QUESTION ONE: What Evidence is there for God’s existence?
Our own experiences or feelings, although meaningful to ourselves, are useless when arguing the case for the existence of God to non-believers.
(Brad Pitt)
THREE Arguments for the existence of God
Cosmological Argument
Premise 1 – The
(Edwin Hubble 1920)
Premise 2 –
(Lawrence Krauss “A Universe from Nothing”)
Conclusion –
William Lane Craig suggests this cause must be
So what Caused God? - Look at Premise 2 more closely. The uncaused First Cause.
The Design Argument
William Paley 1802, Watch Maker
(Frank Turek, Alphabet cereal)
(Sean McDowell, Cabin in the woods)
The Moral Argument
Objective Moral
Objection 1: Different
Objection 2: Morals are
The best explanation is a
This argument does not suggest atheists can’t do good, but that we wouldn’t know good or bad if it weren’t for God.
QUESTION TWO: How can a Good God allow evil and suffering?
“Why doesn’t God just stop me from being mean before it happens? Like, right before I’m mean, why doesn’t He just make me be nice?”
“Yeah, like I don’t understand why He doesn’t just stop bad guys before they do bad stuff. Why wouldn’t He just want good things to happen?”
Perceived contradiction in their budding faith:
“If God is perfectly good, how can there be evil in the world He created?”
It’s a question that’s been asked for thousands of years and continues to be one of the most significant challenges to Christianity today. The problem of evil can be a very emotional one—one that’s often tied to a tragic personal experience.
Defining the Problem of Evil
Why is the existence of evil such a difficult problem for Christianity?
The Heart of the Issue is:
- If God is
- If God is
But Evil Exists
- How then can the existence of evil be reconciled with the existence of God?
Christians use the Fall of Man as their go to answer traditionally:
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
This is where it can be traced back to
While this is true, a lot of the times when dealing with this question you are dealing with:
People who do raise this question may not necessarily believe it
The problem, can be an emotional one, so linking it to the fall 6,000 years ago back to a tragedy happening today is an almost impossible problem.
Did God Create Evil?
God created everything (Genesis 1:1; John 1:3; Colossian 1:16)
Evil is Something
Therefore God created Evil
The problem with this argument is a faulty premise in Point 2 which leads to a faulty conclusion.
Understand: Evil is very real, we admit that as Christians.
However
Can’t have the rot without the tree
Can’t have rust without the car
So it is better to understand that God created only good thing and evil is a corruption of His good creation, and God allows it.
Where Does Corruption Come From
- Human Corruption or Moral Evil
Natural Evil
Human Corruption
- We have Free Will – We are Not Robots, the ability to choose our own paths, make our own choices!
- God wants us to
- A love that is
Why Doesn’t God Just Stop Moral Evil
Why an all-good and all-powerful God does doesn’t just stop the moral evil that is possible before it happens?
We hear the statement, God can do anything! But is that true
- He cannot
- God cannot do anything contradictory like
- Making a square circle
- A married Bachelor
- A stone so heavy he can’t lift it
So the question is: If we were created with free will, then is it possible to destroy moral evil without destroying our present world? NO
This is logically impossible
God can’t force us to freely make good choices; He would have to destroy our freedom so He could destroy evil.
But the good news, He will free us from evil as part of His overall redemptive plan (Revelation 21-22)
What About Natural Evil
More difficult issue to address by theologians
The problem of natural evil is that it’s actually the by-product of good processes
“Our planet requires oxygen and a warming sun and water in order for us to live here, and we appreciate this, even though we recognize that people can get sunstroke and drown in the ocean. So, too, it seems that plate tectonics are… a ‘central requirement for life’ as we know it.”
(Dinesh D’Souza, “Why We Need Earthquakes,” Christianity Today (April 28, 2009), at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/may/12.58.html?start=1.)
Some Natural Evils are actually the result of moral evils. Africa/Starvation/Leaders
We can’t explain every instance of Natural Evil. What we can say is that God must have morally sufficient reasons for permitting the natural evil we do see
The Problem of Evil Is Tough But Not Insurmountable
The problem of evil is a difficult challenge, but that doesn’t mean there are no answers we can offer.
Moral and Natural evil can both be viewed as a by-product of God’s perfectly good creation
Let’s be honest in acknowledging the enormous difficulty of the issue.
QUESTION THREE: Why would God command the Genocide of the Canaanites?
The Old Testament recounts God’s command to utterly destroy the people of Canaan so the Israel could take over their land. This is an issue for sceptics as they argue that if a good God exists He wouldn’t command something immoral like genocide. They conclude God must not exist and the Bible is wrong in attributing these events to Him
An
- 400 years before, God promised Abraham and his descendants eventual inheritance the land of Canaan (Gen 15:18-21)
- When the time came, the land was already inhabited by the Canaanite people and they were very depraved
- God did not want Israel to settle amongst the immoral Canaanites because He knew how easily they would influence Israel’s morality
So the Canaanites had to go. The time for the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham converged with the time of God’s execution of judgement on the Canaanites (Deut 20:16-18 and Deut 9:5)
Was God’s command for Genocide immoral?
In Question 2 sceptics ask how a good God can allow moral evil without intervention and call Him immoral for not stopping bad people. In this Question those same sceptics now call God immoral for doing exactly what they said they wanted Him to do, to stop evil people.
- ‘Genocide’ evokes horrendous images and violent emotion - victims are usually innocent
- We have earthly judges with the authority to sentence criminals to death. God is more just and more pure than humans. His authority is perfect and absolute
- This was an execution of God’s judgment not an unmerited immoral massacre
Question FOUR: How can a loving God send people to hell?
Three layers of questions about hell that people often unknowingly roll into one big question.
- Why Does Good Need To Punish Anyone?
- Who Should Be Punished?
- What Should The Nature Of Punishment Be?
a) Why Does Good Need To Punish Anyone?
Common Objection: “I believe in Jesus and all He taught, But I can’t believe in hell. I think of how much I adore my own kids, and no matter what they did, I would never want them to be severely punished. God must love us even more than that, so how could He create hell?”
Two Big Problems
- It Ignores the Problem of Sin
- It Ignores the Fact That God is Both Loving and Just
What is sin?
- God’s moral code on the human heart
Psalm 18:30; 1 John 1:5, Romans 2:14-15
- Sin is a transgression against the laws
- If God didn’t exist, there would be no sin because there would be no sin, because there would be no moral laws.
- Why wouldn’t we expect a penalty for breaking divine laws
- God is Just
Deut 32:4; Psalm 9:7-8; Psalm 33:5; Isaiah 61:8
- Justness vs Lovingness
- Not a Contradiction
If sin is real, and God is just, there must be a penalty for that sin
b) Who Should Be
We can agree to punishment for really bad people
But what about the average person
- The first group is more easier to take and understand
But ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God! Romans 3:23
The penalty for sin is death.
So all should be punished
But punishment at different levels?
- Luke 12:47-48
- Revelations 20:12
So while the Biblie talks of this, it is best to avoid hell together. But don’t sell it short!
c) What Should The Nature Of Punishment Be?
If hell was based on what we think of today for punishment – the punishment matching the crime Our human idea of what’s reasonable has no necessary bearing on what’s true
God doesn’t act or think the way we do (Isaiah 55:8)
- He is perfect
- He is just
Jesus referred to hell:
- An Unquenchable fire (Mark 9:48-49
- An outer darkness (Matt 22:13)
- A Fiery Furnace (Matt 13:42)
- A Place of Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth (Matt 8:12)
- A Place of Spiritual and Bodily Destruction (Matt 10:28)
There is agreement on severity.
The difference on what hell is and how long it will last
LITERAL : Hell is a place of actual fire
Reject Jesus free gift of forgiveness will experience
Conscious, unending torment
METAPHORICAL : Hell is everlasting punishment of some kind
There is no fire, it is a metaphor of some sort
CONDITIONALIST : Those who are not saved will eventually cease to exist
Eternal or everlasting punishment refer to FINLITY, not DURATION
Even though there is disagreement, we all agree it’s a very serious (and just) punishment of eternal separation from God.
d) Hell Is A Harsh Reality, But It’s Also A Choice
“There are only two kinds of people—those who say ‘Thy will be done’ to God or those to whom God in the end says, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell choose it.”
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 116.