Why does evil exist?

[ebia]

wow this is a really profound response I paticularly liked how you compared popular answers to understanding the mind of God like the mind of man [which alot of us try to do]. I guess the problem here [which i've kind of tried to get across other places on the fourm] is that if God doesn't exist, than there's no point trying to get inside his mind. However if he DOES exist, than there's no point in trying to get inside his mind because his thinking is higher than ours. This is really the problem with merging the human mind with relegein and this is where I see the most controversy.

The problem is simply this in a nutshell "do relegious people claim God's mind is higher in order to cover for their manpulation? Or do relegious people truly beleive in a real God who truly thinks higher than humans do?". If God exists and is higher than our minds than our concepts of morelity and life and pretty much everything would be inferer to his. Alot of his acts we wouldn't understand and we would have to take by faith.

While that's true to a point, except that God's ultimate revelation of himself is in the fully human person of Jesus of Nazareth - someone who we can begin to understand - and it's by looking at Jesus we get our clearest picture of God. So, while we can't fully understand God, we can (constantly) make steps towards understanding him.

However, we also need to be aware that when we deduce ideas or doctines from the bible we are producing something further from, not closer to, the reality.

The bible tells us about evil, how it came to be, and what God is doing about it, almost exclusively through naratives; it would be most arogant of us to think our theories are as good, let alone better, explanations than the stories themselves.