I sometimes marvel at how different my twins are. Although I know they’re unique people with unique sets of DNA, it seems like people who enter the world on the same day and grow up in the same family would somehow converge in personality. Not so. My son and daughter could not be more different in how they approach life.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in how they undertake their piano lessons. My daughter learns a new song by carefully figuring out each note and ensuring accuracy as she plays. My son, however, tackles new songs with brute force and is happy to get them mostly right.
Last week at lessons, my son started to play his latest piece but was quickly stopped by his teacher. “Whoa! Wrong notes! Wrong notes!”
Frustrated that he had to fix something, my son replied, “How can any note even be wrong? They’re just keys on the piano!”
His teacher responded, “All notes are wrong except the one you were supposed to play.”
If my son had just been messing around and hitting keys on the piano without trying to play a song, he would have been correct—those notes couldn’t have been wrong because there were no “right” notes to play. But as soon as he was playing notes in the context of a song, there was an objective standard each of his notes could be compared to. His notes either matched the song’s notes, making them right, or didn’t match them, making them wrong.
I was immediately struck by how analogous this is to the problem of evil that atheists face. Like piano notes, human behavior can be right or wrong only if there’s an objective standard to compare it to, but in a world without God, there is no objective standard; evil can’t actually exist. Let’s look at this atheistic problem of evil more closely, then we’ll turn to the better known theistic problem of evil.
The Problem of Evil—without God
In the last few chapters, we’ve seen that many things can’t exist in a world without God. There can be no objective meaning, no free will (at least in the sense we commonly assume), no objective way people should live their lives, and no innate human responsibility to one another. Now we can add one more to the list: there can be no evil.
On any given day, we can scroll through news headlines and read about people being murdered, children being abused, women being raped, and much more. It’s part of our most basic human intuition to categorize such things as “evil.” But in a world without God, there’s no objective standard for calling anything evil. Just as people can’t hit wrong piano notes unless there’s an objective standard to which the notes can be compared, people can’t do anything wrong unless there’s an objective moral standard to which their behavior can be compared. When it comes to evil, the challenge for atheists is this: no human action can be evil in a world without God, despite the fact that our deepest human intuition tells us certain things are horribly wrong. A person’s view of murder, child abuse, and rape can be only a matter of opinion. That’s a tough thing for most people to say they believe.
As counterintuitive as it is, however, many atheists bite the bullet for consistency and admit this is the implication of their worldview. For example, in an online debate on this subject, one atheist said:
There is no innate good or evil. Good and evil are just two words and feelings that humans use to categorize things. Love, family, kindness—good. Murder, rape, drug abuse—evil. The extreme majority of the population would agree with those six categorizations, but in reality that’s only because we’ve been taught that certain things are good and evil. Nothing, by itself, is either way, but only becomes so in a human’s eye.1
This view, of course, is consistent with the idea of unguided evolution. If all life originated from a single cell via blind evolutionary forces, then humans are just another animal. And as we discussed in chapter 4, we don’t assign moral categories to animal behavior—a dog doesn’t do something morally wrong by biting someone. Similarly, if there’s no God, then there’s no reason to assign moral categories to human behavior. We’re just animals, and what we do is simply a fact of our existence. Good and evil are meaningless.
The Problem of Evil—with God
The problem of evil for Christians and other theists is often more obvious than the one for atheists: How can so much evil exist in a world created by a good God? It seems that such a God would never permit the many terrible things we see. Christians have an objective basis for calling things evil but face the challenge of explaining how evil exists given what they believe about God.
This difficulty is not easily resolved. Thoughtful philosophers and theologians have grappled with the problem of evil for centuries. There’s nothing you’ll find here or anywhere else that will make you say, “Oh! I get it now. The extent of evil in the world is actually quite easy to understand!” What we can do, however, is look at two important points that can help us begin to understand the problem of evil from a Christian perspective.
First, the coexistence of God and evil is logically possible. This is an important starting point for discussion because some philosophers have suggested that there’s no logical way to resolve the problem of evil without removing one of God’s biblical attributes. The argument basically goes like this:
In order to demonstrate that this conclusion doesn’t follow and that the coexistence of God and evil is at least logically possible, we need to show that one of the first two statements isn’t necessarily true. Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga did exactly that in his classic work God, Freedom, and Evil. Plantinga demonstrated that an all-good God wouldn’t necessarily eliminate evil if the existence of human free will is a greater good. This is known as the free will defense. Plantinga explains:
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; and 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.2
Plantinga’s free will defense shows that the existence of evil doesn’t disprove the existence of God—there’s at least one possible way to reconcile them, and most philosophers today acknowledge as much. But even if the existence of evil doesn’t disprove the existence of God, many people go on to say that the existence of evil at least counts as significant evidence against the existence of God.
This brings us to our second point. Evil must be considered in the context of all the evidence for God’s existence. If we look only at evil, the picture indeed looks bleak. It certainly seems this world is inconsistent with the idea of a perfectly good and loving God. But we must remember that evil is only one of many pieces of evidence we have to consider. Recall what we learned in part 1: the origin of the universe, the origin and the development of life, and our innate moral understanding are all pieces of evidence that point to God’s existence. In addition, there are other important pieces of evidence we didn’t have space to discuss, such as the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.3 All this compelling evidence remains, even when evil exists alongside it. So the question is, What’s the best explanation for all that we observe? Perhaps surprisingly, Christians believe the existence of God is the best explanation for all that we see, including evil—if we acknowledge that evil is an objective reality that can be accounted for only by the existence of a moral authority.
As it turns out, evil can actually be evidence for God.
The Difference God Makes
Atheists can feel as much moral outrage at the evil in the world as anyone who believes in God. But they have no objective basis for appealing to others to feel the same way. The most they can do, based on their own opinion of what’s evil, is work toward corresponding laws and justice on Earth. But remember: no one can be morally blamed for their actions in a world without God. Putting a person in jail for murder is the moral equivalent of putting an elephant in jail for stepping on a toad.
For Christians, however, evil isn’t an illusion that ends with the earthly imprisonment of various molecules in motion. We understand evil to be the result of humans using their free will to rebel against God’s perfect laws. We mourn human bondage to such sin. And we recognize that the solution to evil is not to deny its existence but to turn to Jesus, who conquered evil on the cross. Revelation 21:1–5 tells us of the glorious day when that victory will be realized in full through the creation of a new heaven and a new earth:
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
Not only does a Christian worldview make sense of evil in a way that atheism cannot, but it also offers the hope that evil will be forever eliminated. In our final chapter, we’ll look at why hope matters so greatly for humankind.
KEY POINTS
Open the Conversation
Advance the Conversation
Apply the Conversation