If God is Good, Why Much Evil in the World? -Part I

This is a question that is so often asked by atheists and has had quite a resurgence in the past few years. It is a question that most of us have a hard time coming up with an answer for. Generally, I do not think that it is profitable to speak with most modern and postmodern atheists because it seems that they live lives of one objection after another. If you give them a reasonable answer to one objection, they have another and another, ad infinitum. When it comes to the truth, they are like lions for cherries.

What they really do is proselytize - spread the bad news. There message is that life was created without meaning, is meaningless, so enjoy it if you can. One can only wonder why anyone would want to spread such a message. But the "new atheists," imagine that it is for our own good that we embrace the emptiness of it all. Cheerful sorts, aren't they?

But I do think that we ought to have firm in our own minds that there are answers for their objections and that just because you may not have an answer at the moment, doesn't mean that one does not exist.

I recall that when I was in college, one of the young men who had been raised in a Christian home had decided that he did not want to be a Christian anymore. He was young and handsome and the Christian life was getting in the way of a number of interesting temptations. When I asked him why he was taking the path he was taking, he said that there were a number of questions that he could not answer and that he was sure lead to the conclusion that God did not exist. Two of them seemed particularly inane and I had thought, until recently, had died a proper death, but they are around again. Perhaps, they have never disappeared, but have been merely below my radar.

They are similar. "Can God create a rock so large that He cannot lift it?, and, Can Good create a ladder so tall He cannot climb it? The supposed point is that no matter how you answer it, God is not omnipotent - he can't do anything He wants.

The problem falls apart on a number of grounds, not the least of which is that when we say that God is omnipotent we do not mean that He can do anything. As Balaam put it, God is not a man that he can lie..." He cannot do foolish things, nor things that are contrary to His nature - or the nature of matter, for that matter. God is not finite and mass is not infinite. The rock must collapse into a singularity long before it is too large for God to lift it. Furthermore, God does not lift things, he moves things according to His will and creativity. If He is omnipresent, He is on both ends of the ladder no matter how large it gets. These "problems" propose a rather small god, not the God of the scripture. They are arguments made by the ignorant to boost their own position and discomfort their opponents.

We must remember that the Bible teaches us that men live their lives in personal dishonesty and tend to get extremely angry when you tell them so. Like the pigs who built their homes of straw and sticks, they believe that their arguments will protect them from the wolf in their existences -God. Our problem is that we sometimes see their flimsy arguments as houses of brick, not realizing that God is not a wolf - he is more like a wrecking ball for hollow arguments.

The "evil in the world" argument is hardly better than the others, though better constructed. So let's take a look at it in Part II.