The mystery of evil and God the Benevolent

[Alan McDougall]

Enigma of the existence of evil and the Garden of Eden and God the Benevolent

 

 

I know the story of the Garden and Eden and the fall of man is most likely a mythical account of a peoples interaction with God, long past in the mists of time

 

I will try in my own humble way to answer this most difficult question.

 

How can we ever reconcile the fact of sin/ evil, suffering and pain, existing side by side with a benevolent holy God of light and love?

 

Let us go back to the story of the Garden of Eden God says to Adam in Gen1, Chap. 2 Verse. 17, “that he may eat of any tree except the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”.

 

Note; There was a tree of knowledge of both Good and evil, so Evil existed before Adam and the Garden of Eden.

 

However, God being all-knowing knows before hand that Adam is going to fail the test so why did he give it to him in the first place? Because he wanted us to have a free will and not be robots!!.

 

I don’t buy this, completely, as God could easily given Adam absolute free raine and said to him “Adam your can do anything you want without any reservations. But then sin/evil as well as good would have had to be approved by God and God is Holy in the absolute and thus could never had permitted sin and evil to exist forever in his domain of paradise and heaven

 

But, nevertheless, God wanted to test, teach and make man worthy so he allowed sin/evil to enter our world.

 

Nevertheless, GOD in his infinite wisdom goes ahead and gives Adam (and Eve) a test he "knows they are going to fail", why?

 

Was this fair seeing the awful consequences for humanity down through the age?

 

Yes! absolutely as I will describe later in this essay

 

Let us go back to the origin of evil, where it came from.

 

Isaiah Chapt. 45 Verse 7 God says "I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil I God do all these things". GOD made everything so he must have made evil but why?

 

Let us go back to Adam and the pampered environment of the Garden of Eden. If Adam and Eve had remained and obeyed God completely. ( remember God knew they would not obey him) they would have existed forever in a paradise setting of beauty warmth, comfort, never ever have to toil work just reach out and eat do any thing they want . No pain no gain!

 

This would be wonderful for say a hundred years or a thousand years, but having never ever experienced cold they could not appreciate warmth, never being hungry never appreciate food never being thirsty they would not appreciate the taste and satisfaction of sparking water , never knowing hate the would not know what love was.

 

They would have existed in a one-sided reality never knowing the opposite. But God knew that they must know evil, pain and sorrow to become fully functional free thinking beings similar to him in consciousness and indeed co- creators of their own domain and reality

 

Think?, after countless years what would at first be a wonderful paradise to Adam and Eve would become a boring non -challenging never changing hell. Therefore, God simply had to banish them into the world or toil sorrow and hardship to give meaning and purpose to their lives.

 

So God being fair and just gave them the test, which they failed and drove them out into the present reality world of thorns, cold, dark, pain, evil etc, etc. This reality is based on a duality we know evil so we know the beauty of goodness; we know truth so we can hate the lie, and we experience the light so that we know dark.

 

Humanity can look back on a paradise lost with a longing to for the eternal wonder and beauty of the original Eden, which they would love and rejoice as paradise regained

 

 

I do not for one moment believe the nonsense that there is an eternal battle between God and the Satan and that this being is almost Almighty Gods equal. Satan can only do what God permits him to do as we read in the book of Job.

However, God permits or allows the below dualities for our own good.

 

Good and evil

Light and dark

Truth and lie

Deception and honesty

Love and hate

War and Peace

Positive and negative

Faith and despair

Holiness and depravity

Warm and cool

Life and death

And so on and so on

 

God bless

Alan

[immortal]

However, God being all-knowing knows before hand that Adam is going to fail the test so why did he give it to him in the first place? Because he wanted us to have a free will and not be robots!!.

 

I don't buy this, completely, as God could easily given Adam absolute free raine and said to him "Adam your can do anything you want without any reservations. But then sin/evil as well as good would have had to be approved by God and God is Holy in the absolute and thus could never had permitted sin and evil to exist forever in his domain of paradise and heaven

 

I do not for one moment believe the nonsense that there is an eternal battle between God and the Satan and that this being is almost Almighty Gods equal. Satan can only do what God permits him to do as we read in the book of Job.

However, God permits or allows the below dualities for our own good.

 

God bless

Alan

 

I cannot agree more with you about your thought that both good and evil comes from God but I disagree with the freewill part. The bolded parts in your statements are contradictory to one another. If God knew what Adam was going to chose and if Satan can only do what God permits him to do how can anyone have freewill?

[Prometheus]

How about an alternative mythology...

 

God is an evil, jealous being, evidenced by his slaying of many people in the old testament.

 

Lucifer knew this. He rebelled against the tyranny of god, but alas lost. God created mankind for the purpose of giving them 'free choice' to worship him (but choosing wrong incurs eternal torture of course). Lucifer did not like the slave race god had created so tried to do something about it. He encouraged mankind to eat from the tree of good and evil, so that mankind would be able to discern for himself what is good and what is evil. Lucifer, genuinely wanting us to have agency over ourselves, did not impose punishments for wielding this free will. Thus mankind has been able to explore for himself the knowledge of good and evil. The road is far from straight, and indeed there is a long way to go yet. But already we have come to a point where mankind's morality far exceeds that of his stone age creator deity. Thank Lucifer, the light-bringer.

[Moontanman]

This video has a good explanation of evil and it tells how Satan as christians think of him didn't exist until around 3 or 4 hundred years after the Death of Jesus. There was no being the opposite of god in the old testament.

 

[pawelkolasa]

Enigma of the existence of evil and the Garden of Eden and God the Benevolent

 

 

I know the story of the Garden and Eden and the fall of man is most likely a mythical account of a peoples interaction with God, long past in the mists of time

 

I will try in my own humble way to answer this most difficult question.

 

How can we ever reconcile the fact of sin/ evil, suffering and pain, existing side by side with a benevolent holy God of light and love?

 

Let us go back to the story of the Garden of Eden God says to Adam in Gen1, Chap. 2 Verse. 17, "that he may eat of any tree except the "tree of knowledge of good and evil".

 

Note; There was a tree of knowledge of both Good and evil, so Evil existed before Adam and the Garden of Eden.

 

However, God being all-knowing knows before hand that Adam is going to fail the test so why did he give it to him in the first place? Because he wanted us to have a free will and not be robots!!.

 

I don't buy this, completely, as God could easily given Adam absolute free raine and said to him "Adam your can do anything you want without any reservations. But then sin/evil as well as good would have had to be approved by God and God is Holy in the absolute and thus could never had permitted sin and evil to exist forever in his domain of paradise and heaven

 

But, nevertheless, God wanted to test, teach and make man worthy so he allowed sin/evil to enter our world.

 

Nevertheless, GOD in his infinite wisdom goes ahead and gives Adam (and Eve) a test he "knows they are going to fail", why?

 

Was this fair seeing the awful consequences for humanity down through the age?

 

Yes! absolutely as I will describe later in this essay

 

Let us go back to the origin of evil, where it came from.

 

Isaiah Chapt. 45 Verse 7 God says "I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil I God do all these things". GOD made everything so he must have made evil but why?

 

Let us go back to Adam and the pampered environment of the Garden of Eden. If Adam and Eve had remained and obeyed God completely. ( remember God knew they would not obey him) they would have existed forever in a paradise setting of beauty warmth, comfort, never ever have to toil work just reach out and eat do any thing they want . No pain no gain!

 

This would be wonderful for say a hundred years or a thousand years, but having never ever experienced cold they could not appreciate warmth, never being hungry never appreciate food never being thirsty they would not appreciate the taste and satisfaction of sparking water , never knowing hate the would not know what love was.

 

They would have existed in a one-sided reality never knowing the opposite. But God knew that they must know evil, pain and sorrow to become fully functional free thinking beings similar to him in consciousness and indeed co- creators of their own domain and reality

 

Think?, after countless years what would at first be a wonderful paradise to Adam and Eve would become a boring non -challenging never changing hell. Therefore, God simply had to banish them into the world or toil sorrow and hardship to give meaning and purpose to their lives.

 

So God being fair and just gave them the test, which they failed and drove them out into the present reality world of thorns, cold, dark, pain, evil etc, etc. This reality is based on a duality we know evil so we know the beauty of goodness; we know truth so we can hate the lie, and we experience the light so that we know dark.

 

Humanity can look back on a paradise lost with a longing to for the eternal wonder and beauty of the original Eden, which they would love and rejoice as paradise regained

 

 

I do not for one moment believe the nonsense that there is an eternal battle between God and the Satan and that this being is almost Almighty Gods equal. Satan can only do what God permits him to do as we read in the book of Job.

However, God permits or allows the below dualities for our own good.

 

Good and evil

Light and dark

Truth and lie

Deception and honesty

Love and hate

War and Peace

Positive and negative

Faith and despair

Holiness and depravity

Warm and cool

Life and death

And so on and so on

 

God bless

Alan

 

You can't be GOOD without having an OPTION to do EVIL.

 

If you have option to have evil and evil is POSSIBLE it will happend because, everything that is POSSIBLE eventually HAS TO happen. Otherwise if it wasn't going to EVER happen, it would not be "possible".

 

That's how God could predict that, Evil will happen and could predict it.