Let’s return to the oft-repeated claim of atheists that the existence of evil means that God may be all-powerful or all-good, but not both. This claim amounts to a judgment upon God. Is it really true that we are able to judge God?
St. Maximus the Confessor offers us a simple
test. He says that “God is one, unoriginate, incomprehensible,
possessing completely the total potentiality of being, altogether excluding
notions of when and how, inaccessible to all, and not to be known through a natural
image by any creature.”*
Let’s restrict our attention to one
point: either (1) the God we worship is incomprehensible or (2) He
is not.
Let’s
examine (1). If God is incomprehensible, any attempt to understand
Him is pointless and any complaining about what we don’t like about life and
the universe is absurd. We simply cannot understand (what in human
terms would be) the rationale for (what in human terms would be) far-reaching decisions made by God.
For us to
complain about an incomprehensible deity is like a kindergartner finding fault
with calculus or a cat meowing about her visit to the vet’s office. The incomprehensibility
of the divine defendant sends the plaintiff packing (cf. Ps. 50:6 [LXX!]).
This is
not to say that we know nothing about God. The Bible and the Fathers
offer us a great deal about Him in terms so plain as to remove all possible
doubt about Him, such as what He is (I Jn.4:8), what He wants for us (I Tim. 2:4) and what he expects from
us (Mic. 6:8, Eph. 2:10).
Indeed,
if we have been told what He is is, what He wants for us and what He expects from us, but we have not been
told why He permits evils to exist, we may reasonably infer that it is not for
us to know why evils exist. The reason for the existence of evils may, like the
return of Our Lord, be knowledge deliberately withheld (Mt. 25:13) or by nature impossible to be understood (Eccl. 3:21).
My
cynical guess is that some people are not motivated by His desire for our salvation
or enthusiastic about acting justly; they would rather speculate about the
origins of evil or catching God out.
(2) If
God is not incomprehensible, we are worshiping and arguing with an imperfect
creator who gave us existence but could not guarantee us universal happiness
(however defined). This God is a well-meaning creator who only
sometimes gets it right. This view has the advantage of explaining
all evils perfectly, but the creator it envisions is not the God of the
Christian faith.
This
fundamentally non-Christian, even non-Biblical conception of God belongs to Gnosticism
or the polytheism, both of whom feature hapless creators who cannot get things to
work out right for everyone.
In
conclusion, each of us must decide whether God is comprehensible or not and
then stick to the logical consequences of our decision. If God is
incomprehensible, there are no grounds for complaints. If God is not
incomprehensible, there are indeed grounds for complaints, but they must be
taken to a non-Christian forum to be heard and decided.
We may
now briefly treat another great source of doubt.
Why did
God make man? Why indeed did God make anything? If we
concede that God is incomprehensible, then we can dispose of that doubt
immediately: we cannot fathom why we exist any more than we can
understand why evils exist. All we can do is accept the fact of our
existence and the terms upon which we exist.
So,
instead of wondering about questions whose answers we are by nature incapable
of understanding, let’s get busy doing the good works we were created to do (cf. Eccl. 3:20).
ENDNOTES
*G. E. H.
Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware (trans. and eds.), “Two Hundred
Texts on Theology” (The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. II [Faber
& Faber, London & Boston: 1979]), p. 114. The reader may consider
for himself how we can judge a Creator to whom the “notions of when and how” do
not apply; who is “inaccessible to all”; and who is “not to be known” by the
only means we have at our disposal—“through a natural image.”
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