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Isaiah 45:7 affirms that God creates darkness and disaster. It is not a creation of mankind, nor of fallen beings or Satan. The Hebrew word here that is translated as "disaster" could also mean "wickedness", "hurt", "affliction" or "adversity". God creates these things directly. Any argument that asserts that evil is a result of Human free will must first get over the fact that the Christian Bible states that God creates evil and disaster itself. Not only does this God create darkness and disaster, but it actively "does" them too. It doesn't merely create them as possibilities for other people, it actively chooses to do them itself.
The Book of Lamentations confirms that free will cannot stop evil, when evil comes from God, nor can man stop goodness, when goodness comes from God:
Who is he that can speak, and it happens, when the Lord command it not?37
Out of the mouth of the Most High proceedeth not both evil and good?38
Some of these are of the young, the innocent, and some are even the results of accidents. They are my five favorite smitings of the Old Testament (click the link for full descriptions of each one):
In addition to these are some more serious issues:
The Adam and Eve story shows god as an immoral bad parent, not as a loving God2002
As various authors copied copies of the Hebrew Scriptures, changes accumulated in the stories. Sometimes, the same story appears twice. There are even two accounts of the Creation that contradict each other in the details. One such doubled story shows us clearly that the Old Testament God is evil, and Satan itself is not a separate being, but is actually part of God, a face of God. There is one occasion when David took a census of his men in order to count how many could fight in the armies of Israel. 1 Chronicles 21:2 and 2 Samuel 24:2 both contain a copy of the exact same text:
| “So David said to Joab and the commanders of the troops, "Go and count the Israelites from Beersheba to Dan. Then report back to me so that I may know how many there are."” | “So the king said to Joab and the army commanders [a] with him, "Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are."” |
What had happened is that God had a rule: That David was not allowed to 'number' Israel. But, for some reason, David went ahead and did so. As a result, God punished them all for breaking his rule. But, it is very telling when we examine the preceding verse: Who inspired David to count Israel's fighting men?
| “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel” | “The anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, "Go and take a census of Israel and Judah." ” |
In one copy of the story, we are told Satan told David to do so. In the other, it was God. How can this be? It is because in the Old Testament, Satan and God are the same being. Satan in the old testament is merely the face that God puts on when it is testing it's people. "The anger of the Lord" is Satan. It was common in old religions (Hinduism, Roman religions, etc) for gods to have multiple faces, each associated with different emotions. In the Christian Bible, Satan is God. It is not just the Old Testament that contains such revealing truths, the New Testament tells the same story:
2nd Century Marcionite Christians believed that the Old Testament God was Evil2006
The author of the Gospel of Luke wrote that Jesus said that 'a tree is known by its fruit' (Luke 6:43-44): "Good trees do not produce rotten fruit, and rotten trees do not produce good fruit". The Old Testament God, who says that he "creates evil" (Amos. 3:6, Isaiah 45:7), cannot therefore be a 'good tree', but must be a rotten one. An ancient form of Christianity was preached by Marcion, who realized that the God of the Old Testament must be Evil[Ehrman 2003]. As Marcion believed that the Good News of the New Testament was the plan of salvation from a good God, he believed that through Jesus the evil god the Old Testament had been defeated.
"The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name"
"For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God"
The Old Testament describes God as angry, fearsome, destructive and veangeful. In continual deviance from what a good god would do, and feel, the God of the Old Testament sometimes repents of its own actions and thoughts. How can a god that knows everything, and is never wrong, repent? How can a good god even have evil thoughts, let alone do evil actions?
It seems one thing that Old Testament gets right is its assertions that we should fear god. See Lev. 25:17; Deut. 6:2, 6:13, 10:12, 10:20, 31:12-13; Joshua 4:24; 1 Sam. 12:14; 2 Kings 17:39; Job 28:28; Psalms 19:9, 25:14, 33:8, 33:18, 34:9, 96:4, 103:11, 103:17, 111:10, 112:1, 115:13, 128:1, 147:11; Proverbs 1:7, 22:4, 24:21; Ecc. 5:7, Ecc. 12:13; Jer. 5:22 . We should definitely fear such a god as this!
In Old Testament times, people were exposed to many different Gods. Frequently, people would simply have to be scared into worshipping one god over another. By representing it as powerful, destructive, jealous and harsh, the Jews who wrote the Old Testament were affirming that they believed their God should be worshipped, and other Gods should be abandoned.
Jesus and the Disciples accepted the Old Testament as God's word. They could only do this if they themselves believed that God was not benevolent. They also preached the goodness of God, despite his apparent evil. This is because they, like the writers of the Old Testament, do not care if god is 'good' or 'evil', they are merely slaves to fear.
The Book of Revelations is the climax and final book of the New Testament, where it is said that God will once again revert to his Old Testament ways... the suffering and pain described in the apocalypse is something that a good god could never let happen. To even believe that God do this is to believe in a monstrous demon of a God.
"Not only does the existence of God logically, philosophically and theologically deny the possibility of free will, but the Bible also says that there is no free will! Examining the writings of St Paul, the Biblical books of Ephesians, Romans, 2 Timothy, 2 Thessalonians and Revelations, we see that God's plan overrides our free will; those that do good do the specific good that God predestined them to do, and all others are ruled by Satan because God sends "powerful delusions" to them. The Christian Bible frequently states that God creates our future and decides our fates, no matter what our own will is. It constantly denies that we have free will.""The Christian Bible Denies Free Will" by Vexen Crabtree, 2005
Like the doctrine of original sin, the doctrine of predestination, as found in the New Testament, affirms that God is not just, not moral, and is actively evil and arbitrary. There is no grand moral plan to god's will. It makes no sense to say that this is the behaviour of a good god... but it explains a lot more if an evil god exists instead.
Jesus said: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."Jesus said: "Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law."
These compare well with Exodus 15:3, "The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name".
List pages on the Problem of Evil on this site by Vexen
"If God is all-powerful and all-good, it would have created a universe with no suffering and no evil. But, evil and suffering exist. Therefore God does not exist, is not all-powerful or is not benevolent. Attempts to justify the existence of evil are called theodicies. There have been no fully working theodicies created to date, even popular ones such as the free will theodicy were rejected thousands of years ago for reasons that still stand today. It seems that if there is a god, it is not the all-good moral being that classical religions would have us believe.""Introduction to Theodicy" by Vexen, 2000 Jan
Arguments that God Must be Evil, by Vexen Crabtree2003
"The existence of such large quantities of suffering, despair, pain, of natural disasters such as earthquakes, of the death of the unborn and the immense suffering of lovers & kind-hearted people means that god is evil and intentionally creates life in order to create suffering. That all life exists in a food chain means that life is completely tied to death, and such a barbaric biological cycle could only have been made by an evil god. Also, that such a god appears not to exist, or actively hides itself, is a source of confusion, conflict, war and stress and is again more likely the antics of an evil god. Given the state of the natural world, it is impossible that a good god exists. [...]If God did exist and was evil [...] it would create maximum confusion by preaching multiple conflicting religions. It would create heaven and make it hard to get to in order to tease and torture people into making their own lives hell. As all of those things happen, if there is a God, it is doing the things an evil God would do!
Once I recognized and accepted this state of affairs and adequately called myself a Satanist, I could concentrate my life on happiness, love, stability and peace. Because I know and understand that death always wins, that life is temporary, I waste no time on short-term whims that reduce my quality of life, or of those around me, and I waste no time with spiritual pipe dreams. Recognizing Satan as the personified meta-figure of reality is self-affirming, life-affirming, positive, honest and clarifying."
"If there is a God, it is an Evil God" by Vexen Crabtree, 2003
Ehrman, Bart
"Lost Christianities" (2003 hardback). Oxford University Press, New York, USA.
By Vexen Crabtree 2006 Jul 11