The Gnostic Answer to the Problem of Evil | DEMIURGE

Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Is God both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Every major religion has had to answer the same question.

If God is all good, all loving, all powerful, and all knowing, then why does the world look the way it does?

If God is all loving and all powerful and all knowing, why is there pain and suffering? How could God be a good God and a loving God in a world of pain and suffering?

And the very fact that there is a world in which there is suffering that occurs, isn't that evidence that this God can't be ultimately good? That, that somehow he has the world he wanted.

I mean, if he's almighty and this is his world, he made it, he created it, ultimately he's the one responsible for all the suffering and, and pain that, that, that continually pummels our world, or else he would have done it a different way.

He would have created it differently.

And dare I say it, that if there were a button here that we could push, the stop evil button, and all you had to do was come to the front of the classroom and push that stop evil button, dare I say it, that most of us would push that button.

But isn't it interesting that the only being in the universe that could potentially push that button, namely God, doesn't?

The word theodicy is a branch of religious study that seeks to deal with the issue of God's love or justice in the face of evil.

The word in the academic world is theodicy.

Theodicy is from two Greek words, which is theos, which is God, and dike or dike, which is justice.

The word theodicy means, uh, God and justice.

It basically deals with the question, if God is truly loving, then why is there so much pain and suffering?

In 1710, the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz combined two Greek words, theos, meaning God, and dike, meaning justice.

God's justice, the attempt to justify God in the face of a world that seems to contradict everything that a good God should stand for.

The earliest formal statement of this problem came from the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who wrote in 300 BC, "His argument was simple and it was brutal.

If God is willing to prevent evil, but not able, then he is not all-powerful.

If God is able to prevent evil, but not willing, then he is not good."If God is both willing and able, then whence cometh evil? And if he is neither willing nor able, then why call him God? Four lines, twenty-three centuries old, and still no clean answer.

For centuries, the greatest minds in the ancient world wrestled with the problem of evil, and they came up empty-handed.

But in the second century, a collection of radical Christian sects emerged with something that no one else had offered.

They were influenced by Middle Platonism, Persian Zoroastrianism, Jewish mysticism.

They constructed a cosmology unlike anything the ancient world had ever seen, a completely different story about who or what the Creator actually is, a map of reality that answered the problem of evil.