Cold Case Christianity: Is the Problem of Evil Really a Problem for Christianity? Yes

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: Is the Problem of Evil Really a Problem for Christianity?

Posted: 12 Oct 2018 01:14 AM PDT

I’m honored to train the adults and students at Green Bay Community Church, investigating the reliability of the New Testament Gospels and the nature of truth. Troy Murphy has done a wonderful job assembling a powerful staff at the city’s largest church. GBCC’s youth pastor, Evan Gratz, opened up his youth group to me on Sunday night. As usual, the best part of the time with students was answering questions at the end of the evening. The problem of evil was raised by a teenager who described her recent conversation with an atheist friend. As an atheist myself for most of my life, I resonated with the objection and offered a brief response: If what we believe as Christians is true, evil and suffering are only a problem for atheists. The problem of evil isn’t really a problem for Christianity.

But since what you believe as Christians is false, you are deprived of your fluffy magically wonderful after-world where nothing bad every happens.

I have already critiqued apologist Frank Turek's attempt to show that morality is inconsistent with atheism.

Evil and suffering are typically experienced and understood within the context of one’s life.

Right.  How else?

As an atheist, I hoped for (and expected) a life of approximately ninety years. In the context of this span of time, if I had developed cancer in my forties, I would have been angered by the amount of time stolen from me as I battled the disease.

 That anger would have been the result of you finding out facts about life that were contrary to your subjective desires.  Being angry about it hardly argues that your desires arise out of some objective standard of morality that transcends humanity.

In fact, if I had been diagnosed with a terminal disease at that age, I would have been outraged by the fact it was going to deprive me of fifty percent of the life I expected. When your life is only ninety years long, anything cutting the time short is evil, and any prolonged suffering along the way is unjust and intolerable.

But what if we could live more than ninety short years? What if our lives had a beginning, but no end? How would we see (and respond to) evil, pain and suffering in the context of an eternal life?

Given the incoherent nature of the question, it hardly requires a response.  What if the tooth-fairy gave you a vision showing you what the dark side of the Bermuda Triangle looked like from the Andromeda Galaxy?  How much more time would you spend analyzing the paranormal?

How many of you who can remember the painful vaccinations you received as a child?

How many of you remember Isaiah 13:16-17, where God apparently had a morally good purpose for causing men to rape women?  If the result of the pain is good (i.e., it hurts to get a shot in the arm, but the benefits of better health justify the pain), then under your own logic, because God thought the outcome of men raping women would tend toward some type of greater moral good, this would morally justify his causing rape no less than how we justify causing pain to a child when giving them a flu shot.

If you’re reading this article at the age of thirty, the small period of your life occupied by the pain you experienced during those vaccinations has been long outdistanced by the years you’ve lived since then. As time stretched on from the point of that experience, you were able to place the pain within the larger context of your life.

Correct.  But unfortunately most rape victims cannot do the same as they look back on their having been sexually assaulted.  Trust in the afterlife merely papers over the problem.  No analogy.

You don’t even remember it now. If you have pierced ears, ask yourself a similar question. The pain you experienced at the point of the piercing is nearly forgotten, especially if it has been years since it occurred. Evil, pain and suffering are experienced and understood within the larger context of one’s life.

But not rape and child murder.  You are not doing apologetics, you are warming up an already-Christian audience for the inevitable "God's ways are mysterious but we can be sure he works all things to the good for those that love him" crap.

If the Christian worldview is true, we are eternal beings who will live forever.

 The Christian world view is not true.  Hence, your conclusion doesn't follow.

We get more than ninety years, we get all of eternity.

 Now you are merely resting upon the biblical teaching about "eternal life", when in fact the reasons to reject Christianity thereby also perform the function of showing "eternal life" to have more in common with a 12 year old girl's crush on a Hollywood actor and less to do with actual reality.

Our experience and understanding of pain and evil must be contextualized within eternity, not within our temporal lives.

 Translation:  "If Christianity is not true, there will never be ultimate justice.  You don't like that thought, do you?  Well then, doesn't it feel better to believe in eternal life and a great day of judgment?"

Reminder, the book of Revelation doesn't describe the end as the wicked finally banished, it describes them as continuing to do wicked deeds, continuing unpunished,  while others are in heaven watching:

 8 I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed me these things.
 9 But he said to me, "Do not do that. I am a fellow servant of yours and of your brethren the prophets and of those who heed the words of this book. Worship God."
 10 And he said to me, "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.
 11 "Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and the one who is holy, still keep himself holy."
 12 "Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done.
 13 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
 14 Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city.
 15 Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying.   (Rev. 22:8-15 NAU) 

Wallace continues:

Whatever we experience here in our earthly life, no matter how difficult or painful it may be, must be seen through the lens of forever.

 Then perhaps I can be reasonable to assume you aren't directing this toward atheists.

As our eternal life stretches out beyond our struggles in mortality, our temporal experiences will become an ever-shrinking percentage of our consciousness. The suffering we may have experienced on earth will be long outdistanced by the eternal life we’ve lived since then.

 Yeah right.  What else are you gonna say?  God loves you?  Well, if it sells books, I guess one man has just as much right to sell Jesus as another one does.

Our life with God will be a life without suffering, without pain and without evil. “God will wipe away every tear from (our) eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). It will also be a life where justice is realized, “for the Lord loves justice; he will not forsake his saints,” (Psalm 37:27-28) and He “will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work” (Ecclesiastes 3:17). As our glorious eternal life with God stretches beyond our temporal experience, whatever suffering or injustice we might have experienced here on earth will seem like it occurred in the blink of an eye.

 The only problem being that if we truly do have a spirit that doesn't desire food, water, material possessions or sex, God could have created mankind on earth without bodies, and if he had, about 99% of the sins in this world would have been preempted, all without violating anybody's freewill.  This bit of bad news means you are no longer allowed to hide behind "because god respects our freewill" to "explain" the existence of evil.  And if you think somebody we'll go to heaven and never desire to sin again, then apparently you believe it is indeed possible to create a world in which free creatures authentically love and worship god, but are guaranteed to never sin.  If god can achieve that in heaven, he could have created Adam and Eve with the same constitution of the will, they would never have eaten the forbidden fruit, and sin would have been permanently preempted.  If your doctrine of freewill forces you to leave open the possibility that saved Christians might sin even after they get to heaven, perhaps apologetics isn't your calling.

In the context of the Christian eternal life, pain, suffering and evil can be faced and endured with strength, hope and confidence unavailable in an atheistic worldview.

 The Mormons can boast the same thing about Mormonism.  Under your logic, that would reasonably justify the recently raped and depressed women to go join the Mormons.  Would you encourage this if she asked you?  Or would you bother the nice lady with all of your criticisms of Mormons while this lady is living with unaddressed emotional trauma?

What used to seem so unjust to me is now less egregious.

Perhaps explaining why most Christians don't really give a shit about trying to make the world a better place.  That time can be better spent evangelizing, because somebody soon a giant Jesus will float down from the sky on a galloping horse to make everything all better, amen?

What used to seem so unbearable can now be faced with hope. The problem of evil, from my new Christian perspective, isn’t the same kind of problem it was from my old atheistic perspective, because the problem of evil isn’t really a problem for Christianity.

 Bullshit, your god caused men to rape women, by his own admission.  Search for "Isaiah 13" in one of my articles.

If your god can cause rape on earth, consistent with his allegedly infinite righteousness, then causing rape for people in heaven would also be consistent with said alleged infinite righteousness.  You will say nobody in heaven deserves to be raped, but you already say that about women on earth (don't you?)  And if God is infinitely wise, the spiritually mature person is more likely to accept God's judgments without question, so that the more spiritual you are, the less you care about whether God's ways conform to universal standards of fairness and justice.  If you see god causing a man to rape a woman in heaven, the mark of spiritual maturity is to just shut up and avoid asking "why?", see Romans 9:

 18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.
 19 You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?"
 20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, "Why did you make me like this," will it?   (Rom. 9:18-20 NAU)

Follow that trail of unquestioning devotion down the road apiece and you wind up becoming an abortion clinic bomber, a hijacker, or some other idiot extremist who cannot be reasoned with, because they are so sure that God's ways are mysterious.