The Torah teaches that a personal, all-powerful, and all-loving God exists and solely created the universe “yesh me’ayin” (יֵשׁ מְאַיִן), or out of nothing. As his crowning creative achievement, God created free moral agents – both angels and man – who could choose to do what is good or what is evil. For reasons that are not entirely clear, however, some of the angels chose to rebel against God (chief among them Lucifer, later renamed Satan), and these angels, in turn, conspired to seduce human beings to do likewise. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s moral law, they effectively joined the angelic rebellion. The consequence of this was catastrophic, and the mankind “fell” away from God as their King into a state of alienation and exile called “spiritual death.”

Since God had created man to exercise lawful dominion over the earth (שׁגח), however, as the steward and “federal head” of creation, the effect of his apostasy affected not only his life, but also that of the entire created order itself, as Satan then usurped the authority given to man and began his reign of terror upon the earth. With the spiritual and moral order usurped, mankind was under the hegemony of Satan, and anarchy resulted. The natural order likewise broke down and dissipated. The original transgression of man therefore affected not only his relationship with God but also that of the entire created order itself. Natural evils and chaos erupted as the earth became a rebel outpost from the original Kingdom of God. Satan enthroned himself as the “god of this world” (ὁ θεὸς τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου) and humanity has subsequently suffered under his tyranny of deception and malice ever since.

Now this general account of the origin of evil may be considered philosophically, and indeed it is often discussed in such terms, since the main objection to the idea that an all-powerful and all-loving Creator exists is the concurrent existence of evil, and in particular, pain and suffering that seems to be omnipresent in the world. How could such a God allow evil in his creation? And doesn’t the prevalence of such evil impugn faith in God?

The contrary challenge being made here is that the following four propositions: 1) God exists; 2) God is all-powerful, 3) God is all-loving, and 4) evil exists are together logically incompatible and therefore one (or more) of them must be false. So the first order of business regarding this critical challenge is to consider each proposition (and its negation) to determine its credibility (or lack thereof), and then, after better understanding the meaning of the propositions, to decide if they are really inconsistent or not.

As for the first proposition, namely, that God “exists,” we need to consider various rational arguments for the existence of God, for instance, the cosmological argument (argument from cause), the teleological argument (argument from design), the ontological argument (the a priori argument), the argument from intuitions of beauty, morality, and logic, the argument from mystical experiences, arguments from fulfilled prophecies, evidences for the historical reliability of the Scriptures, and so on. Working through these arguments is beyond the scope of this short article, since my goal here is to briefly explore how “evil” and the existence of God are not only compatible, but are in indeed complementary to sound theology.

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