Rodrigo asked:

Seeing it from the religious point of view, If God wants only good things for us, why we can't have a
perfect world without wars and problems?

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The short answer is that world without wars and problems would be a world without freedom and
personal growth and so wouldn't be a perfect world. A world in which God nipped every incipient evil
in the bud would be morally, if not also physically, unrecognizable.

The regularities we discern in nature are preconditions of our moral life: we couldn't achieve any of
our goals without relying on those regularities, and the inability to achieve goals would itself be a
great evil. We would hardly understand what caused what, however, if every time the operation of a
natural law were about to collide violently with a fragile human body, God intervened to save the day.
(And if he didn't do it every time, he could be charged with being capricious.) If in such a world
suffering did not exceed that of a stubbed toe, we could ask why we have to suffer even that. If
human beings are the source of the unpleasantness, well, then: whose bodies should God restrain?
Whose minds should he invade and control?

It is better for God to have created a universe with persons other than himself than not to have done
so. But if there are persons, then there is freedom. A world in which there is creative freedom is better
than a world in which there isn't. It would be incoherent for God to create persons and then prevent
them from understanding by experience the consequences of their actions and those of things in
nature. Creative freedom would be effectively absent (even if essentially present) were God to
frustrate every evil motivation.

The universe is an arena of growth for persons, not a safe-haven from trials and tribulations. Were
God to "protect us from all anxiety," as many believers pray on Sunday, our problem-solving
capabilities would have never developed. What would get us out of bed each morning, what art would
we create, what songs would we sing or stories would we tell, if the tension that is human living, that
bears within it the possibility of evil breaking out at any moment, were absent?

We assume that God knows more about any situation than any of us do. We'll further assume that
whenever we suffered because someone we loved was harmed or worse, something we value was
weakened or destroyed, or our attempt to realize value was frustrated, that suffering was sometimes
a means to our enjoyment of greater value — and God knew that, too. In the literature such evils are
called "disciplinary." That is, they are opportunities for persons to learn and thereby grow. Personal
growth, all things being equal, is a good thing.

But there are some evils that cannot reasonably be called disciplinary. Some losses of real value and
some frustrations of real-value realization bring with them suffering that is so excruciating that there is
nothing to learn from it. You can think of many candidates for such nondisciplinary evil; my favorite, if
that's the right word, is a child's dying painfully. What is there to be learned from such suffering, either
by the child or those who love him or her? Assuming an answer is forthcoming, was the good of the
learning proportionate to the suffering that paid for it? In far too many cases, it was not.

The problem of evil for believers in God is the problem of excessive, nondisciplinaryevil, evil out of
which no overriding or compensating good could conceivably come, evil that is disproportionate to
any good that might occasion the aftermath of the evil, evil that God arguably could have prevented.

There is no refuge in agnosticism: if one says that we don't knowwhat future good might come out of
present evil — which would revise our judgment that it is an irredeemable evil — the ready reply is
that we also don't know what future evil might have its roots in some present good. Are we equally
ready to revise on such hypothetical grounds our judgments of what is good?

If one believes that one has sufficient reason for believing that there is a cosmic person who cares
about his creation in general and created persons in particular — a question we cannot go into here
— the existence or occurrence of evil need not overthrow such belief provided one's idea of God is
not loaded with indefensible metaphysical attributes.

In the effort to square the existence of God with that of nondisciplinary evil, E. S. Brightman and,
following him, Peter A. Bertocci have suggested that God's control over his creation is not unlimited,
that there is an obstacle within God's own nature that impedes his effort to reduce the amount of evil
that mars his creation. If you wish to explore this proposed solution, I would suggest tracking down
Bertocci's Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion,Prentice-Hall, 1951. To challenge or pursue
anything I've said above, please feel free to write me.

Tony Flood

From a religious point of view, don't forget it is freedom God gives us. This is the basic good.
Problems go with sovereign freedom. The solutions are in our hands. To help us God revealed laws,
which are not 'natural' as such, although from different premises one could also argue that they are
natural. Law operates within reason. Some would say a law-abiding world would be a good one.
History shows that sometimes we have to fight for justice and that can lead to war. Conversely,
pacificism can lead to oppression and injustice (invariably it does). Jesus' point was that law-abiding
was not enough, that the spirit of the law, which is not reducible to legalities, must not be lost and in
fact must be understood. Again, such understanding is a demand made upon reason.

Matthew Del Nevo

www.sicetnon.com