Forgive these questions; in a perfect world I wouldn’t have to ask them. But if God is all good and all-powerful and all-knowing, why does he allow bad things to happen to good people? [Craig] This is I think the principle argument

For the atheistic side that my opponents in the debates will sometimes bring up, and I think that there’s a couple of ways to respond to this. First we need to understand what the atheist is claiming here. Is he arguing that God and

Suffering are logically incompatible with each other? If he is, then he needs to show that there’s some sort of implicit contradiction there, because there’s no explicit contradiction, and I would say that no atheist has ever been able to sustain that burden of proof to show that there are necessarily true

Assumptions that would reveal some kind of a contradiction between God and the suffering and evil in the world. In fact, I think we can prove that they are compatible by just adding a third proposition, and that would be that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evil and suffering in the

World. As long as that’s even possible, it shows that God and evil are logically compatible. So that logical version of the argument doesn’t work. Now very quickly, there’s a probabilistic version of the argument which says alright God and evil are logically compatible but nevertheless it’s highly improbable that

God exists given the evil and suffering in the world. And I think there’s a number of moves that the theist can make in response to that argument to show that it’s not improbable that God exists given the suffering in the world.

[Questioner] I happen to believe, and I’m trying to be as objective as I can throughout the debate, that the reasons why there is suffering and pain are entirely obvious and in fact they’re inevitable if there is a loving God. But how would you explain

Them? Why then does God have to allow discomfort, suffering, pain, terrible pain? [Craig] Well I would say Michael that there isn’t any single reason. Rather there’s a multitude of reasons that would be in play here. One would be that God wants to create a world of free creatures who can become responsible

Moral agents and mature persons, and that will require a world that operates according to certain natural laws where the fire that warms you can also burn you; the water that sustains you can drown you, and it would require the ability of these creatures to do morally evil acts. And so

Creating that sort of an arena I think is going to allow the possibility of natural suffering and moral evil to occur, but that God permits these with the overall goal in mind of bringing people freely into a knowledge of himself and

To eternal salvation. And the goal of human life is not happiness in this life; we are not God’s pets. His goal is not to create a nice terrarium here for his human pets. Rather, it is to bring persons into communion with himself forever

Freely, and in order to do that, it’s not at all implausible that a world suffused with natural and moral evil would be the correlative of that.

#God #Evil #Suffering