The Problem of Evil basically asks, "If God is good, how can there be evil in the world?" Many have answered this question by blaming free will, but this does not really solve the "creative" problems, those that arose by creation: Natural disasters, disease, Brazillian Wandering Spiders, parasites in the Amazon, etc.
But if God exists, and is everything that Christians say about him, and yet evil exists, then God himself cannot protect even his Own from disaster, then, what is the point of believing i
n Him? Perhaps worse is that the author brought up the Book of Job, which is an egregious mistake on his part, because as I've explained earlier the evil in the story comes directly from God himself when he agrees to Satan's wager, and later when he confronts Job as the Whirlwind2.But we can at least say that God that learns from his mistakes: He expressed regret to Noah after everything on Earth drowned from his Word, and he rewarded Job for his steadfast commitment to Justice.
So if more than 2,000 years ago, God learned to control his Warrior half, why should he repeat those mistakes again? The only answer open to us is to admit that God either was never involved in the first place and was a religious expression of the Israelites' collective will--a distinct possibility which underpins the entire Bible and especially in the Book of Esther, when she rescues her people from a situation similar to that of Egypt (Exodus) without God's help--or has since lost interest (The Tanakh places Job as the very last book in which God directly speaks to humanity).
In a broader context, the problem of good things happening to bad people and vice-versa is probably even older than Greek philosophy, and no one has ever come up with a truly satisfying answer that does not rely on belief in supernatural forces, even though the answer is right in front of our faces.
The world is simply a web of infinitely conflicting orders. We have seen in the past 2 and 1/4 years the entire global economy collapse because of the avarice of a few, we have seen a nation face an extreme natural disaster and nearly nuclear holocaust. We have seen the few wield power with a complete disregard for the many. Why? The movements of the Earth's tectonic plates, the apathy of those who know right from wrong toward our political process. There is a famous quote that has been attributed to many people: "All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." We did nothing, and the Tea Party took control. How come it's just Representative Wiener who is making the Republicans look foolish when it is incredibly easy for all of us to do so? How come no one else is standing up for what is right?
But this view accounts for much less, also. Bus routes, for example, are an order. The hiring process is an order, a Kafka-esque one to be sure, but an order nonetheless. Anything anyone does or creates is an order, and these nearly infinite orders collide to either create or destroy.
My favorite example to use is traffic patterns: Traffic lights are on a timer, and school buses are on a schedule. You left the house at 3:10, and you know that the school gets out at around 3:00, so when you blame God for being stuck behind a school bus breathing in diesel exhaust, you can blame only your bad timing.
But the existence of these orders does not negate the existence of free will. Given the existences of these orders, we can make decisions and influence them towards what we want. In the job search, the organization my dad belongs to claims that job seekers should form some kind of relationship with people who work where they want to work and attempt to indirectly influence the hiring process. We are also capable of direct action: Talking to someone at a party could lead to a new friendship or romantic relationship.
Psychology has attempted to dissect--for better or worse--the motivations that drive us to do what we do and believe what it is that we believe. We cannot escape who we are, but in the process of growing up, we can shape ourselves to who it is we want to be. This is, granted, inextricably tied to who we were as children, but we can make conscious decisions to avoid bad outcomes. I was heavily bullied in school, and in middle school, I sketched really bad things in my notebooks, and I grew up on Duke Nukem 3D, a game much, much worse than Doom. I myself, because some kid told the teacher what I was doing, was almost a victim of the draconian policies that emerged after Columbine. But I knew from the outset that I never ever wanted to take revenge, even in high school where it was worse. It was a conscious decision, because despite the incredibly violent media I consume, I am actually an incredibly non-violent person*.
But there is an underlying reason for this: I have always learned from the consequences resulting from others' actions. I've always been a people-watcher, and I always watched when people would get in trouble for doing things that were reckless. Imagine if I became a bully myself, or that I had brought a gun to school? Where would I be? If I had become a bully in turn, I would be no better than those who oppressed me, and if I had brought a gun to school, I would be dead.
So while we do not have total control over our lives, we do not have no control, either. Our ability to make conscious decisions, even if these decisions are heavily influenced by who we are as persons, counts for free will because we have the power to shape who we become.
The process of becoming is a complicated one, but it is primarily influenced by the drive to learn and what we learn. People who read different things are almost entirely different people. Someone who reads economics textbooks and Atlas Shrugged is going to be completely different from someone who reads Plato, Heidegger, and Mill.
Back to the subject at hand, the overriding orders and their constitutions change as other orders expand and contract in response to those orders that are currently dominant. Politics is an excellent example of this kind of play. For 11 years, the Republican party had enjoyed prominence, despite Obama's landslide election, which only further incited the GOP, culminating in the election of the Tea Party to legislative and state executive positions. But by abusing the power lent to them, a competing order is gaining momentum against them, and will hopefully overtake them.
These orders and who they hurt or help is not at all dependent upon the beliefs or moral structures of individuals. I'm sure many of those who were killed in Japan believed in God, as did many of the 3,000 who lost their lives on 9/11. I'm also sure that many of those who lost their parents and siblings and friends to AIDS in Africa believed in God. I'm sure that most Tea Party Patriots do sincerely want what they think is best for the country, even though the movement they joined of their own free will will leave all of us poorer, less educated, and less free than before.
In Plato's Republic, Thrasymachus, a nihilist, believed that being unjust was more profitable than being just. Socrates disagreed because he believed that those who were unjust would eventually be punished. On a much smaller scale, this view commonly holds true, but not always. Aristotle took up this theme in Nicomachean Ethics, when he discussed The Golden Mean. We have certain agency within a relatively small sphere of influence to receive our just desserts. But we have to act. A good person will largely find himself good friends, whereas a bad person will have to rely solely on financial resources to find friends, but these friends will not be true friends and will leave him when he can no longer pay for them.
However, most of the time any kind of moral retribution relies entirely upon individual or collective human action. A serial killer is brought to justice because of police investigation, a witness, and a resolute jury. But most of the time, people whose malevolent influence stretches far beyond any serial killer are let free, because these criminals are able to fight the order against them with their vast financial resources. Bernard Madoff and the collective will of Wall Street bankers and oil industrialists, despite having impoverished society and compromised national security (as well as poisoning the environment), respectively, are able to maintain control by manipulating both the people whom they are disenfranchising and the very government. It is to the point now where it is uncertain if the collective Will of the People could ever reestablish itself and mete out appropriate punishment to those who have wronged it.
There is no room for any God here, who, ironically, has only five times exerted his "godlike" powers over the Earth independent of human action (Creation, The Flood, Sodom & Gomorrah, the Plagues, and the Parting of the Red Sea). For his dealings with Israel and its neighbors, God has exerted his influence entirely through human action. This is no different, except that God is removed from the equation.
There is nothing guiding us, nothing mitigating the damage we might do to one another, nothing influencing orders to maintain Good in the world. Only our own orders and the orders of the natural mechanisms of the planet and the animal and plant kingdoms exist. Evolution is a response with survival as the goal; humanity has a little more to worry about, and our competing orders express our needs and wants, and most of these compete with one another.
Many people talk about a pendulum, swinging back and forth. But it's not a pendulum. It's an elegant, tightly-knit spider's web, with some threads bolder than others. Superficially, it appears chaotic and random, but underneath belies some semblance of order.
1) http://www.sunrisepresbyterian.org/PDFs/Lent%20Lessons%2009/Pausing%20on%20Road%20Jerusalem%20Session%203.pdf
2) http://informeddecider.blogspot.com/2011/02/book-of-job-part-ii.html
*I really enjoy martial arts.
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