God conquers evil with a butterfly
As a teenager living in the suburbs of Chicago, the cable TV in my bedroom was a place I spent way too much time. When I started really getting interested in my faith, I stumbled across this channel called TBN. TBN stands for Trinity Broadcasting Network, but don’t be fooled by the name. Basically, on that channel, all of the health-and-wealth, showy, filthy rich televangelists — and everything you don’t like about them — comes together on one airwave.
You may know the message: “God has a great plan for your life, and that plan is getting rich and being healthy. So give me your money, and God will bless you for it!”
Not knowing much about Christianity, I didn’t know any better at first. Thankfully, I also read the Bible, and other real Christian literature, which gave me a much better picture of how things are.
The fact is, the televangelists’ claims are manifestly false. Not only does God not typically directly reward people for doing good deeds, but evil permeates this world and makes people suffer. Suffering doesn’t discriminate: the righteous and the evil get cancer, get in car accidents, and die in wars; the good and the evil get rich, dodge bullets, and live to be 100. No one hasn’t gone through suffering — everyone’s gotten sick and injured and been betrayed and heartbroken — but when we suffer, it certainly isn’t based on a system of reward and punishment in proportion to our deeds.
So the responses go: “There’s a reason for everything.” “God’s got it under control.” We may quote Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Not that they help much at the time, but at least they’re true, right?
Well, maybe not the way we mean it. Usually, when someone says something like that, they mean something like, “It happens for a reason for you. God will make sure that there is some ultimate benefit to you for this having happened.” But we don’t always see that. Yes, sometimes we are made stronger through suffering a tragic event, but other times we are not. Other times people fall away from God; other times people die. Sometimes terrible things happen that just have no discernible benefit to anyone ever. We always come back to the classic question many term the Problem of Evil: Why does a good God allow evil in this world?
The most common explanation given for this is the free will defense: God made humans, to have a real relationship with him, not computers. He didn’t program us. Programmed entities cannot choose to do evil, but they also can’t choose to do good. After all, when a computer in a hospital works 24/7 to keep someone alive, no one praises the computer for its magnanimity and selfless character. It’s just doing what it was programmed to do; it couldn’t choose to do otherwise. So, to truly choose good, to truly choose to love, we also need to be able to choose to do evil. Otherwise there’s no goodness in the choice.
That’s a good start, but I think that explanation is incomplete, for two reasons. One, it doesn’t explain natural evil, like non-human-caused wildfires and hurricanes. Two, it doesn’t explain why God appears to stop some evil people and not others. God could allow us to make free choices, but stop us from carrying out the bad ones — or at least the worst of them. That doesn’t hinder our free will; it only changes the result of it. We can see in Scripture that God sometimes does this, like when he stopped the Assyrian army at the siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC (Isaiah 36-37, 2 Kings 18-19, 2 Chronicles 32). God could let someone lie or steal $50, but he could also stop Hitler and Stalin from carrying out their massacres. He could stop child molesters. Why doesn’t he do that?
We can, of course, never arrive at a truly sufficient and all-explanatory answer. But one key to reconciling this dichotomy may be found in what theologians call God’s “middle knowledge.”
Basically, what that means is that not only does God know everything that’s ever happened, is happening, or will happen, and all the free choices that his creatures will choose to make, but he also knows all the free choices any of us would choose to make in any conceivable set of circumstances. So God knows exactly how my life would play out, and every choice I would make, if I had not joined my current church, or if I had never moved from my native Ohio, or if I had been born in Kyrgyzstan (and for that matter, if Kyrgyzstan existed when I was born). He knows the same thing for every one of us. He has that “middle knowledge.” This doesn’t restrict our free will at all — he doesn’t make those choices for us, but he simply knows what choices we would freely choose to make. God can create the world, and set the initial conditions of the world, in such a way that the free choices of every free creature, and every natural occurrence, interact and build on each other so as to ultimately bring about God’s will — which we can speculate is that as many people as possible come to know God and be saved.
Those who are science-fiction fans may be familiar with; a phenomenon called the butterfly effect. Originally coined by a meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, who saw that when he made a tiny, almost imperceptible change in the initial conditions of a weather model, the results when he extrapolated far enough out were drastically different. The initial difference was so small, and the eventual result so drastically different, that it basically amounted to that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in, say, South Africa, could create a tiny, imperceptible change in the air, that interacted with all the other tiny imperceptible changes in the air, which together in that combination produced a hurricane in Florida. He initially described it this way: “One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a sea gull’s wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever. The controversy has not yet been settled, but the most recent evidence seems to favor the sea gulls.” (He later changed the animal to a butterfly, giving the effect its popular name.)
In scientific terms, the butterfly effect is often used to show how random factors make it impossible to predict anything reliably long-term. But God can perfectly foresee exactly what short-term and long-term effects every single decision we make — and every single thing, good or bad, that happens to us — will have. We will never see those long-term effects, but they will probably be profoundly impactful on someone.
So maybe a man tragically dies of cancer in his 40s. His daughter, mostly apathetic about church, gets angry at God and walks away from the faith for a few years. When she comes to believe again, she is motivated by her experience to become passionately involved in church. (If she hadn’t had this experience, perhaps she would have remained apathetic; God would know.) She joins a ministry to the homeless and forms a friendship with a Christian woman who had a similar experience and is about to walk away herself. Eventually, inspired by her influence, that woman renews her commitment to Christ. (Had she not met the first woman, she might have walked away and never returned; again, God would know.) Three generations of her family grow up, most of the children remaining lifelong believers. Via the butterfly effect, with the loss of one life comes the salvation of 30 or 40 others, who would otherwise not have been saved or perhaps not have even existed. And, of course, there are countless other events and decisions, good and bad, that factored into each of those people’s journeys to Christ.
Or a different, even more indirect scenario: A drunk driver tragically kills a 30-year-old man. An acquaintance of the deceased is devastated when he hears it, and begins to contemplate his own mortality. A spiritual journey of ten years finally leads him to Christ. He becomes a Sunday school teacher and leads a teenage boy to Christ. That boy grows up, and despite living in a family of alcoholics, he swears off alcohol because he knows his teacher’s story. He raises a family, five generations go by, and one of his great-great-grandchildren, in the year 2200, goes to China and leads a revival where tens of thousands are saved. God would know whether, if that accident hadn’t occurred, the teacher would have ever accepted Christ, and if any of his descendants would have ever existed. And from the loss of one life springs the salvation of 50,000 others.
But how can we know that’s the case? How can we know that something good will actually result and that it’s not just a pointless random tragedy?
Now here’s where we can bring in Romans 8:28. “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Notice that nothing in this verse is person-specific. It doesn’t say that God will work out my sufferings for my good, or any individual’s suffering for their good. This passage is all about God’s big-picture plan for all of his people. The bad things that happen to us may not be turned around for good to us, in our lifetimes, but something good will result from them — something good which would not have occurred if that bad thing didn’t happen to us. It’s not based on my power of prediction, but I think that’s what God’s promise means. And yes, that might lead to the uncomfortable conclusion that others will benefit from the butterfly effect of our suffering, just as we have benefited from the butterfly effect of other people’s suffering, but then we can consider that God has great rewards for us in eternity as well.
Evil exists in this world. We may not find a meaning or purpose for our suffering, nor may we find that some good always results from it that we will experience. But it is not meaningless, purposeless, or irredeemable. But God conquers evil. And until he comes back on a white horse to destroy the evil in this world once and for all, he will probably most often conquer evil through the wings of a butterfly.
