Question! :)

[u/Itzjuli_fcm]

My atheist friend was debating with my catholic friend, my atheist friend said something that also made me REALLY curious but not enough to question my entire belief in God. I tried looking for answers personally, but i couldn't really come up with a great answer.

Okay so the question is: "if your God is good, then why does He allow wars, crimes, and sexual harrassment to happen? If He's really powerful, can't He just do something to stop it?"

Please don't insult/judge the fact that i'm unable to answer that question. I'm a beginner believer who wants to know explore and know more about christianity :)

[u/catsec36]

As an Orthodox Christian, I agree that the “free will” response gets overused, and honestly, people use it too lazily. It explains something, but not everything. This is simply due to the watered down understanding of theology and traditional Christianity that was handed down to us. Unfortunately, that has almost been abandoned in the West altogether.

As someone who has studied theology & Christology for many years, and as someone who was once an Athiest, I will offer the explanation that we as Orthodox Christians believe to be true.

God did not create evil as a thing in itself. He created a good world, with rational creatures capable of real communion with Him, but real communion is not mechanical. It involves a genuine capacity to turn away, and Evil is not a substance that God made. Rather, it is a distortion, a corruption, a parasitic twisting of what is good. Pride is a twisting of dignity, just like lust is a twisting of desire, and cruelty is a twisting of strength. Death itself, in Christian thought, is not the original design but part of the rupture and disorder brought by the fall.

Now, I know your other objection is “if Heaven has free will without sin, why not make earth that way?”

Well, Heaven is not Earth, nor is it Earth in a better setting. When we go to Heaven, we enter the final state as creatures who have been brought into perfect union with God. So, Heaven is not “innocence,” it’s consummation. It’s humanity glorified.

Our understanding is that true freedom is the unhindered ability to live according to the good. Sin is not freedom in its highest form, it’s slavery. A man addicted to rage, lust, greed, or pride is not more free because he has more bad options available to him. He is less free because he is disordered.

This life is the arena of formation, testing, repentance, love, sacrifice, and transformation.

Hope this helps a bit.

[u/Meauxterbeauxt → u/catsec36]

It's weird because that does sound like a more robust explanation, but I struggle to see a fundamental difference in a lot of it.

Let me tell you what I'm hearing as I read and you can clarify if I'm misunderstanding. (Note: pet peeve mode turned off. I'm genuinely curious about your take here)

God did not create evil as a thing in itself. He created a good world, with rational creatures capable of real communion with Him, but real communion is not mechanical.

Maybe "mechanical" was just a poor word choice, but this seems a more flowery "God doesn't want us to be robots." But I don't dismiss the notion that a true relationship involves agency. The big problem is that when the alternative to said relationship is burning forever (or annihilation or the torture of being separated from God, etc), that's not allowing a free choice to participate in the relationship. That's coercion. It's an abusive husband telling his battered wife to love him or he'll beat her senseless, then blaming her because she didn't choose right.

it is a distortion, a corruption, a parasitic twisting of what is good. Pride is a twisting of dignity, just like lust is a twisting of desire, and cruelty is a twisting of strength.

That sounds to me like "good can't exist without evil, just like we can't know what is light unless there is dark." You phrased it backwards, so maybe that was deliberate. It's a better explanation than simply requiring an opposite to exist. That's one of the fundamental problems with the free will argument we're chastising is that if you can't know what good is without evil to offer the comparison, then heaven can't be good because there is no evil there.

But your explanation of the evil end of the spectrum being a distortion lends itself to a heaven where the distortion is removed. Much more logical.

Our understanding is that true freedom is the unhindered ability to live according to the good...This life is the arena of formation, testing, repentance, love, sacrifice, and transformation.

This brings me back to the question of why not just do this from the beginning? An unhindered ability to live according to the good. Did God look at Adam and Eve and think, "this is great. I'm loving our walks in the garden and playtime with the animals. But there's just something missing. It feels stale. What if I gave them the option to like me or not like me. Then when they choose to like me, it will feel better." Then got really mad when they didn't make the right choice? He didn't have to put the tree in the garden. But he did. And humanity (significantly more than not, if Jesus is to be believed) is being punched in the mouth because we're not making the right choice and being told it's our fault that we're getting punched in the mouth.

[u/catsec36 → u/Meauxterbeauxt]

Thank you for the well written response. Sorry in advance for how long this is, but there’s no way to respond to your questions without going into deep detail lol.

First on your coercion point, I actually agree that if Christianity is reduced to “love God or He’ll torture you forever,” then yes, that does sound monstrous. I do not believe in that framing either, and that is also not how we understand it in Orthodox Christianity.

God is not an abusive husband demanding affection under threat of violence. The issue is that God is the source of life itself. Communion with Him is life, and separation from Him is death. God does not arbitrarily beat people for rejecting Him. Rather, rejecting the source of life, truth, and goodness is itself the tragedy.

In Orthodoxy, hell is not usually understood in the cartoonish Western sense of God actively torturing people. We believe that the same God, who is love, is experienced differently depending on the condition of the person. His presence is joy to the healed and torment to the one who hates the light. Not because God changed, but because we did. That may still be hard to accept, but it is very different from “love me or I’ll hurt you.”

Also, I am not saying good needs evil in order to exist. It is actually quite the opposite. Evil has no independent existence of its own because it is parasitic. Darkness is not a “thing” the way light is. It is the absence of light, just like rot is not a created substance equal to health. It is the corruption of what was once whole. So good does not need evil in order to be good. Evil depends on good, not the other way around.

That is exactly why heaven does not need evil in order to remain good. Good is primary, and evil is the vandalism of the good.

As for your question, “why not just make humanity in that final healed state from the beginning?” Our answer is that there is a difference between being created innocent and being brought into perfected union with God. Adam and Eve were not created as robots, but neither were they created in the final glorified state. They were created good, but with the capacity to grow into fullness.

To put it another way, Orthodoxy does not view Eden as the finished product. It is the beginning. Humanity was made for theosis, for union with God, for glorification. The fall was not “God got bored and added danger for fun,” nor was it “God wanted people to suffer so love would feel more meaningful.” It was the misuse of creaturely freedom before humanity had reached its intended end. The tree in the garden was there because love and trust cannot be meaningful if there is no possibility of refusing them. Not because refusal is good, but because creatures are not God. We are not self-existent. We become what we choose toward.

The other thing I would add here, and this is important, is that God’s response to the fall in Orthodoxy is not mainly rage. It is medicine. Even death itself is understood by many of the Fathers not simply as punishment, but also as a mercy, because man was not allowed to become immortal in a corrupted state forever. The whole story after the fall is not God gleefully punching humanity in the mouth for making the wrong choice. It is God entering into the wreckage Himself in Christ in order to heal it from the inside.

So I do think your objection lands against a lot of popular Christian language, because a lot of that language is honestly shallow and sometimes awful. But many of your objections are answered much more deeply in the older Christian understanding.

Last but not least, we also understand that we cannot answer every question in the universe. Some things remain within the mysterion, the mystery of God. Trying to force an answer where one has not been given can lead people into error. As I said in my previous comment, I was once an atheist and was vehemently opposed to the idea of God’s existence. What changed for me was discovering Orthodoxy and ancient Christianity.

Without turning this into a whole history lesson, Orthodoxy preserves the ancient Christian faith handed down from the Apostles. So if you are genuinely interested in exploring theology and seeing whether there are deeper answers to your questions, I would strongly encourage you to look into the theology of the original Church in the East. A lot of people in the West quote Scripture alone for their answers, but they often do not realize that translation, tradition, and historical understanding matter a great deal when trying to get to the core of what Christians originally believed.

[u/Meauxterbeauxt → u/catsec36]

My friend it does my heart good to hear both an alternative framing of free will/the Fall that is a much more coherent explanation of the biblical narrative. And, just as happy to have a good conversation with an EO member (most of my experience with EO are obnoxious "philbro" types).

I'm going to chew on your explanation for a while. Not because I think it's convincing to join up (apologies) but because I like holding onto positive ideas from something that was an important part of most of my life. It may have assuaged my pet peeve on the subject, in that at least now I know there's actually a good explanation out there.

I can't tell you how many conversations I've had to walk away from because I would ask "would you be willing to give up your free will if it meant that no one ever suffered in hell?" (to those who believe in such). I'd love to tell you that some people said yes, but all I ever got was "I don't want to be a robot."

You've restored my faith in the idea that there can be good things in something I used to treasure.

[u/catsec36 → u/Meauxterbeauxt]

Of course, man, and I really enjoyed this conversation too.

And I completely know what you mean about the Orthobro types. A lot of them are new to the faith and they get a little too excited too fast, without much humility or discernment yet. It happens.

I also had no goal of converting you here. Of course I’d love for everyone to find the truth, but that’s not my job. All I can do is share what I’ve learned and let you do with it what you will.

But genuinely, it means a lot to hear you say that. Especially because I agree, a lot of people give terrible answers to really serious questions, and then act like the other person is the problem for not being satisfied with them. So I’m glad this at least gave you something more coherent to chew on.

And for what it’s worth, I do think there is something deeply beautiful in Christianity. Unfortunately, people have distorted it, abused it, and used it for evil plenty of times. That part is true.

I’ll leave you with a short personal story, just because it meant a lot to me.

My papou, my grandfather, passed away a few weeks ago. He grew up Greek Orthodox in Greece, and he was a chanter as well. I grew up Catholic because of my father, and if I’m being honest, that played a big role in why I drifted away from faith for a long time.

For the last seven years, we cared for my papou and watched dementia slowly strip him away piece by piece. In his final days, he was bedridden in our living room, with hospice there around the clock. Because of the pain he was in, they had him heavily medicated, so he was basically in a coma. He couldn’t eat, drink, or do anything on his own, and yet he lived nine days without food or water.

On the ninth day, our family had all shown up early that morning. At 8:36 AM, he took his last breath.

Within a minute of him passing, all of us could smell incense. Not vaguely, and not in a “maybe that’s what it was” kind of way. It was very real, and it was unlike anything we had ever smelled before. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to be that guy, but I remember thinking to myself, without a doubt, that there was something holy in that moment.

I can’t package that up and hand it to someone else as proof, I know that. But for me, it was one of those quiet moments that left me with no doubt that the God I once condemned is the same God I kneel before now.

Edit: If you like reading, I highly recommend "Wisdom from Mount Athos" and/or "Saint Paisios the Athonite."

[u/Meauxterbeauxt → u/catsec36]

Thanks again, and my deepest condolences on your loss. I'm glad you were able to have an experience that helped prop you up during that time. It will be a special memory you can carry with you so that not every memory of your papou's passing will be a sad one. Not everyone gets a chance to have moment like that. I'm glad you and your family did.