Is God Evil? Debunking the Free Will Anti-Theodicy

The alien concept that God could be evil comes from a combination of the problem of evil and a challenge to Christian apologetical logic. Theologians and skeptical secularists would be familiar with the notorious "problem of evil," which articulates the complication that arises out of the belief in a good God and the simultaneous recognition of near-omnipresent evil. How, in other words, could God be all-powerful and all-good if evil still exists?

Apologists with responses are swift and numerous. These answers to this proposed "problem of evil" are known as theodicies. And one of the most popular theodicies is one localized around the moral necessity of free will. This particular theodicy goes something like this: God offered humanity paradise in the form of the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, was placed within the Garden to give humanity the choice between paradise (and the consequent submission to God absolutely) and autonomy in an entropic universe (and the consequent departure or separation from God). Since free will is good, God had to maintain that value, even if it meant humanity would suffer (by our own choices) in separation from Him. Therefore, sin and evil entered the world because we wanted it to. The price of absolute subjugation to God was too high for us, so we rejected paradise and ate the fruit. If God knew this would happen -- assuming, of course, He is all-knowing -- why would He allow it in the first place? Why would God even create humanity if He knew it would lead to tragedies like the Holocaust? Like war, famine, disease, murder, mass murder, serial murder, systematic murder? The answer, within the free will theodicy, is that God desires for us to be like Him. God created other beings so as to share His power, not because He needed to but because He wanted to. So in living in a world like ours where evil is everywhere, God expects us to choose to do good, even when it results in self-detriment. If we choose to do good, we could reach Heaven and be similar to God. We could be Christlike.

Other than those who subscribe to modes of self-worship and pseudo-spiritualities based on supposed human perfection, most would probably regard this theodicy as rather foolproof. Those who know Christian theology at least to this extent would also already know these doctrines from Genesis that comprise the theodicy. It is consistent, after all. It makes sense, presupposing that you'd give any legitimacy to the creation story, moral necessity, or divine, cosmic proximity as a metric for an amount of suffering. Or, ultimately, if you accept the presupposition itself that God is, in fact, good.

In 2010, an English philosopher named Stephen Law questioned this very presupposition by posing what he called the "evil-god challenge." In a nutshell, he essentially asks you to imagine the opposite -- that God is maximally evil, rather than maximally good. You could use the inverse of the same theodicy, and the consistency would still ostensibly appear foolproof. If God were fully evil, for instance, the existence of good and evil could still be explained by suggesting that this evil god allows goodness to exist because he also allows humans to enjoy free will and some simply choose to do good. This evil god would do this so that those who commit evil would do so because they choose to and because they truly want to be corrupt. Wouldn't an evil god want his creation to be purely and innately evil, just like him?

This is a compelling thought experiment, and while it doesn't threaten theism as a whole, it does threaten the integrity of the free will theodicy as a solid justification for God's existence in the presence of evil. Right?

Wrong.

Law's free will anti-theodicy, as I will refer to it, is not an equivalent inverse to the original. A maximally evil god, for example, would not create life to begin with. Think about moral necessity, as mentioned earlier. I stated that God "had" to maintain the value of free will because in spite of the fact that He is omnipotent, He is also good. So to do anything that defies goodness is to defy His own nature and to defy Himself. (One could tangentially argue that God is the arbiter of goodness -- such that anything He does becomes good -- so what could I possibly mean about God conforming to some state of goodness? Well, in this case, I'm talking about consistent behavior -- that the predetermined notions of goodness are regularly held to, not ever-changing.) An evil god, if his nature is, in fact, the essence of evil, would not be able to do something good like create life because it would challenge his own nature. This automatically deflates the anti-theodicy, but let's assume an evil god could create life for the sake of argument.

Maybe an evil god wanted lesser beings to exist simply in order to make them suffer and to allow evil to be absolute. Why, then, would he allow free will? Again, free will is a value that an evil god would not be able to engage in without violating his own nature. A paradox may even be at hand because to do something freely is to do it honestly, and to do it honestly is to do it truthfully. If truth is good, then to say someone can do something freely evil is a bit of an oxymoron. But, once more, let's overlook these inconsistencies. The anti-theodicy proposes that this evil god wants his creations to truly embrace evil, but the only reason this works for the inverse -- that God wants His creations to honestly embrace righteousness -- is because a good God wants us to be like Him. An evil god wouldn't encourage "godly" behavior because he wouldn't want to share his power or allow people to be like him. A maximally evil god would want to create life (assuming he can at all) in order to make it suffer, which would simply be Hell. Why would this evil god care whether people think or act like him? He would simply desire that they feel pain, a lot and forever, conceivably. Would this not be an omnipresence of evil and an ultimate victory for the evil god? Again, the only reason a good God allows evil is because he desires to see it overcome and vanquished so that His creation can be godly. So a good God's victory must be prefaced by the free existence of both good and evil. Since an evil god would not desire to see "godly" people like him, his victory would merely consist of the basic existence of immense evil and suffering, not the epic battle that would ensue if goodness also exists.

The only way for free will and a maximally evil god to exist would be if that evil god is sadistic (as he obviously would be) and thus allowed goodness to come into existence and allows people to choose to do good so that it could simply witness the battle and be amused by the triumph of the wicked through his own anti-divine interventions. While this would be more consistent, but still incorrect, the exact inverse of the free will theodicy -- that an evil god wants people to become corrupt by choice -- still fails. This evil, sadistic god would still be allotting people the potential to be like him, which is unselfish and thus against his nature.

At this point, I suppose the question becomes: is false hope for goodness to prevail more painful than Hell? I think an evil, sadistic god would think not.