Paula asked:

Is it possible for God to give certain benefits without the existence of evil being inevitable?

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It is often assumed that a good God and evil can — indeed must — logically exist together. Valuable
sentiments like compassion and tolerance can only exist in the face of evil events (whether natural
evils or moral evils). So for some benefits to exist, there has to be evil.

A tradition that can be traced at least as far as St Augustine has denied that evil has an ontological
status: evil is just the absence of goodness. For example, the world and man were created good. As
Aquinas interprets Aristotle, doing evil actions is falling short of what one is supposed to be; so evil is
just an absence of the good that God intended.

The logical issue can be captured in four simple propositions:

*God can do away with evil but won't *God cannot do away with evil but would *God can do away with
evil and does *God cannot do away with evil and wouldn't

The issue here is: How do we find a balance between defending God's omnipotence and defending
his goodness in a way that is logically satisfactory? In the first case God is not good but is
omnipotent, in the second he is good but not omnipotent...and so on.

If God omnipotently made us free he cannot make us always choose the good, so theists often argue.
If freedom is the privilege that Christianity believes it is, then it is a benefit that does make evil
inevitable. Logically, if you are free to choose good, you have to be able to choose the opposite —
choose the non-good. The good cannot be forced. So evil is inevitable if we are to be free to fulfill
God's plans. The assumption that freedom is the highest good for man is one that you might want to
question (see 'The Grand Inquisitor' chapter from Dostoevsky's great novel The Brothers
Karamazov).

If you believe we have libertarian free will you might think that God could neverbe responsible for the
actions we choose since he has given us power to act in ways that cannot be controlled.
Unfortunately this does not help, as if we really were free in this way it would no longer be possible to
know for sure that the freedom really does outweigh the evils which are inevitable. God certainly
couldn't control the actions to ensure that the freedom really was worth it. So God would have made a
mistake. If you believe instead that we are free to act in accordance with our natures (i.e. assume a
kind of causal determinism or liberty of indifference) then God can be held responsible for our natures
and these natures he could change. The existence of evil would thus not be logically inevitable,
whatever the metaphysical value of freedom.

The question as to why God could not create us free andsuch that we always choose the good is
usually answered by saying that doing logical contradictions is something God cannot do, and that
this does not constrain his omnipotence. If you go along with Descartes and think that an omnipotent
being cannotbe constrained by logic however, then the answer to your question would have to be
'yes' and we would have to wonder why God does not remove evil andmaintain the benefit of
freedom. It is fairly clear that God does not do this in our world, unless you constrain human
understanding intolerably.

As J.L Mackie has argued inThe Miracle of Theism,if I can choose the good today, then it must be
logically possible for me to choose the good every day; the fact that I do not choose good every day
implies that God is responsible for not bringing it about such that I always freely choose the good. So
at the very least, God's goodness is open to question. These kinds of logical issues cause severe
difficulties for a convincing defence of traditional theism in my opinion.

Adam Gatward