The two hard questions: evil and God’s hiddenness

Before we get to obligation, we must stop at two questions that every reader asks, and without which the picture is not complete. If there is a good God, why is there so much evil in the world? And if he exists, why does he not reveal himself?

The problem of evil

It is worth distinguishing two kinds of evil. There is evil that human beings do: murder, robbery, the Holocaust. And there is evil that nature does: diseases, earthquakes, a child who dies.

For human evil, the answer follows from what we have already seen. God created a human being who has free will, and we saw that without choice there is no good and evil at all. But real choice means that one can choose evil. And God, according to the conception presented here, does not “bring about” the deeds of human beings. Our deeds are in our hands, and so is the responsibility for them. “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven,” said the Sages, and Rashi explains: what depends on a person’s moral and religious choice is given into his hands and not into the hands of Heaven. Whoever wants a world in which murder is impossible is asking for a world of puppets.

For natural evil, the answer is different, and it follows from the second argument. God created a world that runs according to constant laws. We saw that this is exactly what testifies to him. But constant laws are also a price. A law of nature does not check who is standing in front of it. Fire burns the righteous too. And if nature changed according to who was in the vicinity, we would live in a world that could not be understood: you jump out of the window and fly upward, because a righteous man is standing below. In such a world there is no science, no medicine, no planning, and no choice either, since one cannot know what will follow from one’s actions. In other words, natural evil is not a “punishment” and not arbitrariness. It is a necessary consequence of the decision to create a world with laws, and with creatures who choose within it. In this sense, God’s hands are “tied”: not out of weakness, but because of logic and because of what he himself wanted.

Hence also the answer to the ancient question of “the righteous who suffers”: why do the righteous suffer? Because the laws of nature do not distinguish between righteous and wicked, and the deeds of human beings are given over to their choice. The question was hard only for someone who assumed that God intervenes in every detail. According to the picture presented here, this is not an objection but an expected consequence.

God’s hiddenness

And now to the second question: why does God not reveal himself?

Think of a parent. When the child is small, the parent is involved in every step: feeding, lifting, preventing falls. As the child grows, the parent deliberately steps back. Not because he loves less, but because he wants the child to stand on his own feet. So too in the relationship between God and humanity. In the biblical period he was involved: miracles, prophecy, open intervention. Over the generations this intervention diminished, and in our day it hardly exists. That is a fact the believer too must admit. But it is not abandonment. It is maturing. The Torah itself describes this transition: in the desert, manna came down from heaven, and in the Land of Israel one must plow and sow and wait for rain.

And where is God now? In everything we look at. In the laws of nature, in the order of the world, in our ability to understand it. He does not need to reveal himself in miracles, because he reveals himself all the time through the world itself. And whoever has studied the previous arguments sees it.

There is also something liberating in this picture. The believer does not have to live with the feeling that everything that happens to him is a message from heaven, and does not have to fear that science is “hiding” God. He can understand that usually no miracle will happen, that what will happen is the result of the laws of nature and of his own deeds, and that this is exactly the world God wanted.