The Christian Answer to Why God Creates Evil People
I’m gonna keep this short. Here’s a short story.
An intellectual war between religions
Back in the 4th century, Christianity had a serious competitor — Manichaeism (pronounced mani-kee-ism). It was a dualistic religion that did not believe in a single, all-powerful god. Instead, it preached that there exist two fundamental forces — the good and the evil — that are constantly at war with each other while humans just live as the battle goes on. This way of thought gave manichaeism a philosophical edge over christianity — any follower could possibly taunt a christian with this question -
If you christians really are so right about everything and god really is such a nice, benevolent guy, why did he create all these evil people? Why do thieves and murderers exist, when he could’ve just created us all with pure hearts? If he really is all-powerful, why wouldn’t he just stop us from sinning instead of judging us for it?
See, manichaeism had an easy answer to the question — their philosophy already accepts evil as a fundamental part of the universe, so they didn’t have a “nice-guy” god to defend.
Christianity did.
But the problem was bigger than just having to lose an argument against a rival religion. For a lot of christians this felt like a fundamental inconsistency in their understanding of God itself! And that’s a terrible situation to be in — if you’ve ever had faith in something, you’d know how incredibly uncomfortable it feels when you realise you could be wrong about the whole thing. That’s how the christians felt.
One of these christians was a man named Aurelius Augustinus, and he came up with a solution so, so brilliant that it blows my mind every time I think about it.
Aurelius’s Story
Aurelius wasn’t the kind of person who’d do something just because a priest told him he should — he liked to think for himself. This guy was literally the son of a christian saint, and yet strongly rejected christianity throughout his young years. Instead, he ended up spending his youth quite sinfully — or rather, lustfully — in the city of Carthage (in present-day Tunisia).
In fact, he was so strong-willed that despite being raised all around strict christians, Aurelius eventually decided to be a manichaeist. Of all things. It wasn’t to piss anyone off, though — he genuinely felt it had better answers to his philosophical questions.
Talk about rebellion.
But over the next decade, he started getting less and less satisfied with the religion’s teachings. Eventually, a conversation with a friend led him to read a christian text, and in 386 AD he officially converted to christianity.
But it sucks to switch teams only to see the one you were in before start winning. Aurelius had chosen Christianity over Manichaeism for it’s better reasoning in the first place, he naturally wanted there to be a good answer to the manichaeists’ question now. After some big IQ thinking, this is what he came up with -
Evil exists because god wants us to have free will.
It isn’t obvious at first just how genius this is, so bear with me here.
What he’s trying to say is that god wants us to be able to make our own decisions. He doesn’t want to swoop down from the heavens to stop every evil decision you make — if he did that, you wouldn’t have free will anymore! No, god knows you will commit sins, but preventing those sins isn’t in his job description — he’s only supposed to deliver you from them. He’s supposed to show you the good, non-evil path, but ultimately you must be free in your decision to walk it.
You must be free, even if it allows you to be evil.
But why is free will so important to god?
It’s a core christian belief that god created this universe for you. But for there to even be a ‘you’, you must have free will. Think about it — if everything you thought, felt or did was pre-programmed, how would you be any more ‘conscious’ than a side-character in a video game? How would your life be any more real than a James Bond movie on TV? For although Bond may feel he’s reacting to gunfire and explosions to save the world, you realise he’s nothing more than a bunch of pixels on a 2D screen, much like you’re just a bunch of atoms moving on a 3D screen.
The only thing that makes you different from other, ‘non-conscious’ objects of nature is that you have the capability to think independently and act on your thoughts. If you didn’t have that capability, you’d be nothing more than a lump of mass pre-destined to think it has free will, when really it doesn’t.
So, free will is a necessary condition for consciousness, and that’s why for there to be a ‘you’, you must be allowed to be evil.
Now, none of what he says has to be true. Christianity doesn’t have to be right about god at all. Aurelius’s genius lies not in finding the truth, but in making christianity’s beliefs consistent with each other — in justifying how even a benevolent god must create evil people. Let’s appreciate that.
Aurelius went on to be one of the greatest christian philosophers of all time, and is better known today as Saint Augustine, son of Saint Monica.
There are always arguments against any concept in philosophy, and this is no exception. I’d love it if you email me what you think about this here. Write to me at this email address and I will make sure I write back.
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