Since God exists, what about evil?

Scott Preller | from The Christian Science Journal

Jesus didn’t ignore evil. He clearly disproved its validity in all his healing work.

How do we know God exists? The question has been very much in public thought lately, with several books on the bestseller list arguing against the existence of God. So how is it that in the face of so much turmoil and suffering in the world, Christian Science can insist not only that God exists supreme, all-powerful, always present, but that there is a way for the yearning heart to prove it?

There is an old joke about a sidewalk preacher giving a sermon in a downtown park. He is loudly praising God as he describes the biblical account of Moses parting the Red Sea, leading the children of Israel through it, and finally seeing Pharaoh’s army destroyed in the deluge. The preacher is interrupted by an atheist who tells him that he’s done a lot of research and come to the conclusion that the events described must have happened at a place called the “Reed Sea,” where the water was only six inches deep and could easily have been divided by a naturally occurring steady wind. Having stated his case, the atheist leaves for lunch satisfied that he has debunked the preacher’s ill-placed faith. But when he returns sometime later, the preacher is thanking God even more loudly than before for His miracle in saving the children of Israel. The atheist pulls him aside and says, “I thought I told you this didn’t happen at the Red Sea.” The preacher says, “Yes, I know, I’m not testifying about the miracle of parting the water anymore. I’m praising God for the fact that He managed to drown the entire army of Pharaoh in just six inches of water.”

One’s perspective makes all the difference! The same is true in thinking through the issue of whether God exists. If you start with the questioning words, “Is there?” you arrive at a very different place than if you start with the affirming words, “There is.”

Christian Science champions intelligent exploration.

The fact is, Christian Science champions intelligent exploration, a right sort of questioning, and the doubting of unsustainable assumptions. But Christian Science is also careful not to accept the one-sided questioning that isn’t really a question at all, but is actually a narrow insistence that all thinking be done from the basis that matter is the only substance and source of everything that exists.

The material view: forever limited

We can know, feel, and prove the actuality of God, but we will never be able to do so by reasoning from the basis of the physical senses. To arrive at an understanding of God requires us to be brave enough to approach God on God’s terms—from the standpoint that Spirit is the actual Life, Mind, and substance of all that exists. This is a far cry from demanding that we have a blind faith in God. It is simply a recognition of the fact that a material sense of things is literally incapable of knowing God, who is Spirit. To know God, therefore, requires a willingness to trust the weight of one’s thought to the spiritual idea of being—an understanding that the substance and intelligence of reality is spiritual.

Several years ago when I was an Air Force chaplain, I was sent to a conference on God and religion. In the course of preparing to go, I developed an extremely painful ear infection. Even though I was praying for healing, the situation was only getting worse. In fact, by the time my taxi dropped me off at the conference center, my whole sense of equilibrium had been so disrupted that I literally fell out of the cab into the gutter.

Evil could not exist where God is present.

After I eventually checked in to the hotel, I made my way to a telephone where I called the Christian Science practitioner who had been helping me treat this problem with prayer. I carefully told her my detailed story of suffering. She shared some ideas about God’s goodness and my genuine spiritual identity as a child of God. And then she said something I’ve never forgotten. As to the infection, she gently but emphatically said, “There’s nothing there. There is simply nothing there.” The only reality she was asking me to entertain was that of God’s supremacy and goodness. Evil could not exist where God is present.

I remember walking back to my hotel room with a feeling that this woman just didn’t get it. She just didn’t realize how much pain I was in. And then as I sat there on the edge of my bed, reaching out to God, I suddenly realized that if I really was going to heal this problem through prayer, then at some point, sooner or later, I was going to have to get to the point where I was willing to think of this problem as nothing, as having no validity, authority, or presence in the face of God’s goodness and power.

I lost track of time as I kept thinking more and more deeply about what the idea of God’s allness meant in terms of this evil having no power over me. The more I thought about this idea, the more real it felt. I felt enveloped in the reality of God’s presence. And when I finished praying, the pain in the ear was entirely gone. The actuality of God’s goodness and power had displaced the sense of suffering. I was healed. During that two-week conference I heard a lot of interesting talks about God from many of the most prominent theologians of the day. But nothing I heard compared to the reality of God I had felt in that healing experience.

Irreconcilable propositions

Only two of the following three statements can be true: 1. God is all-powerful. 2. God is wholly good. 3. Evil is real. Everyone has to sort through this issue. Throughout history there has been a lot of theological juggling going on, with thinkers and theologians trying to find a way to live with these irreconcilable propositions.

At times people have thought of evil as God’s way of punishing the unrighteous. Others have insisted that God has to allow evil to exist so that man can have free will. But if that is the case, then I could easily argue that I am a better parent than God. Why? Well, I would never, for example, leave my child in a room with a toy and a loaded gun, and then argue that I did so in order for my child to have the freedom to choose between good and evil. As a loving parent, I want my children to have the freedom to choose between an infinite variety of good, and I would do anything in my power to provide such options instead of tempting my child to self-destruct or harm him- or herself. Is it reasonable to expect less from a loving Father-Mother God, who is Love itself? Some years ago, yet another explanation for the problem of evil became popular, which basically stated that God is wholly good but evil exists because God isn’t quite finished with His work. The idea is that perhaps God isn’t all-powerful yet, but is in the process of becoming so, and until He is, we must endure evil in the world.

Jesus never doubted God’s goodness or God’s power. Instead, he challenged and destroyed evil.

This issue of theodicy, or the question of how to understand God in the face of evil, has an entirely different explanation in Christian Science. Christian Science examines the works and teachings of Christ Jesus and then shows how plainly evident it is that he never doubted God’s goodness or God’s power, never wondered if God were up to the task of healing, never wondered if someone’s sin had caused God to stop loving. Rather, in every instance of the Master’s healing ministry, it is the evil, the suffering, the disease, the effect of the sin that gets challenged and destroyed. Given his track record, no one could accuse Jesus of ignoring evil, yet he clearly disproved and disbelieved its validity in every healing he did.

What if we take Jesus’ view utterly seriously? What if we challenge evil rather than let it make us challenge our understanding of a loving and omnipotent God? Then we will find our lives animated by Christ to do good—and less willing to let evil go unchallenged. Mary Baker Eddy explained how Christian Scientists actively strive to follow Jesus’ example when she wrote that “our faith takes hold of the fact that evil cannot be made so real as to frighten us and so master us, or to make us love it and so hinder our way to holiness. We regard evil as a lie, an illusion, therefore as unreal as a mirage that misleads the traveler on his way home” (Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 14). Spirit, God, is infinite, and hence the only true substance. It is that which we can concretely feel when our spiritual sense is alert and awake, whereas matter is actually only substantial to a material sense of things. This limited sense of life, while quite vivid and familiar, is actually seen to be merely a distorted, or shadow, version of what is actual.

The real question: asleep or awake?

It really isn’t a matter of deciding whether or not God exists, as though the human mind were adequate to objectively determine such a thing. The issue is whether or not we have enough self-knowledge to discern the difference between being awake to the actuality of God versus having been put to sleep to that actuality. There is a scene in one of C.S. Lewis’s classic Chronicles of Narnia series that captures the deadening, thought-dulling effect of a materialistic outlook on life. In Narnia, where there is an active sense of Christ (depicted by the Lion, Aslan), the children are able to live up to their greatest abilities. But at one point, the young prince and his friends find themselves in another world where they fall under the hypnotic influence of the evil queen. Through her enchantments, she tries to persuade them that her world is the only world there is and that Narnia doesn’t exist except as a dream.

The children fight hard to rouse themselves to some clarity of thought by remembering some aspects of Narnia. At one point, the queen says, “What is this sun that you all speak of? Do you mean anything by the word?” The children explain that it is like a lamp “only far greater and brighter.” After casting doubts on everything they thought they knew about the sun, the queen insists that there is no such thing. She says, “You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun …. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world” (The Silver Chair, pp. 178–180).

Finally, their companion Puddleglum is able to disrupt the queen’s hypnotic control and challenge her assertion that Narnia is only a dream. He says (and he might as well be the voice of spirituality speaking to the world of material sense), “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one” (p. 182). The effect is immediate. The evil queen drops her pretense of being a benign human and takes her true serpent form, whereupon she is destroyed, and the travelers return to Narnia where life and goodness are real.

Christian Science explains how to know God exists.

Christian Science shifts the question from “how do we know?” to an encouraging explanation of “how to know” God exists. And at a time when words like Darfur, Iraq, 9/11, Afghanistan, disease, poverty, and injustice bring images of evil into sharp relief, no one can afford to be indifferent. If the conclusion is that evil gets the last word on determining reality, then it would hardly be surprising to find people abandoning the idea of God altogether. But if our spiritual sense—an unshakeable conviction of God’s goodness and all-power—gives us a basis for exposing evil as invalid and vulnerable, then we will see and feel the actuality of God everywhere. We will find our understanding of the power of God, who is entirely good, will prove practical in making a healing difference in our world.

Scott Preller is a Christian Science practitioner and teacher. He lives in Andover, Massachusetts.