Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Nov 29, 2021 9:29 pm
I have thought of Job, and I don't understand how his story explains evil in the presence of good all-powerful God.
Not "evil"
pe se, but suffering. They are not the same thing. Job deals with the question, "Why doesn't God make good things automatically happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people?"
That's probably how we would arrange it, if we were asked.
But there's a problem we don't often think about: that with this strict Pavlovian regime of reward for good and punishment for evil, we would also have
no free will.
For it is only a situation in which rewards and punishments appear in ways unrelated to deserving that we are free to choose. Otherwise, the regime itself would keep us from ever making a choice different from the prescribed good one. Unless one can do evil and, at least in the immediate and foreseeable future, remain unpunished or even seemingly rewarded for one's efforts, then how would one ever convince oneself to choose anything but good? In other words, what would "choice" even mean, anymore?
And, on the other side, if good were immediately rewarded with the best results every time, then one would never actually
choose the good...because the good would be functionally pre-chosen for one. Indeed, only when good is very likelty to go unrewarded, or even seems to come at a cost, and sometimes a terrible cost...only then is one really, freely choosing the good.
Free choice. It's a very great good. It makes possible so
many goods...identity, creativity, individuality, relationships, charity, faith, loyalty, mercy, hope and love. And these are things that the world is decidedly better for, better even that a pain-free world would be.
And one more thing Job decidedly shows: being the oldest book in the
Torah, it shows that mankind's complaint that God should always prevent evil is very old, and has long been known to God. He has not only not
ignored the objection, He answered it
first.