Problem of Evil

Young men and philosophers like to raise the problem of evil when explaining why they do not like God.

The argument goes like this.

Evil exists on earth
If God is good
and all-powerful
he would remove evil from the earth.

Evil does exist on earth,
so either God is not good
or he is not all-powerful.

Therefore, a good all-powerful God does not exist.

This argument leaves out a couple of important steps.

An all-powerful God who is a creator
can constrain his power
by giving the people he created
control over part of his creation.

Therefore, it is not surprising
that there is evil on earth,
if the people he created
decided to reject him
and allow the powers of evil access into his creation.

God is good
so he does not take back the authority
that he has given to the people he created
when they mess it up.

Conclusion

We should be surprised that there is evil on earth
given that humans were given authority over it
and we should not expect that a good God
who keeps his word to constrain his power
would act immediately to eliminate the evil
that the people to whom he gave authority
allowed into the earth.

We would expect him to wait
until he is given permission by the people
that he created and gave authority,
before releasing his unlimited-power
that he had constrained
to give authority to the people he had created.