If God is all-good and all-powerful, why does He permit evil? This question of the ages has often served as a obstacle to faith. Anthony Bosman engages students in a discussion to see how the great controversy theme helps us think deeply about and respond to the problem of evil.

ACF Institute 2017: Never Alone

<p>If God is all-good and all-powerful, why does He permit evil? This question of the ages has often served as a obstacle to faith. Anthony Bosman engages students in a discussion to see how the great controversy theme helps us think deeply about and respond to the problem of evil.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Christian Fellowship (ACF)

Anthony Bosman

Responding to the Problem of Evil

So I polled my friends on Facebook 1 day, and this is always a dangerous thing, right?

Like you don't know what you're gonna get out of it.

So what was some of the responses you might expect to come in?

Some people say things like God is good, God is love, God is powerful, God is mighty to save, right?

He says, to clarify, I think that God is not at least 1 of the following things, all-loving, all-powerful, or real.

Either He doesn't exist, or He's not all-loving, or He's not all-powerful.

Because I can't understand how He can be all of these things at once.

Now earlier today we were talking about how to share hope, right?

How do you think you ought to respond to this?

I just asked him to explain, what are you talking about?

I want to better understand what you're saying.

And if you see here, it says, view more replies.

This became a very, very, very lengthy discussion and it was fascinating.

But let me tell you the big problem that was hanging him up.

He's a Greek philosopher by the 3rd century, and he poses it like this.

Epicurus says, is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

He's saying, okay, if God is willing to prevent evil and he's not able to prevent evil, then he's not all-powerful, right?

If he's able to prevent evil, but he's not willing to prevent evil, then he must not be good.

He's not a good God, he's not a loving God, he's a malevolent God, he's a bad God.

If he's both able and willing to prevent evil, then why is there evil?

But if he's neither able nor willing to prevent evil, then why would you call him God, right?

This is a classic criticism of the classic Christian understanding of God.

And so 1 response to this is simply say, huh, I guess you're right.

And let's see how well we can do without it.

So 1 person who attempted this is Nietzsche.

Interestingly enough, he was born in October of 1844.

Maybe you know something else that happened that year, right, that month.

So Nietzsche, a well-known atheist German philosopher, famous for saying, God is dead.

He's not saying that God was alive at some point, he died.

What Nietzsche is claiming is that we no longer have any need for the idea of God.

As a society, intellectually, we can recognize there's no need for God.

Has anyone ever faced that sentiment at all?

Maybe we've progressed past the need for the idea of God, That's what people believed back then, but now we know better.

That kind of falls back into that story of progress.

I guess we've also progressed in terms of understanding of religion.

We've also progressed in terms of understanding of morality.

And we've progressed to know that God is dead.

But Nietzsche recognized in saying this there would be consequences.

Nietzsche observes in Twilight of the Idols, when 1 gives up the Christian faith, 1 pulls the right to Christian morality from under one's feet.

Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together.

By breaking 1 main concept of it, the faith in God, 1 breaks the whole.

So what Nietzsche is saying is saying if you give up the concept of God, God is dead, that entails something.

In particular, all of the morality, all of our conceptions of good and evil, that Christianity had hinged on the idea of God, that also all fails, right?

Here's a more modern author who comes to the same conclusion, Richard Dawkins, a well-known atheist.

He writes in his book, A Draining View of Life, he says, the universe as we observe it has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

They started out with just rejecting the idea of God.

But by rejecting the idea of God, a few other things came with it.

The Christian system of morality, the notions of good, the notions of evil, the notions of purpose, those began to disappear as well.

After all, If there's not a mind behind the cosmos, then what is there to imbue the cosmos with purpose?

If there's not some master mind behind it, then good and evil, these are just our conventions that we come up with.

The words we use to describe that we prefer this thing over that thing, but there's no binding force that tells us that indeed this thing actually is good and this thing actually is evil it's something we must come to agree upon ourselves and if my understanding of good and evil may be different than your understanding of good and evil.

Or my society's understanding of good and evil.

It's maybe different than your society's understanding of good and evil.

But these are just conventions, constructions.

They're not actually something that's embedded in the substance of the universe.

Does that make sense, where they're coming from?

So they're saying, we've gone away with God, but now we're actually losing these other categories as well.

The Epicurean dilemma begun by recognizing there's evil in the universe.

And we said, because there's evil in the universe, how could a loving God, there must not be a God, right?

But then we got rid of the idea of God and what happened?

Well, now it doesn't make sense to call something evil, right?

You can say, I don't prefer that activity.

We might use the word evil, but when we use the word evil, we really just mean, I prefer this over this.

Or my society has decided collectively that we don't like this kind of behavior.

But if it was a different society, they might have decided something different, right?

So by abandoning the notion of God, we actually abandon the right or the privilege to be able to call something evil.

Like surely when we say something is evil, we don't merely mean that it's just distasteful.

We actually mean that there's something evil.

Responding to the Problem of Evil

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