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Natural-ly There Is A Problem With Evil

Atheism, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Alex McElroy

One of the most difficult issues to reconcile in life is the presence of evil. This is the case whether one has a theistic, agnostic or atheistic worldview. The existence of evil is undeniable both in our witness and experience but is evil objective in nature or merely an apparition. Even atheist J.L. Mackie recognized a dilemma. In one book, he writes, “There are no objective values.”[1] Elsewhere, he writes, “We might well argue…that objective, intrinsically prescriptive features, supervenient upon natural ones, constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events, without an all-powerful god to create them.”[2]

This poses a problem for the naturalist or the atheist because whatever evil does exist in people cannot be attributed to anything other than misfiring neurons. Well, known atheist Richard Dawkins has stated, “DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”[3] However, if we are just dancing to our DNA, then no one can ultimately be held responsible for any actions, and evil becomes a term without an ontic point of reference. Ravi Zacharias wrote, “Atheists often blunder into the right by borrowing from assumptions that are not logically deduced from their own worldview. But their opinion is so strong that they straddle the two worlds and make up a bridge because they have reached an unbridgeable chasm, given their starting point.”[4] That starting point of random, unguided natural processes is hardly the building blocks for a moral framework.

Sam Harris, an atheist who is both a philosopher and neuroscientist, has much to say on how humans can arrive at life-sustaining moral standards simply through biological evolution. He writes, “Many people imagine that the theory of evolution entails selfishness as a biological imperative. This popular misconception has been harmful to the reputation of science. In truth, human cooperation and its attendant moral emotions are fully compatible with biological evolution.”[5] First, it should be noted that many scientists, most notably Biochemist Michael Behe, have shown a flaw in the premise being proposed by Mr. Harris in regard to the selfishness of biological evolution. With regard to the underlying theory contained within Harris’ assertion, Behe writes, in Darwin Devolves, about two groups of extended evolutionary synthesis scientists who propose a similar theory:

The first speculates that once master genes and their regulatory networks of connections were in place, perhaps novel complex features could be developed mostly by random changes that accidentally form new signature sequences near various genes….The second group…emphasizes the ease of deploying an array of machinery to different locations, which, like ectopic fly eyes, would generate a lot of variation much more easily than Darwin might have imagined. Maybe that would give selection more to choose from. If all that sounds distressingly vague, I’m afraid that is the gist of the argument…The unanticipated discovery of layers of control – master switches and the stunningly sophisticated genetic regulatory networks they activate – does not make the putative undirected development of life any easier to explain, evo-devo (Evolutionary developmental biology) enthusiasts seem to imagine. It makes it harder. The need for a foreman and subcontractors to coordinate construction does not make it easier to explain how unintelligent processes could make a building out of bricks and wood and pipes and wiring. It shows it to be impossible.[6]

Behe is indicating that an external infusion of sorts, in fact, a number of external infusions would be required in order to advance biological evolution. Who or what could that provide that infusion? If not God, it seems unlikely that unintelligent and unguided natural forces could be responsible for natural evolution, not to mention moral evolution. Additionally, Sam Harris simply assumes that “human cooperation and its attendant moral emotions” would be natural outgrowths of a macroevolutionary process. But that’s a large assumption considering that one component of Darwinian evolutionary theory is survival of the fittest, not survival of the most cooperative.

Mr. Harris goes on to write, “The work of evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers on reciprocal altruism has gone a long way toward explaining cooperation among unrelated friends and strangers…Because moral virtue is attractive to both sexes, it might function as a kind of peacock’s tail: costly to produce and maintain, but beneficial to one’s genes in the end.”[7] Even if we accept Harris’ premise that moral virtue is attractive or beneficial, it still does not allow us to assign an objective value to what morality is in its essence. How are we to know if what we are attracted to in another is being accurately perceived as high moral character? What standard are we comparing their moral virtue to in order to determine where they measure up? How do we define what is most beneficial to us or to humanity at large? These are metaphysical questions that cannot simply be reduced to physical or naturalistic foundations.

In reviewing the works of C.S. Lewis, David Bagget noted, “Moral language today is so peculiar, in fact, that Lewis suggests that this is why many people try to explain it away. Some attempt to reduce moral impropriety to an instrumental matter – as we do with a tree, for our purposes, does not shade us well and is, for this reason, and in this sense, a ‘bad tree.’”[8] Terms such as good, bad, or evil simply lose all substantive value in a purely naturalistic worldview. This does not mean that an atheist cannot be a good person. Of course they can and most of them are morally upright. The issue is not that you cannot be good or do good things if you do not believe in God or the God of the Bible. The issue is that such a thing as good cannot objectively exist if God does not exist. If evil exists, good exists, and if good exists, God exists.

Notes

[1] J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977), 15.

[2] Ravi Zacharias & Vince Vitale, Why Suffering: Finding Meaning and Comfort When Life Doesn’t Make Sense. (New York, NY: Hatchette Book Group, 2014)142.

[3] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1995)133.

[4] Turek, Stealing From God, ix.

[5] Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. (New York, NY: Free Press, 2010), 56.

[6] Michael Behe, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution. (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2019)118.

[7] Harris, The Moral Landscape, 56.

[8] Gregory Bassham, C.S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics: Pro and Con. (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 127-28.

Putting God on Trial

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Al Serrato

“I can’t believe in a God who would allow so much evil and suffering in the world.”

Have you encountered this challenge? Most anyone who has tried to defend the Christian worldview surely has. The person bringing this challenge will often claim to be atheist, but when you dig in a bit this challenger is more often someone who knows there is a creator but who is deeply offended by the world, and angry at the God who set all this – the carnage, the anguish, the pain – in motion.

In my last post, I restated the traditional Christian response to this problem of evil. God did not create the evil that surrounds us because evil is not a thing. Evil is a departure- a deviation- from the good which God did create, and which God defines. This answer serves a particular purpose: it shows that the Christian belief system is internally coherent. For if God did create evil, he could not be the God described in the Bible because an all-powerful, all-good, and all-loving God could not be the creator of evil.

But, the atheist insists, even if I grant that God did not create evil, He created this universe and everything in it. Isn’t He, therefore, still responsible for all the evil that we see around us? In other words, if God isn’t guilty of the crime of actually creating evil, is He not still liable as an aider and abettor?

C.S. Lewis wrote about those who put God “in the dock.” It seems a natural human tendency to find fault with the way others have acted or decisions they have made. As a criminal prosecutor, I found that I would often slip into this kind of thinking too, silently building a case against God, accusing Him in my inner thoughts of not doing things the way He should have, the way I would have. The created order is filled with so much beauty, so much elegance, so much to admire and to be awed by….yet, we know that something is also very much amiss. Every beautiful thing God has created has been marred in some way. Out of every good in the world, there springs forth, weed-like, much that is bad, much that is evil. Why has God allowed this?

By satisfying the demands of logic, the traditional explanation of the nature of evil helps to make sense of our faith. But notice what it does not attempt to do: it does not seek to defend God, which is, in essence, what this challenge is asking us to take on. Nor does it provide an emotionally satisfying explanation to the one who is suffering, no easy answer to make it all quickly better.

What, then, can the Christian to say in response to this challenge?

Perhaps the answer should begin with the recognition that we need not – that indeed we cannot – defend God. Yes, God is responsible, ultimately. It is His creation, His universe, His set of rules to which both conform. For reasons that make sense to Him, He endowed us with free will, knowing that we would use it in inappropriate ways, in ways that displeased Him and would cause harm to others. True, this answer is not satisfying emotionally. It is instead a logical answer, and while logic has its place, we are not strictly logical beings. We feel, and when we experience evil, we suffer. As beings who love, we grieve when we see those whom we love suffer.

The challenger may argue that a God who allows suffering cannot be loving but is it not the case that suffering may serve a purpose. We grasp this intuitively: we know that hard work can often lead to much gain; we see that the cure of the physician or surgeon may at first be quite painful; we note the agony of labor that precedes the birth of a child. Everywhere in nature, we see the source of the expression “no pain, no gain.” We also know, at a more profound level, that none of this, neither the pain nor the glory, lasts forever. We are on the road to …somewhere…and there are indeed many obstacles, many pitfalls, along the way.

And yet, are we really in a place to put God on trial? With what arrogance would the pot stand in the well to accuse the potter of poor workmanship? How would the robot, constructed to complete a particular job, rightly complain that the tasks to which it is put are not just? That it should instead rule the world into which it was placed.

At present, we see through darkened and distorted lenses. Free will and suffering. These concepts will never make complete sense to us. But as the created and not the creator, perhaps all we can do is remember that they make sense to Him.

The Wounded Healer: Finding Ultimate Purpose in Your Suffering

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Luke Nix

Introduction

The other day, I heard a podcast that I want to highlight for anyone who is a victim of the evil and suffering of life and questions God’s purposes, His love, or even His existence. Whether our experiences are singular traumatic events, day-in and day-out pain, or a combination of the two, suffering often feels completely unbearable. These experiences can be so painful that many people are compelled to honestly question and seek legitimate answers to how an all-loving and all-powerful God could and would permit the suffering that we experience in our lives and see others experience in our world. This is called the logical problem of evil and has been long recognized as having been resolved, even by atheists (click or tap the link to see how).

Some, though, have wondered if that given the amount of evil and suffering, it is likely that an all-powerful and all-loving does not God exist. Simply stated: “There is too much gratuitous suffering in the world for an all-loving and all-powerful God to exist.” While this is a more modest concern that seems reasonable, if it is to be granted, such a denial of God’s existence based upon gratuitous suffering is necessarily reliant upon the idea that God does not have reasons to allow the amount of suffering that He does. Further, that depends upon knowing God’s purposes (or lack thereof) and how those purposes could (not) be accomplished. However, both the purposes of God and the methods of their fulfillment would have to be extremely limited for one to reasonably conclude that the amount of evil and suffering in the world is gratuitous. God’s purposes and methods are not so limited, so evil and suffering cannot be used to reasonably conclude that God does not exist. Yet, even though this answer is reasonable, it does not really answer the question of what the purpose of evil and suffering actually is. That is where I believe that Dr. Emerson Eggerichs picks up from the logical answer to the problem of evil and suffering and makes a deeply personal connection to their purpose.

Evil, Suffering, and the Great Commission

Our experiences of evil and suffering are deeply personal, so it makes sense that their purpose is personal as well. What are the purposes for which we are placed in different situations of suffering? We need to look not much further than Matthew 28:19a- “Go and make disciples of all nations.” Suffering is no respecter of one’s status, deeds, or even worldview, so all people experience it. Suffering reveals weakness; thus it is an experience that forges bonds of trust-trust of one another that is grounded in the knowledge that the other person has an intimate understanding of the anguish of their suffering.

Two Perspectives and the Cross

From the perspective of the moment, suffering is painful; yet from the perspective of eternity, suffering is trivial. The perspective of the moment instills in us a strong desire for relief for not only ourselves but for those who suffer like us. The perspective of eternity instills in us a strong sense of purpose and encouragement to know that the relief we desire for ourselves and others in the moment will be realized.

These two perspectives converged nearly two thousand years ago at the Cross. Jesus saw his suffering the torcher of crucifixion in the light of the rest of eternity for those who would choose to accept Him. He understood that that time of suffering was finite and could not be compared to the infinite time of bliss that it would provide to those He would reconcile to the Father. Three days later, this convergence was verified as Jesus overcame His suffering and conquered death in His Resurrection. It is this historical event that demonstrates the ultimate purpose of our suffering.

Suffering Is Only Gratuitous If We Allow It To Be

While suffering can strengthen the trust of the Christian in Christ, Christians can turn those same experiences into many opportunities to bring unbelievers into a loving, trusting, and healing relationship with Christ and share the relief with us. The Apostle Paul wrote, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). It is through our own suffering of tragedies and evil in this world that the Great Commission can be accomplished- that unbelievers, who we love and comfort through our own personal experiences of the same suffering, can live pain-free and for want of nothing for eternity with their Creator, Savior, and Healer.

As the Body of Christ, we are His representatives in the physical world; it is through us that those who suffer can see, hear, and feel the heart of our suffering Savior- the One who lives so that they may live also (John 14:19). Every bit of suffering in our lives can have an ultimate purpose. It is our choice, though, if our suffering will be more than gratuitous and have an ultimate purpose. That purpose is to allow us to come alongside someone else who is also in that suffering and be trusted and permitted to speak the truth, hope, love, and healing of Christ into that life. We are wounded by suffering so that we have the opportunity to heal others wounded by suffering by pointing them to the ultimate Healer who was wounded for us.

Conclusion

Dr. Eggerichs describes in this podcast how he was wounded but uses those wounds to heal others and point them to the ultimate Healer. Please listen to the podcast and be encouraged that the evil and suffering that you experience in your life can be used to guide someone else to an eternity free from those experiences and full of unspeakable joy. Our suffering is only gratuitous if we allow it to be, and why would we want to allow that? Click or tap this link: Love and Respect Podcast: The Wounded Healer, then choose to speak life to the broken hearted.

Luke Nix holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and works as a Desktop Support Manager for a local precious metal exchange company in Oklahoma.
Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2MZW3cf

July 3, 2018/by Guest