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Introduction toApologetics
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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”
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.
