Evil

Opening: How Do We Know God Is True?

• When Greg's daughter Annabeth was about eight, she asked him, "How do we know that God is true?" He told her God is "the best explanation for the way things are."
• "Christianity is messy," because religion and life are messy. No view answers every question; the task is to find the best answer, all things considered.
• Everybody knows something is wrong with the world, and that what is wrong is the people in it.
• In the film Sophie's Choice, a mother at Auschwitz is forced to choose which of her children will die. She concludes that "only a Jesus who no longer cared for me could kill those people I love."
• The problem has two sides:
  • Intellectual: if God is powerful and good, he would deal with evil; evil exists, so he is not powerful, not good, or not there at all.
  • Personal: "The real problem of evil isn't intellectual. It's personal." Bertrand Russell asked how you can talk about God "when you're kneeling at the bed of a dying child?"
• Greg comes to it as a human being, not as a theologian or philosopher: "this is a human problem, not a Christian problem."
• So every worldview has to answer it. The atheist who gives up God because of evil still has the evil, and has more work to do. Greg's question for him: "What's the alternative?"
• The real question is who has the best explanation of evil, and the best resources to deal with it. Greg's answer: "The answer to evil is God in Jesus on a cross at Calvary."

01

Evil Is Something

• For there to be a problem of evil, some things must actually be bad.
• Many people think morality is personal opinion. Greg calls this the inside-outside distinction: to a relativist, morality is on the inside, with no standard on the outside over everybody.
• But if relativism is true, "there is no problem of evil." No objective morality means no broken morality, and no objective good either.
• You tell a good bowler from a bad one by the score. Good and bad need a scoring system. If morals are only taste, rejecting God because of evil is like rejecting him because of Brussels sprouts.
• You cannot break the speed limit on the Autobahn, because there is none. With no moral speed limits, there are no broken ones.
• As a student at Michigan State in 1971, Greg was a relativist who marched against the Vietnam War as an evil war. He wanted to live as a relativist, but did not want others to be relativists toward him.
• Atheism fails the same way. On an island with no government, there are no speed limits. "If there is no lawmaker over the universe, then there are no laws over the universe," no broken laws, and no problem of evil. But there is a problem of evil, so there is a lawmaker: God.
• The irony: the problem of evil "turns out to be one of the best arguments for the existence of God." If things are not the way they're supposed to be, there is a way they're supposed to be, and you can't have that "without a sposer."
• Greg spent five and a half hours on camera in New York with atheist Alex O'Connor, who denies objective morality yet pressed Greg on suffering. Greg said he was "smuggling morality in," because he is a human being made in the image of God, living in God's world.

02

Evil Is Not Some Thing

• God created everything that is. If evil were a thing, God would have created evil. But evil is not a stuff floating around the universe.
• You cannot eat a donut hole; it is where the donut is not. Evil is "a hole in goodness." A shadow is where light is missing.
• Our words for evil describe something missing: unrighteousness, impurity, lawlessness. The New Testament Greek word for sin, hamartia, means missing the mark.
• Greg borrowed a pencil from the audience and broke it. Nothing was added to the broken pencil; something was taken away, and it can no longer do what it is supposed to do.

03 · Genesis 1:31

Evil Is an Intruder

• Here Greg stepped into the Christian story. The brokenness was not there at the beginning, and God did not cause it. God saw all that he made, and it was very good (Genesis 1). Human beings caused evil.
• Parents set boundaries because it is dangerous out there. Cross them and something gets broken: a vase, a relationship, a whole life, sometimes beyond repair. God set boundaries for the human race for the same reason.
• Our first parents chose to obey what was inside them, not what was outside them. That is relativism, "the primal heresy." They broke their relationship with God, with each other and with the world, and we keep breaking it.
• Evil is at home in our story: it starts in chapter 3 and "doesn't get fixed for 66 books." And "Our story is not over yet."

04

A Good Thing Made Evil Possible

• This is the heart of the alleged contradiction: "Something good made something bad possible."
• Greg offered his own speculation, one theodicy (an explanation of why God would allow evil). God is perfectly happy because he is perfectly good, and he wanted to share his happiness with us. That takes moral beings who can choose the good, and so can also choose evil.
• In Donetsk, Ukraine, a strong student Greg called Vito could bend a paper clip into a square and into a circle, but not into a square circle. Not even all power can do a contradiction.
• Asking for morally free creatures who cannot choose evil is the same kind of contradiction, "like married bachelors." Taking away the possibility of evil means taking away moral freedom.
• People complain about evil, but they never ask, "why doesn't God do something about my evil in my life?" We want God to hold back other people, not us, because we know our freedom is valuable.
• Through chosen goodness we grow in goodness. "Salvation is all God. But sanctification is a partnership."
• Greg's four observations together: evil is something, so relativism and atheism are false; evil is not a thing; it is an intruder; and a good thing, moral freedom, made it possible. "So evil doesn't refute God, it affirms God."

05 · Revelation 21:3–4

What God Is Doing About Evil

• Back to the dying child. Greg quoted William Lane Craig: what will the atheist say at that bedside? Tough luck? The atheist has no hope and no comfort to offer.
• So is there an answer? There are two directions a person can take.
• One answer: do anything that makes you feel better. On The Diary of a CEO, Alex O'Connor was asked what he would tell someone with no meaning in life: go to church, take drugs, read philosophy. It is a choice a person can make, but not a good one. Greg: "We can do better than that."
• The other answer, the good one: what God has done and is doing about evil. Four things:
  • Three institutions to hold back evil. Government, to punish evil and reward good. The family: in Matthew 19 Jesus went back to Genesis, male and female and a man joined to his wife, and "you take an ax to the root of family and you take an ax to the root of civilization." And the church: Greg credited Christians with teaching the world to read, ending slavery through William Wilberforce and others, and caring for women and children through crisis pregnancy centers.
  • His Holy Spirit, given to anyone who wants to deal with the evil in their own life. "You cannot do it on your own."
  • His return, when he will remove every remnant of evil. Revelation 21: he will wipe away every tear. But he will deal with evil completely; C.S. Lewis said "when the author walks on the stage, the play is over," and "our prints are on the smoking gun."
  • The cross. He sent his Son to die for evil men, offering mercy instead of justice. He is patient, waiting for people to bend the knee and say, my fault.
• Why do good people suffer? "There are no good people. Not in the way God counts it." "Hitler's not the standard. Jesus is the standard."
• Greg's close: "Atheism is not the answer to the problem of evil. God is the answer. In Christ. On a cross. At Calvary."

Questions and Answers

• Conrad Wozniak introduced Greg and moderated. Some questions were his; others came from cards at the tables.
• What is the difference between evil and suffering? Greg had said Alex O'Connor smuggled suffering into a conversation about evil. (Conrad)
  • Greg: what Alex smuggled in was a moral judgment about suffering. Suffering is a problem only if something has gone wrong, if this is not the way it is supposed to be.
  • Christians often ask why God allows suffering in their own lives, but the New Testament is "thick with" warnings that the Christian life will include suffering. Hebrews, 1 Peter and 1 and 2 Thessalonians were written to suffering Christians, and Paul wrote Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and 2 Timothy from prison.
  • The same smuggling happens when someone says there is no objective morality, "therefore it's wrong for you to push your morality on me."
• Did God create Satan, and what role does Satan have in evil? Three cards asked nearly the same thing. (audience cards)
  • Greg: like human beings, Satan was created good and went bad. In the spiritual world, probably before the physical world was made, he made the same kind of wrong choice humans later made in theirs. Satan did not break the world given to humans; they broke it.
  • Satan has real but limited power here, and Jesus dealt with much demonic activity. That does not take away God's sovereignty: God allows it as he allows our sin.
  • God has arranged no salvation for demons, which shows that "God does not owe anyone a pardon." He chose mercy as well as justice, because Jesus took the punishment we deserve.
  • The whole world lies in the power of the evil one (1 John 5) and is blinded by the devil (2 Corinthians 4). The only way out is for God to take the initiative and rescue us.
• Doesn't eternal condemnation seem harsh for sins committed in a short life on earth? (audience card)
  • Greg: he is sympathetic. People made in God's image value justice, and the punishment should fit the crime.
  • He holds "the standard classical conviction of eternal conscious torment," and said there is some debate about it. He is not happy to defend it, but he is guided by what Scripture teaches, not by what seems right to him.
  • The punishment for a crime does not depend on how long it took to commit. A child who slaps another child does wrong; a child who slaps a parent does something worse. The weight of a crime depends on whom it is against.
  • In Psalm 51, after his adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah, David confessed that his sin was against God first. All our sin is against God first, and we rarely see how holy God is, as Isaiah and Peter did.
• If the fall darkened our minds and wills, how are we to blame for evil when our wills are already bound? (audience card)
  • Greg: one of the hardest questions for him. Adam and Eve were not fallen; we are morally crippled from birth.
  • But that does not change the moral equation. "Our corrupted natures themselves are damnable." We are guilty from the womb, which he called basic Christian theology; Pelagius, who denied it in the 4th century, was a heretic.
  • His illustration from The Two Towers: an Uruk-hai comes out of the mud and kills the orc helping it. It is bad from birth and still deserves justice. We are not that bad, Greg said, but we are pretty bad.
• How do we deal with the evil in our own lives? What hope and encouragement can you give? (Conrad)
  • Greg: fix your eyes on the hope set before you, the return of Christ. Books like Pilgrim's Progress show the hardship of the Christian life honestly; the rest of the world hopes to escape it, but the death rate is still 100 percent.
  • His saying: "life is hard and then you die." Not dark, he said, but realistic.
  • In 2 Corinthians 4, Paul called his beatings, shipwrecks and stoning a "momentary light affliction" that is producing an eternal weight of glory. So hardship is Greg's "eternal 401k."
  • Francis Schaeffer said utopian ideals are cruel because they can never be fulfilled. Marriage, children or anything else will not make life right. So invest in what lasts: "Only what's done for Christ will last."
  • Conrad added Genesis 50:20: Joseph told his brothers that what they meant for evil, God meant for good.
• A final word: how do we think biblically about the problem of evil? (Conrad)
  • Greg: true evil in the world is a clue. There must be a God who made the world different and wants it to be different again.
  • That God helps us with the evil in our own lives and offers mercy for our guilt. When we bend the knee and say "my fault," we come into his family as children, not rebels.
  • Hebrews 12: as his children we have a Father whose discipline is for our good and later yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness, until we go home to be with him.