Isaiah 45:7 (KJV) says:
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
But why?
Why   did   god   create   evil?
Obviously this isn't a condition that was going to pop up all on it its own, one that would simply materialize as the antithesis of peace, or god wouldn't have found it necessary to specifically create it. A feat so unique he even makes note of it, and insures it's never forgotten by putting in the Bible.
And just so there's no tap dancing with the word "evil," Strong's Lexicon lists the following meanings (transliterated as the Hebrew "ra`"):
2) evil, distress, misery, injury, calamity
a) evil, distress, adversity
b) evil, injury, wrong
c) evil (ethical)
Note that "evil" is the primary meaning of "ra`." And although some Bible versions fudge and use terms such as "disaster" or "calamity" in place of "evil," the most preferred rendering
is "evil."
So again I ask:
Why did god create evil?
(And please, let's have none of those specious "So we would have free will" arguments.)
.
I think one or both of two answers could be the case. The more direct answer is that there is no free will without evil-- I know you didn't want to hear that, but I'm sorry, it happens to be the case. God wanted us to exist: reasoning, self-aware beings with free will, who learn and grow and evolve. Without the chance to make wrong choices, there is no learning, and without experiencing the sorrowful effects of choosing evil, there is no true enrichment with wisdom, which usually is gained through suffering-- either directly, or vicariously in empathy. Evil is, unfortunately, necessary, if only to comprehend why it should not be done. And true evil, requiring malicious intent, is only the result of human choices: no other creatures or situations create evil. I think that if God did not value our capacity for free will, and to learn from our bad choices, we would not exist. God would have been satisfied merely with the angels, which have no free will, and no real capacity to be enriched with wisdom, merely to bear knowledge.
The more indirect answer is that in the passage in Isaiah,
ra may not mean evil. It usually does, but the verse in Isaiah is composed in poetic parallels.
Yotzer ohr uvoreh choshech (I form light and create darkness)
oseh shalom uvoreh et ha-ra (I make peace and create evil): light and darkness are clearly a poetic parallel, and are used as such all over Biblical literature. But peace and evil do not occur anywhere else in Biblical literature as a pairing, and there is no clear reason for them to parallel each other. Unless we read
shalom not as "peace" but as "completion," (which the word can absolutely mean, provided the letters are pointed differently), which was, classically, a euphemism for order, and
ra as "chaos," a usage not uncommon to the classical and medieval Jewish philosophers writing either in refutation of or under the influence of the Greek philosophers. In which case the proper translation of
oseh shalom uvoreh et ha-ra is "I make order and I create chaos," which is a perfect parallel. If that is what Isaiah meant in that verse, then it seems to me that the verse is a reminder that much of what we often mislabel as evil is not evil at all-- diseases, natural disasters, accidents, and other misfortunes we suffer-- but are merely part of the necessary structure of the universe. Even in modern parlance, we understand that chaos-- the apparently disordered patterning of probabilities and entropic thermodynamic degradation-- is part of how the universe functions. Yet as a force of nature, it is impersonal, incapable of being evil because it is incapable of malice.
And I think it serves us well to note that God creates chaos directly. But evil comes about secondhand, in the creation of us.
