Download - Apologetics 102, WK6: Evil & Suffering
EVILall that is opposed to God and His purposes; that which, from the human perspective, is harmful and nonproductive (suffering)
DEUT. 28 If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, … all these blessings will come on you and accompany you… However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you…
Ancient Jews
Evil, the most frequent objection to God, loses to the resurrection. Death, a great evil, is not the last word.
The Cross
Evils appear in creation when created things and creatures stop functioning in the way they were created to function, when they cease to have the being God intended them to have.
Plantinga’s Defence: “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 the 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; 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 forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.
“People ask me why I’m an Arminian and not a Calvinist. My most basic answer is that I believe Calvinism is impossible as it implies that God does what is morally wrong. Of
course, no Calvinist I know says they believe that…. What wrong? Foreordaining and
rendering certain all that occurs, including the fall and the Holocaust. Roger E. Olson, edited
“My main objection to Christianity and other monotheistic faiths is the problem of evil, which the religious scholar Huston Smith has called “the shoal on which all theologies founder. ” If God is all-powerful, just and loving, why then is existence so painful and unfair for so many people? Why do kids get cancer? Why do earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters kill so many people? I have never encountered a satisfying solution to the problem of evil . JOHN HORGAN
“I sympathize with Horgan’s main objection–the problem of evil and pain. It is the hardest problem for both of us. Yet for me it leads to God and not away from him for several reasons. Firstly, at the intellectual level, if there is no God then I agree with thinkers from Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that there is no such thing as evil (e.g. Dawkins’ famous statement: “there is no good…no evil… no justice…DNA just is and we dance to its music”). Rather contradictory then to talk about a problem of evil at all. JOHN LENNOX
“Second, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan denies this … but I still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have suffered and not received justice in this life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never receive justice since there is no life to come.
“Third, whether God could have made a world in which fire warmed but didn’t burn and there were no destructive earthquakes is difficult. After all, earthquakes are paradoxically essential for the maintenance of life. Certainly, God could have made a world in which there was no moral evil. But there would have been no humans in it–it would be a robotic world. The greatest God-given capacity we humans have is the capacity to love. It inevitably carries with it the capacity to hate. Hence the world presents us all with a mixed picture – beauty and barbed wire.
“The question I ask is, granted that this is so, is there anywhere evidence of the existence of a God whom I can trust with this deep issue? Yes. At the heart of Christianity there is a cross.