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Good, Evil, and Paradigms
The Question:
"If God is good, then He must not be powerful enough to deal with all
the evil and injustice in the world since it is still going on. If He is
powerful enough to stop wrongdoing then He must be evil since He's not
doing anything about it. So which is it? Is He a bad God or a God that's
not all-powerful?"
The Thesis:
The seeming paradox presented by the question is in fact no paradox at
all. It is perceived to be paradoxical because of the conflict between an
ever-advancing empirical body of knowledge of the physical universe with
accompanying descriptive language and the static ancient language and
paradigms used to explain the un-explainable and imagined or almost
perceptible spiritual universe. The latter remains static due to a fear in
fundamentalism (of all religions) of the core tenets of faith being lost
to the heretical and experiential. Ironically it will ultimately be the
static nature of the faith-language that will cause the demise of faith.
Dr. Joel Barker, about ten years ago, produced videotape that was
distributed widely through American industry as a tool for promoting
change within organizations. His thesis was and is that we see what we
expect to see. Our paradigms or models of reality will filter all data
that we perceive so that we can protect our paradigm -- or in other words
we will interpret data to agree with the answers we expect. In fact all
information that comes into our consciousness passes through this filter
of expectations put there through years and years of experience and
thought process.
This is why in the scientific world experiments are
conducted repeatedly to ensure the data and interpretation of data because
it is so easy to see what we expect or what we want. As a demonstration
Dr. Barker placed images of regular playing cards on the screen for a
fraction of a second. The viewer was then asked to identify the cards
seen. Almost anyone could get them all correct even though they were only
on screen for 1/30th of a second. Then he ran through the same sequence
again... this time showing the card for a longer duration... and when the
frame of one particular card came up everyone stumbled. As the images were
on screen for longer and longer periods it became clear what the card was
that caused the viewers to stumble. At a rapid speed it was interpreted as
any other card. At slow speed it was different but took several viewings
to figure out why. It was a black heart. Everyone had interpreted it as a
spade. The paradigm of the basic shape and color caused the viewer to
interpret it as something it was not -- or rather to interpret it as
expected data.
As constituents of Western Culture we are heavily influenced by the
extremely Cartesian thought that we must remove ourselves from the
macroscopic and treat ourselves only as observers if we are to understand
the fundamental nature of things. Within that context we tend to
comprehend the universe around us through the models of Democritean and
Newtonian mechanistic models of the universe, or classical physics, which
reduces all phenomena into the motions and interactions of things --
within the confines of Euclidean three-planed, three dimensional geometry.
Within this paradigm things are or are not. They are here or there. It is a rigid determinism even in the face of modern physics -- because we don't think in quantum terms -- we think in the macro. It is a determinism that still clings to a universe -- the belief of most in the western Judeo-Christian-Muslim traditions -- in which God created the matter, the energy, the forces, the fundamental laws of motion and time, and that it has all been running ever since like some big machine.
Due to our 'scientific' experiential paradigm and given our religious mystical traditions of an all powerful God who made it all -- the introduction of evil into the system appears to present a paradox -- if God made it to work a certain way and it doesn't how did it break? In short we could say evil is the singularity in the Newtonian Judeo Christian paradigm of reality. It presents an inconsistency just as daunting as a fading horizon presented to flat earth believers.
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