If God Real Why Bad Thing Happen?

[00:00:00]Hey religious folk, your God is meant to be all powerful and also all knowing and also all good, omnib benevolent, omnipotent and omnicient. So the question remains, why is there so much suffering in the world? Why are four-year-olds getting cancer? Why do buildings collapse on hundreds of hospital patients? Why is there abuse and assault? Your God condones it all?

[00:00:16]If God real, why bad thing happen? Why baby get cancer? Why tornado knock down house? This is the most common argument used online against the existence of God. Philosophers call it the problem of evil. And the premise is pretty simple.

[00:00:32]If God is all good, then why doesn't he prevent suffering? If God is all- knowing, then he knows suffering occurs and does nothing about it. And if God is all powerful, then he has the power to stop suffering and doesn't. That means God is either not all knowing, not all good, or not all powerful, or doesn't exist at all. This argument works against one specific idea of God. It works against the idea that God is a very powerful person who lives outside the universe and manages it from a distance. Sky Daddy, as the atheists put it, under that model, God creates the world, watches what happens, judges human behavior, intervenes sometimes, and remains responsible for everything he allows. If God's main job is protecting living creatures from pain, then cancer, famine, natural disasters, and the death of children are hard to explain. But that's not the model of God that I use. I do not think God is one being amongst other beings. God is not an invisible person standing outside of reality. I also don't consider God some vague force like the ground of being. I understand God as the mind of reality itself. The universe exists within a cosmic mind and individual minds are smaller expressions of it. And a thought is not separate from the mind thinking it in the same way that we are not separate from the reality experiencing itself through us. People naturally give God human traits because human traits are what we understand. We imagine God as a larger parent, a king, a judge, engineer or manager. We give God human motives and human moral duties. We then condemn God for failing to behave like the ideal human we imagined. But if God is the mind of reality, that mind would be completely alien to human psychology.

[00:02:16]It would not experience existence from the point of view of one animal trying to stay alive for 80 years. It would contain every organism, every conflict, every birth, every death, every pleasure, every injury, and every human judgment at once. The popular problem of evil begins with a category error. It turns God into a human personality and then judges that personality by human standards. But God is not a man. God is not even a person in a normal human sense. God is the alien mind that underpins all things. God is awareness itself. God is always watching you. But not because there's a giant person staring down from outside the universe, but because reality sees through your eyes. It hears through your ears. It experiences your own thoughts from the inside. The same thing happens through every other conscious being. Reality is becoming aware of itself through the beings inside it. That's what I mean by God. Now, a lot of the time I'll make this point and people online will say, "I'm just redefining God." But this God concept has existed even longer than Christianity. Versions of this idea appear across many traditions like Platonism, Vidanta Hinduism, even Christian mysticism, hermeticism, most notably panentheism, idealism. The details differ, but the basic idea is similar. God is not one object inside reality. God is the mind within which reality exists. The problem of evil changes once God is understood this way.

[00:03:39]The normal argument imagines God as a game designer and the universe a video game. The game produces suffering. So the designer is accused of being cruel or incompetent. But that model assumes things that have not been proven. It assumes reality exists mainly to keep living creatures comfortable. It assumes preventing pain is the highest purpose of existence. It assumes we could have freedom, biological life, growth, change, novelty, love, individuality without also having failure, disease, loss, and death. We live in a cosmos that produces novelty. The reality we dwell within creates new things. We live in a reality that is capable of creation. But in order to make something new and original, therein lies the possibility of things also happening in a way that humans call bad. The same process that creates stars also creates cancer. The processes that make life possible also make suffering possible.

[00:04:32]Now, cancer is a good example. The body depends on cells dividing to grow and repair itself. Sometimes a cell mutates and divides out of control. That same process that normally keeps the body alive begins destroying it. Cancer is not placed into life from outside the system. It's one way the system can behave. A universe that produces novel things must contain risk. Bodies can grow because cells can divide, but that also allows tumors. Species can adapt because genes mutate. That can also allow birth defects. People can form relationships because they can affect each other. That also allows betrayal and grief. That same quality of our universe that allows new things to appear also allows things to break.

[00:05:14]Sometimes believers in God often use free will to answer the problem of evil.

[00:05:19]They say bad things happen because God gave us the ability and the free will to choose our own moral decisions. But then the atheist typically responds, "How does free will explain childhood cancer?" Well, my answer is that freedom does not only belong to human choice.

[00:05:33]All of the cosmos is given free will.

[00:05:36]Reality itself is given freedom. You know, nature is not frozen. It's not a machine repeating one controlled event forever. Reality can produce new forms and matter can enter new arrangements that have never happened before. That freedom allows reality to create. But creation can also fail. Novelty comes with risk. The usual response to that is that an all powerful God should be able to keep everything good while removing every cost. People can be free but never cruel. Bodies can grow but never turn sick. And love can exist without loss.

[00:06:06]And on face value, that sounds satisfying. But a person who cannot make a harmful choice is not free in the truest sense. A cell that cannot divide cannot repair tissue. A person who cannot be lost cannot be loved. A world where nothing harmful could happen would require reality to interrupt itself constantly. Fire burning wood but stopping at the moment it touched a person. Gravity working until someone fell. The world might contain less suffering, but it would also have no stable rules. Cause and effect would only operate when the results were acceptable. So in plain English, suffering is the result of living in a reality that consistently generates new things with stable laws. Some suffering really is unnecessary, too. Human beings create enormous pain through cruelty, greed, and neglect. That suffering should be reduced. None of this changes the fact that a living world contains vulnerability. People can be betrayed because they can trust. They can grieve because they love. Courage exists because danger exists. Heroes exist because villains exist. This does not mean suffering automatically creates meaning. Sometimes suffering only causes damage. Pain can destroy a person.

[00:07:11]disease can kill a child before that child has the chance to understand anything. The argument is not that every tragedy teaches something. The argument is that meaningful beings are also vulnerable beings. And I'm not preaching to all of you from an ivory tower. My family buried an infant last summer. I'm chronically ill. I'm not discussing suffering as an abstract problem from a philosophy book. I know it intimately and personally. The death of an infant is not good. Disease is not good.

[00:07:37]Nothing requires me to call these things blessings. The mistake is assuming that because they're bad that they're meaningless. That infant that we lost mattered. That is why the death produced grief. The child did not need to live for 80 years or produce anything to matter. Its existence made it matter. My family loved that child and that is enough for its life to have mattered.

[00:07:57]Meaning does not require permanence. A song ends and it still matters while it played. A brief life can remain important to the people who loved it.

[00:08:04]Now, even though my little cousin's life was brief, it was significant. It happened for a reason. Under my understanding of God, God was not absent for my infant cousin. God was present as the infant. God existed within the mind of reality the same way a thought exists within the mind thinking it. My baby cousin's life happened within God. The death happened within God. The love and grief of my family happened within God.

[00:08:28]This does not mean a human-like God deliberately killed my cousin to teach us a lesson. I'm not saying that at all.

[00:08:33]I'm saying the child was never separate from God in the first place. Some atheists look at a dead child and conclude reality contains no meaning. I reach a far different conclusion. The child mattered enough that the loss permanently affected my family. And a family is not outside the universe. A family is the universe. When a family grieavves, reality itself grieavves through them as humans are reality experiencing itself. After all, the presence of evil also permits the existence of heroes. Without darkness to overcome, there would be no need for bravery. And bravery contains beauty.

[00:09:05]And beauty is how we see God in the physical world. Disease should be treated. Violence should be defended against. Reality produces cancer, but it also produces doctors. It produces tyrants, but it also produces revolutionaries. Reality produces grief.

[00:09:19]It also produces people willing to sit beside someone who's grieving. The desire to reduce suffering is not evidence against God. It's another expression of God working through humanity. The doctor treating cancer is reality responding to cancer. The stranger helping an injured person is reality becoming aware of suffering and acting against it. People expect God to enter the world from outside, a hand from the sky to stop the disease, prevent the accident, reverse the death.

[00:09:45]But when this doesn't happen, they conclude that God doesn't exist. But if God is the alien mind reality, God is not outside the world waiting to intervene. God is present as the body attempting to heal, the scientist studying the disease, the family mourning the loss, and continuing to live while carrying the dead with them.

[00:10:02]These things do not solve every tragedy.

[00:10:04]They show that reality contains processes that produce suffering and conscious beings are capable of resisting it. That is the glory. Good and evil at the end of the day are human categories. We call something good when it supports life and flourishing. And we call something evil when it produces cruelty and suffering. These judgments are real because we are living creatures with bodies, relationships, and limited lifespans. But good and evil do not exist outside reality as laws imposed onto it. There is no court above existence. No second universe standing outside this one and grading it. If God is the mind of reality, God is not one person being judged by a higher moral authority. God is the reality from which moral beings and moral categories emerge in the first place. People anthropomorphize God. They never give God empathy. And what I mean by that is they never try to think like God. I know that sounds absurd, but think about it.

[00:10:55]If you were a cosmic mind capable of perceiving every birth, every death, every pleasure, every injury, you would not think like a human being. You would not organize existence entirely around the survival needs of one species on one planet. This does not mean human morality is false. It means human morality is human. Murder is still wrong to us because we are creatures capable of being murdered. The death of a child is still a catastrophe because we love particular people and imagine futures for them. These judgments remain real within the human world. They simply can't be used as a standard outside God by which God is placed on trial. Calling God good does not mean every event is good. I'm not saying cancer is good or the death of a child is good. The word good becomes incomplete when applied to the whole of reality. God contains life, death, creation, destruction, love, grief. God is not one side of that structure. God is the totality of that structure. God is beyond human moral categories altogether. Seriously, think about it. If you were a cosmic mind that was capable of perceiving everything that happens in the infinite expanse of reality, why would you order reality for the satisfaction of one temporary species on one temporary planet? It's very anthropocentric.

[00:12:06]Because when you zoom out and look at the big picture, reality is constantly decaying into entropy. Things break down. Like I said, we live in a novel universe that creates things, but things also break down. Entropy is just a fact of reality. Evil is what humans call entropy. Evil and bad are the human-made labels that we layer over the fact that things break down and become disordered.

[00:12:29]The atheist asks why God permits suffering. My answer is that that question begins with the wrong idea of God and treats human goodness as if it were a law above reality. God is not a supernatural manager whose job it is to keep every organism comfortable. God is the mind of reality in which organisms comfort suffering and this debate even exists. Bad things happen because real things happen. Real things form through processes that can fail. That's not pleasant. And it doesn't remove our responsibility to reduce suffering. It means that suffering is not proof that life has no meaning or that God is absent. My infant cousin's death did not make that life meaningless. The grief proved that life mattered. My illness does not prove that existence contains no value. It proves that a body can fail. Yet the consciousness dwelling within it can choose to continue enduring suffering despite the physical body breaking down. A world capable of producing conscious beings is also capable of producing beings that suffer.

[00:13:24]That's the cost of living in a cosmos that can actually create. The correct response is not to demand the mind of all reality conform to the moral instincts of one temporary species on one temporary planet. The correct response is to use those instincts where they actually belong. We can heal what can be healed. We can protect what can be protected. We mourn what cannot be restored. We continue creating despite the possibility of loss. Good and evil exist through beings like us. The cosmic mind I call God contains the beings, the categories, and everything those categories attempt to describe. Bad things happen because we live in a universe where things are allowed to happen. The universe itself has free will. The universe itself is allowed to generate novelty. And maybe we should all just zoom out for a minute and think maybe if there was a cosmic mind, it would be more concerned with a universe that freely creates than a universe that is tailored to the satisfaction of homo sapiens. So to me, an angel is a non-human intelligence of order and righteousness. Very similar to the video I did on demons, I believe they're non-physical entities that interact with us directly via consciousness. Perhaps they're made of consciousness or dwell within it, but they do not exist physically.