33. Is There More Good or Evil in the World?
Many people mistakenly believe that there is more evil in the world than there is good. They come to this erroneous conclusion because they narrowly focus on details of their own individual circumstances rather than looking at the big picture. [III, 12] An ignorant person considers the world as existing to fulfill his own whims, so if things don't go the way he wants, something must be fundamentally wrong with the universe. If a person takes a giant step back and looks at the entirety of creation, he'll realize how truly minuscule his problems are in the grand scheme of things. There's no evil in the stars, the planets, or in nature. Evil only exists as a small percentage of the human experience, which is a tiny fraction of the universal whole.
If a person should become ill, some will lament that the world is a harsh, cruel place. Not only are this person's misfortunes anecdotal, all of humanity is but the smallest portion of creation. Biblical verses that convey this idea include Psalms 144:4 ("Man is like a vanity, his days like a passing shadow"), Job 25:6 ("How much less man, who is a worm, and the son of man, who is a maggot") and Isaiah 40:15 ("Behold, the nations are like a drop in a bucket..."), among numerous others. It's important for a person to keep his sense of self-importance in perspective.
The universe is not here to fulfill our whims; it exists because God wills it so and man is actually pretty low on the hierarchy of creation. Nevertheless, man's existence is a great gift from God and whatever evils we encounter in life are ultimately of our own devising. We create problems in this world and then we blame them on God. Deuteronomy 32:5 says, "Is corruption His? No, the fault is His children's, a crooked and perverse generation." Similarly, Proverbs 19:3 tells us, "The foolishness of man perverts his way and his heart complains against God."
