Teacher to Teacher - December 2008 - (Page 2)

for reasons; it is really a cover for a series of much more direct questions: • Is God unwilling to stop it and thereby really not a good person?3 • Would a good God really do something like this? • Is evil really just imaginary?4 • Or is there no God at all?5 Well, if you think you are going to get an answer in a single article, you must be out of your mind. This is a really difficult problem. The problem is compounded by ineffective attempts to answer it. Richard Dawkins records the response of an atheist Oxford professor to a colleague who suggested that God allowed the Holocaust in order to give the Jews a Avon, 1981). It is also popular among certain liberal theologians, most especially adherents to process theology, or the doctrine of an evolving God, and its distant cousin open theism. Of this view, John Frame well writes, “A nonsovereign god is an idol of conventional wisdom, not the absolute personality of Christianity.” Apologetics to the Glory of God: An Introduction (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1994), 154. 3 4 chance to be an example of endurance through suffering: “May you rot in hell.”6 So is the problem of evil unsolvable? How do we guide our students through this difficult minefield? What will we say after the next tornado or hurricane or earthquake? • Shouldn’t He have stopped this from happening? • Do I really want to serve a God like this? This is The Big Question, the one that has troubled believers for centuries. It is the one that unbelievers most commonly present as the basis for their unbelief. It is usually called simply “The Problem of Evil”: If God is both great and good, why is there evil? The Basics An attempt to deal with the problem of evil is called a “theodicy,” or an attempt to justify God’s ways to men, as Milton put it.7 We should start by observing that God does not need our help; He is just—in fact, He is the very definition of just—and He is wise, powerful, and good and so can take care of Himself in the face of attacks by His greatest enemies. History is filled with examples of God’s using those very attacks to accomplish His 6 • Is God really not great enough to stop it?2 2 This is the view proposed by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner in his popular work When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Teacher to This is the view of Satanism. This is the view of Christian Science as well as a number of Eastern religions and philosophies. This is the view of the leaders of what I call “the atheist revival.” The most active recently are Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (London: Free Press, 2006); and Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Random House, Inc., 2006); and Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007). Teacher balanced perspectives in education 5 Executive Editor Dawn L. Watkins Assistant Editor E. Anne Smith Creative Director Elly Kalagayan Graphic Designer Michael Boone Advertising Coordinator JoEllen DeLuca Photography iStockphoto, p. 1, pp. 2–3, p. 4, p. 8 BJU Press © 2008 by BJU Press, Greenville, SC 29614-0060. Teacher to Teacher is published five times a year by BJU Press and Bob Jones University School of Education. U.S. subscriptions are free. All rights reserved. Send all correspondence and changes of address to Teacher to Teacher, BJU Press, Greenville, SC 29614-0060. 1.800.845.5731 www.bjupress.com t2t@bjupress.com This defense is a variation on Leibniz’s “best possible world” approach—that there must be evil and its accompanying suffering if there is to be victory over it and the joy that comes from such victory. It has been observed in reply to Leibniz that God did create a world that was “better than” this one and that was not marred by sin (Genesis 1), as He will do again in the eternal state (Revelation 21−22). Thus, the current world cannot be “the best possible” one. Paradise Lost, 1:26 7 page 2 Teacher to Teacher | December 2008 http://www.bjupress.com http://www.bjupress.com

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