Our world is certainly preoccupied where the issue of origins. We hear about it, read about it, all the time. Almost every edition of the newspaper, every edition of the major magazines of our nation discusses origins; how things came to be the way they are, either in terms of the physical universe or in terms of the spiritual universe, in terms of human sociology or human anatomy. To know the truth about origins, we have to go back to the Bible. God has given us the story of origins in the book of Genesis.
In Genesis 1 and 2 is the origin of the physical universe as we know it. In Genesis 3 is the origin of evil. Turn in your Bible to Genesis Chapter 3. I want to read this passage just so it’s set in your mind. After the six days of God’s creation, He rested. “Everything he had made,” according to Chapter 1 Verse 31, “was very good,” and God rested. He had created a perfect universe. But we live in anything but a perfect universe, and there’s a reason. When you come to Chapter 3, a dramatic scene takes place. And this is the reason why the world is the way it is. “Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, ‘Indeed, has God said, You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’? And the woman said to the serpent, ‘>From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, You shall not eat from it or touch it, lest you die.’ And the serpent said to the woman, ‘You surely shall not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ “Now when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.” The true diagnosis of the human condition stems from that event. God, the creator of the universe, is all good, and only good. And his original creation was all good and only good. The goodness of his creation was a reflection of the goodness of his nature.
Now let me get a little philosophical with you here. God is not the author of evil. If God created evil, then God would be both good and evil. And if God were both good and evil, there would be no hope for the ultimate triumph of good, which the Bible promises. If God were himself evil, he could not, therefore, triumph over evil, so good could not triumph. If God were the source of evil, he would have to be evil himself. And if He were evil himself, then there could be no basis for salvation, for God could not save us from evil if evil was in His nature. So the Biblical revelation of the original goodness of creation protects the goodness of God. And it makes the source of evil outside of God. Only if the source of evil is outside of God can God conquer evil and can God save sinners from evil. And just as a footnote to that; if God used any kind of evolution to create, evolution is dependent on decay and death, all effects or reflections of evil. So if God used any kind of evolution to create, then God authored evil; He created decay and He created death. And if God used any form of evolution, then His creation was not all good; it was not perfect when he created it, and it is what it is now because of decay and death, which He must have used in his creation, which are evidences of evil, then God must himself be evil. But God is not evil. God is all good and only good.
The question then is: Where did evil come from? And the answer to that is that we only know what we know from the Bible. It is really useless to speculate about that.
Nobody would argue that there is evil in the world. Everybody admits that. Not everybody admits that we are totally depraved and that we have original sin in us. Not everybody admits that we are evil and wretched to the core. But everyone admits there is evil in the world to some degree. And in fact, the problem of evil in the world has really occupied the best minds of history. Certainly, we would agree in our own country, in the history of our own country there’s never been a greater brain, a greater mental capacity, than that enjoyed by Albert Einstein. Not just the greatest scientist of this century, but maybe the greatest intellect we’ve known in modern times. And for Albert Einstein, just for an illustration, the great scientist that he was, the great mind that he was, the toughest intellectual barrier to the Christian faith was not the question of God creating the world. Simple reason, the reason of cause and effect, was not hard for Einstein to grasp. He saw that the universe was an effect and it had to have a source. He saw that the universe was designed, and it had to have a designer. He saw that it was ordered, and it had to come out of an orderly mind. And so Einstein concluded that there must be a mind behind the universe. He rejected the idea of matter simply bumping around endlessly in space until, by random, it formed itself into the universe that now exists. As he put it, quote: “The universe reveals an intelligence of such superiority that it overshadows all human intelligence.” No. Einstein was not stumped by God as a creator.
What really stymied Einstein was something far tougher than the doctrine of creation. It was the problem of evil and suffering. He knew there had to be a designer. He agonized over the character of that designer. How could God be good, and yet allow terrible things to happen to people? Einstein couldn’t resolve the problem of evil and suffering with a good God, and so he turned completely away from the God of the Bible, the God he had been raised in Judaism to believe in. What really tripped up Einstein was that he was a determinist; that is, he viewed human beings as complicated machines. He saw them doing simply what they were programmed to do by natural, irresistible forces. In fact, Einstein concluded that human beings were like “wind-up toys.” You wind them up, and they do what they’re manufactured to do. “If that is so,” he concluded, “… there can be no such thing as morality. There can be no such thing as right or wrong. There can be no such thing as sin. There can be no such thing as guilt. If a person’s actions are determined, if he is just a wind-up toy wound up by a cosmic mind to do what it was designed for him to do, then he cannot be responsible for what he does before God. “He,” said Einstein, “is no more responsible for what he does than a stone is responsible for where it goes when someone throws it.” Who is responsible? Well, “God has to be responsible,” Einstein concluded. “But if God is responsible, then he cannot be a good God, or he’s responsible for evil. And if God is responsible, the God of Judaism or the God of Christianity, then he makes us do bad things, as well as good. “And if,” Einstein said, “God was like this, he would be constantly passing judgment on himself as evil.”
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
