I promised I would blog on the issue of the problem of Evil.

Why would an all-wise Intelligent Designer create a world so full of trouble? Christians often give various answers, and perhaps my least favorite is:

The evil in the world is the consequence of Adam’s sin.

But such an answer is not satisfying to sincere seekers or those experiencing grief. Try telling that to a husband who just lost his wife to tragedy. It is not a satisfying answer….The question a grieving survivor is really asking is, “can you help me make sense of what happened. It seems pointless and painful. If there is meaning in this, I can be comforted.”

Saying “the evil in the world is the consequence of Adam’s sin” when confronted with the question of evil is like telling a child after her puppy was run over by the truck, “the reason your dog died was a matter of physics, force and momentum.” It really doesn’t answer the question that is really being asked.

The atheists of course have no answer. Dawkins, the prophet of pointlessness, is quick to say:

The universe we observe…has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference.

But many atheists I know are not so cavalier as Dawkins. They profoundly hold out hope there is a reason and
purspose for all things. They would rather the world have purpose rather than Darwinian pointlessness.

But the argument from bad design has great force, even with me. Once upon a time if someone answered my question about the problem of evil by saying “the evil in the world was caused by man’s sin”, I might have responded by saying:

then why did God make a creature capable of breaking down. Where’s the reliability engineering? Making a creature incapable of evil (like Adam) seems a better solution. Besides, why would God put a snake in the Garden of Eden to tempt Eve? That’s begging for trouble.

It would seem, on the surface, the argument of bad design has great force and is irrefutable. But then I looked to an out-of-the-box type explanation. And it is an explanation I can live with…..

There is much trouble in the world. For example, I mentioned this horrible crime committed against my family: Memorial to murder and rape victim, Connie Reyes. Why would such things happen? Why did Sean Taylor have to die? Or why would Darwin have to have deformed children after he inbred with his cousin?

The birth of Darwin’s deformed child caused him to have much resentment toward the idea of special creation. But the irony is that in the Darwinian world, deformed kids are only part of the evolutionary process of random mutation. In the Darwinian world, rape and murder are merely forms of adaptation (ala Thonhill and Ussery). In the Darwinian world, when a creationist survived a scuffle with a Darwinist by murdering the Darwinist, the creationist by definition is the more fit species since the fittest are the ones that survive. That’s the cruel irony of Darwin’s theory.

But for those who reject Darwinisn, they are faced with wondering how an all-wise God would subject his creation to such miserable experiences. The presence of Irreducible Complexity in biology seems a bit lacking in its ability to persuade when compared the objections of bad design and evil in the world.

I could try to dismiss these emotional objections to ID and simply argue physics. Indeed, the laws of physics suggest the existence of God. It is a straightforward deduction from Schrodinger’s equation and tne Universal Wave Function which I describe here: Kalaam Cosmological Argument, Schrodinger’s Equation, and the Existence of God. Mathematician Douglas Hofstadter refers to Universal Wave Function as “the mind - or brain, if you prefer - of the great novelist in the sky”. The MIND of the Great Novelist in the Sky implies that as that MIND acts, it acts with intelligence, thus the universe is the product of Intelligent Design.

And physicist FJ Belinfante of Purdue wrote in Measurements and time reversal in objective quantum theory:

We thus see how quantum theory requires the existence of God. Of course, it does not ascribe to God defined in this way any of the specific additional qualities that the various existing religious doctrines ascribed to God. Acceptance of such doctrines is a matter of faith and belief.

If elementary systems do not “possess” quantitatively determinate properties, apparently God determines these properties as we measure them. We also observe the fact, unexplainable but experimentally well established, that God in His decisions about the outcomes of our experiments shows habits so regular that we can express them in the form of statistical laws of nature. This apparent determinism in macroscopic nature has hidden God and His personal influence on the universe from the eyes of many outstanding scientists.

F.J. Belinfante

In addition to Belinfante, the mathematicians Godel and Cantor felt that mathematics pointed to the existence of an Absolute Infinity, and they (especially Cantor) associated this Absolute Infinity with God.

However, all the reasonable logical arguments from physics and math are quickly negated by the emotional argument that goes something like this:

an all wise God would not make such a flawed and cruel universe. Therefore He doesn’t exist. I don’t care about what Schrodinger’s equation says, my heart tells me an all-Wise God wouldn’t do this, therefore He doesn’t exist.

Indeed most Christians are not schooled in giving a satisfying response. But for the moment, let’s just formulate an answer based on some common sense.

First of all, would a Perfect Being create another being as perfect as Himself? Is that logically possible? No. Ergo, it is reasonable a Perfect Being will create creatures lesser than himself, and thus in a sense they would be imperfect by definition. At the very least, a Perfect Being is perfectly justified in making imperfect creatures — and through the principle of mathematical induction, if a little imperfection is admitted in the process of creation, then it stands to reason, a little more imperfection can be admitted, and so on and so forth until one admits the possibility of a very imperfect world indeed.

But that is still a logical-type argument, that is not an emotionally satisfying argument to those who are grieving over their loved ones. But let me back up a bit to offer some perspective and deal with the problem of evil from a more down to earth perspective….

In the 90’s the Darwinists tried to brainwash public school kids with so-called “outcome based education”. One of the features was that we have to treat all kids as winners. If they played a baseball game, it was forbidden to keep score. The possibility of having losers was prevented. Thus a nice sanitized, Huxlian Utopia was achieved. But this sterilized world was unappealing to children. I seem to recall these kids were caught privately keeping score and counting the number of runs batted in. (hehe, good for them and for their rebellion against Darwinist, Socialist brainwashing).

Would we be interested in sporting matches where there were no losers? Would we rush to watch a Huxlian Utopia League with no losers and all participants are superbowl champions? I have no answers as to why we find worlds where there is a possibility of losers and winners more compelling, and dare I say more real and beautiful, than world where all troubles sanitized away, and the heroes have no chance of experiencing adversity and pain.

Would we expect a great screen writer or a great novelist to write a work where there were no problems or villains? Would we expect a composer to write great works of music with no dissonance. If he doesn’t, one will be stuck with a monotoned sine-wave. Not very beautiful or compelling.

Thus if we would expect a great novelist on the Earth to create a world full of villains, winners and losers, is it not reasonable to think the Great Novelist in the Sky to do the same. It is possible he would create a world, a story line where there are heroes and villains. A world without such drama is like Star Wars without Darth Vader. It seems a rather strange property of reality that great good and beauty are realized with the possibility of evil and loss. We may not like it, but it seems that like the laws of thermodynamics dictate, things must come at a cost, and everything of any worth must come at a great price.

The present universal state may only be the early chapters in the greatest story ever told. The present futility and misery might possibly make sense only in light of how the story ends. Perhaps the present distress is only a chapter in the work of Great Novelist in the Sky, we are only in the middle of the evolution of Shrodinger’s Universal Wave Function, we’re not in the final state — the present distress is is not the whole story by any means. The Great Novelist in the Sky may have more to offer than meets the eye….

It may actually stand to reason, that trouble was ordained and premeditated for this universe, that perhaps it was planned from the foundation of the world that even innocent lambs would be slain…

(stay tuned)