On good and evil
Theodicy undoes biblical accounts of a good God
“If Adam and Eve had the knowledge, they would never have eaten the fruit. Irony.”[1]
I’m pretty sure that “Ray*mond Li*terally” didn’t mean that to be considered seriously, but it’s actually a really, really, really good point: Without the knowledge of good and evil, how can Adam and Eve have known it was wrong to eat the fruit? How can they have known that their disobedience would condemn not only themselves but their offspring eternally through the generations? And how can a just God hold them culpable—and all of us culpable for the sins of our ancestors?
Of course, if we understand an allegedly good God as having created everything, which includes evil, then we have to ask why evil exists in the first place. The question of theodicy follows: Why does a supposedly good and omnipotent God allow, let alone create, evil?
To my knowledge, theologians have never come up with a satisfactory answer about theodicy. Cornel West, in his memoir, recounts going round and round with a friend about the question and finally satisfying himself by doing good[2]—as if doing so in any way even began to answer the question.
For me, theodicy challenges foundational premises about God. If He, She, or They exist, He, She, or They are not just good, but evil as well. Satan is no ‘fallen’ angel but rather the yin to God’s yang, integral to the supreme being(s). God cannot merely be as presented in the Bible, though that’s certainly capricious enough—in addition to all His, Her, or Their crimes in the Old Testament, imagine sending His, Her, or Their son to a horrible death in crucifixion.
The biblical account is unsatisfactory and plainly incomplete. We do not know God, certainly not from the Bible, and cannot know His, Her, or Their motivations, let alone His, Her, or Their plans. We cannot know if He, She, or They are even worthy of worship.
I remember once talking to a Baptist preacher. She could not even imagine the possibility of doing good without the threat of Hell to compel it. She could not fathom doing the right thing simply and solely because it is the right thing.
Her notion of doing good relies upon what some ethicists deride as the ‘unseen enforcer.’[3] In this view, we are hopeless sinners but for fear of an unknowable and capricious God, whom, as we see, is evil as well as good, whose worth as an object of worship is unknowable.
At the other end of the spectrum, some postulate that evil exists to give humans ‘free choice,’ but free choice depends not on good and evil, but rather meaningful choice, something our political and economic system denies to all but the wealthy. We are thus in an evil predicament, deprived of the very choice this postulate asserts we must have, but which God permits us to suffer anyway, bringing us right back to the question of why He, She, or They allow it.
And when we look at Jesus and his crucifixion, the only possible rationalization for this abject cruelty can be that Jesus was the means to an end. Ethicists are also not much impressed with using people as means to ends. If the end justifies the means, then how can we account for this horrendous system of social organization that deprives so many of so much? That is, without forever kicking the can down the road, insisting that the end has yet to come?
It sounds more like a scam. We accept evil in the here and now in the hopes of a reward in an uncertain afterlife, the existence of which is asserted only in the very same dubious sources that pretend—and clearly fail—to describe God. And we are thus excused from doing anything about that evil or the evildoers who do it. Or the capricious God we are supposed to worship.
[1] Ray*mond Li*terally, Mastodon, June 28, 2025, https://mastodon.social/@madbarrister/114764273982262292
[2] Cornel West, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (Carlsbad, CA: SmileyBooks, 2009).
[3] Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2011).