This is my reply to J. Warner Wallace's article
For many, the presence of moral evil is evidence against the existence of an all-powerful, all loving God.
This is illogical. God's being an asshole doesn't mean he doesn't exist.
The problem of evil is perhaps the single most frequent objection I hear when speaking to unbelievers, and it has been uttered by thousands across the span of history.
It has also been a serious problem for serious Christians, and has caused plenty of them to leave the faith.
Epicurus (the ancient Greek philosopher, 341-270BC) expressed the problem clearly: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing?” There you have it: If a good, all-powerful, all loving God does exist, and we, as humans, are allegedly created in His “image”, why are people be so inclined to do immoral things?
The bible says God takes personal responsibility for all murder (Deut. 32:39), and that he not only causes the worst of evils, such as rape and parental cannibalism, but gets a thrill or "delight" out of watching people commit such horrific atrocities, Deut. 28:30, 53, 63.
And why doesn’t this all-powerful God do something to stop evil, immoral behavior?
Why would he stop himself?
A God such as this is either too impotent to stop evil, doesn’t care enough to act, or simply doesn’t exist in the first place. But think about it for a minute. Which is more loving: a God who creates a world in which love is possible, or a God who creates a world in which love is impossible?
It is more loving to protect your loved ones from evil to the extent that you have ability and opportunity to do so.
It seems reasonable that a loving God (if He exists at all), would create a world where love is possible.
Then you cannot have any problem with atheists whose arguments proceed under the same "seems reasonable" criteria.
A good God would create a world where love can be experienced and expressed by creatures designed “in His image”.
And a perfect god would have been perfectly content with the way things were before anything was created, in which case this god would have had no motive or desire to change up this happy equilibrium. If God was perfectly content with the pre-creation state of affairs, he would not have created anything.
But this kind of “love-possible” a world is, by necessity, a dangerous place. Love requires freedom. True love requires that humans have the ability to freely choose; love
cannot be forced if it is to be heartfelt and real. I cannot force my
children, for example, to love me. Instead, I must demonstrate my love
for them, provide them with the knowledge and moral wisdom necessary to
make safe and loving choices, and then allow them the personal freedom
to love one another and do the right thing.
No, you think the people that have already died and gone to heaven, cannot chose to sin, yet you believe they still authentically love and worship god. So freedom to sin and the possibility of evil are
not necessary to get creatures to authentically love god. If God can impose that state of affairs in heaven, he could have imposed it on Adam and Eve, in which case they would never have chosen to sin, and God would have avoided all the future situations that made him so angry at mankind. God has only himself to blame for giving us freewill and the mess it created, when freewill was not necessary to successfully creating loving creatures.
Eventually, as a parent, I have to let go, and this process of letting go is dangerous.
Strawman; you believe your god is omnipresent, so he never "lets go" of anybody the way parents let go of teenagers.
In order for my kids to have the freedom to love, they also need the freedom to hate. Freedom of this nature is often costly. A world in which people have
the freedom to love and perform great acts of kindness is also a world
in which people have the freedom to hate and commit great acts of evil.
You cannot have one without the other, and we understand this
intuitively. Let’s consider an example. Every year, millions of
scissors are manufactured and sold in countries across the world.
Everyone knows how valuable and useful scissors can be. No one is
arguing for laws to prevent the manufacturing or sale of scissors; we
understand how beneficial they are. Yet every year, hundreds of
homicides and assaults are committed with scissors (I’ve actually
investigated some of these). While scissors were designed for a good and
useful purpose, they are often used to commit great evil. In a similar
way, our personal “free agency” is a beautiful gift that allows us to
love. It was intended to provide us the means through which we can love
one another and even love God. But this freedom, like a pair of
scissors, can be used for great evil as well if we choose to reject its
original purpose.
Irrelevant, creatures can authentically love god without having any ability to sin. See above.
As Christians, we believe that God created us in His image.
There were no other words the Hebrew author could have chosen to express the idea that we physically resemble god. This whole business of the image of god being "freewill" is total bullshit. The god of the early parts of the OT was physical even if also invisible. Christians only insist that "divine image = freewill/conscience" for no other reason than because they wish to harmonize Genesis 1:26-27 with the rest of the bible, which says god cannot be likened to anything on earth. But a more objective approach is to ask what the original biblical words for "image" and "likeness" meant in their own limited contexts. Jehovah Witnesses also like to use scripture to interpret scripture, but that obviously doesn't benefit them in the least, as all they end up doing is justifying their own heretical theology thereby, so its pretty safe to say that grammar and immediate context are paramount, while biblical inerrancy (i.e., scripture interprets scripture) does not deserve to be exalted in our mind to the status of governing hermeneutic, given that Christians are disagreed about whether it is biblical, and if so, what version is correct.
We have the freedom to love and we are eternal creatures who will live beyond our short existence on earth. Our free agency allows us to love and perform acts of kindness, and our eternal life provides the context for God to deal justly with those who choose to hate and perform acts of evil. God will do something to stop evil, immoral behavior, He is powerful enough to stop evil completely, and He does care about justice. But as an Eternal Being, He has the ability to address the issue on an eternal timeline.
The modern Christian notion about God being "eternal" is contradicted by every biblical description of heaven, which asserts things going on there, with God, in a way that necessarily presupposes the same degree of temporal progression of events that exists on earth. This idea that your god lives in some eternal "now" that is fundamentally different than the "time" dimension we live in, is not biblical.
It’s not that God has failed to act; it’s simply that He has not chosen to act yet.
The more biblical answer is that horrific evils occur because God causes them to happen, see Deut. 28:63. Read everything between vv. 15-63, then you tell me that anybody who causes parents to eat their own kids, is "good".
1 John 4:7-8 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
This biblical logic is faulty, because according to the bible many of those who do not love, lack that love precisely because God wanted it that way: David hates idoloters themselves, not just their idolatry, in Psalm 31:6, and god forbids the Israelites from doing anything nice for certain other people in Deut.23:6.
Compared to eternity, this temporal, earthly existence is but a vapor, created by good God to be a wonderful place where love is possible for those who choose it.
Again, all biblical descriptions of heaven assert that events take place there with no less temporal progression than they do on earth. Again, if God was perfect, he'd have been perfectly content to exist without creatures, and thus would never have become motivated to think that changing the original solitary perfection-state was "better".
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