Problem of Evil or Mystery of Love?

I have learnt, in my many hours spent engrossed in episodes of Aaron Sorkin's 'The West Wing', that the best way to respond to an inconvenient question is to repudiate the premise.

According to 'the World', the problem of evil is thus structured:

'If God is all-powerful, and all-loving, why does evil persist?'

Notice that this is not a statement: it is a question (albeit a semi-rhetorical one). It establishes three premises: 1) God is all-powerful, 2) God is all-loving, and 3) Evil exists in the world. The causation is semantically implied. A full logical argument would thus proceed:

If an all-powerful and all-loving God existed, He would not allow evil to exist.
Evil exists.
Therefore, an all-powerful and all-loving God cannot exist.

The inference is either that a) no God exists or b) a god exists that is either not all-powerful or not all-loving, or both (and assumedly this would nullify notions of monotheism).



Let us return to the original premises.

1) God is all-powerful, 2) God is all-loving, and 3) Evil exists in the world.

I accept these premises. However, I add another premise, which I believe to be indisputable.

4) The evil that exists in the world is man-made / Human beings are evil.


Now let us rephrase the Problem of Evil.

If human beings are evil, and God is all-loving, why does He love us?


Elaborating, I append a further premise: 5) God is all-righteous.

We are left with a more refined Problem of Evil, which really, is a Mystery of Love:

If human beings are evil, and God is all-righteous, all-powerful, and all-loving, why does God love us rather than simply destroy us?

The logic of the mystery is completed when we attatch a final premise: 6) God is love.