Response to the question "If God exists, why does evil happen?"

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The above question is a question that has been thought out by many great philosophers and have tried to solve this so called “paradox”. There r several answers to this question but there is also a hidden presupposition that needs to be rectified before attempting to answer this.

Many fail to realize that this so called “paradox” that is posed by non theists is based on the false premise that somehow the existence of evil and the existence of God is a paradoxical concept, a mere contradiction. However, from a theist perspective, there is no paradox.

To put it simply, there is no paradox or contradiction between existence of God and existence of evil. With that, we can lay out a few answers to this question easily.

“Free will”

Good and evil in the world is a result of human beings, not necessarily God. Although yes, God is the creator of all things we do, that does not change the fact that the evil that exists in this world is a result of human beings choosing to commit evil, that...

merely exist. The question of why God does not simply take away evil and intervene when a man is robbing a store by having a lightning strike him is basically asking why does God not simply take away our free will. However, should this happen, we human beings would not be...

humans. We humans would be merely in a vegetative state basically being forced to make decisions, almost like programmed robots.

"The value of doing good"

What makes good, in fact good, and bad, in fact bad? The reason one is even able to ask the question “if God exists then why does evil exist?” is because of the fact that both evil and good exist. Without evil, you would lose the value “goodness”...

has as you would be deprived of a measuring stick to differentiate between the two. A man who has only seen a straight line his whole life, will never know that the line itself is defined as “straight” unless he has some reference as to what a crooked line is.

The difference in morality of earning a living through permissible and ethical means has value not necessarily only because of the act itself, but also because the opposite of earning a living honestly, is stealing. In comparison, the latter is obviously an immoral thing...

to do. The issue is, without one, the other loses it’s “value” and it’s weight that it carries. Compare this with the act of turning the TV on. The act of turning on the TV does not exactly hold any value in terms of a “moral landscape”. The act of turning the TV on is merely...

an act which does not have any “moral weight”. It holds neither a virtues value nor an evil one. This is how all our deeds would be internalized in a world where evil did not exist, and only goodness existed or vice versa.

Overall these are simply attempts of answering questions to the problem of evil. To conclude, the “problem of evil” is not much of a problem, in the sense, within the paradigm of theism, existence of evil is not an inconsistency.