The Problem of Evil , as formulated within the philosophical & theological tradition, presupposes that one acknowledges a magisterial god who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. If such a being exists, then the existence of evil becomes a moral mystery. On the face of things, an all good God would eliminate evil; an all-knowing God would know how to eliminate evil, an all-powerful God would be able to eliminate evil, an all-good God would desire to eliminate evil. Evil shouldn’t exist, if God exists, because everything should already be perfect, precisely because the world is the creation of a perfect creator.
BELIEF
Our beliefs are not static, they evolve. For me, my belief in God began when I encountered the ideas of Georg Cantor, Alan Turing, Boltzmann and others, along with the study of emergence in complexity. What I learned about entropy and determinism forced me to a startling realization: I had no true free will, that reality itself was a deterministic illusion. And yet, precisely because of this, I was compelled to believe in God, not through faith alone, but through logic and necessity, for if life is deterministic, then it must be due to a greater power with an agenda. From that point on, my question became: what is God’s intention?
Christ,the Platonic vision of Sophia, the Upanishads, the Tao all explore profound questions about the nature of reality, the self, and the universe.these represent our desire to know the unknowable. When we contemplate God, we reach toward what forever exceeds us. Alan Turing once wrote, “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” Like Sisyphus, each day we labor, only to face another day of endless tasks. But for what purpose? Do any of us truly know why? This is why we must have an honest religion to help answer these questions.
We build the future, in this way, we are like the Demiurge: architects shaping reality according to plans we cannot fully comprehend, mistaking partial knowledge for control. We sense order but cannot fathom the whole while tied to a deterministic path.
For me, God is not found in rigid dogma but in the living attempt to understand the word good. God resides in acts of kindness and compassion, though these are often obscured by the suffering I see around me. To pursue God is to keep learning, to continually reshape my understanding, is all that is valid. I see God in the Platonic Nous, intelligence as a bridge toward the unknowable. The more I understand myself, the Atman, and the complexity of life, the closer I come to glimpsing God.To refine my sense of what is good is, in turn, to understand God’s intention.
This is why the monastic ideal, withdrawn from desire, devoted to uncovering the unknown, holds such deep appeal for me. It is not escape, but alignment: a way of living closer to the mystery we call God.
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