Gordon Clark’s book God and Evil: The Problem Solved, is really an essay he wrote for a British journal and published later in his book Religion, Reason, and Revelation. It has recently been republished as a stand-alone booklet. The central issue which Clark addresses is the age-old question, If God is all-good, and if God is all-powerful, then why are sin and suffering in the world? In other words, how can the existence of God be harmonized with the existence of evil? Clark analyzes the historical answers to this dilemma, and comes to a conclusion using logic and Scripture. Clark’s answer to this situation does not deny any of the Scriptural characteristics of God as held by historic and orthodox Christianity.
Historically, Clark argues that most of the answers to this dilemma center around the proposition that if God is good and wants to eliminate sin, but cannot, He is not omnipotent. If he is omnipotent, and can eliminate sin, but doesn’t, then He is not good. Therefore, God cannot be both omnipotent and good at the same time. Some religions pose the theory that the universe must be the work of two independent, conflicting deities. Some pose that God is not the cause of everything, but only some things. Some pose that evil is not really real, but metaphysical, and so since it is not real, then God is not the cause of evil. However, historically, the answer to this question has generally entailed a limited deity. At some point, God is not the omnipotent and omniscient being that is clearly defined in the Bible. Read the rest of this entry »
