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Mary Jo Sharp asks: what is the solution to the problem of evil?

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Hard Questions, Real Answers
Hard Questions, Real Answers

I saw that Roger Sharp had tweeted this post from Confident Christianity on Twitter. It’s Mary Jo’s book review of William Lane Craig’s chapter on the problem of evil, taken from his book “Hard Questions, Real Answers“. I highly recommend that book, even for beginners, and the second edition has chapters on abortion, homosexuality and exclusive salvation.

Excerpt:

In Hard Questions, Real Answers, Craig organizes the problem of evil into two categories: the internal and external problem. The internal problem of evil addresses the premises that are consistent within the Christian worldview; analyzing whether the Christian worldview, itself, is based on inconsistent beliefs. The external problem of evil concentrates on whether or not the Christian worldview is adequate to explain evil; focusing on premises Christians would not necessarily commit to as tenet of Christian theism, but would generally recognize as true. Craig explains, “The first approach tries to expose an inner tension within the Christian worldview itself; the second approach attempts to present evidence against the truth of the Christian worldview.”

Craig further breaks down the internal problem into two areas: the logical problem and the probabilistic problem. The logical problem states that it is illogical for both God and evil to coexist. Craig asserts that this argument is seriously flawed, because there is no reason to think that God and evil are logically incompatible.There are no overt contradictions between them. He demonstrates that it can be proven God and evil are actually logically consistent, “So long as it is even possible that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil, it follows that God and evil are logically consistent.”

The probabilistic argument states that it is highly improbable that both God and evil exist. Craig makes three major points regarding the probabilistic argument. First, relative to the full range of evidence available, God’s existence is probable. The probabilistic argument relies on God’s existence being improbable strictly in relation to evil, which could appear as a solid argument. However, in light of all the evidence for God, the probability of his existence far outweighs the probability against. Second, we are not in the best position to discern whether God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evil that occurs. We are finite beings who are attempting to understand an infinite God. Obviously, we will experience some deficiency here. Third, the doctrines of Christianity increase the probability that God and evil coexist. One of the most important areas Craig addresses on this point is, according to Christian doctrine, happiness is not the chief purpose of life; rather, it is the knowledge of God. God’s role is not to provide a comfortable world for his “human pets.” The relationship between humanity and God is much deeper than this surface view of mankind’s happiness. Innocent human suffering can provide a “deeper dependency and trust in God,” which the Bible describes as true fulfillment: “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness” (2 Peter 1:3).

And more:

This past year, a friend of mine, David, debated an atheist on the intellectual problem of evil. David answered nearly every single philosophical argument the atheist offered; however, the end result was not what I expected. Instead of conceding any of the philosophical arguments (intellectual problem of evil), the atheist began to singularly argue from the emotional problem of evil. From the review on the Answering Infidelswebsite,

Throughout the debate, David Wood and John Loftus approached the problem of evil from two different aspects. Wood adhered to the formal argument and explained that an argument from animal and human suffering cannot negate the theistic worldview. Loftus, however, kept reverting back to examples of suffering, almost as if he expected Wood to give an explanation for each instance of suffering. However, the argument from evil, to be an argument, must include adherence to the formal argument: otherwise, the experiential side, which is subjective to each person, will just create a convoluted mess of argumentation. On several occasions, Loftus had to avert the original question just to continue to argue against Wood.

The intellectual problem, once answered, did not negate the atheist’s commitment to the emotional problem of evil. David’s debate was a poignant illustration of how the emotional problem can be the root of skepticism; a point we, as Christians, must be sensitive to when dealing with objections from evil. And if we find the skeptic at this point, we “must proceed very cautiously” with the person who is experiencing the emotional problem of evil.

Very good post. A lot of people get disappointed with God because of evil, and sometimes it’s just simple stuff like expecting God to help them to find their cricket bat or something silly like that. Just keep this in mind. Don’t just answer the problem, be aware of the mistaken view of God as Happy-Clappy Santa Claus that is lurking under the surface of the objection.

Rejecting God because he doesn’t make us happy

Often, when people say “God doesn’t prevent suffering”, what they really mean is that God didn’t meet their personal expectations for making them happy. Atheist Lewis Wolpert said in his debate with William Lane Craig that God didn’t help him find his cricket bat so he became an atheist.

Other atheists say , “God doesn’t prevent poverty”, but what they really mean is that God didn’t give them an emergency bailout when they acted irresponsibly. Just read my post on Dan Barker: this is not at all out of the ordinary. Other people dump God when they rush a romantic relationship forward on feelings with a non-Christian and it fails. Bye-bye God.

I just think that this is something we should be aware of when people push the problem of evil. You just have to tell them that God is not their butler or their mommy. Life isn’t like that. And if we knew God, and reflected on the suffering of Jesus in obedience, we wouldn’t expect life to be Heaven on Earth. If it wasn’t for Jesus, then it won’t be for us, either. I am not sure exactly how to respond to this caricature of God, but telling the story of Jesus and how teh Father let Jesus suffer in order to do good things and to learn obedience and endurance is good.

Does anyone have a really good story about a Christian who persisted through suffering and came to know God more fully, and serve him better? That would be a good response to this. Craig has one in the book chapter about the woman who is sick. There is evidential value for apologetics in someone who has suffered but who has nevertheless managed to keep their faith intact. If anyone has a good story I can link to on this, send it to me.

Learn more

I’ve written a comprehensive post on the problem of evil here, in case you guys want to learn more about it. And you can listen to a good debate on the problem of evil here, between William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, who is a VERY good atheist and knows what he is talking about. Their debate was made into a book published by Oxford University Press. I don’t rally recommend BUYING it because it is expensive, for a paperback. But you can read this debate between William Lane Craig and Kai Nielsen FOR FREE instead.

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Ground Zero: Why truth matters for preventing another 9/11-style attack

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Philosopher Michael J. Murray wrote an interesting research paper that I think is relevant to the 10th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center by Islamic terrorists. The title of the paper is “Who’s Afraid of Religion?”, and he begins by discussing why it is that people are so hesitant to talk about religion.

He writes:

…we would be perfectly happy to have a discussion of claims like…”Mahayana Buddhism emerged in the first century BCE with the appearance of the Mahayana sutras.” … It is OK to speak of religion… as a historical phenomenon or a socio-cultural influence. It is something altogether different to discuss religious commitments that one owns. That is the sort of religion that troubles us.

And:

…think about the last time you heard a devoutly religious person argue, on explicitly religious grounds, that gay marriage should be banned, or that intelligent design should be taught in the public school biology curriculum, or that abortion is murder and thus should be outlawed.

Why are religious commitments difficult to discuss? Well, I think most people think that religious convictions, no matter what the religion, are not rooted in logic or evidence. That’s the perception of religion that many people have. Even religious people have this idea that religion, no matter which religion it is, is not really something that people have arrived at by a careful process of investigation and study. Many people believe that religions are just stories that religious people grow up with and they “believe” those stories in order to get along with the families or their cultures.

The problem is that people often act in public on the basis of these religious convictions. Sometimes, they just vote in laws and policies that we all have to live by. But other times, they take over airplanes loaded with innocent people and fly them into buildings. What are we supposed to do when people act on convictions that are not rooted in logic or evidence? How should we respond to that?

So what’s the answer?

In his paper, Murray  argues that the evil actions of people acting on religion can be opposed by falsifying the underlying religion using reason and evidence. He points out that refuting of a religion is possible because religions all make testable claims. So, if we are afraid of the excesses of a dangerous religion, they we should argue that its testable claims are false.There is no reason to be afraid of expressions of religious belief when you are free to argue against the testable truth claims of that religion. 

Here are just a couple different claims made by different religions that can be opposed using widely-accepted facts:

  • Hinduism is committed to an eternally oscillating model of the universe, but this model has been falsified by the measurements from 1998 that showed that the mass-density of the universe was not sufficient to halt the expansion of the universe. That means the universe will expand forever, and there are no cycles of creation and destruction, as required by Hinduism.
  • According to the Secular Humanist Manifesto, atheism is committed to an eternally existing universe, (See the first item: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”). If something non-material brought all existing matter into being, that would be a supernatural cause, and atheists deny that anything supernatural exists. However,  eternal models of the universe have been falsified by the Big Bang cosmology, which requires that all the matter in the universe come into being out of nothing. The Big Bang has been confirmed by experimental evidence such as redshift measurements, light element abundances and the cosmic microwave background radiation.

So it’s quite easy to argue against an entire world religions like Hinduism and Atheism simply by using universally accepted facts.

How is it relevant to the 9/11 tragedy?

On the anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, it might be a good idea for us to consider whether there is any similar evidence, accepted by virtually everyone, that falsifies Islam – the religion that motivated the 9/11 terrorists.

And it turns out that there is. The Islamic Scriptures contain the following verse that Muslims must accept in order to be Muslims.

Surah 4:157 from Quran.com:

And [for] their saying, “Indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah .” And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them. And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption. And they did not kill him, for certain.

They think that Jesus didn’t actually die – that he was never crucified by the Romans.

Now the interesting thing about this is that there is no non-Muslim historian who believes that Surah 4:157 is true. The crucifixion of Jesus is a fact that is acknowledged by atheist historians, Jewish historians, Christian historians, Buddhist historians, Hindu historians, and every other non-Muslim historian who has ever existed. There is not one shred of evidence that the Quran’s view, which is recorded hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, should supercede the attestation of Jesus’ death found in earlier Christian and non-Christian sources.

Eminent secular scholar E.P. Sanders of Duke University lists the facts about Jesus that the broad consensus of historians consider to be almost indisputable.

In his book, “Jesus and Judaism” (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985)., he lists the following almost indisputable facts about Jesus on p. 11:

1. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.

2. Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed.

3. Jesus called disciples and spoke of there being twelve.

4. Jesus confined his activity to Israel.

5. Jesus engaged in a controversy about the temple.

6. Jesus was crucified outside of Jerusalem by the Roman authorities.

7. After his death Jesus’ followers continued as an identifiable movement.

8. At least some Jews persecuted at least parts of the new movement . . . .

That book won the annual Grawemeyer Award in 1990 – a prize given to the best book in religion published that year.

The death of Jesus is corroborated in every source inside the Bible and outside the Bible, up until the Quran is written about 600 years after the death/non-death is supposed to have taken place.

Watch it disputed in debates

The best way to assess this testable claim made by Islam is by seeing how well Muslim scholars can defend this claim in formal, academic debates with non-Muslim scholars.

Here is a debate on the question “Was Jesus crucified?”:

And here’s a debate on the resurrection of Jesus featuring a Muslim scholar, which has a substantial discussion of the crucifixion:

So it turns out that there is a way for us to make sure that another terrorist attack like 9/11 never happens, quite apart from national security or foreign policy concerns. And the way that we do that is by arguing against religions and ideologies like Islam that can cause harm, using logic and evidence. There is no reason to treat religious ideologies- and non-religious ideologies – as being somehow above inquiry and investigation.

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Can you use the Bible to prove that the Bible is true?

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From Melissa’s blog Hard-Core Christianity.

Excerpt:

What bothers me about young-earth organizations (more so than their accusations of compromise aimed at old-earth creationists) is that they shoot themselves in the feet when it comes to offering a viable apologetic to non-believers.  You often hear them make statements like, “We should start with the Bible, view everything in the world through the lens of Scripture, and adjust our beliefs about the natural world accordingly.” Of course the Bible should be our ultimate authority on everything; if we hold Scripture to be the inspired word of God, and we understand its factual reliability based on centuries of rigorous historical and textual research, we should trust it to be completely and utterly true (while accepting that there is some latitude in how some passages can be interpreted).

However, when it comes to defending the faith and keeping our hearts united with our God-given intellect, we need to examine this approach more closely. When someone asks you why you believe the biblical claim that “God created the heavens and the earth,” how far do you think you’re going to get with them by answering, “For the Bible tells me so”?  This is a fallacy known as circular reasoning, and it is fatal to our apologetic and to having a reasonable faith ourselves!

What we need instead is extra-biblical evidence that supports the truth of the Bible. (Notice that I did not use the word “prove.”) Philosophers use the fancy phrase “epistemic grounding.” We need to meet the non-believer where they are–observable nature–and carry them towards the truth of Christianity. As believers, we benefit from having both intellectual AND spiritual reasons for our beliefs, and we escape the trap of having a privatized theology where our confidence in the Bible is based exclusively on internal feelings.

Find more good posts on Melissa’s blog.