Omnipotence And Evil

To ask the question why is there evil in the world if God is truly omnipotent and good is to bring up many different debates found within the Christian faith, among them the question of original sin and human free will. These questions have been debated since the foundation of the early Church and have never fully been resolved since that time. Ultimately all viewpoints on the subject -- if they are truly Christian viewpoints -- would agree that God is both omnipotent and good, at least to varying degrees. However, the question of how a good God could allow evil - sin - into this world is a never-ending issue amongst theologians. The basic viewpoints on this issue can be summed up by that of privation and that of the greater-good defense, …show more content…
While the term omnipotence itself is not found directly in scripture, “the term is appropriate to refer to two biblical ideas, closely related to each other: 1. God can do anything He pleases. [and] 2. Nothing is too hard for God.” This is a very important point to be made at the outset of this highly debated question. Mankind must view itself correctly in relation to God, namely that God is the Creator and mankind is the creation; God is the potter, and mankind the clay. Additionally, the fact that nothing is too hard for God should bring comfort to those that God created, especially to the children of God. “‘God can do all things’ is a normative premise that should govern the thinking of His …show more content…
Some of these theories are found within different sects of Christianity and theology and some of them are found outside of religion. One theory to explain how an omniscient and good God could allow evil into the world is that of the privation theory. To view evil as a privation means, “It is a lack, a defect in a good universe. It is an absence of good, rather than the presence of something not good.” The privation theory can be accounted to Augustine in the early Church. “Augustine saw a privation account of evil as the only way to answer the problem of evil without falling into the Manichean heresy. If evils are privations, they are not substances that God had to separately and intentionally create.” To hold the view of the privation theory is to assert that evil is not a creation of God. Rather, evil is a lack of God’s goodness in the world. An analogy to understanding privation theory is to say that as cold is an absence of heat or darkness is an absence of light, so is evil an absence of God. This view seeks to take the blame of evil completely off of God and places the blame back onto sinful mankind. John Frame references Etienne Gilson, a proponent of the privation theory, who says of God and evil, “‘The cause of evil lies always in some good, and yet, God, who is the Cause of all good, is not the cause of evil…The evil caused by a defect in the acting being could not