Willy Wonka and the Problem of Evil.
By Nathan
Why does evil exist?
This is a big question, especially if I believe God is all-good and all-powerful. If that’s true, then why does He allow evil to exist? If evil exists, isn’t God to blame? Didn’t He create it alongside good?
Quick left turn. Let’s talk about Willie Wonka of Chocolate Factory fame. Willie Wonka is a crazed candy maker who sits around dreaming up delicious things to delight children and adults around the world. He holds a big contest and kids who find a golden ticket get to come to his factory. Some of the products he shows them are not quite done yet. Some of the rooms hold potential dangers. Willie explains the dangers to his guests and tells them they’ll be perfectly safe if they just obey the rules.
But they don’t. All of them, including Charlie Bucket, break the rules (at least in the movie version). Terrible things happen to the children one by one because they don’t resist temptation.
Whose fault is the evil that occurred? Is it Wonka’s fault for allowing children into his factory? Or for making candy in the first place? Did he consider the possibility of his creations being used poorly? How could he be good if his creations allow for the possibility of evil? Isn’t he responsible for the evil itself?
God is a Candy Maker.
Have you ever looked at a blackberry bush covered with ripe blackberries? It’s a thing of beauty. Blackberries are my favorite, but maybe you prefer strawberries or blueberries. It’s a bush that produces candy. Candy that, if you plant a piece in the ground and pour some water on it, will produce another bush that produces more candy. It’s amazing.
So let’s walk back in time to the Garden of Eden. God has filled the garden with good things and planted Adam and Eve in a perfect paradise. Everything He has made is good, and the creation of man and woman is, by God’s own testimony, “very good.”
The tree of knowledge of good and evil is not good for food, so God tells Adam not to eat from it. It will kill him. Eve gets deceived by the serpent, eats the fruit, shares it with Adam, and then our first parents get kicked out of the garden. Chaos ensues.
Why did God create a tree that would cause all of this trouble and put it in the middle of the garden? My personal pet theory is that God’s long-term plan was to allow them to eat the fruit at some point, but it wasn’t ripe yet. But that’s idle speculation. The fact is that God created something dangerous and put it within reach of the first man and woman. Doesn’t that make this whole thing God’s fault? Isn’t He responsible for creating evil?
Magnificent, Dangerous Freedom.
The mystery of human freedom lies at the heart of this primordial drama. God made man and woman free. It’s not a small thing. None of God’s other creations besides the angels were given freedom.
A bear, for instance, isn’t free. It’s a bear. It does what bears are made to do. It eats as much as it can during the summer so it can sleep all winter. It’s incapable of going against that fundamental pattern of behavior. Same with a shark. There’s no malice in a shark, just hunger. It was designed to eat pretty much everything that moves. When it does that, it is fulfilling its purpose. It will eat when hungry and not eat when satiated.
Humans are different. While I have a love for berries the same as the bear, I don’t have to act on it. I can freely choose to act or not act. If I walk past my neighbor’s loaded blueberry bushes, I can choose not to eat the berries because they don’t belong to me, even if I’m hungry. The bear will just see berries and go eat.
Why is this important? Because freedom is what makes love possible. Love is the best thing in the universe. God Himself IS love, so it’s the best thing outside of the Universe, too. But bears cannot love. Neither can sharks because they aren’t free. No mere animal can love in the way God or human beings can love. They don’t have the capacity.
And let me be specific here. When I talk about love, I’m not talking about the warm fuzzy feelings you get when you’re scratching your dog’s tummy. That’s a good thing, but it’s not love. It’s a form of pleasure in something pleasant that can be a very good thing. The dog can likewise take pleasure in something pleasant.
But love is something different. Love is to will the good of another. It’s an act that must be freely chosen. It requires the kind of freedom that God gave human beings, a freedom that includes the possibility of NOT choosing to love.
Choosing not to love is evil.
Love is Worth the Risk.
God’s creation is entirely good, but it isn’t entirely safe. This is hard for a modern American helicopter parent generation to understand. There’s a current misconception that good parenting means removing anything even remotely dangerous from their child’s environment. High school boys get expelled from school for carrying pocket knives because they have sharp edges that might be dangerous.
Being dangerous doesn’t mean something is evil. A shark might be dangerous, but it’s not evil. A pocket knife might be dangerous, but it isn’t evil. The fruit in the middle of the garden was dangerous. Deadly dangerous. God told Adam as much. But it wasn’t evil.
The forbidden fruit at the center of the garden symbolizes freedom or rather the misuse of freedom. God gave me freedom to give me the capacity to love. Then He gave me some simple guidelines of things that I shouldn’t do with my freedom because they are destructive. Don’t worship idols. Don’t kill anybody. Don’t commit adultery, or even look covetously at my neighbor’s wife. Etc. The list is actually pretty short.
Like in the garden, there is a nearly infinite variety of good, loving things I can do with my freedom. I can build a house, learn to play a musical instrument, bake cookies, serve the poor, play a board game with my kids, program a robot. Freedom is an incredible gift.
But freedom is not safe. God knew that when He gave me the gift. But the gift was so good that He didn’t want me to miss out. It was worth the risk. Learning to handle something as dangerous as freedom opens the door for me to do amazing things.
By giving me the gift of freedom, God gave me the capacity to become a co-creator of His creation. I can choose to make or do something that doesn’t already exist, that isn’t already written into my nature as an instinct. I am responsible for my actions and creations because God didn’t program them in my nature the way He did with a bear’s pattern of eating and hibernation.
I can also choose to make a mess and be destructive to myself and others. I can choose to do evil. Been there, done that. Lord, have mercy. This is not God’s plan. It’s contrary to His plan. But He allows it because He has given me freedom.
God’s Beautiful Mess
Keeping my house clean is a perpetual battle. I have five children who can undo hours of cleaning in mere minutes. I’m starting to teach the older ones to clean (which is part of God’s plan for parenting), but sometimes it feels like a tremendous uphill battle.
It’s worth it. I love my kids and I’d rather have a house full of noise and life than a perfectly manicured mausoleum. If we didn’t have kids, designing and maintaining a Better Homes and Gardens lifestyle would be relatively easy. But it wouldn’t be as good as what I have now.
God chose the mess because He saw how good it was to have a world filled with people who can love and create. He knew that it was risky, that it would be messy. That evil would be a possibility. But that’s not His plan. He doesn’t want evil. He didn’t positively create evil, even though He did create dangerous things. The dangers are part of His plan to teach us prudence, responsibility, and obedience to His will.
Willie Wonka loves creating delicious treats. God loves creating human beings with the capacity to love and create. It’s not safe. It’s positively dangerous. But it’s worth the risk. And it is very good.
Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.
