The problem of natural evil centers on the following question: is the existence of an all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful God consistent with the enormous suffering resulting from natural disasters, diseases, genetic defects, predation, and other “evils” that appear to be inherent features of the natural world?
The pervasiveness and brutality of so-called “natural evil” is widely regarded as one of the most difficult aspects of the problem of evil because it requires the biblical theist to address two seemingly impossible challenges that have emerged from the work of natural scientists. First, the theist must reconcile the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God with the findings of physics establishing that the material order is governed by processes which are indifferent to the suffering they often cause. Second, the biblical theist must reconcile the narrative of man’s direct creation and fall with the findings of evolutionary biology. Discoveries in this field of study include a huge and ever-growing assemblage of ancient fossils indicating that—for hundreds of millions of years prior to the first humans arriving on Earth—a vast number and array of animals lived, reproduced, suffered, and died. Taken together, these findings of natural science show that suffering, death, and the indifferent processes of nature that are often the immediate cause of suffering and death were all present long before man arrived into the temporal material realm. This timeline suggests that man’s original sin could not be the cause of natural evil.
To date, no prominent theodicy has been able to reconcile the findings of natural science with the narrative of creation and fall in Genesis 1—3. The Advent of Time addresses the problem of natural evil by asserting that time itself is a product of the Fall. It then examines the differences between “timeless being” (defined as a form of existence that is experienced completely outside of the construct of time) and “temporal being” (a finite form of existence in which beings live out their lives locked within the one-directional flow of linear time). An overview of these arguments appears on the “Science & Direct Creation” page of this site. The full argument appears in Part II of the book.