In this fifth assertion, our secularist brings out one of the big guns: the "problem of evil." There are two major attacks on the Christian worldview, and this is one of them. We will listen to and deal with Siegfried's argument using the Greek conundrums, but then spend two more blogs on making the best effort to answering the problem of evil. First, Siegfried...

The real problem for you, of course, is the problem of evil. It is the 800 lb. gorilla in your living room. According to UNICEF, 29,000 children below the age of five die every day, the vast majority from easily preventable conditions - diarrhea, malaria, pneumonia, etc.¹ That's over 20 kids each minute, nearly 11 million children every year - below the age of five. That's a holocaust on an annual basis. And what does your God do? He doesn't so much as lift one omnipotent little finger to stop this. 225,000 people died in one morning because one continental plate subducted under another off of Sumatra causing a tsunami. So much for your intelligently designed planet. 225,000 is nearly three Hiroshimas. That same number died when an earthquake happened off the southwestern coast of Haiti, a catastrophe from which these poor people have yet to recover. And where was your God? Apparently, right in the thick of this. Your Bible. Your prophet. Isaiah 45:7:

So, this is the god you love and worship? Someone who apparently delights in creating such chaos and carnage? I don't get that, but... to each his own. But perhaps you can begin to appreciate why someone like me finds your religion incoherent.

We've been dealing with this problem in terms of God for two millennia. The following paradox is attributed to Epicurus, though it's doubtful it originated with him. But it goes like this:

• If God wants to destroy evil but cannot, he is not all-powerful.
•  
• If he can but does not want to, he is evil. (We've just dealt with this is Isaiah's comment.)
•  
• If he both can and wants to, then why is there evil in the world?
•  
• If he cannot and does not want to, then why call him God?

Do you think your young people are equipped to answer a question like this? I doubt it. Or let's consider a dilemma articulated even before the Epicurean paradox - the question posed by Socrates to the Athenian ethicist, Euthyphro. In its modern rendering it states: Is what is moral loved by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is loved by God? Be careful, Christian. These are the horns of a dilemma from which there is no escape. If you say that what is moral is loved by God because it is moral, you are admitting that moral values and duties have an intrinsic value of their own, and we don't need God to tell us what that is. In other words, I didn't need to go to Mount Sinai to know that murder, theft and perjury were wrong. So what role is left for Mount Sinai? What role is left for God? He is out of a job; he is irrelevant when it comes to morality. We don't need him to recognize moral values or duties; we don't need him at all.

If, however, you'd like to choose the latter, that what is moral is moral because it's loved by God, then you admit that moral values and duties are based on God's whims and capriciousness. He says, I'm not feeling too chipper today - it's a Monday - so let's wipe out the Amalekites. This is your Divine Command theory in action, by the way; anything God commands is legal. If he commands the genocide of the Canaanites, go for it. Which is why Christopher Hitchens quipped, isn't it true then that with God, anything is permissible? Any wonder you're losing your young people? They are not equipped to handle an intellectual environment that wrestles with these ideas this honestly.

So now we move to the incriminating stats, all the mayhem and suffering in the world, and how that shows that God either doesn't exist or he doesn't care, or is, in fact, right in the middle of things creating the mayhem. We've just dealt with the former, and we see that there is good reason to think that a Creator God does exist, so we must address the latter, that he doesn't care or worse.

Siegfried then quoted a passage out of Isaiah where God seems to make as self-incriminating a statement as anyone could imagine. Isaiah 45:7:

The problem for Siegfried, and the rest of secular culture who like to point to this passage, is that the word for evil, here, is more accurately translated as calamity, the tools of God's righteous judgments and correction. So, no, God is not evil. He is not unjust nor does he lie, which is why Christopher Hitchens was wrong when he charged that with God anything is permissible. God cannot and will not lie; He is bound by His own unchanging nature which is both true and just; He is the origin, the foundation of all truth - of all that is just.

The problem of evil has a number of different facets, which we'll get to, but before doing that I want to address the Greek conundrums Siegfried raises, because your kids are about to.

First, let me say that just because an intellectual problem is old and has a Greek name associated with it, it doesn't mean it's unassailable. Aristotle, one of the recognized greatest intellects of all time, gave us three erroneous ideas that took us centuries to correct: the earth-centered universe, the eternal universe and spontaneous generation (the idea that life can come from non-life). It took us 1800 years to correct our location in the universe - or the solar system, as the case was - that we weren't the center. Copernicus did that in the 1500s. Then Pasteur put the kybosh on the idea that chemistry easily becomes biology - that life can pop into existence - rotting meat creating flies. That was in the second half of the 1800s, a full two millennia after Aristotle asserted that idea. And then Einstein scientifically gave us an expanding universe with his General Theory of Relativity in the early 20th Century, and this showed us that the universe had a beginning point and was not eternal; it confirmed the intuition that we cannot traverse a material, infinite past. Ancient Greek ideas can be wrong.

So... let's have a look at these scary conundrums.

If we're going to answer the Problem of Evil, we need to address two all-encompassing question:

1. How is it, in a world created by an all-good, all-wise, all-loving and all-powerful Being, that evil is even a component in the first place? And second...
2. If God exists, then why does He seemingly sit so idly by as evil and suffering ravage what He's made?

Christian philosophers and theologians (in the previous blog) who defend God by claiming that objective moral values and duties are not dependent upon God's will - his choices and tastes - but upon his nature - who and what he truly is, are almost in complete agreement that God is not the author of evil. He did not conceive of it, and does not propagate it in any way. But these same theologians and philosophers do agree that God is indirectly responsible for evil. How so? Because of a combination of two things: he made a rational, free creature, and he put him in a moral environment the conjunction of which could prove to be lethal, and, in fact, was. Watch...

Genesis 1:26 has God making man. But, initially, we find man in a pre-moral environment. There are no prohibitions, so no way to fail. Until we get to Genesis 2:17. Here the tree is identified and the prohibition is given. Now, I want you to see something: The issue isn't the tree. The tree isn't evil; God doesn't create evil things. And the issue isn't the prohibition. If Eve or the snake had told Adam, "Don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," he'd have said, "Who are you (to tell me what to do?" No, the prohibition was issued by God, and that makes all the difference. Why? Because...

Let me say it once more...

I wish I could make this statement shorter or more concise, but that's as concise as I can make it; every word is necessary. So here's the deal. It's New Year's or Halloween - it's a big weekend - and my college freshman says, "I'm going to a party. Can I be in by 2am?" And I say, "No. The weather is bad and there's a lot of craziness going on - lots of drinking and partying. I want you in by midnight." That would be one thing. But what if the little sister wags her finger at him and says, "I want you home by midnight."? Same directive - be in by midnight. And the same prohibition - don't be out after midnight. But it carries no authority. This is called moral ontology, what gives moral values or duties their force - their traction; why we are accountable to them and obligated to keep them.

So, you're in a conversation with a secularist, and they use the term "evil." You can legitimately stop them and ask: when did they begin to believe in God?

"I don't believe in God."

"But you just used the term evil. Evil is an exception to the rule, not the rule itself. Its use, though, is an admission that the rule exists. But that rule wouldn't carry any weight - it wouldn't be valid or binding at all - unless it's issued by a legitimate authority with the capacity to enforce it. And you are neither. Nor is anyone else. That role is God's alone. So you can come around to my side of the table and admit that God exists, or go find your own vernacular. Call the holocaust regrettable. Call what ISIS did to the religious minorities in Syria and Iraq monstrous, but don't use the term evil; you don't have access to it."

And this is why objective moral values and duties is a category inaccessible to atheism. It isn't that atheists can't be moral or ethical. The ones I know certainly are. They just have no legitimate or authoritative basis for those values or duties. No. We didn't have to go to Mount Sinai to understand that murder, theft and perjury were wrong. That's called moral epistemology - how we "know" what to do. We needed Mount Sinai to tell us why we are obligated to them and will be held accountable. All of us.

Make no mistake about it: evil is as much evidence for God's existence as good it. In fact, evil is impossible if God's not in the picture; if God doesn't exist, neither does evil. As Richard Dawkins once stated: "In a universe where there is no design and no purpose, there is no evil or good. There's nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." In other words, without God, we are just molecules going through the motions, doing what we do at these temperatures and under these conditions. God, good and evil are inextricably linked. Own it.

This is probably the harder of the two questions. The first is logical in nature. This one is more existential; it creates the personal angst. And to address it, I need first to state a caveat:

This question can engage the problem of evil on both a personal and a theoretical level. But as a personal issue, there are no answers. You can't give a "reason" to someone for their diagnosis of terminal cancer, or the mother who's just been told the child she's carrying has a birth defect, or a family who has lost someone in a tragic accident. All you can do is come alongside and cry with, pray for and try to humbly support those going through these things. The last thing you want to do is add to the evil with some commentary like Job's friends attempted. God seemed to have little regard for their insensitivity.

The theoretical problem of evil is different. Nothing is more common than for the secularist to pull out this issue and turn it into a club with which to bludgeon the Christian faith, so it is incumbent upon us to address the issue intelligently - to give a warrant for Christian belief in a loving, sovereign God in the face of evil. And that's what we're going to attempt to do here. To do so, I need to tell you a story.

I am a senior sales consultant for my company; I've been there over two decades. That being the case, the young bucks will come to us for help with something, and one day Colin Lane sticks his head in my door and says, "Hey, I've got a quick question for you: What's the meaning of life? Just kidding. I need help with a lease."

I said, "I can answer both for you."

He says, "You can tell me the meaning of life in four minutes?"

"Yep."

"Fire away!"

"The meaning of life, Colin, can be answered by understanding how God addressed a significant challenge. You see, before we were made - God's biggest and best idea, because there isn't any bigger or better idea than being made in God's image - the angels existed with God. The Bible tells us these beings are very powerful and rational. They had complete access to him, they saw him in all his glory, they saw him face to face, yet they rebelled. How was God to keep mankind from following the same, disastrous course in our immortal future?

"Most of us aren't thinking about this kind of thing; we're wondering who the (Bucs) are playing this weekend. But thankfully, an early Christian theologian was thinking this through. His name was Augustine, and he gave us a formula. One segment of that formula states, in Latin, Non Posse Peccare - when we get to heaven, God will give us an inability to sin. Hmmm. The inability to sin - the inability to fail in some moral way. We might ask: what's the difference between giving an inability and removing an ability - to fail in some moral way? And wouldn't this adversely impact the one thing that makes our love, faith and obedience mean anything at all to God - our free will? And if God could give us this inability, why didn't he do it in the Garden, and avoid all this mayhem and destruction that ultimately resulted in the humiliation, torture and death of his son? As it turns out, God can't give this inability to us, but he can instill it in us. And he does so through our experience. Watch.

"I like to use a cast iron frying pan; it's healthy. To clean it, I'll put it on the eye of the stove and heat it up, and steam clean it. So I've got the pan on the stove, and I tell my son, 'Be careful. Don't touch the hot frying pan. Don't touch that hot frying pan! Watch out for the...! Aggghhh!' So what does my son now have other than a crispy hand? He's been given a disinclination to ever knowingly touch a hot frying pan again, and his free will hasn't been affected one iota. God's doing the same thing with us, and he's using mortality to do it. How so?

"Remember, God made us mortal in conjunction with the fall - 'In the day you eat of it, you will die.' (Gen. 2:17). Why is this important? Because the angels were immortal when they fell. There was apparently no way to undo what had been done. This is why the author of Hebrews tells us that 'He does not give help to angels, but he does give help to the descendants of Abraham.' (Heb. 2:16)

"By making us mortal, God could put us in a finite box where we could experience the consequences of our rebellion - all the pain and heartache, injustice and fear, all the alienation, violence and terror, until it's coming out our noses and ears... In fact, the more horrendous our experience with it, the more indelible the lesson, which might be why God seemingly sits so idly by as evil and suffering ravage what he's made. But by making us mortal, he also gave himself the tools to extricate us from our predicament. Christ could enter into our humanity, take on our nature, live among us, love us, and teach us of himself, then take on our death sentence, and die our death for us, and get us out the other end through his resurrection, all the while instilling in us a disinclination to ever come down this road again. God just might be involved in a giant inoculation project.

"So you see, Colin, this not only helps us understand one big reason we are here - the meaning of life - but it appears to go a long way in helping us solve the problem of evil. Now what was your question about a lease...?"

Colin has since given his life to Christ and is growing in his faith.