For centuries priests, ministers, and theologians have struggled to answer the mystery of why a kind, compassionate, personal God that answers prayers and looks out for our personal welfare, would allow so much evil to occur in the world? This is referred to as “the problem of evil.” In the fourth century BCE, Epicurus addressed this question by pointing out that it was hard to get God off the hook. “Either God wants to abolish evil and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot he is impotent. If he can but does not want to, he is wicked.”
    Several thousand years ago the Gnostics, a group of quasi-Christian mystics proposed there really was no problem because they viewed God as so inherently evil that he would have no interest in preventing evil.  They called this demonic God the Demiurge, taken from a term Plato used to denote the creator of the base world. The Demiurge was the God that interacted with man. The real God or “true Father” represented the less flawed world and could not be held responsible for the actions of the Demiurge.
    The deists propose a solution that still leaves God blameless but judgment of him is less harsh. They propose that God did indeed create the early universe but when this job was completed he was no longer involved. This approach has the advantage that it allows those who believe in this type of God to also believe in Darwinian evolution as the mechanism by which all life including man himself was created. This is far more satisfactory to the rational brain than the proposals of the young earth creationists who believe the Bible is literally true and that the world is less than 6,000 years old, and that Darwinism is baloney. The deist solution is not very satisfactory to the majority of people in the world who believe in a personal God that guided the evolution of man and watches over us on a minute-to-minute basis. These are called theists and they have proposed a number of solutions to the “problem of evil.”
       The most popular solution is that God endowed man with free will. This relieved God from the onerous duty of being responsible for all the minute detailed decisions that billions of humans make everyday. God could not be responsible if it was a person’s individual decision to do evil things. This, however, did not explain the evil done by nature in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. Some have suggested that nature also has its own free will.
      Another creative answer to the problem of evil is the yin and jang solution. This says we cannot have good in the world if the opposite, evil, is not around to compare it to. We cannot have hot without cold, love without hate, or good without evil. Another explanation is that evil is part of God’s mysterious plan. This is especially evoked when a child dies or is killed. Somehow the pain is supposed to be lessened if this event is all part of God’s mysterious plan. A further solution, popular with several fundamentalist religions is that “people get what they deserve.” This was especially popular during the 2004 tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the orient. Some ministers proclaimed that was God’s pay back for abortions, liberal sex, homosexuality, failure to pray to God in public school, and many other supposed transgressions against God’s laws. The problem is, none of these answers is truly satisfying if your child is killed, your spouse dies at a young age, or thousands or even millions of people are killed in natural disasters, purges, genocides, wars, epidemics or other horrors humans have been subjected to.
     There is however, one simple solution to the problem of evil, one answer, one explanation that does not require any of the above circuitous stretches of logic. That is a simple reversal of the assumption made by most people that God created man – to man created God. This proposes that man created the theory of a personal God who created the world, who answers prayers, and who attends to our minute-by-minute needs. In pre-modern times this theory was the best possible solution for the unknown questions – Where did we come from? Where are we going? When I die am I gone forever? Is there life after death?  In modern times with remarkable advances in biology, physics, and the neurosciences, these questions now have answers that do not require the ancient theory of a personal God. This takes God out of the issue entirely. The most simple and satisfactory answer to the “problem of evil” is to realize that man created God.