of them
were choosing death. Certainly
they were making altruistic choices.
However, their inexperience with the long-term consequences allowed them
to make choices, which seemed benign and yet would lead to big problems. Adam and Eve made such a choice
to do something apparently trivial (as suggested by “eating the apple”), which
actually had dire consequences. By
not trusting God, they trusted their own limited judgment and fell into a
situation that was self-destructive. It seems to me that we are immersed in the
consequences of choices made upstream.
I look at this as a game of chess. We choose a move that has consequences much later. An experienced player can foresee those consequences, but an inexperienced player has to learn by losing.
Sin is a cancer. It is self-destructive for sure. However, it will feed off the host until the host is gone and only then will it too self-destruct. Meanwhile the host has cancer and is unhappy. For the angels, we say, “there was war in heaven”. Certainly God could intervene at any point. However, His goal is to demonstrate that the choice for death is worse than merely dying - it's a self-destructive world that doesn't survive. Unfortunately we cannot understand His logic until we have been there and done that. Our limited experience allows us to believe that somehow we can overcome the consequences and live happily ever after. We will not fully understand why that cannot happen, until we actually self-destruct. So, our saga must be allowed to play out without God overriding the free will choices being made. Then and only then will all the witnesses be convinced that the wages of sin are death. Those who observe this human drama will understand “evil” so thoroughly that they will see the long-term consequences and avoid making any choices that will ultimately lead them to self-destruction.
Conversely, the choice for Life is a choice to trust in the Thinker to think up a more desirable scenario that will work for all eternity. The wages of Trusting God are everlasting Life.
In conclusion, “evil” is as eternal as “good”. Both are choices in the mind of God. There is nothing wrong with this nor does it make God the source of bad things. Each choice once made has consequences. It’s the choice to do evil that creates sin and the problems that follow. So, evil comes from God, but sin from His created beings.
5 December 2002
For more on this and a response to any questions, please email any comments to nasamike@nasamike.com