More problem of evil

Today's reading has an interesting problem of evil aspect about it. Our ancestors didn't worry about evil the way we do. For us it is a pseudo problem or a logical problem at best. We posit an all-powerful, all-knowing God and then wonder how there can still be evil. It's not a real life problem at all but the sort of problem dilletantes get exercised about when they have nothing better to do.

Our ancestors had a problem of evil as opposed to the problem of evil. To put it simply, there was a lot of evil about and they needed to reconcile that with their belief in a loving God. Not because they doubted his existence but because they weren't sure he liked them as much as they'd hoped. They didn't take God's love as an entitlement.

(This it seems to me is the real challenge; not believing in God but believing he loves us. You see it in a lot of atheists—let them talk and you get the sense they believe in God very much and they hate him.)

Anyway, back to today's reading.

When the LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth,
and how no desire that his heart conceived
was ever anything but evil,
he regretted that he had made man on the earth,
and his heart was grieved.

You might say that is the problem of evil from God's perspective. This is the set up for the Noah story. The people who set this story up in the form we know it in the Bible were not reporting history. They weren't even telling a story that was original to them. They were setting up a story that everybody already knew and explaining it's moral significance. It remains a much more profound story than all the philosophical discussions of the problem of evil put together.