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Wyatt Graham

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Evil

Every Morally Evil Thing Points to Its (Proximate) Cause, Which Is Us

December 13, 2020 by wagraham Leave a Comment

In a prior article, I argued that every Christian should be committed to a view of reality in which every good thing points to its Cause, which is God. Here, I want to argue the converse. Every Christian should be committed to a view of reality in which every morally evil thing points to its (proximate) cause, which is us. (We can cause moral evil only because God as prior Cause ensures our creaturely freedom).

The argument here should be a given. For some, it is not because of a particular view of God’s sovereignty that seems to require that God somehow directly causes moral evil. But God is good. Is it good to carry out moral evil, or is it good to require agents to do moral evil? I answer no, as would almost anyone (I hope). I will explain what I mean more fully below, but I believe we should see moral agents as being responsible for their moral evil because they willed to do evil. 

To make this argument, I first need to make some necessary distinctions about what I mean by evil since I am specifically talking about a certain kind of evil, namely, moral evil.  [Read more…] about Every Morally Evil Thing Points to Its (Proximate) Cause, Which Is Us

Filed Under: Theology Tagged With: Apologetics, Evil

Did God Create Evil?

February 8, 2019 by wagraham 3 Comments

God created everything. Nothing came into being except what he made. Does that mean that God created evil? Isaiah 45:7 seems to suggest so: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (KJV).

But if God created evil, then he seems implicated in evil. How can evil come from a simple, good being like God? In him is no darkness. So why does God himself claim, “I make peace, and create evil”?

Exegesis, reason, and theology all point to one answer: evil has no being, and so God could not have created it. Isaiah 45:7 also teaches this same reality. Here is how.

[Read more…] about Did God Create Evil?

Filed Under: Theology Tagged With: Evil

Evil Does not Exist

November 25, 2018 by wagraham 18 Comments

Evil does not exist. If it did, then God would not exist. And all suffering at the hand of evil people would cease to have significance. Yet God created the world out of the overflow of his goodness, and he made all creation “very good” (Gen 1:31). Since nothing exists outside of what God made, then either God created evil or evil does not exist. But God did not create evil. So evil does not exist. It can only corrupt good things. 

Augustine recognized this when he wrote, “For you evil does not exist at all, and not only for you but for your created universe, because there is nothing outside it which could break in and destroy the order which you have imposed upon it” (Augustine, Confessions, 7.13). Hundreds of years later, Thomas Aquinas wrote, “For evil is the absence of the good, which is natural and due a thing” (Summa 1.49).

And this is good news because if evil exists God would not and our suffering would be meaningless. Here’s why. [Read more…] about Evil Does not Exist

Filed Under: Theology Tagged With: Evil

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Wyatt is the Executive Director of The Gospel Coalition Canada. He enjoys his family and writing. You'll generally find him hiding away somewhere with his nose in a book.

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