Why is there evil in the world? That’s the age-old question. Why would an all-powerful, all-loving God allow evil to exist in any form in the world? That question is often presented as a paradox to disprove the existence of God because, as their argument goes, an all-powerful, all-loving God must not be all-powerful or all-loving if he allows evil to exist.
The reason why God allows the possibility of evil to exist is because he understands the importance, and the necessity of free will. If God were to remove evil from the world, he would have to remove free will from the world. If human beings were not allowed to choose evil over good, then they would not have free will, or self-determination. We would become auto-matrons. We would only be allowed to choose good which would not be a choice at all.
Everything that makes us human would be removed from us. If we lose our free will, we lose our ability to do bad things, we lose our capacity for goodness, we lose our morality because how good and moral we are is dependent on the choices we make. We would never call a robot that was programmed to perform certain tasks, good or bad, or moral or immoral because the robot has no choice in determining its own actions.
If we lost our free will, we would lose the concept of love because love is dependent upon free will. If someone is forced to love someone else, or programmed to love another person, then it is not really love. It is more like a mathematical calculation. So even though evil and immorality are existential threats to humanity, without them, there would be no humanity. This is why God does not reveal himself to the world because if human beings were able to see God in all his glory and power, we would be so overwhelmed that there would be no choice but to love and worship him. And God wants to see who we are, and what choices we make without the coercion of his power and glory.
When I look at what the far-left is trying to do, pushing our society toward this unrealistic unattainable utopia where there is no evil, and no unfairness, requires the stripping away of our humanity, our self-determination, our free will. It requires turning us into robots controlled by the state, ceding our free will and self-determination over to the government. A loss of who we are as people, a loss of human goodness and morality, the loss of the ability to love and be loved. The state has to strip everything away that makes us human.
We see this in the response to Covid-19. People have become mere pawns to the government bureaucracies in control of the Covid response. They are stripping people away from their own humanity because the people no longer have self-determination over their medical decisions. The mask and vaccine mandates have created a two-tiered system between those who comply with government, and those make their own decisions. And those who do not comply are being deprived of their basic human rights, and are being castigated as immoral. Joe Biden, once again, blamed this pandemic on unvaccinated people, even though the vaccinated can get and spread the virus just as easily as the unvaccinated.
One would argue that God could remove evil, and still allow for the free will to choose between the varying degrees of good. But if you’re not allowed to choose from the full range of the highest good to the most depraved evil then you really do not have free will. Even choosing between the varying degrees good options would eventually not be allowed. We would be compelled to only choose the best, the “most moral” option because choosing anything less than the “most moral” option would then be considered a form of evil. But who gets to choose the “most moral” option?
That is what happens with limits on free speech. It starts with limiting “hate speech”, “racist speech”, “vulgar speech”, speech which most people disagree with and don’t engage in, but then it mutates from choosing between the varying degrees of “good speech” into censoring all but the “absolute best speech”. But then who gets to choose what constitutes the “absolute best speech”? This is what we are seeing in social media. If people are not toeing the “company line” or the accepted far-left narrative, they are censored, or canceled, electronically ostracized by society.
Even though at times we do not understand it, God did the right thing by leaving in the possibility of evil in the world because with it, he left our humanity. The only way to bring about the full expanse of our humanity is to maximize our freedom and free will, even if that means leaving in the potential of evil in the world. It is up to each if us individually to remove the bad and the evil in our lives, through the choices we make, and the thoughts we hold. Just as it is up to us to filter out the “hate speech” or “misinformation” that we see and hear on social media. We don’t need the state doing that. We don’t need bureaucracies doing that. We don’t need “fact-checkers” at some social media company determining what we can and can’t read. We can, and must make those decisions for ourselves.
The natural state of humanity is freedom, self-determination. It is not servitude, obedience, or conformity to the wishes of the state. Once the level of power to eliminate evil is established by the state, that power will inevitably be used for evil because evil manifests itself precisely in the unaccountable power needed to eliminate evil. And that power can only be kept at bay by individuals willing and able to speak up against and hold the powerful accountable which is being stripped from us every day. We have seen this play itself out in every totalitarian and communist regime ever established in the world. Unaccountable power brings death and destruction to the very civilization it controls, and the evil it brings is so much worse than the evil it claims to be fighting against.
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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.