Posted on 04/24/2011 8:32:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
It’s easy to spot militant atheists who attend my presentation called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. They usually sit with their arms folded and scowls on their faces. During a recent presentation at Michigan State, I knew I’d get push back from one such scowling student sitting to my right. He looked mad and was mad. (He wouldn’t even smile at a hilarious Homer Simpson clip!)
He shot his hand up during the Q&A and yelled out, “You mentioned the problem of evil during your presentation but you didn’t answer it! If there is a good God, then why does evil exist? Why doesn’t God stop it?”
I said, “Sir, that is an excellent question. Sometimes I bluntly answer this way. ‘If God stopped all evil, he might start with you . . . and me because we both do evil every day.’ To end evil on earth God would have to take away our free will. But if he takes away our free will, he takes away our ability to love as well. Allow me to show you a video that beautifully illustrates this in less than two minutes.” I then played this outstanding video (developed by my friend and fellow seminary graduate, Jim Zangmeister), which traces evil back to free will.
Most in the audience appreciated the clip and applauded. But the atheist was unmoved. “Why do babies die, why do tsunamis occur? These aren’t the result of free will!” he protested.
“True, they are not the result of someone’s free will today,” I explained. “But Christianity traces all of our trouble back to a free will choice by Adam. As a result, we live in a fallen world where bad things happen, but God takes the initiative to bring good from evil. In fact, you can sum up the entire Bible in one word—redemption. Paradise lost in Genesis is paradise regained in Revelation. God initiated and achieved this redemption by sending Jesus Christ who suffered and died on our behalf. So we can question God about suffering as the biblical writers did, but God didn’t exempt Himself from it. Jesus was the only completely innocent person in the history of the world, yet he suffered horribly for our redemption. He brought good from evil.”
The atheist didn’t like that either. He interrupted me several times, so I finally asked him, “Are you an atheist?”
He refused to answer but then blurted out, “It doesn’t matter!”
I said, “It does matter because if you are an atheist (I later learned from his blog he is), then you have no grounds by which to judge anything evil. Objective evil doesn’t exist unless objective good exists and objective good doesn’t exist unless God exists. You can have good without evil, but you can’t have evil without good. In other words, the shadows prove the sunshine. You can have sunshine without shadows, but you can’t have shadows without sunshine. So evil doesn’t disprove God—it actually shows there must be a God because it presupposes Good. Evil may prove there’s a devil out there, but it doesn’t disprove God.”
The atheist persisted, “But if God exists, why do some babies die such horrible deaths?”
Well, if the atheist is granting that God exists, then he has a valid question. While he can’t explain evil and suffering from his atheistic worldview, I need to explain it from mine.
My explanation went this way. Although I know why evil in general occurs (see the video), I don’t know why every specific evil occurs. But I know why I don’t know why—because I’m finite and can’t see into the future. Since God is infinite and can see all the way into eternity, he may allow evil events that ultimately work together for good. In other words, he can still bring good from evil even if we can’t see how.
To illustrate, I referred back to the classic Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” That’s where George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, falls on hard times, becomes despondent and tries to commit suicide. He’s saved by an angel and is permitted to see how life in his town would have turned out if he had never existed. George sees that everything would have turned out far worse without him, and thus realizes that even though evil infects life, good can prevail in the end. George could only see this with God’s timeless perspective. Only God can see how trillions of free choices and events can interact ultimately for good even if some of them seem hopelessly negative at the time. (In fact, that’s one reason why God told Job to trust him.)
At that point, a man sitting ten feet from the atheist raised his hand.
“Go ahead, sir.”
He first looked over at the atheist, then back at me and said, “I know of a young woman who was raped and became pregnant. The rape nearly destroyed her.” His voice began to crack . . . “But she decided that she would not punish the baby for the sin of the father. She later gave birth to a baby boy.” (By this point he was weeping openly.) “And that boy grew up to be a pastor whom God has used to help bring many people to Christ. He ministers to people to this day. That boy grew up to be me.”
He then looked back at the atheist and said, “My mother turned evil into good, and God can too.”
The atheist left immediately after the event ended, but I did get to meet that brave pastor who spoke up. His name is Gary Bingham, and he’s the pastor of Hillside Wesleyan Church in Marion, Indiana. Gary told me that his mom had self-confidence issues for many years but is doing much better since becoming a Christian a few years ago. I thanked him and asked him to let his mom know that she touched many for good that night. I hope through this column she has touched many more today.
This is superb! thanks for posting.
Thank you, for this beautiful post.
Happy Easter to all.
Tatt
Behold, I make all things new.
Bm
You are welcome
You are very welcome and Happy Easter to you also
Sorry, but what is Bm?
Never mind
Are we all robots in heaven? Can there be no objective good in heaven because there's no objective evil there?
One can square a circle in non-Euclidian space. One can grow a twig that circles around and grows into itself--thus, a one-ended stick can be made. Surely, God could have created a world where we have free will without the suffering of the innocent.* Of course, that's the need for Adam & Eve--to claim none of us are innocent, even the tormented babe who has done nothing evil himself. Regardless of our own actions, we carry that sin because of being born human, right?
So God allows us to be tormented for who we are, not what we do, and "who we are" is the way God created us. What an arbitrary (and dare I say "evil"?) behavior!
A "recent post" in the sidebar of the site asks, "Why are Atheists Angry at God?" Normally, I would have answered, "Who said they are?" But after this column, I have to say, "if there is a God, they sure have every reason to be!"
*e.g., where the tormentor perceives torment, but the innocent victim doesn't actually feel tormented.
BFL
Thank you! What a great way to start the Easter day!
What should we pray for then?
“”if there is a God, they sure have every reason to be!” “
I disagree, no they don’t. God owes them nothing. He is God; we aren’t.
Great post!
May God bless teller, preacher and mom. And soften the heart of the atheist... if it be His will.
It is my opinion that many lost souls and minds are lost because they, knowingly or not, practice faith in the grand religion of unattainable equality and hopelessly subjective fairness.
Satan’s religion.
He was condemned for preaching that crap in the first earth age. And from the beginning of this age he has done the same.
Satan asked Adam and Eve why they were unfairly treated by God. Just take what is not yours, the forbidden fruit, and be equals, he tempts.
Leftism at it’s heart.
The often disingenuous twist on the fairness temptation is the “God can’t be fair if He allows pain, suffering, poor people, dead babies, Republicans, etc.”
That reasoning requires an admittedly not uncommon ignorance of Christian doctrine. The prize on which the Christian eye is kept can NOT be achieved by long life nor earthly successes or comforts of any kind.
Satan’s pitch reeled in one third of the audience prior to this age. His modern American political surrogates generally pull in roughly the same numbers of true mis-believers.
When they sugar-coat the ‘our subjective notion of equality trumps objective individual freedom’ platform with enough targeted temptations to at least temporarily sway more than half of the mushy middle third, then they win elections.
Christianity is the religion of freedom, NOT equality.
True. A highly debatable point that I noted was:
“objective good doesn’t exist unless God exists.”
If God allows evil does that prove there is no God or that God allows evil?
This atheist’s is guilty of faulty reasoning. If the reason for not believing God exists is because if God exists he would only create a world without evil or consequences places a condition on God that God does not necessarily place on Himself. God could be a jerk who wants to see folks suffer. He could get jollies from seeing little babies die of terrible diseases.
A belief in God does not mean that God is benevolent, all caring or all loving.
Self-reliance and the ability to face the world without appeal to a God?
Beats me...I'm not God.
So you feel there's no reason to be angry at someone unless they owe you something?
Wow.
I suppose that by your reasoning, there's no reason to be angry at Satan, then, either. I admire your stoicism.
No we aren’t robots in heaven. Is Christ a robot in Heaven? The angels could make a choice, and a third of them made the wrong one.
Besides in heaven, you forget that we will be redeemed into a perfect, glorified state, to a place and creator we want to be with. We will not want to leave. We will experience what Paul and John experienced and not ever want to be away from it. And this was their view while they were still in their sinner/saint status.
God wanted people that would love Him. If anyone knows what real love is it is god, who IS love. He knows what is necessary for the love to be real and genuine.
Real love is made by a person with a free will, that is totally able to make a choice NOT to love back.
For genuine love the ability to not love back must be a real option. Hence the ability to make a sinful decision must exist.
Agreed. But I think the discussion was whether there was a benevolent, loving, and compassionate Christian God.
I've pointed out before that some people seem to think that the Christian God is Loki, god of misdirection and deception. After all, what God would lay out such strong and clear evidence of an old earth, if it's actually young and "He just made it look old." But the story posted for this thread referred to the other aspects more typically ascribed to Him, such as love and compassion.
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