Most who believe in an all-good God face the problem of how an all-good God could allow the existence of all of the misery and suffering throughout all of human history (and still ongoing).
Some just chalk it up to his inscrutable wisdom for why he allows it to happen, figuring that he will square things in the end.
Some say that free will is so ethically necessary to God that evil is just a “necessary evil” in order to allow man to freely choose for him/herself
what kind of person they will be.
(Ouch! But if you choose not to be good and love and worship God and Christ, you end up burning forever in hellfire! So your free choice in the oppositie direction from Christianity is punished, even if it is allowed!)
Some say that the existence of evil proves the nonexistence of God, or at least the less-than-omnibenevolence/omnipotence of God.
Well, how about…THE HEROIC OVERRIDE!!
The Heroic Override is a new theory proposing a logical coexistence between an all-good God and the existence of human evil.
Given God’s omniscience (the ability to know everything (that is true) that will happen past, present, and future from some past point in time (before the relevant events occur)) it follows that God foresaw every evil act that was to be: the Jewish Holocaust, kidnappings, murders, rapes, etc.
Let’s call the entire continuum of these evil acts: THE GRAND PRIMORDIAL NIHILISM ( in the sense that every evil act was foreseen in the distant past by an omniscient God, and that it engendered a nihilistic philosophy that life is nothing but a meaningless sequence of events governed only by the law of cause and effect)
God, disturbed by the GPN determined to deal with the fact of GPN rather than to “run from it” by choosing to create nothing at all or some all-good world (which might have been nice; but optimistically we can say that an all-good world is in the making…if we believe this).
So, he “cheats” the meaning of GPN by creating the future victims of every evil act (at least those acts leading to death, predominantly) as ZOMBIES; not the horror movie, brain-eating type, but as philosopher’s zombies, or living biological organisms, having functioning brains and bodies, but totally devoid of consciousness.
(See David J. Chalmers, professor of Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence Studies at Arizona University, and his online site and paper: “Consciousness and it’s Place in Nature” for more about zombies, and their conceptual use as “proof” of a distinction between consciousness and the physical
If God makes the victims zombies (or partial zombies, or humans having consciousness right up to the day of their murder, when God “abducts” their consciousness, while allowing the body to drive the car, go to work, and inadvertantly run into it’s “murderer”), placing the original consciousness within some “temporary paradise”, then God has in a
sense, “heroically overriden” the inherent nihilism in acts of evil.
Simply by cheating evil individuals of the consciousness of their victims, allowing the body to continue to “go through the motions”, thus giving the illusion that the victim is having a traumatic experience.
There’s more to this theory, but it does validate biblical verses of how God “protects the righteous” and of how God is " all-good, all the time".
And, one can argue that if the theory is true, then from an observational (sensory) viewpoint, the world would appear and behave just as it in fact does, since the existence or non-existence of consciousness would appear behaviorally (observing a physical body from an external point of view) indistinguishable.
The reader is invited to judge this for logical inconsistency and invited to post their views about this unconventional speculation.
Thank you,
Jay M. Brewer
phenomenal_graffiti@yahoo.com