When it comes to nature, evil results from bad decision-making. This can be on our part: Doing something dumb like trying to live right next to a volcano. This can also be on the part of nature. I view all matter as alive, as having a subjective side. Hence, natural elements can also make bad decisions.
Next, the issue of how God is related to change is a very complex issue. It will take us beyond questions about evil. I am gong to email you some of my thoughts on this matter right now.
To provide some relevant background, most Christians assume there is only one model of God, one official picture of what God is like in his own nature. At present, that is definitely not true. There are at least two, classical theism and neo-classical theism, also termed process theology. Most Christians the traditional Christian model of God (classical theism) came directly out to the pages of Scripture. Absolutely not true. Let's go way back in history for a moment. The Greeks had a real appetite for metaphysics, for inquiring into what is the basic structure of reality. Is it all mind? Matter? It it changeable? In contrast, metaphysics was of little or no interest to the ancient Hebrews. The Bible, for example, tells us very little of how God is actually built. Is God all immaterial? Material? What? As the church worked its way up into the educated classes of the Greco-Roman world, it had to provide some kind of metaphysical system and level of discussion in order to survive. So the church fathers freely incorporated Hellenic concepts into their description of God. Although there were many different schools of Hellenic philosophy, the Greeks as a whole had real trouble wit the physical world of time, change,relativity, and matter. More than one major school argued that change in any form, most especially movement, was a logical impossibility and therefore dos not exist. Plato was a dominant force here, arguing that the world of time and change is just a big illusion and the major source of all suffering and evil. The truly divine, “the really real,” was a wholly immaterial world of static perfection, totally immutable, wholly simple, wholly detached form the evil world of time and change.
Once these Hellenic notions were incorporated into Christianity, God was defined as void of body, parts, passions, compassion, wholly immutable, omnipotent, without even the shadow of motion, the supreme cause, never the effect. I am listing almost verbatum here the description form the major creeds,s such as the Westminster Confession, and the writings of the major church fathers, such as Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, etc. Granted, they spoke of God's love, but it was a totally cold, unemotional love. Both Anselm and Aquinas insisted that although God might seem to us to be compassionate, he defiantly is not, in his own nature. Since God has no passion (emotion), then he could have no compassion, either. Unlike human love, God's love was totally minus any sympathy or empathy. God could have no emotion, because emotions are changes in bodily state, and God does not have a body and God does not change. Not to suffer is better than to suffer, hence, God as the most perfect being was wholly incapable of suffering, or experiencing any other negative emotion. Suggesting in any way the the Father suffered was ruled out as a major heresy.
In the 20-century, this model began to be seriously questioned. It really didn't seem at all compatible with a God of love at all. At best, it seems to present a picture of God as a Ruthless Moralist, Ruling Caesar, and Unmoved Mover. Also, it seemed incompatible with out modern understanding of realty, the really real,as in a constant state of flux and also relativistic,where entities are not ever solitary, but emerge out of their relationships with others. The Greeks enshrined the values of the immune and the immutable,and this also was in question. Why should it be seen as a weakness that we have needs? Why should God be seen as weak of it or she also has needs? What's wrong with God experiencing genuine pain and suffering? How can anyone other than a suffering God help? If God can't change in any way whatsoever, then saint or sinner, it's all the same to God,who remains blissfully indifferent to the world. But who can put any real faith in an indifferent Deity? If God could be just as happy,whole, and complete without a universe as with one,then why did he bother to create one and how is it to have any real significance I the life of God, when it contributes absolutely nothing to him?
The result was a new model of God in which God and the universe are mutually interrelated. God grows as the world goes. God is the supreme effect as well as cause. My favorite metaphor here is that the universe is the body of God. I can't find any other that does justice to God's radical sensitivity to all things. There is a direct, immediate flow of all creaturely feelings into God, and a direct immediate flow of God's feelings into creatures. Hence, God radically transcends us, as we are total strangers to the empathic responsiveness exhibited by God. Now, there is much more to say here, but I feel I should stop for now. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
