An atheist asked me how I can believe that God exists, and is good, considering all of the terrible stuff that happens in the world. This, of course, is one of the most common objections people have been making against God for millennia. I think it is worth addressing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| So before I went on vacation, I received an email that I wanted to respond to, but that I didn't have a chance. | |
| I ran out of time, so I thought there's no reason why I can't go back and respond to it now, so that's what I'm going to do. | |
| All right, here's what it says. Matt, you are constantly giving God credit for good things that happen, but I notice that you never blame Him for all the evil in the world. | |
| If your God exists and He is good, as you claim, how do you explain a world filled with rape, murder, torture, terrorism, sex trafficking, and so many other evils? | |
| It's clear to me that there is no evidence for any kind of God. | |
| There especially is no evidence for a good God. | |
| All right. So this is the classic why do bad things happen to good people objection. | |
| And I think it's a good and important and complex question. | |
| And it's one that Christians have been talking about and debating and writing about for centuries, since the beginning. | |
| I also think it's kind of a weak argument against the existence of God. | |
| So it's a good question to talk about. | |
| I don't think it's a great argument for the atheists. | |
| I don't think it's a good argument in the atheist corner. | |
| I also think that my friend here in the email didn't even use the best version of his own argument. | |
| He made the same oversight that a lot of atheists surprisingly make when it comes to this objection, which is they use the weakest version of it. | |
| So let's unpack it and we'll start with this. | |
| There are two forms of bad things that might happen to a person, just broadly speaking, right? | |
| There are two categories of bad things that happen in the world. | |
| There's the kind of bad thing that the email describes, which is rape, murder, and so on. | |
| Things that are the result, in other words, of human choices. | |
| If you're the victim of rape or murder, that is the result of the choice of not yourself, but somebody else, the person who is victimizing you. | |
| Then there are the bad things that may happen to you as a result of your own choices, and then there are the bad things that happen to you as the result of a combination of your own choices and the choices of other people. | |
| So take, for example, a man who commits a crime, goes to jail, and then is murdered in jail. | |
| Well, the fact that he was murdered is the result of the choice of the person who murdered him, but the fact that he was in jail to be murdered was the result of his own choice. | |
| And I think a lot of bad things are kind of explained that way, where there's a combination of There's a whole storm of bad choices blowing this way and that from all different directions, and it results in all kinds of bad things. | |
| The other category, the one that this atheist didn't even mention, but which I think presents a greater challenge to believers, that is the category of bad things that happen seemingly apart from anyone's choice at all. | |
| So, diseases, okay? | |
| Well, of course, and there are diseases that are the result of choices that we make, but there are many, many, many tragic, millions of tragic examples of people being killed by horrible diseases completely apart from any choice at all that they made. | |
| It just happened to them. | |
| They were just victims of it, and that's all. | |
| Take the most tragic example of all, of course, would be a child who dies of cancer. | |
| How could God create a world where a five-year-old Obviously, through no fault of his own, dies of leukemia. | |
| Or where anyone dies of leukemia. | |
| Or a world where anyone could die of any kind of horrible, agonizing disease at all. | |
| Now, I'm going to try my best to answer both of these questions. | |
| I should warn at the beginning that I am not a theologian, and the answer that I give is just my own answer. | |
| Now, it's an answer that I hope is grounded in Christian teaching and in Scripture, but my point is, if it's a bad answer, or incomplete, or poorly conveyed, then blame me for it. | |
| Okay, don't blame Christianity. | |
| That would be my fault. | |
| Now, to understand these things, we have to go back to the Christian doctrine of the fall. | |
| And it seems like there are a lot of atheists and secular people who just simply don't understand this doctrine and have made no attempt to understand it. | |
| And that's a problem, because if you're going to raise these kinds of objections against Christianity, then you have to understand, at least on some level, this doctrine. | |
| Because it all goes back to this. | |
| Now, it's our belief as Christians that God created, originally, human beings who were in complete harmony with Him, With each other, with themselves, with nature, with the world. | |
| They were living in paradise. | |
| So, when an atheist says, well, if God is loving, why didn't he create a utopia? | |
| Why didn't he create a world filled with nothing but love and happiness and kindness and peace and prosperity? | |
| Well, the answer is, he did create that world. | |
| That's exactly the kind of world he created. | |
| And he also created many other forms of life on earth. | |
| But The thing that separated human life from all other forms of life is that human life was made in the image of God. | |
| That's what it says in Genesis. | |
| And to be in His image meant that these humans were not merely slaves to instinct or to nature. | |
| They were given a will of their own, a free will. | |
| The ability to choose between one thing or another, and that still is the primary thing that separates us from the animals, is that we can make judgments about what we ought to do and what we ought not do. | |
| Animals cannot make those kinds of judgments. | |
| They can't conceive of them. | |
| They operate according to instinct. | |
| And if they make any kinds of choices at all, I'm going to run this way or that way, these are morally neutral choices. | |
| And even those choices, in the end, go back to instinct. | |
| We, however, are above that, and so we can assess, this is right, this is wrong, I'm going to do the right thing, or I'm going to do the wrong thing. | |
| And that will, that incredible power that God gave us, Is one of the primary things that makes us creatures in His image. | |
| Now, as long as these humans chose to obey God and to remain in communion with Him, they were happy and they were safe and they were in paradise. | |
| God ruled over man, and through man, God ruled over nature. | |
| So we say that man had dominion over nature, dominion over the animals. | |
| Well, of course, God is really the one who had dominion over nature and the animals, but he had dominion over nature, over the animals, through man. | |
| He ruled through man, and man was able to enjoy that. | |
| He was able to enjoy that dominion so long as he submitted to God's authority. | |
| Now, if you're an atheist, We'll just step to the side here for a minute. | |
| If you're an atheist, you don't believe that any of this happened. | |
| I realize that. I know. | |
| But the question that I was asked and that atheists ask all the time is, why would a good God allow bad things? | |
| I'm trying to explain that. | |
| I am not trying to explain why God exists. | |
| That's a completely separate conversation. | |
| I'm just trying to explain how Christians can believe in a good God who allows bad things. | |
| And this is one of the problems that we run into when it comes to discussions between atheists and theists, is that every conversation eventually goes back to an argument about whether or not God exists. | |
| And of course, inevitably, it will come back to that. | |
| But if you're trying to understand individual Christian doctrines, and if you're trying to understand not just our belief in God generally, but the The kind of our belief in the goodness of God and in the nature, | |
| the good loving nature of God, if you're trying to understand that, then you have to be able to put aside for a moment your objections about the existence of God completely and instead look at the individual doctrines. | |
| Okay, so there was this harmony, and then man chose to rebel against God. | |
| So before we got there, now we just got into the rebellion, but before we got to that point, everything makes sense in terms of Well, this is what a loving God would do, right? | |
| Garden of Eden, paradise, even from an atheist perspective, even though you don't believe in God, but I guess you probably would say, well, yeah, if there was a God and he really was a good God, that's the kind of world he would have made. | |
| Okay, great. That's the kind of world he did make, according to Christians. | |
| But there was that thing, remember? | |
| That power, that will, that free will, that choice that he gave us. | |
| So man took that choice, And he used it to rebel against God. | |
| And for the purposes of this conversation, it doesn't really matter what exactly that choice was. | |
| The exact nature of that choice for this conversation doesn't matter. | |
| The point is, he was given at every moment a choice between serving himself and serving God. | |
| And for a period of time he chose to serve God, he was happy, and then one day he chose himself. | |
| And then catastrophe struck. | |
| And a whole literal world of misery followed. | |
| Now, the objection to that is, well, why would anyone choose that? | |
| You're in paradise. You're in utopia. | |
| I mean, it's unreasonable to claim that somebody could be in paradise and then choose to destroy all of that. | |
| Well, it is, in the end, an unreasonable choice, but is it unreasonable to believe that That a person in paradise would make that choice? | |
| No, it's not unreasonable at all. | |
| I mean, look even at your own life. | |
| You have made in your own life, if you're going to be honest about it, you have made smaller versions of that exact same choice. | |
| I'm sure there have been points in your life when you have been in a situation where there is relative harmony and ease and happiness, and then you do something That destroys it. | |
| And later on, you look back on it with a little bit of maturity and wisdom, and hopefully with some self-awareness, and you say, why did I do that? | |
| It's crazy. I had this good thing. | |
| Why did I ruin it? Or take a more extreme example, but a very common example, of somebody who's in basically a happy marriage, a peaceful marriage, a marriage with harmony and unity, and then one day they go out and have an affair. | |
| And even the affair itself, there's that fleeting physical pleasure that comes with the affair, but it's also caked in on both sides and guilt and secrecy and lies and misery and all of that for this fleeting pleasure. | |
| And then in the end, it ends up destroying this good, wonderful thing that the adulterer had. | |
| And that person is going to look back on it later and they're going to say, why did I do that? | |
| You know, when they're divorced and they're living alone in their one-bedroom apartment and their spouse hates them and their kids hate them, they're going to look back on that wonderful thing they had, living in that, you know, in that nice home with the white picket fence and the kids and the nice family and the vacations. | |
| And now they're just alone in misery. | |
| And they're going to say, why did I do that? | |
| I had everything. | |
| So the point is, you know, it's not that hard to understand how a man in paradise could choose to destroy it. | |
| Because people have continued making exactly that choice over and over and over again, and you yourself have made it on some level at various points in your life. | |
| So a man chose to rebel. | |
| And there was this break. There was this divorce. | |
| You know, I use the example of marriage for a reason because that's the example that Scripture uses constantly. | |
| In describing man's relationship to God, the image of marriage is used frequently. | |
| And God, through the prophets in the Old Testament, is constantly accusing sinners of being adulterers. | |
| Not because they're literally committing adultery, although sometimes they are. | |
| But what he's saying is that they are adulterers because they are betraying him, they're betraying their relationship to him. | |
| So this image of marriage is used. | |
| And so it makes sense to say that at the fall there was this split, this divorce. | |
| And the unity, the harmony, was destroyed by the free choice Man had separated himself from God, and in the process he had lost, in many respects, his dominion over nature. | |
| He became subject to nature. | |
| He found himself at nature's mercy. | |
| Because he had stepped out of line. | |
| He had stepped out of the process. Remember, there was this process. | |
| There was God, man, nature. | |
| God ruled nature through man. | |
| Man had dominion over nature. | |
| Well, man extricated himself from that process and ended up literally in the wilderness and now at the mercy of nature. | |
| And so, in some sense, he still has dominion over nature, but also nature has dominion now over him. | |
| And this is where things like disease and senility and human frailty and all of that come into the picture. | |
| But then the next question is, okay, well, So it makes sense that the first human beings were given this choice. | |
| They made the bad choice. They suffered the consequences. | |
| Well, then why do we all have to suffer the consequences? | |
| And there is an element of mystery there. | |
| We can't get around it. We can't escape it. | |
| God could have corrected the problem right away. | |
| He could have corrected it, balanced the account, changed everything during mankind's first generation, but he chose not to. | |
| Why did he make that choice? | |
| Well, I mean, nobody can speak absolutely to the motivations of God. | |
| I think that's a very dangerous thing to try to do. | |
| I'm not even going to attempt it, but I will say this. | |
| We have to understand that a change occurred not just to the individual people involved at the time personally, but a change occurred to the human species, to the human race. | |
| A change occurred to our very nature. | |
| There was a change in the nature of man. | |
| These being the first humans, our first parents, them stepping out, them stepping away from that harmony with God. | |
| Well, kind of logically, by doing that, they took all of us out of harmony. | |
| Again, it's not that hard to understand. | |
| When we look at, on a personal level, we look at examples that are all around us now, maybe examples that are in our own lives. | |
| Think about a A father who chooses to be abusive. | |
| A father who chooses to be an abusive tyrant. | |
| Well, when the father decides to be like that, a change occurs to the family itself, to the nature of the family. | |
| And the consequences will be felt through the generations. | |
| A new course is set. | |
| Or you know what? I think a better example is, let's go back to divorce. | |
| There was the divorce that when man at the fall betrayed God, there was that divorce. | |
| Think about divorces in actual personal marriages. | |
| And let's say it's a divorce where one person, where a man decides to abandon his family. | |
| Well, in doing that, he has broken the family apart. | |
| Without the direct consent of all the other members of the family. | |
| And he has set the family on a new course, a bad course. | |
| And he has set off a series of consequences that will be felt all through down the line, that will be felt by his children and his children's children and his children's children's children, even 15 generations later. | |
| You could look at children that are being born 15 generations later and you could say correctly, That they would not be quite like this if not for the choice that that man made 15 generations ago. | |
| We are all connected, right? | |
| Especially in a family, we are all connected. | |
| And the choices that we make affect others. | |
| And the choices that we make as parents have an effect on our children and all down the line. | |
| So it makes sense that this horrible choice that our first parents made would be felt all down the line. | |
| So that's all kind of on the first aspect of the question. | |
| That's my very brief and insufficient explanation about how disease entered the world and why we are suffering the consequences of the fall today. | |
| But let's look at the second aspect of the question. | |
| What about all the bad things that happen as a result of people victimizing each other? | |
| Now this, I think, is easier to understand, especially in light of what we just talked about, and it's pretty simple, I think. | |
| God gives us the power to choose. | |
| Just as He gave Adam and Eve the power to choose, He also gives us the power to choose. | |
| And though they chose wrongly, and we inevitably suffer the consequences of that wrong choice, still, we have the power to choose rightly. | |
| Now, you can't help it if you were born to a broken family, divorced parents, abusive father, whatever, but you can help carrying that on. | |
| You can help it if you make the same choice. | |
| Your likelihood of making the same choice may be increased because your parents were terrible, but you don't have to make the same choice. | |
| You could make a different choice. | |
| And if you end up in the same situation, you know, if your parents were abusive, terrible, and then you end up abusive and terrible, I think your parents deserve a lot of the guilt and blame for that because they set you on that course, but you also deserve 100% of the guilt and blame because in the end, you still made a choice. | |
| Why are we given a choice? | |
| Why does God allow us to make bad choices? | |
| Because choice and the potential for a bad choice is necessary for love to exist. | |
| Love is a choice. | |
| And if we really are going to love God and love each other, we have to choose it. | |
| If you don't choose love, then love is meaningless. | |
| If your wife doesn't choose to love you, then her love for you means nothing. | |
| If your wife wants to leave you and leave the marriage, and your only way to keep her with you is to lock her in the basement, then the fact that she is still with you and in the marriage is meaningless. | |
| She's only there because she has no other choice but to be there. | |
| If we have no choice but to love God, then we are just God's robots. | |
| We are God's puppets. | |
| We are not creatures made in His image. | |
| We are just Puppets on a string. | |
| And in that case, in a world without choice and without meaningful chosen love, then we would have to look at all the misery and all the suffering and say that it's all part of some weird, awful game or stage play that God is putting on. | |
| But that's not the case. | |
| God wants us to love. | |
| He created a world with love. | |
| He created it in love. | |
| God is love himself. | |
| And God wants us to share in that love. | |
| He wants us to be virtuous, to be holy, to be good, to have joy. | |
| But none of that can happen without choice. | |
| But choice, the choice to do something, presupposes the option of doing the opposite. | |
| If you have the choice to do X and X is good, then you must also have the choice to do Y. Even if Y is bad. | |
| If you had no choice but to do X, then you never had a choice and you didn't choose to do X. And therefore, X is meaningless. | |
| The fact that you're doing X means nothing. | |
| And if God gives us the choice to do bad or good, but then every time we try to do bad, He just reaches out His hand and blocks us from doing it every single time, then again, we never really had a choice. | |
| So, why does God allow a man to set a building on fire? | |
| For the same reason He allows a man to rush into a burning building and rescue a child from it. | |
| If a man can't choose acts of cowardice and evil and destruction, then he cannot choose acts of courage and self-sacrifice and generosity. | |
| If we do not want a world with the potential for evil, Then that means we don't want a world with the potential for good. | |
| And that's not to say that good is dependent upon evil. | |
| It's not to say that this isn't dualism we're talking about here. | |
| I'm merely saying that the point of life is to choose God and choose good, and such a point, such a purpose can't be achieved in a world where the opposite choice is impossible. | |
| Love is a choice by its nature. | |
| And so what you could really say is, God could not have created a world where there is love but no free will, because love is a certain thing. | |
| Love has a nature. | |
| Again, God is love, and love by its nature is an act of will. | |
| God's love is perfect because His will is perfect, which isn't to say that He doesn't have a will, but His will is perfect. | |
| But this idea that, well, why didn't God make a world where there's love and happiness and harmony, but there's no choice for anything else, and we're all just automatons programmed to always do the good thing? | |
| Well, because that's nonsensical. | |
| That's kind of like the question of, can God create a boulder that's so heavy he can't lift it? | |
| That's just a nonsensical question. | |
| It means nothing. And to say, well, could there be a world with love but no choice and no will, that's just nonsense. | |
| It means nothing. It's like saying, can there be a world with up and no down? | |
| It doesn't make any sense. | |
| Now, there's one other thing to remember, and this is really important, of course. | |
| As Christians, we can't leave this part out of it, that the Christian belief, my own belief, And if you're trying to understand the Christian belief, you have to also keep this in mind, that God did not abandon us to this fate. | |
| He created a world, he created a paradise, man chose to abandon that, chose to serve himself rather than God, and that choice has been repeated billions of times down the generations by everybody. | |
| And many horrible things happen as a result and continue to happen. | |
| However, God did not abandon us to that. | |
| He's not just sitting back and saying, well, you know, sorry about all that, guys. | |
| You're out of luck. And that's why God sent His Son. | |
| That's why God sent Christ. | |
| God Himself came to earth, incarnate, to redeem mankind, to kind of drag us out of the pit. | |
| We talked about the example of the burning building and the man who rushes in. | |
| Well, God Himself was the man who rushed into the building to save us. | |
| And so, even though we live in a world now where there is misery and Misfortune and pain and suffering and agony and all of those things, we are not abandoned to that world. | |
| We are not doomed to live in it forever. | |
| And this is not the whole picture, the whole story. | |
| This is not the whole point. | |
| The full point, the full purpose will be realized in the next life. | |
| But it is inevitable in the meantime that choice is a part of the story. | |
| And that we have to continue making the right choices. | |
| We have to continue choosing God. | |
| So, hopefully that was a somewhat sufficient explanation. | |
| Although, if you're... | |
| I'm trying to find it. I can't find it. | |
| If you're really looking for... | |
| I had the book somewhere. If you're really looking for a better explanation as to, you know, if you want a better answer to this question... | |
| Oh, here it is. Pick up this book, Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis. | |
| It's really short and thin here. | |
| And he addresses this same question, and he does it much better than I do. | |
| And you can read this whole book in like a couple hours. |