You, who acknowledge God, with all His "absolute" attributes, further assert that this God-love of the miserable, unfortunate, suffering man, when he finally finds rest in death, will send him for his sins to hell, where this unfortunate criminal will suffer forever -- "there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." There was not enough weeping and gnashing of teeth here on earth, it turns out that the all-loving Lord has prepared even greater torments in the next world for eternity. What nonsense! What a horror! And yet I must believe! Never! If, with a certain stretch, I can still admit the existence of both an incomprehensible and an "invisible" God, then when I ask myself the question of evil and suffering, I feel that belief in God is simply absurd nonsense.

Confessor. Everything you have just said is really "deadly" questions, but not for believers in God, as you think, but on the contrary, for those who do not believe in Him. And I am very glad that you have posed these questions so clearly and firmly, for there is no other way out of them than faith.

Unknown. It's great. Do you want to turn my weapon against me? Let's see how you do it.

Confessor. I will try to reveal to you how faith answers your murderous questions, and then you will see how helpless unbelief is before these questions.

Unknown. I only hope that you will dispense with references to the Church Fathers and other authorities.

Confessor. You have probably noticed that in conversations with you I avoid such references, although I always have in mind both the Word of God and the works of the Church Fathers. But in this regard, perhaps, I will quote the words of the Holy Fathers, not because I consider them an authority for you, but because they express with such perfection what is almost inexpressible in human words.

Unknown. However, since you give me complete freedom to speak as I see fit, I should not constrain you in this regard. I'm listening.

Confessor. Why does Almighty God allow evil to exist? Why did He not destroy evil and make everyone good by a single act of His will? This is the first question you put to me. The very formulation of this question seems to me to be a misunderstanding. For example, imagine the question: Can Almighty God commit sin? Obviously not. But if He cannot commit sin, then He is not omnipotent? Is it possible to seriously raise such questions? And your question only seems different at first glance. "Can Almighty God make people good?" But this means to destroy the basic property of good and to turn "good" into moral nothingness.

Unknown. I don't know what you mean.

Confessor. If good were a simple and inevitable consequence of the power of God, it would be, like any other phenomenon of the material world, causally conditioned, and therefore would lose its moral content. I have already shown you, when we were discussing immortality, that a causally determined phenomenon cannot have a moral evaluation. That which is deprived of liberty can be neither good nor evil, but is inevitable. The concepts of good and evil presuppose "freedom of choice" in man. But where we are talking about freedom, we can no longer talk about causal dependence. So, in a logically formal sense, your question contains a misunderstanding, which will become quite obvious if the question is put in this way: why does not Almighty God Himself, by His power, make people good, that is, deprive them of freedom, without which no good can exist at all?

Unknown. Of course, the question does not make sense in such a formulation.

Confessor. But this formulation follows from the essence of the concept of good. Thus, the answer to the question: why God Himself does not make people good and incapable of doing evil, is clear. Because He gave them freedom. It is on this concept of freedom that we will now dwell in more detail. When we talked about immortality, I was considering free will, because it was necessary to show the meaninglessness of this concept to an unbelieving mind. Now we will try to consider this concept from the point of view of its positive content, so important not only for the solution of the question of evil, but also for many other questions.

The concept of freedom is one of those concepts which, like eternity and infinity, are on the one hand incomprehensible to our reason, and on the other hand, are affirmed by it as something that undoubtedly exists. Man thinks according to the laws of causality. For the limited human mind, every phenomenon must have its cause. He cannot think of action and phenomenon as "causeless". But freedom is causelessness, something primary, unconditioned by anything previous, some mysterious principle, completely incomprehensible to us. Freedom for our reason has no limit in the sense of causality, just as infinity has no limit in space or time. And if we were to conceive of freedom as causality, we would arrive at the same hopeless situation as trying to comprehend infinity in time and space. If we break the chain of the causal series and say, "This phenomenon depends on such and such a cause," and then set a limit, our reason will immediately ask: What was the cause that determined this last of these causes? If, however, we say: no, it was the last cause, and it is not conditioned by anything, we thereby affirm the incomprehensible concept of free will as causelessness, which undoubtedly exists.

Unknown. But why can't the causal series be recognized as infinite?