by Mary W. Matthews

Created on: September 26, 2010

Why does God allow evil to exist? Many people believe the answer is “free will.” If there were no evil, there would be no sin. All humans would be blissfully happy robots, incapable of judging the morality of their own behavior because we would have no choice; we would INVARIABLY do the right thing, having no other options.

To me, however, the “free will” argument has a fatal flaw: It does not take into account what are called NATURAL evils: the volcano that erupts and buries entire towns; the hurricane that kills thousands, good and evil, sinful and innocent alike; the flood that kills hundreds of thousands, the drought that kills millions. Why did God allow Hurricane Katrina to kill thousands? Why did God allow the earthquake in Haiti that killed almost a quarter of a million people? Why did God allow the flooding in Pakistan that is causing more than 15 million innocent people to suffer? (If you answer, “All of them, even the babies, even the mentally challenged, must be evil rather than innocent, because their nation doesn’t share my theology,” bear in mind that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t share your theology either. The Christian Testament didn’t even exist, at least not in its current form, until several hundred years after Jesus’s death.)

There is a simpler answer. In all the Universe, ONLY God is perfect. ONLY God is incapable of sin. ONLY God is purest goodness, without one speck of evil. ONLY God is inerrant.

If any part of God’s creation were as perfect as God is – incapable of sin, evil, or error – then that person, thing, or phenomenon would be indistinguishable from God. For example, if the Bible were as inerrant as some people say they believe, the Bible would be so obviously perfect that NO ONE could say, “No, the Bible is NOT ‘inerrant’; it DOES contain errors and inaccuracies.” The Bible would be so obviously perfect that even famous skeptics like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins would say, “Yes, the Bible is inerrant, perfect, without flaw. There is no evil in it. There COULDN’T be.”

If any person, thing, or phenomenon were incapable of evil, that person or thing would be indistinguishable from God. People would worship the pope – who Roman Catholics say is inerrant when teaching from his throne on matters of faith and morals – as if the pope were God: since the pope would be perfectly free of evil or sin,

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