God and Evil

If an omnipotent creator was not prepared to provide his creatures with the necessities of existence, material and spiritual, he would have done better not to create them.

I could not reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin. Most people’s badness is due to heredity which they couldn’t help, or to their environment, which they didn’t choose. If I had been God I couldn’t have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the worst, to eternal damnation.

If Hell is the deprivation of God’s presence, but if that is such an intolerable punisment that it can justly be called hell, can one conceive that a good God can inflict it? After all, He created men: if He so created them that it was possible for them to sin, it was because He willed it.

If I trained a dog to fly at the throat of any stranger who came into my back yard, it wouldn’t be fair to beat him when he did so. If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did He create evil?

It seemed to the monks that man by conqeuring the wickedness in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain and sorrow and misfortune as the trials sent by God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to receive His grace. Is like seding a fellow a message to some place and just to make it harder for him, you constucted a maze that he had to get through, then dug a moat that he had to swim, and finally built a wall that he had to scale.

I wasn’t prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn’t common sense. I think when the Absolute manifested itself in the world, evil was the natural correlation of good. Its an ingenious notion but never satisfactory.

Source: Larry’s quest of God in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge