The problem of evil is the most used and biggest objection to the existence of God
there is not a skeptic out there who doesn't cite the existence of evil as a reason God probably does not exist and
So we need to be frank
this is a serious objection that Christians cannot simply overlook and
There are no answers to the problem of evil that can explain every horrible event
The reason why this is a persistent objection is because of the emotional sting that evil causes runs deep for mankind
Why does God allow so much pain and misery?
Does God really love us if he can look down and see a child being tortured and not stop it any?
One of us would if we came across such a horrible act
Yet the omniscient God does nothing and simply lets evil continue unchecked why
I've spent years researching this in Adelaide a formal video on it because I wanted to take my time and give it a fair treatment
Again, this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed
But over the years of my research, I have come to the conclusion
The only way to address the problem of evil is not just through philosophy
Although that is part of it because the problem of evil stings emotionally more than anything else. I'm
Indebted to Clay Jones for this but one cannot truly address the problem of evil without the message of the gospel. I
Don't think the problem of evil can be answered without Christianity and I'll explain why later on
But first we need to begin by going over what the problem of evil is and the different types of arguments I
Would suspect the problem of evil has been used for millennia
But the logical problem of evil was famously given by the ancient Greek philosopher
Epicurus and is what most people think of when they think of the problem of evil?
Premise 1 if God is all good. Then he wants to stop evil premise 2 if God is all-powerful
Then can stop evil
Premise 3 there is evil
Conclusion. Therefore there is on an all-powerful and all good God
However, this argument is not used by most modern atheistic philosophers because it ignored another important attribute of God his
omniscience
Being that God is all-knowing. He might in his perfect knowledge have very good reasons for allowing evil that we cannot see
Agnostic Paul Draper notes that some serious attempts have been given that show evil is logically compatible with God's existence
Specifically he says alvin plantinga's free will defense has persuaded many
planting a says of his free will defense a
world containing creatures who are significantly free and freely perform more good than evil actions is
More valuable all else being equal than a world containing no free creatures at all
Now God can create free creatures, but he can't cause or determine them to do only what is right for
If he does so then they aren't significantly free after all
They do not do what is right freely to create creatures capable of moral good therefore
He must create creatures
Capable of moral evil and he can't give these creatures of freedom to perform evil and at the same time
prevent them from doing so as
It turned out sadly enough some of the free creatures. God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom
And this is the source of moral evil the fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong
However counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against his goodness for he could have first Auld the occurrence of moral evil
only by removing the possibility of moral good
Paul Draper notes in order for a logical argument from evil to succeed
It is necessary to show that for some known fact about evil
It is logically impossible for God to have a good moral reason to permit that fact to obtain
this however is precisely what most philosophers nowadays believe cannot be shown and
So the free will defense succeeds in showing it as at least logically possible
For God to exist alongside evil
Because it might be the case a world with freewill and evil is more
valuable than a world with no free will and no evil and
Thus William Roe has to admit there is a fairly compelling argument for the view that the existence of evil is logically consistent
with the existence of a theistic God
What most atheists argue today is the evidential problem of evil
Which today is where the real debate is because it is a probabilistic argument
It argues that given the amount of evil in the world. It is unlikely an all-loving all-powerful
God exists as Paul Draper says
premise 1 gratuitous evil exists
Premise 2 the hypothesis of indifference ie that if there are
Supernatural beings they are indifferent to gratuitous evils is a better explanation for 1 than theism
Conclusion therefore evidence prefers that no God as commonly understood by theists exists
Perhaps Sam Harris explains the issue of evil in a far more relatable way
Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl
Soon he will rape torture and kill her
If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment
It will happen in a few hours or days at most
the girl's parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is
Watching over them in their family. Are they right to believe this?
is it good that they believe this know the entirety of atheism is contained in this response as
You can see the issue many skeptics have is given the amount of horrendous evil in the world
How can an all-loving God allow this to happen, especially if he has the power to stop it?
Surely it is far more likely there is no such God
The issue itself has to be addressed by looking at what moral evil is it cannot be brushed over as mere hardship?
To put it bluntly as Lewis said the Christian answer that we have used our freewill to become very bad is so well known
That it hardly needs to be stated
But to bring this doctrine in the real life in the minds of modern men and even modern Christians is very hard
We need to really look at what evil is and I'm not going to hold any punches back or give a cheap account
So viewer discretion is advised
The reality is the atheists are right that our history is filled with insurmountable
horrendous evil
The reality we all have to face his genocide is not inhumane despite that little lie. We'd like to tell ourselves
Genocide is very much human
When the Bible says humans are totally depraved is meant to be a very serious claim
Matt Dillahunty and many others have argued
The Bible is an evil book that poisons our minds
Telling us we are totally depraved is a horrible thing to say and degrades us as humans
Well, that would only be true if the Bible was lying and we are not actually depraved
If I was suffering from narcissism and you told me I was a narcissist and needed to get psychiatric help
That would only be a horrible thing to say if it was false
If it was true that it might have been the best thing you could have told me
Because you would want to see me get help and overcome my mental disorder
so if the Bible claims that we are totally depraved we ought to test that against reality and
It will help us better understand. What moral evil is
What I'm about to go over will be a hard pill to swallow and it will take some time to unpack
Because once we understand human nature, I suggest the problem of evil falls in the context
See, we like to think of ourselves as further along than our primitive ancestors who engaged in genocide rape and torture
But there have been more people murdered in the past 120 years than any other time in our history
The two world wars gave humanity an up-close look at some of the most brutal
Humans have ever committed against their fellow humans
the Nazis rounded up Jews homosexuals
gypsies the handicapped Polish
Ukrainians and many other groups they deemed unworthy, they ripped children from their mothers and they murdered children in front of their parents. They
Made their victims walk in horrible death marches force them into sweltering rail cars and then made them travel for days without food or water
People would defecate urinate and puke all over each other in these rail cars all to be taken the death camps where they were painfully
exterminated with poisonous gas
Reports from guards talk of people in the chambers climbing over each other to try to claw their way out
They knew everyone was dead when the screaming stopped
The Nazis also performed Carew some experiments on young children where victims were put in a decompression chambers drained of blood or sewn together
The worst part was most of the young men who carried out these killings and tortures were average people from Germany drafted into the military
We have identified over 10,000 camps ghettos and brothels the Nazis set up
Many of the so called unfit were forcing the slave labor for Volkswagen BMW
bayer and many other companies
So it is not like the Germans did not know what was going on
the German population
knew early on Hillier wanted to exterminate those he saw his unfit and most did nothing when he started rounding people up and
Worst of all many joined in and helped him
Was this inhumane this was completely human
Of course it is sadly obvious to any student of history
Japan was probably far worse than Germany the horrors
They brought upon the Chinese people were thought to be unfathomable in a post enlightenment era
the Japanese army raped tortured and murdered more than
300,000 Chinese and committed some of the most gruesome acts known to man
People were lined up in decapitation contests civilians were tied down and used for bayonet practice
Soldiers routinely would target women for gang rapes and torture and more often than not they targeted children
Many went beyond rape and disemboweled women slice off their breasts. They would hang men and women on hooks up by their tongues
Fathers were forced to rape their own daughters at gunpoint people were buried alive
castrated and roasted alive over fires
It was so bad that Nazi leaders present and man king
Intervened to put a stop to it
The Japanese army was so bad
Nazis couldn't even handle it
Was this inhumane?
This was completely human
After the war when Russia marched into Berlin, they did many of the same things to German civilians
Starving women who came out of their homes to search for food were targeted for gang rape by Russian soldiers
Fathers were forced to watch their daughters raped and tortured and were forced to pick which soldier got to go first in
The USSR people were tortured and enslaved in concentration camps in Siberia
Populations like the Ukrainians were selected to be starved to death
Parents were murdered in front of their children
But then the children were left alive to starve to death as to not waste any bullets on them
Was this inhumane?
This was completely human
Okay, but surely these examples are extremes and the result of citizens being brainwashed by fascists and communists
It would be wonderful if that was all this was
But we see endless examples of these massacres throughout history in Rwanda in 1994
People were tortured and raped and over 800,000 were murdered
1.2 million Armenians were murdered by the Young Turks from 1915 to 1923
Roughly 2 million were murdered in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 in
Guatemala
Thousands of mine Indians were murdered the Reconciliation Commission of South Africa found that there were over
36,000 cases of abductions rape tortures and killings
I could go on and on talking about the genocide committed against saroja Muslims the rape epidemic in the Congo and Haiti
Isis the Taliban Saddam Hussein's Iraq the French military in Algeria the British Empire in
Tasmania in many other lands they conquered and even the slavery of Africans in the Western world and the
genocide committed against Native Americans on
every continent in every century
genocide rape and war has been committed by humans
because that is what humans do and
I've only stuck with recent examples
Our history is filled with countless more examples and probably even more acts of genocide that were lost a time
Humans are murderous selfish evil creatures and we have the audacity to call genocide inhumane
I would bet the hundreds of species. We've directly caused to go extinct. Wish we were actually inhumane and
Let's not pretend that we ourselves are somehow better than these other humans or that we would never commit such horrible acts
Most of the people who ended up committing these terrible acts were terrifyingly normal
They did it out of hate fear pride or just to be accepted by superiors
Holocaust survivor and professor Freddie Katz says only a tiny proportion of this century's massive killings are
Attributable to the actions of those people we call criminals or crazy people or socially alienated people
Or even people we identify as evil people
The vast majority of killings were carried out by plain folk in the population ordinary people like you and me
Cats reminds us he was ordinary people that carried out the plans of Hitler Stalin and Mao
It was ordinary people that sat by and let it happen
Assuring themselves their own skins would be saved if they just followed orders
It was ordinary people
They let political divides
Turned into vitriolic hatred for their opponents that eventually led them to think they must be killed first before they turn and kill us
We forget that there were actually many Jews that administered the ghettos or man, the gas chambers out of fear for their own survival
even now in this country
People who are on opposite sides of the political spectrum
Or spoken of is not even human or need to be murdered for the greater good
It doesn't take many more steps before we allow ourselves to slide into actions. We cannot take back
people today are even talking as if a civil war is on the horizon and
Yet we don't think massacres could happen today
Given the history of our species I am highly skeptical things could not get out of control as they so often have in the past
Psychologist Israel journey says
Sometimes sitting in a staff meeting of a modern psychiatric hospital. I could see how it all could happen
The ingredients were all there the bitter hating factions among the staff
disguising themselves in the pomp and circumstances of a mental health conference
the barely disguised superiority and disdain for the hapless patient the patronizing professional sympathy in
Righteousness that barely concealed the brutality of the so-called modern therapies of electric shock in brain surgery
The dehumanizing everyday hurting of anonymous patients into anonymous routines
Everywhere in lovely families that persecuted one or more other members in the Universities
I loved where faculty intrigues and hatred knew no bounds in the Pampas coldness of exalted physicians
Turning away from the death fears of their patients
Almost every researcher that has looked in the genocide
Concludes that genocide is carried out by the average person not by supervillains or dark Lords
Whether we want to lie to ourselves or not
There is potential in us all to commit genocide and all sorts of other selfish evil acts
Laying them Gilkey believed humans were naturally good until he was placed in an internment camp by the Japanese
He said nothing indicates
so clearly the fixed belief in the innate goodness of humans as
Does this confidence that when the chips are down and we are revealed for what we really are
We will all be good to each other
Nothing could be so totally an error
We forget that we have most of our needs met in the Western world
That most people who have lived on this earth did not have access to
We've not had to face the hardships of the past like tribal warfare with the kill-or-be-killed
Mentality because we are blessed with such excess
So we are lucky our primal natures are not so evident
If you had to fight for your survival under a brutal regime
Or in an ancient setting you may very well be surprised at what you were capable of
The reality is our depraved nature is not something thrust upon us. It is very much a part of us and our ancestry
The murder rate in prehistoric times was much higher than we expected
When there was no law or fear of punishment
People often did what they had to do to survive or simply just did what they wanted in
fact a recent paper suggested due to high murder rates the human population bottleneck roughly between
5,000 and 7,000 years ago with only one man for every 17 women
The idea modern societies have simply corrupted us is not backed by data
Studies also back this up
Stanley Milgram conducted the first Milgram experiments
Where a subject would be brought in under the assumption that he was there to be one of two participants in a learning experiment
They were instructed to ask a person in another room a series of questions
Unbeknownst, they were actually a paid actor if the other person answered wrong
They would have to give them an electrical shock as ordered by the scientists
Each shock would increase in the amount of pain it caused
The actor would cry from the other room
They were having heart problems
But the scientists performing the experiments would tell the subject he had to keep going regardless of the pain
They were causing the person in the other room
the results shockingly demonstrated that
65% of subjects in ministered all the shocks as
Instructed including one that was perpetrated to give a lethal shock
Other researchers replicated these results with even higher percentages with subjects administering all the shocks in
1970 in West Germany
85% administered all shocks in
2017 in Poland 90% of participants also administered all the shocks
The data shows it is not hard for the average person to do horrible things
Atheist Michael ruse says I think Christianity has spot-on about original sin
how could one think otherwise when the world's most civilized in advanced people the people of Beethoven Goethe can't
Embrace that slimeball Hitler and participated in the Holocaust
But surely there has to be some good people out there who do not deserve the lives they've been given
Clay Jones asked a very simple question in his book do gang members stop at red lights
Yes, but not because they respect that particular law it is out of self-interest
No one wants it gets sidelined by oncoming traffic
Most people do not rob banks because they don't want to go to jail
Most people do not cheat on their spouse because they don't want to destroy a marriage
they may like ruin the reputation or lose relationships they derive meaning from
It's hard to deny that much of what motivates us is self-interest
when people do decide to go ahead with these terrible acts it is because they think they have clever ways out of them or
Think the act will benefit them more than what they could lose
The sad reality is we are all motivated by our own self-interest in
The light of human nature even acts of heroism and sacrifice can be motivated by self-interest
Ernest Becker who openly rejects Christianity says
Everything painful and sobering in what psychoanalytical genius and religious genius had discovered about a man
Revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn his self-esteem
This is why human heroics is a blind driven as' that burns people up in
passionate people
Screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog in the more passive masses of mediocre
Men, it is disguised as they humbly and complainingly follow out the roles that society has provided for their heroics
Man will lay down his life for his country his society his family
He will choose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades. He is capable of the highest generosity and
self-sacrifice
But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic
timeless and supremely meaningful
The hard truth no one wants to accept is there is no one good
None are righteous. No one no one understands
No one seeks for God all have turned aside together. They have become worthless
No one does good. Not even one
There are many that wish to whitewash Jesus and just reduce them to a good moral teacher that offers some good advice and lessons
But jesus never paints humanity as something inherently good that just needs a little guidance
but instead of sinners that desperately need to repent less we to perish if
Christianity is true. It needs to answer for why bad things happen to people
The answer we offer is this
There are no good people for bad things to happen to
da Carson says
First Jesus has not assumed that those who suffered under Pilate are those who were killed in the collapse of the tower?
Did not deserve their fate
Indeed the fact that he can tell those contemporaries that unless they repent
They too will perish shows that Jesus assumes that all death is in one way or another
the result of sin and therefore deserved
Second Jesus does insist that death by such means is no evidence whatsoever
That those who suffer in this way are any more wicked than those who escape such a fate?
the assumption seems to be that all deserve to die if
Some died under a barbarous governor and others in a tragic accident
It is not more than they deserve but that does not mean that others deserve any less
Rather the implication is that it is only God's and mercy that has kept them alive
Third Jesus treats wars in natural disasters not as agenda items in a discussion of the
Mysterious ways of God but as incentives to repentance
it as if he is saying that God uses disaster as a megaphone to call attention to our guilt and
Destination to the imminence of his righteous judgment if he sees no repentance
this is an argument developed at great length in Amos for
disaster is a call to repentance Jesus might have added as he does elsewhere that peace and
Tranquillity, which we do not deserve show us God's goodness and forbearance it
Is a mark of our lostness that we invert these two?
we think we deserve the times of blessing and prosperity and think that times of war in disaster are not only
unfair become perilously close to calling into question God's goodness or his power even
Perhaps his very existence
Jesus simply did not see it that way
Now I have hammered this point for quite a while because one of the worst lies we tell ourselves
Is we really are good and do not deserve the world. We have created but nothing could be further from the truth
God's judgment our absence in rescuing us from this world seems barbaric
Only to the person that has not understood the depths of human psychology
But if we can take some time to reflect on the state of humanity as seus Lewis puts it God's wrath
Seems to be inevitable a mere corollary from God's goodness
Mere sloth wolf once questioned the wrath of God, but when he saw two hundred thousand people killed in Yugoslavia
He said my people were shelled day in and day out
Some of them brutalized beyond imagination and I cannot imagine God not being angry
Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath
I came to think I would have to rebel against the God who wasn't wrathful at the site of the world's evil
God isn't wrathful in spite of being loved
God is wrathful because God is love
Now I need to be clear that
Myself or any of the author's I've quoted are not saying every horrible thing that happens to a person
Should be seen as a direct punishment from God for their sin. No one is suggesting that
The point is simply to critique the notion that bad things happen to good people
bad things happen to bad people and this is so because this is the world the human species chooses to live in every day as
Our cease pearl once said why do bad things happen to good people?
Well, that only happened once and he volunteered
The truth of the matter is no one has died before the age of accountability. That is not guilty
Every person is invested in self interests and contributes to evil one way or another in
Light of all this the real question we should be asking is not why does a good God allow so much evil?
But why does a good God not just wipe us out for the good of the universe?
The answer to why there is so much evil is simple. There are so many humans
Every day we choose to contribute to the evil in the world by simply going about our day doing nothing and focusing on ourselves
To put this into perspective with numbers the UN estimates that would cost roughly 30 billion a year to end world hunger in
Americans alone wasted 116 billion in gambling in 2016
God has already given us everything we need to turn this world into Eden and we simply delay it
Whether you want to admit it or not every one of us contributes to the evil in the world
Mostly through focusing on ourselves and doing nothing to help
We have everything we need to end things like world hunger and human trafficking and instead
We spend our money on pointless things just to make ourselves happy
Because if the problem is not right in our face we pretend it doesn't exist
Simply put evil exists because we exist
When this has been pointed out the next question is why did God create us this way?
Why are we so easily prone to commit horrible acts?
Well, that is assuming God did make us evil one can argue he did not he made us free and to be truly free means
We have to be allowed to choose how we want to be
Seus Lewis says the moment you have a self at all
There is the possibility of putting yourself first wanting to be the center wanting to be God
In fact, that was the sin of Satan and that was the sin. He talked to the human race
it is not as if we were simply made to be this way as
A species we choose to be this way every day instead of focusing on good and holy things
This is not how things were supposed to be
Early on God called humans out of the wilderness to serve as priests over creation and to enter into a covenant with him
So that he could sanctify us to subdue the rest of creation in his name
This is a story of Eden when Adam and Eve were called by God to be close to him in learn his ways
But they rejected the Covenant God made with them and left his presence
So we could be our own gods in with that came the freedom to go as far into evil as we wanted to
No matter how it would affect those around us
god, they're not dumas to a world of evil our species by rejecting Eden did so and without God's protection and
Eden and the Tree of Life, we now live in a world of moral and natural evil
Now many will object they were not in Eden. How can we be forced to live in a fallen world that we did not choose
Clay Jones response of this by saying that we did an individually vote to make Adam the head of our race
Doesn't matter because God knows who can best represent us
Also, if God knew that all of us would have acted similarly. He does no wrong in choosing one person to represent us
If Christianity is true and the problem of evil needs to be addressed
One cannot say this unfair Adam and Eve were our chosen representatives
God in His omniscience knew who the best representatives would have been and therefore given human free
Will there were no possible futures where humans did not choose sin?
So why even give us free will
Should we really have been given the freedom to be truly evil?
Why on earth would such a world not be better where we are deprived of free will
So as to not cause grief pain and misery
Clay Jones notes
It is not hard to perceive of such worlds and more often than not they are far worse than a world with free will
we ought to consider how humanity has looked at this scenario and unsurprisingly a life without free will is
Often betrayed in movies as a horrible existence, and this should be pretty obvious
Take the old movie from the 50s the invasion of the body snatchers
The invaders do not want to kill off humanity
But simply change humanity to lack free will and they offer it as a wonderful existence free of pain
desire emotion ambition self-interest in such a world not only
Terrifies us it becomes obvious that such a world would be worse than a world with free will and evil
It would have been so much easier. If you've gone to sleep last night Oh relax, we're here to help you
You know better than that
Who you want us to put them would you like to watch them grow? No. Thanks. Put them in there
There's nothing to be afraid of we're not gonna hurt you. But once you understand you'll be grateful
Remember how Teddy and I fought against it?
Well, we were wrong me and Teddy doesn't mind of course not she feels exactly the way I do. Let's go
We'll leave town. We won't come back. We can't let you go. You're dangerous to us
Don't fight it miles. It's no use
Sooner or later you'll have to go to sleep
I'll wait for you in the hall
Myles
You and I are scientific men. You can understand the wonder of what's happened
I just think less than a month ago santomero was like any other town people with nothing but problems
Then out of the sky came a solution
Seeds drifting through space for years took root in a farmer's field
From the seeds came pods, which have the power to reproduce themselves in the exact likeness of any form of life
So that's how it began, how does the sky
Your new bodies are growing in there they're taking you over self or so atom forever
There's no pain
Suddenly while you're asleep, they'll absorb your minds your memories and you're reborn into an untroubled world
Where everyone's the same exactly
What a world
We're not the last humans left. They'll destroy you
Tomorrow you won't want them to tomorrow you'll be one of us
I'm not Becky
Tomorrow will I feel the same there's no need for love
no emotion
And you have no feelings only the instinct to survive
You can't love or be loved am I right you say it as if it were terrible believe me. It isn't
You've been in love before
It didn't last it never does
Desire ambition faith without them life so simple, believe me. I
Don't want any part you're forgetting something miles. What's that? You have no choice
I guess we haven't any choice good
One to love and be loved
I want your children. I don't want a world without love grateful Buda rabbit are
The obvious reason as to why it is better to have free will and evil than the lack both is
because we would simply lose our humanity our
movies and books
Celebrate realities we're a world of free will along with pain and misery is a far better
alternative to a world without these things a
Good example can be seen in the movie, Pleasantville
two teenagers are transferred into a scripted television show from the
1950s where everything is perfectly happy yet enslaved to a script they have to run through
However, the teens begin to introduce new passions and desires to the characters and throughout the movie
All the characters reject are scripted enslavement for a life of freedom and color
Even though that comes with passions emotions
suffering in problems
The message is clear the freedom to engage in love passions desires
Must come with real freedoms to do so
Without free will these things are meaningless
even though it comes with the bad as well an
Existence of freedom along with misery and love is far better than scripted enslavement
The truth of the matter is given the option of a world with free will and pain versus a world without free will and pain
Humans will always most likely choose a world with free will
because as alvin plantinga says a world containing creatures who are significantly
free and freely perform more good than evil actions
It's more valuable all else being equal than a world containing no free creatures at all
So God simply could not have created humans without free will
We essentially would just be biological robots and that is not a world where we could truly experience love and companionship
But with that has to come the true freedom to choose love or choose evil you cannot have your cake and eat it, too
If you want a world with true conscious agents who are free. You have to allow them to choose good without forcing them to
Ask yourself this would you as a healthy adult want to spend a lifetime married to a lifeless?
Robot who always does what you command never speaks to you as a free agent or engages in an honest discussion
The answer is no then you can understand why God chose a world where we are truly free and choose to love him or not
But surely there had to be another way couldn't we have a world without the horrendous evil we currently have a
World without a Holocaust or the Rwanda Massacre where we still have free will must surely be possible
Clay Jones debated Richard Norman on the radio show unbelievable and Jones, press Norman to answer this
How could God give humans free will and not let them hurt others and the only answer he offered was I don't know
I'm not God, but it is possible
the key I guess back to my major point is that doesn't just say it should have been a different world doesn't tell us how
Anywhere near how that world works. Well, I'm not to define creator
I mean saying we're talking about divine omnipotence in which any number of possible worlds could exist
Clay Jones, simply reply to that with if you can't imagine a better way
Then it's at least logically possible that there isn't a better way. I don't know
I'm not God as a cop-out
We've harnessed the atom and put a man on the moon
If you're going to complain that God should have done differently with regard to free will but you cannot offer a better way
Then maybe there isn't a better way
Johnny
There was no other way
As we discuss in our video on omniscience
Avengers infinity Wars provides an excellent analogy
Dr. Strange looked into the future and could only see one possible way to save the most number of people
But that way involved a lot of pain and death
given the free choices of evil creatures
Likewise
Given God's middle knowledge where he can only actualize a world that works with the free choices of creatures
There are no possible worlds where God could create a world where we are free, and there is no evil or misfortune
God would actualize the world where there is the least amount of evil while taking human free choices into account
Therefore the argument is given human freedom within middle knowledge
God might not be able to actualize perfect worlds or worlds with less evil
Because there are no possible worlds where we are free and always do the right thing or do the right thing more often
But couldn't God just actively prevent more evil
When the Nazis lined up the Jews to be shot
Why didn't he just make the guns Jam or caused an earthquake to form a great chasm between them both?
Such a world would not have freedom it would be a playpen with an overprotective mother
Seus Lewis says we can perhaps conceive of a world in which God
Corrected the results of the abuse of free will by his creatures at every moment
So that a wooden beam becomes soft as grass when it was used as a weapon in
The air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies are insults
But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible in which therefore freedom of the will would be void
Evil is not evil only an intention it needs to be carried out and experienced
Otherwise we are not truly free to do what we want
We would be nothing more than constrained robots locked in with predetermined boundaries
This would be a sci-fi horror
Where we know there is something holding us back and can't freely reject it
We can see from sci-fi shows being free up to a certain point is not freedom. It's slavery
System
God wants actual free creatures to do the good
But the only way he can truly have free creatures that will do the good is allow us to see the devastating consequences
that rebellion causes
Babying us is not freedom nor would we ever grow and learn to freely choose to reject evil?
We have to experience it for ourselves and hopefully learn from it
It's a dictator who says be free, but you'll suffer if you use your freedom in this kind of way. Yeah
Thank you for that Richard. I agree. Yeah be free. But if you use your free will wrongly you're really gonna hurt each other
It's gonna be bad. Yes exactly. What is problem with your position precisely precisely that you make God sound like
Some kind of dictator that's just a problem with your position outlet a dictator that says do what you want. And here we are
Yeah, we do what you want and you will suffer for it. Well, do what you want and look what you'll do
You'll do outwits to each other you'll do you'll be the Khmer Rouge. You'll be Rwanda
This is what happens when free wit beans go off and decide they're gonna do whatever they want
And so to say he's a dictator that says to his people. Okay. You don't want to follow my rules knock yourselves out if he
But couldn't God teach us another way
given the self-centered nature of humanity I ask how
Some have suggested God ought to provide dreams to warn people, but that is assuming we would even listen
Growing up. My parents warned me not to do a number of stupid things
I did them anyway, as we all did when we were kids
There's been a Surgeon General warning on cigarette packets for decades people still smoke
Recent history alone is filled with examples of large corporations who had evidence their products were harmful and they did nothing
God performed dozens of miracles before Israel in the desert and they still hardened their hearts and complained
So perhaps if God was more involved nothing would change
Real life is not an episode of touched by an angel
We're glowing being can show up tell us to change and we live happily ever after
people have to be shown how evil they are and what their actions cause if
Everyone could just be told to change things would have gotten a lot better thousands of years ago
This is a hard truth humanity has to learn and it cannot be done by God simply
Babying us and providing knee pads for every corner in
Fact if God did simply that and gave us everything needed to keep us perfectly happy
Arguably it could make things worse
Keith Ward says I could give people lots of good things and they will like me because of what I give them
But will they love me freely for myself? Well, they love me unselfishly
Hardly, in fact such a course of action may be self-defeating. I
Cannot make people unselfish by giving them lots of things they want and so encouraging selfish tendencies
We have to remember the chief goal of God is not to make us happy but to make us holy through sanctification
which will make us truly happy in the long run as we discussed in our videos on the nature of Heaven and Hell and
Given the self-centered nature of humanity that God would want us to overcome
Having us live in a fallen world will help us to realize we need to return to God and to be sanctified
William Lane, Craig and JP Moreland, put it like this
innocent human suffering provides an occasion for deeper dependency and trust in God if
We are depraved as the evidence shows keeping humanity happy and safe will not fix what is actually wrong with us
History seems to show that hardships caused more people to turn to God
Patrick Johnstone has noted in his work that Christianity tends to grow more in countries that have faced severe hardship
Under communist rule in China
Christianity was and still is to some degree heavily persecuted
Yet despite that it is set to become the world's largest Christian nation by 2030
Although I do not argue God is the cause of misery and suffering
allowing us to live in a fallen world that we choose can be used by God to bring us back to him and
Ultimately help sanctify us into eternity where our present pain will be dwarfed in comparison to the joy
we will experience there but
God doesn't always have to prevent evil. Why not just a little more why do children have to die of cancer?
Couldn't the Holocaust have been cut in half if God had simply warned the Jews in a dream to get out of Germany before Hitler
Became Chancellor in
response clay Jones says
First who is to say, how much is too much?
For instance skeptics often cite the Holocaust as an example
I ask those who say God shouldn't have allowed so much evil whether they would be
Satisfied if instead of six million Jews killed only
600,000 had been killed
No one ever says yes six thousand. Nope 600. Nope, six
Should everyone be allowed to live to a certain age before they die?
should certain diseases only effect really bad people at what point is the line drawn between security and freedom a
Reality where we are free and have rejected God's lordship has to have real consequences and be fully realized for what it is
When people suggest this what they are really saying is I want to be God and the Creator needs to be our magical Butler
who watches over us never lets anything really bad happen, but still lets us rebel so that we can do what we want if
That was the case. We would never truly see the real consequences that our rebellion has caused
Instead we would have God as our servant who was supposed to take care of us when it is needed
But doesn't really let the horrendous consequences of what happened when we abandoned him to play out in the natural world without his presence
Unless we see what the evil in our hearts truly does. We will never learn
God's message is simply that your rebellion must be fully realized so that hopefully you will come back
Summary so far
Evil exists because humans had the freedom to choose god, but instead we chose to be our own gods
When we walked away from God in Eden, we chose a different Lord for the earth
And with that a world filled with issues that a connection to God and the Tree of Life would have prevented
Although God could regularly intervene. He doesn't because he wants our species to see the real consequences of our rebellion
which is life without his presence and sanctification as
horrible as it is is the only way to learn the horrors of what life without God is like
Natural laws have to work in a regular way if our actions are to mean anything at all
But that is not the whole story the
Skeptic who makes the argument from the problem of evil often will subtly
Presuppose a non theistic worldview, they will mention a young child who died before his or her time from a horrible disease
but if the argument is to attack a Christian worldview
The whole of that worldview has to be taken into consideration
And more often than not we forget that when that child dies
They do not rot in the grave forever
But can live on an eternity in the pain and this life will be dwarfed in comparison to the joy. We will feel the next
the previous two videos I made went over heaven and hell and explain what they are and how no one in Hell
Doesn't want to be there so
It's important to remember that God has not doomed us to a world of misery in one life or an eternity of misery in hell
Those who die can go on forever in a world of endless love if they choose to and the joy
We will experience in heaven will dwarf the misery. We feel here
So the child dying of a horrible disease is not forgotten but given new life in the age to come
Although God lets us experience. What a world that has rejected him feels like
He still rescues all who want to be rescued
The worst pains of this life will be as miniscule in the next as the pains of when you fell down as a toddler
Are to you now as an adult
So you can't compare the evils we feel now on a Christian worldview without accounting for eternity
God has promised a way back to Eden for all those who want it as seus Lewis said
They say of some temporal suffering
No future bliss can make up for it
not knowing that heaven once attained will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory and
God did not sit idly by
He didn't just make a way back to Eden. He came to us in our pain and misery to pull us out
There are a lot of gods that are for joy for our misery
But sit distantly away never experiencing as we experience never suffering human pain as we suffer
Not with this God
There is only one God that plunged himself into pain to save us
You want to know the answer to a world filled with torture and murder?
It is a God who was tortured and murdered to wipe away every tear in sadness
While we were his enemies
Christ died for us if
Evil was meaningless or a cruel joke and omnipotent God plays on us then. Why did the omnipotent God empty himself?
Become a lowly servant to suffer as we suffer and die as we die
even the Atheist philosopher Albert Camus admitted
Christ the man God suffers too with patience
Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since he suffers and dies
Then I don't go Gotha is so important in the history of man only because in its shadow the divinity
Abandon is traditional privileged and drank its last drop despair included the agony of death
Even if you cannot find a reason for your suffering and have nothing I said thus far suffices in Christ
the reason can't be because he doesn't love us at
The cross a coin was flipped on one side justice and the other side mercy
And it was the only time in history the coin landed on its edge
God allowed justice to fall on self so that mercy might fall on us
The Gospels thus tell the story which is unique in the world's great literature
religious theories or philosophies the story of the Creator God
taking
responsibility for what's happened to creation bearing the weight of his problems on his own shoulders a
Sydney Carta most famous for writing the lord of the dance put it in one of to my mind his finest songs
It's God they ought to crucify
Instead of you and me I said to the carpenter a hanging on the tree
Or as one old evangelistic tract put it the nations of the world got together
To pronounce sentence on God for all the evils in the world
Only to realize with a shock that God had already served his sentence the tidal wave
Of evil had crashed over the head of God himself
The terrorist spear went into his side like a plane crashing into a great building
God has been there. He has taken the weight of the world's evil on his own shoulders
You cannot look at the problem of evil while ignoring the cross
God took evil upon himself so that a new creation could begin in his resurrection
If evil was the fault of God, he has already carried out his sentence as st
Augustine said God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering if
Evil is a problem. The problem is also felt by God the cry of Jesus - Paul says it all
Saul why are you persecuting me?
Notice Jesus did not say why are you persecuting my people? He said why are you persecuting me?
Jesus places himself in the midst of evil and suffering with us if
Evil was too much to bear for any creature. God would never have created in the first place
But God still did create knowing full
Well, he would take the brunt of it because the love of creation was worth more than all the pain he feels through us
Evil exists for now because of us, but even in that God took the pain and misery of us all
Faithfully to the car and in the end he will wipe away every tear
