Apologetics 102, WK6: Evil & Suffering

Introduction toApologetics

Text

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Perov

DEFINITIONS

EVILall that is opposed to God and His purposes; that which, from the human perspective, is harmful and nonproductive (suffering)

unjustifiable reality; disorder; something that occurs and ought not to Henri Blocher

EVIL

2 ASPECTSevil endured, misfortune; evil committed, wickedness Henri Blocher

the branch of theo-philosophy that addresses the problem of evil

THEODICY

the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil

THEODICY

The attempt to “justify the ways of God

to men.” John Milton

Benjamin Vandergucht

Attempt to justify God's actions

Distinguishing a Theodicy from a Defence

CLASSICAL APPROACH

Moral Evil Natural Evil

Natural Evil

evil committed evil endured

Moral Evil

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

DEUT. 28 If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, … all these blessings will come on you and accompany you… However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you…

Ancient Jews

Epicurus, 300BC

DEUT. 28 If you fully obey the Lord your God…However, if you do not obey the Lord your God…

Jesus

Evil, the most frequent objection to God, loses to the resurrection. Death, a great evil, is not the last word.

The Cross

Soul-Making Theodicy

Irenaeus, 200AD

Origen, 200AD

Irenaeus “Plus”

by Botticelli

Augustine, 400AD

Free Will Theodicy

Evils appear in creation when created things and creatures stop functioning in the way they were created to function, when they cease to have the being God intended them to have.

Calvin, 1500AD

Augustine “Plus”

Leibniz, 1500AD

The best of all

possible worlds.

Process of Creation

Hick, 1950AD

Plantinga, 1980AD

Free Will Defence

Plantinga’s Defence: “A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.

“Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely.

“To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so.

“As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.

CURRENT VIEWS

Evil is Necessary

Greater Good

Free Will

Not God’s Fault

Soul-MakingVirtue & Character Development

This isn’t Heaven

Heaven

Skeptical Theism

We Can’t Know

Innocent Suffering

No-one is Innocent

It’s God’s Will

‘Everything happens

for a reason’

“People ask me why I’m an Arminian and not a Calvinist. My most basic answer is that I believe Calvinism is impossible as it implies that God does what is morally wrong. Of

course, no Calvinist I know says they believe that…. What wrong? Foreordaining and

rendering certain all that occurs, including the fall and the Holocaust. Roger E. Olson, edited

God With Us

One Day

PEBBLES IN SHOES

“My main objection to Christianity and other monotheistic faiths is the problem of evil, which the religious scholar Huston Smith has called “the shoal on which all theologies founder. ” If God is all-powerful, just and loving, why then is existence so painful and unfair for so many people? Why do kids get cancer? Why do earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters kill so many people? I have never encountered a satisfying solution to the problem of evil . JOHN HORGAN

“I sympathize with Horgan’s main objection–the problem of evil and pain.  It is the hardest problem for both of us. Yet for me it leads to God and not away from him for several reasons.  Firstly, at the intellectual level, if there is no God then I agree with thinkers from Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that there is no such thing as evil (e.g. Dawkins’ famous statement: “there is no good…no evil… no justice…DNA just is and we dance to its music”).  Rather contradictory then to talk about a problem of evil at all. JOHN LENNOX

“Second, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering.  In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice.  Horgan denies this … but I still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself.  The vast majority of people who have ever lived have suffered and not received justice in this life.  Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never receive justice since there is no life to come. 

“Third, whether God could have made a world in which fire warmed but didn’t burn and there were no destructive earthquakes is difficult.  After all, earthquakes are paradoxically essential for the maintenance of life.  Certainly, God could have made a world in which there was no moral evil.  But there would have been no humans in it–it would be a robotic world.  The greatest God-given capacity we humans have is the capacity to love.  It inevitably carries with it the capacity to hate.  Hence the world presents us all with a mixed picture – beauty and barbed wire.

“The question I ask is, granted that this is so, is there anywhere evidence of the existence of a God whom I can trust with this deep issue?   Yes.  At the heart of Christianity there is a cross.

I’m DISSATISFIED

Perichoresis & Kenosis

The Atheist’s Dilemma

EVIL EXISTS?then good does too

GOOD EXISTS?then Moral Law does too

MORAL LAW EXISTS?then God does too

GOD EXISTS?then Atheism fails

OR ELSE . . .no God = no Moral Law = no good = no evil

The Atheist cannot hold to both

Atheism & evil. He must deny one.