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According to Christianity, long before the foundation of the universe was laid and the seeds of physical existence sown, there was a war in Heaven. The archangel Lucifer led a revolt against God. As punishment for this attempt to overthrow him, God cast Lucifer into Hell along with all the angels who followed him. The question has often been asked: Why didn't God simply destroy Lucifer? Why allow him to exist and eventually come to corrupt and cause trouble for mankind?
Well, to look at the story as a simple mythology, the obvious answer would be that the story represents the origin of Evil and its adversarial relationship with Good. It is a cautionary tale of envy, pride, and defiance. The story is not constructed around any sort of final, complete victory over evil, because the conflict is meant to be an on-going one. The Devil is allowed to persist in the tale out of a certain necessity, because the story is told in retrospect. War, disease, pain, and death are all still with us. Evil still exists, and its agencies are still at large, engineering sorrow and disaster all over the world. The story is not an ending but a beginning, with the battle lines drawn and the world itself at stake.
But this sort of answer only works if you treat the story as a fictional one, and it considers the question above as a matter of plot-construction. It steps outside the reality of the story. It deals not with the action on stage, but instead with the scaffolding that supports the stage. It doesn't really address the problem of why God didn't destroy the Devil. It merely points out that you bought a ticket for four-hour play, and so the main conflict can't be resolved in the opening act. Needless to say, this answer is an unsatisfying one for those who take the story literally, those who believe this didn't take place on a stage, but in the open air of reality. Aside from that, it only confesses the necessity of the plot hole. It does nothing to fix it.
Now, I'm not here to debate the literal truth of the story. I can't say that I've reached the point in my life or my consideration of these issues to make any sort of claim one way or the other. These things, of course, go far beyond the scope of the matter at hand, and hopefully I'll be able to get into these things gradually down the road and reach some kind of satisfying conclusions. For the time being, I don't mean to offend or mislead anyone about where I stand on these issues. All I can say is that I'm still in the process of working these things out myself. For now, I only wish to make a hypothetical proposition concerning the problem above; a proposition that might even lead to some kind of real truth one way or the other.
So, the question was: Why didn't God destroy Lucifer and his followers? I thought about this for a long time, and then it hit me...maybe he did destroy them. Maybe the idea of being "cast out of Heaven" is really a metaphor for annihilation. But the problem is that destroying them created another problem. It created a void in existence. Prior to this God had only created. He had made Heaven and all the angels in glorious perfection. Then this insurrection took place, and it had to be dealt with. Out of necessity, God was driven to do something he had never done before, destroy. This would have an unavoidable side-effect. For the first time, something that was would be no more. For the first time, there would be a nothingness. This nothingness would come to haunt existence, like an inexhaustible vacuum threatening to draw everything into its own annihilation. Satan, the adversary, is the negation of Lucifer. He is the nothingness, the void, the hole in existence that was caused when Lucifer was destroyed. His whole problem is that he doesn't exist. He lurks about reality, trying to consume it and give himself substance. He wants to exist again, even if it means destroying everything in the process.
There is something in the natural universe that provides an excellent example of the process at work here, the black hole. When a star dies it collapses in on itself. In scientific terms it condenses to an infinitely diminished point of overwhelming gravity. This gravity draws everything that comes near it, even light, into it. In effect, it is the void created in the absence of the star. Relativity says that gravity is the manifestation of mass warping space, a curvature drawing matter in. The black hole takes this to its extreme. It's more than a curvature; it's a hole sucking things into the void.
These black holes pose a problem, known to scientists as the Information Paradox. The Law of Information basically states that information can not be destroyed. If you burn a log in the fire, even though the log is consumed, the information of that log still exists and could conceivably be reconstructed on the quantum level from the ashes, the fire, and heat. Black holes seem to violate this law. When they consume something, the information it was composed of seems to be destroyed completely. But this impossible. The information must persist in some form or another. Scientists have proposed various solutions to this problem, but they're still working on it.
Likewise, God's initial act of destruction caused its own paradox. Lucifer and his followers could be annihilated, but the fact of this annihilation could not be erased. The information of their existence could not be destroyed altogether. It was merely inverted into nothingness, consumed like matter in a black hole, but impossible to obliterate completely. An afterimage of their existence remained, like a lingering shadow of a light. This caused a small crack in the fabric of existence, a tiny seed of corruption. It was a problem that had to be solved or it would eventually threaten to undo everything.
So here we are again at the beginning, and maybe we've gained a fresh start on the story. But it's only a start. I plan to go much further with this down the road. For me, this idea, starting as it does with the premise that God was driven out of necessity to create an unavoidable problem that had to be solved, provides a possibility to shed a light on some of the conundrums of Christianity. It gives a reason why there's still evil in the world. It provides a possible driving motive to the overall divine plan and a meaning to the purpose of our existence. The universe, rather than being created on a capricious whim, might play a part in the solution to this problem. The fall of man, which I touched on in an earlier post might not be just a regrettable misfortune, but instead an absolutely essential piece of the puzzle. But these are all matters for future posts. As I said, this is just a beginning.
