Where does Evil come from

If reality begins with love, where does evil come from?

We have been exploring a possibility:

Perhaps the fundamental reality is Conscious Love.

Perhaps Love creates other conscious beings for genuine relationship.

And perhaps the physical universe provides the environment in which those beings can develop individuality, experience and freedom.

But now we encounter the hard question.

If everything begins in love, where does evil come from?

War.

Cruelty.

Greed.

Hatred.

Exploitation.

Violence.

How could these exist in a reality whose ultimate foundation is Love?

Perhaps we have been thinking about evil in the wrong way.

What if evil isn't something God created?

Perhaps evil has no independent existence of its own.

Think about darkness.

Darkness isn't a substance competing with light.

It is what we experience where light is absent or obstructed.

Could evil be something similar?

Not another fundamental force competing with Love -

but what happens when loving relationship becomes distorted, damaged or rejected.

Consider some of the basic drives within us.

We want to protect.

We want to prosper.

We desire intimacy, family and procreation.

None of these is inherently evil.

They can all serve Love.

Protect can mean:

I will defend someone who is vulnerable.

But distorted, it can become:

I will attack anyone I regard as a threat.

Prosper can mean:

I will work, create, provide and build a secure life for those I love.

But distorted, it can become:

I will accumulate as much as possible, regardless of what happens to others.

Our desire for intimacy and procreation can create extraordinary bonds of love and family.

But distorted by domination and selfishness, sexuality can also become exploitative and abusive.

Perhaps, then, God didn't need to create greed, hatred, violence or exploitation.

God created beings with good capacities -

and gave them genuine freedom.

But genuine freedom means those capacities can be turned away from their proper relational purpose.

Love can become possession.

Self-protection can become aggression.

Security can become greed.

Belonging can become tribalism.

Influence can become domination.

And so perhaps moral evil is fundamentally:

The breakdown of right relationship.

That would mean evil isn't the opposite fundamental reality to Love.

Love is fundamental.

Evil is parasitic.

It exists only because something originally capable of good relationship can become disordered.

And this may help explain why God doesn't simply prevent every wrong choice.

Imagine a world in which God intervened whenever someone was about to make a genuinely harmful decision.

A fist could never strike.

A lie could never be spoken.

Property could never be stolen.

Betrayal could never succeed.

At first that sounds wonderful.

But would we still inhabit a world of genuine agency?

Our choices would cease to have real consequences whenever God disapproved of them.

Perhaps genuine freedom necessarily creates genuine risk.

If I am genuinely able to love you, I must also be capable of failing to love you.

If I can genuinely trust you, you must be capable of betraying that trust.

If I can freely give, I must also be capable of selfishly withholding.

The possibility of broken relationship may therefore be inseparable from the possibility of genuinely free loving relationship.

But this leads to an enormously important distinction.

The possibility of evil may be necessary.

The permanence of evil is not.

Perhaps God permits us genuinely to damage relationships precisely because we are genuinely free.

But that doesn't mean God abandons those relationships forever.

And perhaps this is where our conventional understanding of divine justice needs reconsidering.

If evil is fundamentally broken relationship, what would perfect justice accomplish?

Would it simply punish the person who caused the damage?

Or would perfect justice ultimately heal the damage?

Jesus repeatedly talks about forgiveness.

He tells us to love our enemies.

He restores people whom others have rejected.

And Paul describes God's purpose in astonishingly comprehensive language:

“through him to reconcile to himself all things” -  Colossians 1:20

Perhaps reconciliation isn't merely one activity God occasionally undertakes.

Perhaps reconciliation follows from the very nature of reality.

If everything originates in Love, and freedom permits Love to be rejected,

then Love's answer to that rejection isn't eternal abandonment.

It is the patient restoration of relationship.

That gives us another progression:

Love
↓
Relationship
↓
Freedom
↓
The possibility of broken relationship
↓
Evil
↓
Truth
↓
Transformation
↓
Forgiveness
↓
Reconciliation

Perhaps, then, the story of creation isn't:

Perfection → Failure → Punishment.

Perhaps it is:

Love → Freedom → Experience → Brokenness → Healing →

Reconciliation → Mature Love.

And that raises our next question.

If god's justice is about restoring relationship rather than simply punishing wrongdoers -

What might judgment actually be like?

This is discussed in the next part.