Who Made Evil?

A recent email discussion with my girlfriend found this somewhat apocryphal account of Einstein's argument with a professor concerning the nature of evil. Whether it can actually be attributed to Einstein or not aside, the point made is a good one: God did not create evil, and indeed, evil is the absence (or distortion) of God and His love.

The account reminds me of Lewis' argument concerning the relationship between omnipotence and free will. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis writes

His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to his power. If you choose to say 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words 'God can.'... It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

In some sense, God makes a willing surrender of His omnipotence when He grants free will to any of His creatures, be they angels or men. We who have been given free will are given a share---finite as it is--of God's power and are allowed to become co-creators. What are we creating?

In giving us this power, we are allowed a choice: accept of reject God. One may say that a bit of the power of the will is to prevent God from being omnipresent. St Teresa of Avila says in her autobiography that

Prayer is the door to those great graces which our Lord has bestowed upon me. If this door is shut, I do not see how He can bestow them; and even if He entered into a soul to take delight therein, there is no way by which he can do so....If we put many hindrances in the way, and take no pains whatever to remove them, how can He come to us, and how can we have any desire that He should show us His great mercies?

God has given us the ability to reject Him, because only having this choice are we truly able to embrace Him. As a consequence of rejecting Him, we see the great evils of the world. How could we expect any differently? Why would we expect the world to be a good place if we ourselves have exiled the Source of all good? Evil exists, but it is not God who created it; no, that infamy belongs first to the fallen angels--demons--and then to us.

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If you enjoyed this post, here are some related ones:

Unstoppable Objects, Immovable Walls, and Omnipotence (Nicene Guys)
Homogeneity in Heaven and Hell
Does Hell Matter?
The Problem of Pain: A Brief Theology of Theodicy
Why Is God All-Powerful
Cosmological Evil: Some Thoughts
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