I think this is well argued, but incomplete in a couple of specific ways. To me an obvious question about the restraint God exercises in stopping evil is, "Well, people do intervene to stop evil - we have laws, police, even wars that we consider justified. Why can't he do something about evil and harm if we think people should be allowed to?"
There are two answers that I think are necessary. First, God cannot intervene that way without changing something important about the nature of the mortal experience. After all, fixing cancer would not destroy our agency the way that stopping a thief or a killer would. Giving us a revelation saying, "By the way, you should know about the germ theory" would empower our agency, not threaten it, right? So it must be important that we be given a world where we are on our own - perhaps because, like Ender Wiggin, it is important that we be able to demonstrate what we choose to do when we really are alone. Faith would not be the same with those interventions, and perhaps that's important enough for Him to hold back.
But this also leads to the other important answer to the question of "why doesn't God do something." The answer is that he has - he sent his Son, not only to recover our bodies from death and our souls from damnation, but to fix all of the injustices. If we believe that he can heal a lost soul and a murdered body, he can heal those we hurt. He can fix a genocide that has already happened. *That* is what an infinite atonement from a merciful God implies. That this life is a small part of existence, and that God can heal what was destroyed here and make it right there.
Carl, thank you. This is a helpful and thoughtful engagement, and you have given me three things that are worth responding to. Before I do, a small note on method. Every reader who engages seriously with an article like this brings their own emphases and frames, and that is genuinely valuable (as it now seen on my socials where i have posted this article). But it would be a mistake to treat each thoughtful addition as something the original piece should have included. An article that tried to accommodate EVERY legitimate framing would have no defined scope at all. I scoped this piece to one question: whether the atheist's recommended alternative to a world with evil is actually morally superior. That is the work the article set out to do, and I think it does it well enough. Other questions, including the ones you raise, are real and worth addressing in their own right. I think this is where comment sections prove their value, to extend the discussion and explore alteenaye frames snd Qs (despite how much foolishness com.boxes also seem to encourage).
On the first point, I want to gently push back. Human restraint of evil through laws, police, and justified force is not actually an exception to the article's argument at all. In the classical Christian tradition, the magistrate's authority is itself a divinely ordained instrument for restraining evil. Romans 13 names the civil authority as God's minister, bearing the sword not in vain. So when human institutions restrain evil, that is not a counterexample to divine restraint. It is one of the means by which God exercises it. And crucially, it operates without overriding the creature at the point of choice. The thief is restrained after the fact, deterred before the fact, removed from society. The creature's nature is not substituted for. God restrains evil precisely in the way the article allows. It is a glorious thing that God doesn't leave us entirely to the manifestation of our fallen wills.
Your second move is genuinely sharp. You distinguish between divine intervention that empowers agency, like revealing germ theory, and divine intervention that substitutes for agency, like stopping a murderer mid-strike. That is a worthy, clean, and necessary distinction. God can grant knowledge, opportunity, and grace without violating anything, because those expand the creature's capacity to act not diminish it. He cannot pre-empt the act itself without collapsing the creature into something other than an agent.
The Ender Wiggin point sharpens this even further. The moral weight of a life is what we choose to do when we believe no one is watching, when the cost is real, when the help is not coming. Faith and character cannot be formed in a world where harmful intentions are vetoed in real time. The apparent absence of divine restraint is itself part of what makes genuine virtue possible.
The third, the eschatological answer, is where I deliberately stopped the article. The piece addressed why God permits a world capable of evil. It did not address what God is doing about the evil that has occurred. This article, I would hope, is not read in isolation of my broader body of work). Indeed, God has not stood idle. He entered the world in His Son, bore the cost of its evil, and is working to restore all that has been broken. The atonement is not merely the recovery of souls but the healing of everything the creature has destroyed. The present age is not the end of the story. The injustices done here can be made right there. That is the answer to "why doesn't God do something," and it deserves its own piece.
Thank you for reading carefully enough to draw these out.
Excellent, Craig. But that's just moral evil. Do you have a related article dealing with //natural// "evil"?
Thanks brother. The very topic of “natural” evil came up quite a few times in the comments here https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BNsztdBr2/
Might be worth checking out those discussions.
I think this is well argued, but incomplete in a couple of specific ways. To me an obvious question about the restraint God exercises in stopping evil is, "Well, people do intervene to stop evil - we have laws, police, even wars that we consider justified. Why can't he do something about evil and harm if we think people should be allowed to?"
There are two answers that I think are necessary. First, God cannot intervene that way without changing something important about the nature of the mortal experience. After all, fixing cancer would not destroy our agency the way that stopping a thief or a killer would. Giving us a revelation saying, "By the way, you should know about the germ theory" would empower our agency, not threaten it, right? So it must be important that we be given a world where we are on our own - perhaps because, like Ender Wiggin, it is important that we be able to demonstrate what we choose to do when we really are alone. Faith would not be the same with those interventions, and perhaps that's important enough for Him to hold back.
But this also leads to the other important answer to the question of "why doesn't God do something." The answer is that he has - he sent his Son, not only to recover our bodies from death and our souls from damnation, but to fix all of the injustices. If we believe that he can heal a lost soul and a murdered body, he can heal those we hurt. He can fix a genocide that has already happened. *That* is what an infinite atonement from a merciful God implies. That this life is a small part of existence, and that God can heal what was destroyed here and make it right there.
Carl, thank you. This is a helpful and thoughtful engagement, and you have given me three things that are worth responding to. Before I do, a small note on method. Every reader who engages seriously with an article like this brings their own emphases and frames, and that is genuinely valuable (as it now seen on my socials where i have posted this article). But it would be a mistake to treat each thoughtful addition as something the original piece should have included. An article that tried to accommodate EVERY legitimate framing would have no defined scope at all. I scoped this piece to one question: whether the atheist's recommended alternative to a world with evil is actually morally superior. That is the work the article set out to do, and I think it does it well enough. Other questions, including the ones you raise, are real and worth addressing in their own right. I think this is where comment sections prove their value, to extend the discussion and explore alteenaye frames snd Qs (despite how much foolishness com.boxes also seem to encourage).
On the first point, I want to gently push back. Human restraint of evil through laws, police, and justified force is not actually an exception to the article's argument at all. In the classical Christian tradition, the magistrate's authority is itself a divinely ordained instrument for restraining evil. Romans 13 names the civil authority as God's minister, bearing the sword not in vain. So when human institutions restrain evil, that is not a counterexample to divine restraint. It is one of the means by which God exercises it. And crucially, it operates without overriding the creature at the point of choice. The thief is restrained after the fact, deterred before the fact, removed from society. The creature's nature is not substituted for. God restrains evil precisely in the way the article allows. It is a glorious thing that God doesn't leave us entirely to the manifestation of our fallen wills.
Your second move is genuinely sharp. You distinguish between divine intervention that empowers agency, like revealing germ theory, and divine intervention that substitutes for agency, like stopping a murderer mid-strike. That is a worthy, clean, and necessary distinction. God can grant knowledge, opportunity, and grace without violating anything, because those expand the creature's capacity to act not diminish it. He cannot pre-empt the act itself without collapsing the creature into something other than an agent.
The Ender Wiggin point sharpens this even further. The moral weight of a life is what we choose to do when we believe no one is watching, when the cost is real, when the help is not coming. Faith and character cannot be formed in a world where harmful intentions are vetoed in real time. The apparent absence of divine restraint is itself part of what makes genuine virtue possible.
The third, the eschatological answer, is where I deliberately stopped the article. The piece addressed why God permits a world capable of evil. It did not address what God is doing about the evil that has occurred. This article, I would hope, is not read in isolation of my broader body of work). Indeed, God has not stood idle. He entered the world in His Son, bore the cost of its evil, and is working to restore all that has been broken. The atonement is not merely the recovery of souls but the healing of everything the creature has destroyed. The present age is not the end of the story. The injustices done here can be made right there. That is the answer to "why doesn't God do something," and it deserves its own piece.
Thank you for reading carefully enough to draw these out.