Some accuse God of negligence regarding creation. It’s not that God doesn’t care, but His power of unilateral intervention is limited or non-existent.
God has the supreme power of influence (divine inspiration), but His nature as the ontological whole also locks him into a nature which is necessarily “immutable” and thus not all-powerful (omnipotence is not an attribute of God).
God has no free will, and never created anything literally, rather, his “creation” is what was already emerging out of chaos as a natural process (continuous creation; or creation-evolution 造化). Whatever is the limitations of nature is the limitations of God. Whatever is the limitations of God is the limitations of nature. But note that “nature” is an abstraction of human conceptual origin. When we say nature, we mean the phenomena we consider as occurring by themselves without human agency or divine agency.
But what if both human agency and divine agency are natural processes and thus not wholly in human nor divine control? Did you choose to be born? Did you choose to control your evolutionary history? Did you choose to be a conscious being?
Neither did God. This is really putting a new spin on “made in God’s image”— that we are alike due to our naturalness, rather than due to a supposed divine origin.
God is not equivalent to nature (not pantheism). He is not the world, but he is co-eternal to its processes.
But that being said, where is God though? What even is God?
He is not separate from nature, but is also not equivalent to it. If the world is the “body”, than God is the “spirit”— that is to say, there is an ontological distinction that distinguishes God from World, but they are mutual processes in all other respects.
Pantheism (god is world) is wrong. But Panentheism (god pervades world) might be correct.
Now, since you are part of nature, and God is part of nature; whatever we experience as good or evil is no more God’s fault than it is our own.
If there is any negligence, it is plainly mostly our own, since unlike God, we have much greater agency (conditional free will) due to our position in the world as a changing “part”, but not the “whole” (which would be unceasing change, and thus static, and thus God).
“Why do God not stop evil?”, should really be “why won’t you?”If the Mind wants to treat an illness, the Mind influences the Body to do so by taking medicine or performing surgery. The Mind cannot “will” miraculous healing. In this allegory, Mind is God, and Body is Mankind— and by extension, the entire Universe of human experience.
We have all experienced the truth of “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” in our personal lives; but that is also how God is related to us. He cannot move us, because we are unwilling to be moved— but moving us is the only thing God can do. By nature, he cannot do anything else.
Justin C. Hsu 