• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

One of the skeptical questions that the Manichees raise against traditional Christianity is this: If God is all-powerful and perfectly good, then why or how is there any evil in the world? A perfectly good God would not want to create evil in the first place and an all-powerful God could prevent evil from coming into existence. But there is evil in the universe. So God is not both perfectly good and all-powerful as traditional Christians suppose. This argument against the existence of God—at least the existence of a perfectly good and all-powerful divinity—is known as “the problem of evil.” Since the Manichees, like Plato, deny that the good God of the universe is all-powerful, they don’t have to worry about the problem of evil.

The Manichees, however, are left with a problem (or two) of their own. If one lets go of the idea that God is all-powerful, what reason is there to believe that God is more powerful than the forces of darkness? Might it not be that evil is stronger than goodness, as often appears to be the case in our universe and to the characters in Star Wars? Recall Luke’s question to Yoda, “Is the Dark Side stronger?” and Yoda’s negative (yet tentative) reply: “No . . . No [softer] . . . No [even softer yet]. Quicker, easier, more seductive.” There’s also Vader’s constant assertion of “the power of the Dark Side.” Even if the Dark Side of the Force isn’t stronger than the Light Side as Yoda supposes, it might be that the Light Side has no real advantage over the Dark Side either. Bad things happen to good people and many of these bad things will never eventually lead to anything good. One reason that religious believers defend God’s omnipotence is that an all-powerful God can redeem the evil that occurs in this life by drawing from it more valuable goods. For example, a good person becomes even better as a result of suffering pain, whether psychological or physical. Why? She learns to better empathize with others who suffer. She more clearly realizes what’s really important in life: not the pursuit of pleasure, but serving others.

But this brings us back to the problem of evil. Why is there evil in the first place if God is omnipotent? Augustine argues that evil’s presence in the universe is directly caused by the free choices of God’s creatures and not by God’s direct choice. Human beings are created with free will, and (unfortunately) many of us have willingly chosen to do evil instead of remaining steadfast in choosing to do good. Although God could have prevented evil’s actual presence in the universe by choosing not to create a universe at all (or by choosing to create a universe without creatures who have the ability to choose between good and evil), a universe with free creatures (even free creatures that do evil) is better than a universe that contains only mindless automatons programmed to always do good.53 This is why God created the universe, even a universe that carries with it the real possibility of becoming tainted with evil. But Augustine recognizes that simply saying that creatures have free choice doesn’t fully solve the problem of evil:

Where then does evil come from since the good God made everything good? Certainly the greatest and supreme Good made lesser goods; yet the Creator and all he created are good. What then is the origin of evil? Is it that the matter from which he made things was somehow evil? He gave it form and order, but did he leave in it an element which he could not transform into good? If so, why? Was he powerless to turn and transform all matter so that no evil remained, even though God is omnipotent? 54

Augustine believes the answer to the last question is “no.” Unlike Plato’s divine craftsman, Augustine’s God created the whole universe out of nothing. This means for him there was no pre-existing stuff out of which the physical universe was formed. Evil in this world can’t be traced back to defective matter for Augustine, for matter isn’t inherently evil but good, since it too has its source in the perfectly good Creator of the universe.