Calculating Evil
Evil is a mystery that cannot fully be solved in our present state of knowledge. But a few things can be said. First, the concept of evil as a privation of good (Augustine) helps. Good must exist first for evil to corrupt; evil cannot exist on its own. It is essentially a parasite on the good.
Second, if we picture God as pondering whether to go ahead with a creation containing free creatures, knowing that evil would result from their choices, we have to believe that he decided rightly that it was worth it. He was the only one in a position to make that call.
Finally, if we are going to say that God made that call wrongly, we need to say it while standing at the foot of the Cross, looking up into the face of Jesus. There we realize that God did not ask us to pay any price for the existence of human freedom and significance that he was not willing to pay himself. We finally believe in his goodness not because we can perfectly explain evil, not because we have done the math and calculated that there is, on the whole, more good, but because while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). That is the bottom line.
Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
Encounters with Faith & Forgiveness in Communities of Faith by Nicole M. King
18.3—April 2005
on Being a Free Narnian & the Joy of Subordination by Donald T. Williams
19.10—December 2006
Training Up a Child Requires a Well-Formed Imagination by David Mills
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