I fail to see how this is taken out of context. I could in fact say exactly the same thing but I won't (or have I just?
)...I'm trying to understand what Tolkien says about Eru from the text he gives us, nothing else.
Even if evil is an absence of Good then if Eru is omnipotent then he must have caused the situation for that absence to happen.
If you have a can of petrol and a match and you give them to someone and he then burns down your house, who is to blame? You might beat yourself up over it and not trust anyone again. How about if you give your best mate a can of petrol and he offers to fill up your car, and then asks if he can borrow a match to light a cigarette when he's done, but then he burns down your house? Who's to blame then? Of course we might say he was simply using his free will and as we did not realise the consequences, he was our best mate after all, it wasn't our fault. But what if the petrol and the match never even existed? Or we did not choose to put him into that situation? We caused him to be in contact with the petrol and the match, even if we had no idea what he would do.
If evil in Tolkien's world is the absence of something then Eru (as creator of all) causes Melkor to be missing something.
Add into this that Eru
knows what will happen. If he does not know, and if he does not cause everything to be, then he is impotent, not omnipotent.
And if we try and solve it by saying "OK then, Eru is not omnipotent" then who is the Authority and how do we ever distinguish between good and evil?
Having Eru also put evil into the world does not mean that he prefers it, nor even that he likes it. It's just there. It's the understanding
why that's the
really interesting question.
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It is also interesting that Tolkien says that there is no humanly acceptable answer to the problem of evil if one posits a wholly good God (or Eru), which I still insist The Silmarillion does, in spite of how it can be taken out of context.
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The problem here is that you are confusing one type, one interpretation of God with Eru. Whereas there are many, many possible answers to this problem. The whole pursuit of Theodicy is devoted to this problem and that has continued for thousands of years and probably will continue as long as people have religions. Lots of answers have been turned up - and I'll get to one fully commensurate with Tolkien's writings at the end.
This essential problem is why Tolkien creates an Eru who is omnipotent, who creates All and causes All to be. This ties in completely with the concept of the Long Defeat, an idea that critics (including Christians) of Tolkien's work put down simply to the problem that evil can never be fully defeated but we must try to do it all the same or else existence is futile. It ties in with what Eru says about how evil is simply 'tributary to glory'; the only thing which evil can ultimately do is serve to greater increase Glory. It also ties in with the existence of Free Will as without options from which to choose, there is no point in having Free Will in a universe with a fully omnipotent God; the Children may as well be automatons otherwise, flawless Cybermen without the burden of choices to make. This rounding off of even the theological aspects is entirely what we might come to expect of a writer like Tolkien who covers his bases and sought out complete internal consistency and continuity in his world
This concept of an all-creating, all-powerful God is also to be found in the Book of Job in which God repeatedly smites Job with troubles (and allows Satan to do so). Job's comforters advise him to 'repent' as misfortune is always a divine punishment and fortune is always a divine reward, but Job won't do that. His wife tells him to renounce God as he cannot possibly exist if he does this; Job won't do that either. He says: "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away". Job is eventually (it seems that way anyway, it's not wholly clear) released from his troubles. The lesson is that God simply exists, and he should be worshipped even if he does bad things to the good. It's about God's divine right to do as he pleases, as whatever he does it's in our best interests. Not comforting. not even something I personally agree with, but that's what comes out in Tolkien's work whether I like it or not.