by J L Petriesan

Created on: November 20, 2008   Last Updated: January 23, 2009

How can God be responsible for the good and the bad in this world? Certainly, we have been taught that God is all-loving, in fact, that God is love.

"In the beginning," Genesis tells us, "God created the heavens and the earth. . ." Then later, after the fall (How did the serpent get into the Garden without God having placed him there?), God said, according to Genesis, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." and later yet "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life."

Now, "enmity" implies a hatred, or at the least a dislike, a desire to avoid. Literalists have a problem here. They may have a problem believing that God cannot cause something bad and at the same time caused a repugnance, dislike, hatred, whatever, between men and women. But maybe not. One cool thing about being human is we can believe (what is the quote?) two contradictory things before breakfast every morning. (What I am remembering is what the red queen said to Alice: Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.)

"But surely, it cannot mean that God did or caused bad things, can it?" most non-literalists cry as they search for alternate meanings to conform the words in the Bible, which most Christians take to be the Word of God, so that they fit with their particular belief system. And here is a clue.

How did God create everything? The creation story of each of the six days was begun with the phrase "And God said." Now, I am definitely not a literalistic, but the phrase seems rather clear to me: God spoke and then it was. Spoke. Words?

Change in perspective, perhaps the dreaded paradigm shift:

Think of God as an author. He has been called the Author of life, so its not such a stretch.

Now personal. When I write fictions, I often have had people ask me why I had a character do one thing or another. The short answer is I did not make the character do something; the character chose to do it. My role was to put the words on paper. Yeah but, surely I caused it to happen.

Well, yes and no. In the most literal sense, yes I did cause the character's actions because I could have, I suppose, chosen not to have written the actions on the paper. I suspect my Muse would have strangled me, but the choice would have been mine, whatever the consequences. In a higher sense, the character, exercising his free will, chose to do what he did, be it good or bad and that exercise in free will was, by definition and because I wrote the words, within my control. Therefore, any author can be construed to have caused the evil within the fiction produced by the author.

God, the Ultimate Author of Everything, can be said to have caused, to have been responsible for all the evil in the world. While it may not have been His choice for the world, it was in His will. Knowing us before we were formed, knowing all the hairs on our head, He could have chosen to have changed what was done or what is to be done. He chose like, I suppose, I choose to let the characters have their free will, whether that will causes good or evil.

I wrote the story, I am responsible; God is writing/wrote the world; He is responsible.

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