“God is all powerful.  God is all good.  Evil exists.”

     You may have heard this statement before.  I can’t remember the first time I heard it, but it is usually made by atheists who want to expose the absurdity of a believers faith.  Their argument usually goes something like this: “A christian makes the claim that all three of these statements are true, but in actuality they are a paradox.  If God is all powerful and all good then evil could not exist in the world.  Sense evil does exist in this world then God (if there is a god) is either NOT all powerful or he is NOT all good.”

     Here is Webster’s definition of the word paradox:  1: a tenet contrary to received opinion 2.a: a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true b: a self-contradictory statement that at first seems true c: an argument that apparently derives self-contradictory conclusions by valid deduction from acceptable premises3: one (as a person, situation, or action) having seemingly contradictory qualities or phases.

     I’ve been intrigued by paradoxes for many years now.  I find myself often day-dreaming about time travel which is the ultimate paradox.  Say, for instance, you were to go back in time and meet your great grandfather and you shot him and killed him.  Then you never would have been born and couldn’t have invented the time machine to travel back there and pull the trigger. 

     Maybe this isn’t your cup of tea.   Maybe I’m just strange like that.

     Let me give you another example of a paradox that atheists love to use.  Unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere your whole life I’m certain you’ve heard this before, but I want to say that this one really sent me reeling.  I mean, back when I was in high school I was asked this by one of my teachers and I didn’t know how to respond and I was troubled for years afterward over it.  Knowing that I was a christian the teacher asked me if I believed that God could do anything.  I didn’t realize that I was being set up in a trap and I proudly replied that I did indeed believe that God could do anything.  Then the teacher smiled and real calmly asked, “Can God create a rock that he can not move?”

     At the time I was speechless.  At the time this seemed like a very rational and very real problem.  I have matured a lot sense then and I have hammered out these “religious paradoxes” in my head.  Not the time traveling one, though.  I don’t believe man will ever be able to time travel and I also don’t believe time really works the way we percieve it too.  Maybe that will be another article.

    I will now try to write down the “hammering process” that I went through in my mind to solve these “religious paradoxes”, these paradoxes that I at first perceived to be problems with the christian faith, but have come to believe that they are not problems at all.  Rather, I think they are vital truths to the fundamentals of a faith in the God  of Christianity no matter what denomination you yoke up with. 

     Let me say a few things before I Begin, though.  First, I am no expert on these matters.  This is just one man’s journey toward a better understanding of his faith.  It’s a journey that is still going on.  Second, I would love to have discussions with anyone who finds this as fascinating and enthralling as I do.  Finally, my rationalizations of these matters might not be satisfactory for you.  They were for me, that’s all, and i think the answer to both of the paradoxes above is the same. 

     In short, that answer is “man’s free will.”  I have heard several debates that a Calvinist had with different atheists where these topics (explicitly the statement at the very top of this page) have come up.  Sense Calvinists do not believe that man has been given free will I found that his rationalizations were confusing and not very helpful.  Nor did they seem to be very persuasive.  You may say the same for my rationalizations, but please, hear me out.

      Concerning the fact of the existence of evil the atheist rationalizes that a god who is all powerful and all good would not allow evil to exist so therefore there is no god.  My argument is that Christians believe that god is love.  He is pure love.  Man can not even begin to understand love without him.  We also believe that he created man for the sole purpose of loving him.  That’s it.  The meaning of life is to love God.  Case closed. 

     Now, let’s say that I created a robot.  This robot would cook for me and clean for me and take care of me in every need that I had. She would tell me all the time how much she loved me and prove it by protecting me when I needed protection and talking to me when I was lonely and everything in between.  At first glance you would say that this robot really did love me… but you would be wrong.  The robot was only doing what she was programed to do.  She has no choice.  Shes just a machine, a computer running out a program, nothing more.  Someone could come along and hack into her mainframe and change the program to where she hated me and loved someone else instead… still, no choice.

     Do you see what I’m getting at?  God could have created man like that robot.  He could have programed us to love him and never commit evil acts.  Then we could say that God is all powerful, and evil doesn’t exist… but could we say that God is all good in that scenario?  Wouldn’t we only love him because we had no choice?  Would that be good?

     The point I’m trying to make (and failing to make) is Because God is all powerful and Because he is all good, evil Has to exist.

     There is a lot more to say and there are a lot of objections to this that I have heard and dealt with to my satification in the past.  Right now, however, I am running out of time, but i do want to write a paragraph on how I answer the question: Can God create a rock he can not move?  I say that he can and he has.  I call that rock free will.  God created man to love him.  He gave man free will not to love him.  Therefore he created a rock he can not move.