Where did evil come from? One common belief, which has an attractive simplicity, is that because God created everything, he must have created evil. Unfortunately, the question arises: why would I want to worship a God who created mass torture and killing of innocent people, especially children? God truly does create all things. However, God, being Goodness itself, can only create good things. If God created it, it has to be good. If it's good, God created it. So, if God did not create evil and if evil exists, where did it come from?
God indeed did create everything good. God chose to create humans "in his image and likeness" (Gen 1:26), meaning humans, like their Creator, have free will, therefore, humans have the capacity to freely refuse their very Creator and His creation. Now, one can debate whether it was genuinely good to give us this gift, but, He did. With that gift, humans can freely choose to reject their Creator who gave them free will and with that rejection, humans introduce evil into creation.
Evil is hard to think about because it is a refusal, a “no-thing”. Evil is a blank spot where something is supposed to be. Evil is the absence of good and its existence is shadowy, like a shadow which is absence of light. When I want to get rid of a shadow, I don't have to work to get rid of the shadow so that the light has room to enter. I just bring light to it. Good and evil are sort of like that. God's goodness is everywhere, filling everything, except in a human heart where a free will chooses to reject him.
But how can evil affect us if it is a “no-thing”, a nothing? It looks real enough on the surface, but look a little deeper and we find a parasite that feeds upon the goodness that God created. Sin sucks the life out of that goodness, ultimately destroying it if not resisted. What we see are the effects of this refusal.
The Christian creation story shows us the pattern by which evil attaches itself. First, pretend to offer something good:
God knows that when you eat of [the Tree of Good and Evil] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God. (Gen 3:5)
then appeal to the senses:
The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. (Gen 3:6)
and, bingo. It’s not hard. We’ve all fallen for it.
But how can a non-thing such as evil cause such immense material damage? Through humans, who are both spirit and matter. Evil is a parasite on God’s creation which enters through the human spirit, then metastasizes everywhere. A pattern developed in Christian scripture shows that evil destroys relationship, first with God (Eve and Adam) and then with others (Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel) and ultimately with all creation (the Flood). Human activity, be it good or evil, be it reckless or wise, greedy or generous, all affect the physical world; individual greed and overconsumption, for example, are factors in global environmental changes. Humans who act rightly promote growth and life, while evil brings destruction and death to the moral and ultimately to the physical world.
The counterfeit existence that is evil makes life confusing and challenging. Even though it is a no-thing, we know it by its effects, as it twists and bends this way and that, making a muddy mess out of everything. We need divine help to sort out the good from the bad so that we can fulfill our obligation to show mercy to the sinner while making perfectly clear the terrible cost, not just of sin, but the cost of restraining its spread through our moral, intellectual and spiritual world.
Coming soon to a blog near you: How do we fight evil?