The recent flooding in central Texas that devastated the area and killed over a hundred people, including 27 innocent young girls at a Christian campground, is a perfect example of the most difficult topic any defender of Christianity has to deal with. As a skeptical/atheist long-time friend of mine put it to me very directly, “This tells me several things: God is not all powerful, or he is all powerful and doesn’t give a s___, or he doesn’t exist.”
What do we say to that?
It’s a hard charge to answer. But it’s vitally important to keep a central point in mind when you do: The atheist also has to explain it.
I’ll get to that in a bit. But first, my response, which I’ll break into three parts:
How do you define evil?
Why would a good God allow evil?
How does your worldview deal with evil?
What is Evil?
No one is denying that evil, injustice, pain, and suffering exist in the world. But regardless of your worldview, it must offer a consistent explanation for what those things are, where they come from, and how they fit into your view of reality.
The most reasonable worldview wins.
The so-called “Problem of Evil” is the number one argument you will ever hear against the existence of a loving God. But before you try to take it on, you have to remember a very important point:
Evil can only exist if good exists first.
For some reason, this concept doesn’t seem to occur to people. But the simple fact is, you can’t identify something as evil without having a standard to measure it by. And that means we need an explanation for the origin of good.
Frank Turek explains it with the analogy of a rusty car. You can have a car without rust, but you can’t have a rusty car without having the car first. Rust doesn’t exist on its own. It’s a privation — a corruption — of the way the car should be.
Likewise, evil exists only as a privation of goodness. It’s a corruption of the way things ought to be. And Christianity has a perfectly logical explanation for what we recognize as evil in the world. The standard of goodness to which we compare it is the perfect goodness of God’s character.
The Free Will Defense
The most logical response to the challenge of the problem of evil is simple to understand. It is that God wants the beings he created to love and obey him. Pre-programmed robots can’t do that. For their love and obedience to be meaningful, God had to allow the possibility that we could choose otherwise.
So, he gave us free will.
Having free will entails that we have the capacity to make bad choices. All humans do it all the time. Evil is the result of those choices.
Just like you can’t define evil without good, you can’t choose evil without free will.
Christianity’s Unique Explanation
With a proper view of what evil is and where it comes from, it’s essential to understand Christianity’s unique explanation for it all.
First, Christianity describes the world precisely as it is. This includes a perfectly good God as the objective standard by which we compare things, and then define as evil those things that fall short of this standard. And it predicts that humans will use their free will to violate God’s perfect standard. This is what the Bible refers to as sin.
Second, it allows for the possibility that there are reasons that God may have made the world this way.
Suffering challenges those who witness it to show compassion for those who suffer.
Poverty leads us to recognize the emptiness of worldly pleasures and pleads with us to be charitable to those who are less fortunate.
Fear teaches us to be courageous.
Sickness reveals how dependent we are … and how fragile life is.
Loneliness forces us to realize that we are not the center of the universe.
In short, a good God may allow evil things to happen for a greater purpose. That purpose could be that we recognize the perfect goodness of God and are drawn to know Him. As painful as suffering is to experience, there may be a morally justifiable reason for it.
Finally, Christianity is the only religion in which the deity not only recognizes pain and suffering and offers comfort when we experience it … but that he experiences it himself. The God of Christianity knows what suffering is. He willingly takes on human form and suffers with us. No other religion can even begin to countenance such a concept.
So, when it comes to evil and suffering, Christianity explains their origins and gives a rational explanation for why they exist.
What does atheism have to offer?
Complaints About Nothing
The existence of good and evil is evident to all of us. Every human being experiences both. That’s why we complain about it. It’s a real thing that impacts real life in ways we all wish we could avoid.
But when an atheist complains about all the evil in the world — or denies God’s existence because of it — he hasn’t done anything to explain where it came from. He certainly hasn’t offered a solution to the “problem” he’s complaining about.
That’s the catch. Everyone sees evil as a problem. But Christianity has an explanation for it.
Atheism’s got nothing.
In fact, according to the atheistic worldview, there is no such thing as good or evil. That’s not just my opinion. I’ll let atheism speak for itself.
The “Pitiless Indifference” of Atheism
The blogger Wintery Knight offers some fantastic examples of how atheists shoot themselves in the foot on this topic. Here are a few excerpts:
Jerry Coyne
In atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’s editorial in USA Today, “You Don’t Really Have Free Will,” he opines about the fact that we are nothing but moist robots who only have the illusion of free will.
“Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject “decides” to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity [up to 7 seconds in advance]. “Decisions” made like that aren’t conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we’ve made them, then we don’t have free will in any meaningful sense.”
In Jerry Coyne’s world, we don’t really “decide” anything. So, there is no way to distinguish between good and evil — no way even to make sense of ethical choices and their consequences.
William Provine
A historian of science, evolutionary biology, and population genetics, William Provine was well known for his passionate defense of atheism. Provine died in 2015, but this video (transcript below) represents his stance.
“Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposive (goal-directed) forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s going to be the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. What an unintelligible idea!”
You have to give Dr. Provine this — he was honest about the implications of his worldview.
Richard Dawkins
Then, there’s the infamous Richard Dawkins, the de facto ringleader of the “New Atheists.” In one of his early books, The River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995), Dawkins is also candid about where his atheism leads:
“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference … DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
The conclusion is simple but profound. An honest atheist’s worldview has no way to define anything as good. It can say what “is,” but it can’t know what “ought” to be. And that means it also has no basis from which it can complain about the problem of evil.
The Atheist Solution
With that kind of thinking, what does the atheist say to the parents of the little girls who were washed away in Texas?
“Sorry about your luck.”
“Wrong place, wrong time, I guess.”
“Well, you know, there is this thing called survival of the fittest.”
Very few atheists are courageous enough to admit this. Instead, they’ll drone on about how humans evolved to form cooperative communities, seek mutually beneficial solutions, or seek to maximize “human flourishing.”
Don’t be fooled. Ask why cooperation is good. Ask what they mean by “beneficial.” Tell them to define “flourishing.” When they respond, pay attention to their answers. Then, point out that every explanation they’ve offered depends on defining some outcomes as “better” than others.
How so?
What they’re doing is using an objective standard of good that their worldview doesn’t allow for. They’re stealing from God while they claim he doesn’t exist.
The truth is that an honest atheist has nothing meaningful to say about any of it.
Before the Whirlwind Hits
None of this is easy to deal with in the moment. No matter how rational our position is, seeing a group of little girls washed away in a flood is sickening and seems pointless. And no one wants to hear your step-by-step approach to the problem of evil and suffering while the rain is still coming down. At that point, the only thing we should offer is compassion, heartfelt sympathy, and tangible support.
We should be listening, not talking.
That’s why we need to think through these kinds of issues before the storm approaches. Too many Christians are intimidated and flummoxed by the challenge of the problem of evil. They cower in its presence, afraid that it undermines everything they claim to believe in. At best, they accept the fact that it renders God impotent. At worst, it seems to negate his very existence.
Don’t buy it.
The existence of evil is the most powerful argument we have that God does exist. He is the perfect standard of good, the basis for any attempt to deal with the most obvious thing about the world in which we find ourselves. Not only that, but the Christian worldview also provides a way to understand and respond to evil. This is just another example of how Christianity offers the best answers to life’s most pressing questions.
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