Category Archives: Evil

Concerning Evil

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(The following was transcribed from the Q&A portion of the late Rev. Dr. Greg Bahnsen’s apologetic lecture series titled, “Loving God with All Your Mind.”)

Question: If God is all love and righteousness, then how did evil come about?

Dr. Bahnsen: I don’t know.

[After an uncomfortable few seconds of silence, he continues…]

Oh, is that not adequate? 

[Laughter.]

I don’t know because the Bible doesn’t tell us how it is that God, who is perfect, nevertheless could create a creature like Satan that is imperfect. 

But I do know that man is not the same as God, and that it is not at all philosophically disturbing to think that God could create a creature that is less than him and therefore is not able to do all that He does and, in that sense, subject to doing what is evil.

But if you want to know the psychological mechanism by which a man that was morally pure, like Adam, or in the first instance Eve, was able to conceive of rebellion against God and have a desire to do it, the Bible does not tell us how that comes about. 

The Bible does tell us, nevertheless, that you cannot make sense of evil apart from knowing that God is the ultimate standard and that it was introduced into this world by the rebellion of man and that only God can overcome it.

The Bible tells us that God does all things well, so that even though Eve, and Adam following her, sinned against God and did that which was contrary to His revealed will, God’s ordaining it was not for evil purposes. God is not the author of evil and God will use even the evil of men to bring glory to Him and to accomplish good purposes in the end. 

And, believe it or not, the Bible says that when the wicked are cast into hell, though they will be in torment, even they will acknowledge the justice of God that they are getting what comes to them.

Now, I can tell you all those things about evil and expound upon them, but the Bible does not tell us the mechanism, psychologically, by which a man, who was unfallen, was able to rebel against God. The Bible does tell us that we must trust God about this matter.

Now, what are your options? You can either say, “Well God, you either explain to me why you did this and how you did it, or I’m not going to follow you.” Or you could say, “No, I bow my heart and my mind to you and I trust you, as an Ultimate Presupposition, that you do all things well. And since it’s an ultimate presupposition, it is that by which I evaluate everything else and I do not call you into question. 


…If someone says to God, “I will not trust you until you give an account to me,” stop and think about the implication of that. That means that the person who has issued the challenge to God say, “I stand at the bench and, God, you stand in the dock. And when you make yourself worthwhile to me; when you vindicate your ways to me, then I will bow to you as God.”

You see, there is an internal contradiction in taking that approach. Because what you are saying is, “I will be superior to you; authoritative over you; I will judge you, and if you pass my test, then I will grant that you are my Maker and that I have to submit to you and that you are the Superior One.” Well, you can’t have it both ways. 


Now, what happened in the Garden of Eden according to the teaching of Scripture? What happened in the Garden of Eden was just a miniature, microcosmic version of what we’ve just been talking about: man standing in judgment over God. God had said to Adam and Eve they could eat of anything but not of this one tree. Satan comes along and says, “You’re not going to die if you eat of that tree; God’s hypothesis is wrong. And Eve makes the mistake of falling for the subtlety of Satan, and she decides that she will make the ultimate decision here. She doesn’t rebuke Satan. She doesn’t assume, as a presupposition, the truth of God; she decides that she’ll determine what is good and evil for herself. And that is exactly what people who challenge the goodness of God in [His} allowing evil to come into this world are doing. They are saying, “I will stand in judgment over you, God, so that you might eventually become my God.” But anybody who is so defiant as to put God to the test, will never really allow God to be God. 

So, what we are left with is an ultimate mystery, here, that calls upon you trust God that He does all things well.

Does Calvinism Make God the Author of Evil?

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Article by Phil Johnson (original source here)

Arminians often insist that if “God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass” (Westminster Confession of Faith, III.1) then He must be morally responsible for evil. If His decree caused everything that happens, they claim, that makes Him the Cause of evil, and that in turn contradicts James 1:13 and 1 John 1:5.

How have Calvinists responded to that charge?

Classic Calvinism does teach, of course, that God’s
eternal decree is a binding verdict that set everything in motion toward a predetermined end, and God remains sovereign in the outworking of His providence. (Providence speaks of His purposeful care and management of everything He created). The decree is eternal, meaning it was issued before the foundation of the world. It is God’s own sovereign fiat (authoritative edict). The word fiat is Latin for “let it be done.”

But He ordained the means as well as the end. In other words, God is not the direct cause (“the efficient cause”) of all that He decreed. He is by no means a mere passive observer of unfolding events, nor is He subject to any higher or more determinate will than His own. But His “let it be done” is not necessarily the exact logical equivalent of “I Myself will do this.” (See, for example, Job 1:12; 2:6.)

But isn’t it still the case that God’s decree ultimately causes “whatsoever comes to pass”?

Well, yes, in one sense. But there is more than one sense of the word cause. We rightly distinguish between efficient and final causes (sometimes labeled proximate and ultimate causes). These are not concepts made up on the fly for the benefit of dodging Arminian objections. The distinctions between various kinds of causes are long-established differentiations—elementary concepts of truth and logic that go back at least as far as Aristotle.

Aristotle, for example, named four categories of cause:

1. The Final Cause—that for the sake of which something happens
2. The Efficient Cause—the agent whose action produces the effect
3. The Material Cause—the substance that gives being to the effect
4. The Formal Cause—the shape, pattern, definition, or species of the effect

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s “Aristotle” entry:

The development of potentiality to actuality is one of the most important aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy. It was intended to solve the difficulties which earlier thinkers had raised with reference to the beginnings of existence and the relations of the one and many. The actual vs. potential state of things is explained in terms of the causes which act on things. There are four causes:

1. Material cause, or the elements out of which an object is created;
2. Efficient cause, or the means by which it is created;
3. Formal cause, or the expression of what it is;
4. Final cause, or the end for which it is.

Take, for example, a bronze statue. Its material cause is the bronze itself. Its efficient cause is the sculptor, insofar has he forces the bronze into shape. The formal cause is the idea of the completed statue. The final cause is the idea of the statue as it prompts the sculptor to act on the bronze.

God is the final cause; not the efficient cause of evil.

To illustrate that someone or something can be the “final cause” of an evil act and yet not be held morally responsible for it, consider these examples: Continue reading →

Why Did Adam Choose To Sin?

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R. C. Sproul: Excerpt from this source.

But what about man’s will with respect to the sovereignty of God? Perhaps the oldest dilemma of the Christian faith is the apparent contradiction between the sovereignty of God and the freedom of man. If we define human freedom as autonomy (meaning that man is free to do whatever he pleases, without constraint, without accountability to the will of God), then of course we must say that free will is contradictory to divine sovereignty. We cannot soft-pedal this dilemma by calling it a mystery; we must face up to the full import of the concept.

If free will means autonomy, then God cannot be sovereign. If man is utterly and completely free to do as he pleases, there can be no sovereign God. And if God is utterly sovereign to do as he pleases, no creature can be autonomous.

It is possible to have a multitude of beings, all of whom are free to various degrees but none is sovereign. The degree of freedom is determined by the level of power, authority, and responsibility held by that being. But we do not live in this type of universe. There is a God who is sovereign—which is to say, he is absolutely free. My freedom is always within limits. My freedom is always constrained by the sovereignty of God. I have freedom to do things as I please, but if my freedom conflicts with the decretive will of God, there is no question as to the outcome—God’s decree will prevail over my choice.

It is stated so often that it has become almost an uncritically accepted axiom within Christian circles that the sovereignty of God may never violate human freedom in the sense that God’s sovereign will may never overrule human freedom. The thought verges on, if not trespasses, the border of blasphemy because it contains the idea that God’s sovereignty is constrained by human freedom. If that were true, then man, not God, would be sovereign, and God would be restrained and constrained by the power of human freedom.

As I say, the implication here is blasphemous because it raises the creature to the stature of the Creator. God’s glory, majesty, and honor are denigrated since he is being reduced to the status of a secondary, impotent creature. Biblically speaking, man is free, but his freedom can never violate or overrule God’s sovereignty.

Within the authority structure of my own family, for example, I and my son are free moral agents; he has a will and I have a will. His will, however, is more often constrained by my will than is my will constrained by his. I carry more authority and more power in the relationship and hence have a wider expanse of freedom than he has. So it is with our relationship to God; God’s power and authority are infinite, and his freedom is never hindered by human volition.

There is no contradiction between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will. Those who see a contradiction, or even point to the problem as an unsolvable mystery, have misunderstood the mystery. The real mystery regarding free will is how it was exercised by Adam before the Fall. Continue reading →